hypocrisy
new 9/17
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SEE OTHER NODE 2 FACE
SEE Claim Credit Vote Against
Ayn Rand Award
no merri
320 promote 2nd on covid
see bad faith faux outrage/ hype
see pvtize good subsidize bad
see 2 face i forget dist
SEE GOP VOTER FRAUD
see chickenhawk, nevertrumper caves
voodoo? deficit "hawks"? back 1/21 biden pandemic
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federal overreach a kind of legal suppression, SEE RAGA
omg bizz 1 24 there is no pushback on this but dem admin DOJ and maybe good appellate circuit?!
SEE LEGAL SUPPRESSION
SEE NO ASYMMETRY
1 24 TRUMP SAYS HE WILL BE DICTATOR FOR A DAY, DRILL AND BORDER
with polarysis, esp with gop openly stated goal to make obama a one term president by gridlock, he had to move to executive order; neo-con had spend decades building up unitary /imperial presidency (nixon, if the prez does it, it is by def legal]see hypocrisy
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an 11 23
to be honest, I didn't really care whether the Arizona Diamondbacks or the Texas Rangers won the World Series. Once my two favorite teams—the Dodgers and the Red Sox—were eliminated, I didn’t have a stake in the outcome of the World Series. I just wanted to watch to see first-rate baseball and see interesting games, and the Diamondbacks and Rangers didn't disappoint.
Most of the 30 MLB teams are owned by billionaires. But the owners of the Rangers and the Diamondbacks are particularly disgusting. Ken Kendrick, who owns the Diamondbacks, and Ray Davis—whose Rangers won the World Series in Game 5 on Wednesday night with a 5-0 shutout win—are both billionaires with a history of providing financial support for Republican candidates and right-wing causes.
:{:{According to Forbes magazine, Davis has a personal net worth of $2.9 billion. Before getting into the baseball business, Davis was CEO of two fossil fuel corporations—Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) and Energy Transfer Equity (ETE}:). ETP is a natural gas distributor and pipeline company. Davis stepped down as CEO in 2007 but still owns 2.4% of the company. In 2017, despite protests by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Energy Transfer finished building the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline.
The corporation operates over 125,000 miles of pipeline that move approximately 30% of America's oil and natural gas. Davis and a group of investors bought the Texas Rangers for about $600 million in 2010; it's now worth $1.5 billion. Since 2021, Davis has donated at least $225,000 to Texans for Greg Abbott, the state's right-wing Republican governor, according to state campaign finance records. He's also donated to other Republican candidates.}:
In 2003, the Chicago Cubs hosted the first Pride game to celebrate their LGBTQ fans. Since then, all but one of the 30 Major League teams have hosted an annual Pride Day or Pride Night event. The Texas Rangers are the only team without a Pride Night.
Ken Kendrick is only worth $1 billion, according to Forbes, but he's a much bigger donor to politicians and right-wing causes than Davis. He and his wife Randy have made large donations to conservative groups connected with the Koch brothers. According to FEC filings, he has donated to many Republican election deniers, including Arizona U.S. Congressman Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs as well as to conspiracy-theory nutjob Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
Kendrick founded a software company called Data Technology which merged in 1979 with another company called Datatel. General Motors bought the company in 1988 for $511 million, giving Kendrick a big boost in his personal wealth. He made more money by investing early in Woodforest National Bank, which now has more than $1.7 billion in assets. Woodforest National Bank is Walmart’s largest retail partner. Kendrick became part-owner of the Diamondbacks with the team's inception in 1995 and has been the managing general partner (the major owner) since 2004.
Kendrick is one of those Republicans who decry "big government," but he's perfectly happy receiving government subsidies for his business from Arizona taxpayers. The Diamondbacks built Bank One Ballpark (later renamed Chase Field), the first retractable roof stadium in MLB with a grass field, in 1995 with the help of $253 million dollars in public financing through an increase in sales tax in Maricopa County. This happened during a huge county budget deficit and lack of funding for other services. The County Supervisors approved the tax increase without asking for voters' approval. In 2016, Kendrick decided that the stadium needed about $65 million worth of repairs, and estimated that it would need a total of $187 million of upkeep costs over the final 12 years of its lease with Maricopa County. And of course, they wanted the taxpayers to pay for it. County officials refused. One of them, Andy Kunasek, described the Diamondbacks as “parasitic enterprise.” When the County wouldn't provide Kendrick with the subsidy, he sued the County in an attempt to get out of the Diamondback's lease, which expires in 2027. Kendrick has hinted that if the County doesn't pay for those improvements, he'd consider moving to the team and building another stadium.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, Kenrick is also a union-buster. In 2020, when the 30 major league owners locked the players out for three months (essentially, an owners' strike), Kendrick was one of the four most reactionary owners who voted against signing a new collective bargaining agreement with the players union.
So it was a win for the Rangers last night, and congrats to all the players. However, no matter which way this series may have gone, it would have been one right-wing billionaire or another holding the trophy in the end.
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MMA 8 23
After Hunter Biden charges, right-wing media immediately move the goalposts
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/hunter-biden-david-weiss-and-rights-perpetual-bad-faith-scandal-machine
There’s simply no reason for reporters to give credence to the Republicans and right-wing media figures currently rending their garments over Attorney General Merrick Garland’s grant of special counsel powers to David Weiss, the prosecutor investigating President Joe Biden’s son.
The right’s interest in Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes begins and ends with whether they can use him to harm his father’s reelection campaign. They are willing to pretend to be mad that Weiss wasn’t appointed special counsel — and then get mad that he was; for political gain, they’re even willing to pretend to care about tax crimes after years of trying to defang the Internal Revenue Service’s ability to target tax cheats. But reporters covering their responses don’t have to play along with this charade.
Weiss, a U.S. attorney first appointed by former President Donald Trump and retained by President Biden, has been investigating Hunter Biden for five years. The probe has overlapped with a storm of spurious right-wing claims that foreign actors had used Hunter Biden’s business interests to bribe his father. In June, Weiss charged Hunter Biden with two misdemeanor counts of failure to pay taxes and one count of felony gun possession as part of a plea agreement; the agreement fell apart during a court hearing and Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty. On Friday, Garland announced that Weiss had requested special counsel status and he had granted it after talks to revive the plea deal failed.
Republican politicians and the party’s media propagandists reacted to Weiss’ appointment with feigned fury. Just weeks ago, right-wingers were denouncing Garland’s supposed refusal to grant Weiss special counsel status as evidence of the Biden administration’s corruption. But now that Garland has actually done it, that too is a signal of the Biden administration’s corruption — with some on the right even claiming Weiss is ineligible for the position.
Sean Hannity, the Trump adviser and GOP mouthpiece who also has a prime-time Fox News show, and Gregg Jarrett, the Fox contributor Hannity brings on to explain that Democrats are criminals and Republicans are not, showed how this game is played on Friday night.
Hannity opened his show by describing Garland’s appointment of Weiss as “a pathetic new sleight of hand from Biden’s clearly weaponized and politicized DOJ” and “a new strategy — yup — to help shield the big guy and the entire Biden family operation, but especially President Joe Biden.” He added that Weiss’ appointment may not be legal because special counsels are supposed to be appointed from outside government, citing Jarrett. After railing against the newly minted special counsel, Hannity concluded, “So let me be very clear: David Weiss is not to be trusted. This is a sham from the get-go.”
“I think this is a farce, more cover-up and corruption by Merrick Garland,” Jarrett added when Hannity brought him on later in the program. “The attorney general is not allowed to appoint David Weiss as special counsel. Under federal regulations, you can only appoint somebody outside the government because Weiss is conflicted.” Jarrett went on to call Weiss “the absolute last person on Earth who should be special counsel. This is the guy who effectively stopped the case. So, Sean, you know, the fix is in. It’s a sham.”
That’s not what Jarrett was telling Hannity back in April. Then, the story was that “the fix is in” because Garland had supposedly refused to grant Weiss special counsel status (Weiss denied this happened).
“You know, David Weiss, who wanted to file the charges against Hunter Biden, went to Merrick Garland and asked to have him elevated to special counsel status, to give him independence and autonomy which Garland promised in his testimony,” Jarrett said on the April 21 edition of Hannity. “What did Garland do? He said absolutely no. That tells you everything you need to know about this.”
As for Weiss’ eligibility to be named special counsel, the situation is nearly identical to Trump attorney general William Barr’s 2020 grant of that status to John Durham, the U.S. attorney whose investigation of the origins of the Russia probe the right trumpeted.
When that news was announced, Jarrett reacted by telling Hannity viewers, “This was a shrewd and smart move by Bill Barr. He’s essentially made John Durham Eliot Ness. He’s untouchable, giving him elevated status as special counsel. Remember, the A.G. is gone when a new administration comes in and so are the 93 U.S. attorneys, and Durham is one of those.”
That’s a revealing statement. Contrary to Jarrett, President Biden did not fire every U.S. attorney — he left Weiss in place to complete the investigation of his son. The move was one of several Joe Biden took in order to maintain the credibility of the justice system after his election. For that, he gets no credit from the likes of Hannity and Jarrett, as their interests are purely partisan and results-oriented. The integrity of the process doesn’t really matter — if it finds Republicans guilty or Democrats not guilty, it must be flawed.
For decades, Fox talking heads like Hannity and the rest of the right’s scandal machine have relied not just on keeping their audience perpetually angry — but on a pliant mainstream press willing to**parrot**their preposterous arguments as if they were offered in good faith.
They do not actually care about tax crimes. The GOP’s top policy priority is repealing funding for the IRS to target wealthy tax evaders, and right-wing personalities denounced potential new hires for that agency as President Biden’s “army,” “Gestapo,” and “Praetorian Guard.”
They do not actually care about politicized justice. Trump regularly used the justice system to target his political opponents, he and his presidential primary foes are openly running on ending the independence of the Justice Department from the White House, and his media allies regularly call for politically motivated prosecutions.
And they do not actually care about the purported corrupt dealings of members of a president’s family. The allegations regarding Hunter Biden pale in comparison to reporting about Trump, his sons Eric and Don Jr., and his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who worked in his White House.
They are pretending to care, and reporters should not pretend to believe them.
stunning bad faith alt fact earth2
guk ref no lnx gfx
Alarm at rightwing push to reverse clean-energy success in Texas and beyond
Supporters of clean energy say they expect further battles ahead to prevent state’s progress in solar and wind from being unwound
Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor
Thu 8 Jun 2023
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In the scramble before the end of Texas’s legislative session last week,a must-pass bill was amended to impose new costs upon renewable energy.This came amid a barrage of anti-solar and wind power measures pushed forward by Republicans to reshape a state that has become the US’s powerhouse of clean energy.
But the conservative lawmakers had help.
Sections of the bill that impose new burdens upon clean energy providers were directly crafted and edited by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (or TPPF), a conservative group that has led the backlash to renewables and to make what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels”, according to a copy of the draft language seen by the Guardian.
Several dozen edits were made to the bill’s amendments by Brent Bennett, a TPPF policy staffer, the document shows, and Texas lawmakers subsequently passed parts of this language along with the key TPPF desires – to impose new transmission costs on renewables and require them to source fossil fuel “backup” power when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing.
The passage of the bill, which funds the ongoing operation of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, was the flagship victory for TPPF even as a raft of other Republican bills that would have “shut down the renewable energy industry in Texas”, as energy analyst Doug Lewin put it, faltered.
The burgeoning influence of TPPF, an organization substantially funded by fossil fuel interests and publicly lauded by Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, is the catalyst to a rightwing attempt to crimp the stunning progress of renewable energy in the state, whichnow produces more than a quarter of all wind-powered electricity in the US.
The group’s agenda is now extending far beyond Texas, bankrolling efforts to halt offshore wind turbines in Massachusetts and to prop up coal power on native American land in Arizona while spearheading efforts to crack down on sustainable finance in energy-producing states like West Virginia.
“We are very influential, we are meeting with policymakers to share recommendations and we’re having success around the country,” said Jason Isaac, a former state representative and now director of TPPF’s energy initiatives. Isaac said that TPFF regularly helped craft “certain aspects” of bills in Texas related to the state’s electricity grid or environmental, social, and corporate governance (or ESG) issues.
“I think conservatives are slowly but surely moving away from variable generation and towards reliable generation,” he said of the group’s quest against renewables. Isaac claimed renewables have been unfairly propped up by a “cult-like fascination” among politicians who have pursued what he called a “dangerous and deadly” agenda to reduce planet-heating emissions.
The aggressive push against renewables in Texas has alarmed environmentalists who fret it will undermine the state’s nation-leading wind industry and threaten the revenues solar and wind generates for local communities and farmers. More broadly, the template used by TPPF in Texas could hobble efforts by Joe Biden’s administration to tackle the climate crisis.
“We are seeing a rush of these bills attempting to wind the clock back on renewables and TPPF really are at the point of the spear on this,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “They are transparent advocates for the fossil fuel industry and I think they pose an incredible threat to renewables. TPPF have gained incredible traction, they really are shifting the narrative in Texas.
“They’ve won over the top politicians in the state, which is very dangerous. Texas is going to be critical if the US going to get to net zero emissions, so we should take this threat seriously.”
TPPF’s impact can now be found thousands of miles from its base in Austin, Texas, with the group filing a lawsuit in 2021 on behalf of six east coast fishing businesses – collectively calledNantucket Residents Against Turbines – targeting a major windfarm currently under construction off the coast of Massachusetts. Slated to come online by the end of the year, Vineyard Wind will be the first major offshore wind project to be built off the US east coast.
The lawsuit claimed federal agencies did not sufficiently analyze how the project, which is set to deliver enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, would affect wildlife – specifically the endangered North Atlantic right whale – and thereby violated the Endangered Species Act and slew of other environmental policies.
Meghan Lapp, a seafood dealer and longtime offshore wind critic who was a plaintiff in the suit, told Reuters in 2021 that TPPF got involved in the suit at her request. As it announced its involvement in the case, the thinktank also took the unusual step of releasing a trailer called “A Heavy Wind”.
The case was ultimately unsuccessful after a federal judge dismissed it last month, but the idea that wind turbines kill whales has been seized upon by conservatives, especially since December, when dozens of whales began washing up on the Atlantic coast in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) calls an “unusual mortality event”.
Noaa has said there is no evidence that offshore wind power is killing off whales, with fishing practices, boat strikes and the climate crisis among the primary dangers to marine mammals, but congressional Republicans have called on the White House to pause offshore wind development, while Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News, aired a critical series of segments called “The Biden Whale Extinction”.
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The assault on renewables by TPPF and its Republican allies has stunned conservatives who remain supportive of the longstanding bipartisan enthusiasm for clean energy.
The reversal has been particularly stark for Texas which, blessed with the capacious, flat terrain and amenable climate for abundantwind and solar energy, was championed as a bastion for renewables by previous Republican governors George W Bush and Rick Perry, even as they embraced the ubiquitous oil industry.
More than 40% of Texas’s electricity came from carbon-free sources last year, with the state now producing more wind and solar than the next three states – California, Iowa and Oklahoma – combined. This imperious status now seems uncertain.
“I don’t recognize the state sometimes any more from our elected leaders. It’s like we are in a twilight zone where up is down and day is night,” said Matt Welch, state director of Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation.
“I fear we’re losing our lead in the nation and the world as the source for clean energy advancement. It’s just amazing we’ve rolled up the welcome mat and told wind and solar operators they’re just not welcome here any more.”
The Texas Public Policy Foundation was founded in 1989 by James R Leininger, a San Antonio-based physician who made his fortune selling hospital beds, and initially focused on the issue of charter schools before branching out into other topics such as energy. The thinktank is a member of theState Policy Network, a network of far-right non-profits across the country that fight climate-focused legislation.
In 2021, the most recent year for which records are available, donations for the thinktank totaled $25.6m. Publicly available data shows that – like many State Policy Network affiliates – its largest known funder isCharles Koch, the billionaire industrialist who made his fortune from fossil fuels. Entities tied to Koch have contributed at least $8.8m to the group since 2012, according to an analysis by researcher Connor Gibson.
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Tax filings show that the group has received donations from fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, but, as a non-profit, the full extent of TPPF’s fossil fuel funding is unknown.
Issac said, however, it has been “many years” since large oil firms such as Exxon have donated to TPPF as these companies now ostensibly support decarbonization and environmentally responsible corporate governance, which conflicts with the foundation. He insisted that the foundation is committed to “free enterprise and individual liberty” and the eradication of “market distorting” subsidies, not just for renewables but also fossil fuels.
But Welch said that Republican lawmakers, backed by TPPF, have ditched any ideological consistency by heaping onerous restrictions on renewable energy development on private property, in some cases attempting to impose requirements absent from oil and gas drilling, and trying to slash subsidies for the industry at the same time as offering state support for the buildout of new gas plants.
One proposed bill that didn’t get sufficient backing in the latest Texas legislative session would have placed stringent new rules for wind and solar projects, including written permissions from neighboring property owners and setbacks of up to half a mile from the edge of a property for wind turbines. Another would have cut all subsidies for renewable energy.
“On a Tuesday these lawmakers will be adamantly for private property rights, but on a Thursday they will want to stop the growth of renewable energy even though it’s on somebody’s private land,” Welch said, adding thatTPPF was once full of “mini Milton Friedmans for years until recently, and now all of a sudden they throw that out the window.
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“It’s been a shocker. It’s so hypocritical,” he said. “I used to be an acolyte of TPPF but they are now driven by oil and gas billionaires who want to stop alternative forms of energy to benefit their own bottom line. They’ve sold their soul to the almighty dollar.”
Renewable energy remains broadly popular with the Texas public for delivering cheap, clean power along with an injection of cash for entities such as school districts, but affection has somewhat curdled among some of the state’s Republican leadership. A devastating winter storm in 2021, which left millions of Texans without power and led to several hundred deaths, was a major accelerant of this trend.
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In the days following the crippling event, known as winter storm Uri, Abbott and other leading Republicans pushed the blame for the power blackouts upon renewable energy, with misleading pictures of frozen wind turbines from Europe quickly circulating social media as the supposed cause of the grid’s breakdown.
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Subsequent studies have made clear the primary cause of the blackouts were frozen gas pipelines and a lack of infrastructure resiliency to extreme weather, rather than renewables per se, but the perception of faulty wind and solar has stuck, eagerly fanned by TPPF.
“I still believe [renewables] deserve a lot of the blame,” said Isaac. “The storm was helpful in educating people who just assumed when they flip a switch the lights come on that there are issues with grid reliability, that solar panels covered in snow don’t produce electricity.”
Isaac said the foundation accepts that the climate is changing but disputes that this is harmful to people,claiming that the benefits of burning of fossil fuels “far outweighs” any negatives, including deadly air pollution, which he asserts isn’t an issue for the US and its “near natural” air quality. Scientists have, in fact, found that the climate crisis poses huge and growing risks to humanity, with airborne pollutants from burning coal, oil and gas linked to an array of different health problems.
While the most severe of the anti-renewables bills pushed forward in Texas didn’t pass the legislature this year, Isaac said that TPPF remains undaunted and will continue to agitate against what he called “the false panacea of variable power”. Supporters of clean energy said they expect further battles ahead to prevent Texas’s progress in solar and wind from being unwound.
“With the growth trajectory of renewable energy, TPPF can either get on the train or lay down in front of the tracks,” said Welch. “I suspect they won’t rest on their laurels. They’re going to come for renewables again and again and again.”
tom b raw an 10 22
In a blunt-talking editorial from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the editors took two of the most conservative members of the Supreme Court to task for doing little to halt the slide in the court's credibility that has been in freefall after it became a 6-3 conservative majority.
Specifically, they cited Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito over a Thomas ruling last week, and a report on Alito dating back to his confirmation in 2005.
In the case of Thomas, last week he interceded on behalf of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is balking at having to testify in an election corruption case in Georgia related to Trump's phone call to Georgia's secretary of state.
Regarding his ruling temporarily granting Graham relief, the editors wrote, "... as with anything regarding that election, having Thomas involved in any way automatically looks suspect because of his wife, right-wing activist Ginni Thomas. In the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Ginni Thomas flooded Trump’s inner circle with unhinged texts calling Joe Biden’s election a 'coup,' suggesting the Biden 'crime family' should face 'military tribunals for sedition,' and generally encouraging resistance to accepting the election outcome."
The editors added, "In what universe is it OK for Justice Thomas not to recuse himself from anything Jan. 6-related when this is the kind of pillow talk he goes home to at night?"
As for Alito, he was scorched for lying his way onto the court that led to his Dobbs's majority decision that gutted Roe v. Wade 17 years later.
With the New York Times reporting that Alito had assured Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) that he had no intention of overturning Roe, saying, "I am a believer in precedents. People would find I adhere to that,” the Post-Dispatch editors slammed him for his "mendacity."
"That mendacity is hardly a surprise, nor is Alito alone in it," they wrote. "All five conservative justices who voted in June to overturn Roe (Roberts concurred, but stopped short of endorsing full reversal) have at various times waxed on about the sanctity of precedent generally — and have, to varying degrees, offered assurance they weren’t going to go out of their way to flip Roe as soon as they had the votes to do it. Which, of course, is exactly what they did."
The editors also took a shot at Chief Justice John Roberts for acting like he doesn't understand why the court he heads has lost the confidence of the public.
With Roberts complaining, "I don't understand the connection between (Supreme Court) opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Court," the editors explained, "As we noted then, his frustration is misplaced. These latest developments further illustrate why."
You can read the whole piece here.
bunch in 10 22 eg
When President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act into law on November 15, 2021, members of his administration weren’t shy about describing the bill as “bipartisan” — as those who played major roles in crafting it had ranged from conservative Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina to centrist Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. But many far-right MAGA Republicans were quick to condemn the bill, slamming it as “socialism” and describing Tillis and others in the GOP who voted for it as RINOS: Republicans In Name Only.
Almost 11 months have passed since Biden signed the bill into law. And according to CNN reporters Edward-Isaac Dovere and Sarah Fortinsky, some of the Republicans who attacked the infrastructure bill last year have been asking for funds from it — including Rep. Tom Emmer.
“Last November, GOP Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota released a statement slamming the passage of the freshly approved infrastructure law he referred to as ‘President Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar socialist wish list,’” Dovere and Fortinsky report. “Then, in June, Emmer — the House Republican campaign chairman leading attacks on Democrats for supporting the law — quietly submitted a wish of his own. In a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Emmer expressed his hearty support for a multimillion dollar grant to improve part of Highway 65 in his district.”
Other Republicans who went from condemning the infrastructure bill in 2021 to requesting funds from it in 2022, according to Dovere and Fortinsky, have included Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida. The reporters note that like Emmer, Rep. David Valadao of California “slammed the Biden law in public and then behind the scenes, asked for money from it.”
“Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, a leading Biden critic who explained his vote against what he called a 'phony' infrastructure bill by issuing a statement that ‘this bill only serves to advance the America Last’s socialist agenda, while completely lacking fiscal responsibility,’ wrote three separate letters between March and July advocating for projects in his district,” Dovere and Fortinsky explain. “They’d enhance quality of life, Gosar wrote. They’d ease congestion and boost the economy. They’d alleviate bottlenecks and improve rural living conditions…. Kentucky Rep. Andy Barr called the bill a ‘big government socialist agenda.’ He later wrote three letters of his own on behalf of three different projects, also citing their importance for safety and job growth.”
rock scott, rubio on fema? 10 22
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/matt-gaetz-demands-hurricane-aid/
many GOP voted ~ biden covid? bill then claimed credit
gov reynolds 450K$ is-spent? iowa, nice!
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trump-2657893280/
salon sophia mc
When George W. Bush announced that the United States had begun military action in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks orchestrated by al-Qaeda, he emphasized that the mission would also focus on providing humanitarian aid to the citizens of Afghanistan. "The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies," he explained. "As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine, and supplies." The hypocrisy of a military strike framed as a humanitarian mission was on full display. For those of us who could immediately see through Bush's hubris and his malignant American exceptionalism, the global war on terror epitomized the toxic nature of America's culture of political hypocrisy.
It all seems quaint now.
Today we live in a world where chanting "lock her up" at Hillary Clinton for her handling of sensitive documents runs in tandem with outrage over an FBI seizure of classified documents as "un-American;" where unsubstantiated concerns over election fraud are best handled by attempting to overthrow the democratic process; where you chant "Blue Lives Matter" except during the Jan. 6 insurrection or when you attack the FBI; where invoking the Fifth amendment means a person is definitely guilty, except when you do it; where you call for bipartisan unity on one day and then stoke party division the next.
It's actually kind of exhausting to try to list even the best highlights of Trump-era hypocrisy. As columnist Don Kahle writes, since the election of Trump, "GOP hypocrisy has become strategic."
For some scholars, the Bush-style hypocrisy of the War on Terror is considered indispensable for the functioning of the world order. In fact, University of Cambridge professor David Runciman argues that politics isn't possible without hypocrisy. For Machiavelli expert Ruth Grant, hypocrisy is essential to politics because a political life and a moral life are simply incompatible.
For others, hypocrisy threatens democracy because, as political science professor Austin Sharat puts it, hypocrisy "erodes trust and breeds cynicism." For Sharat, Trump's extreme and excessive hypocrisy poses a danger to the future of U.S. democracy because he has normalized it and, thus far, not been held accountable for it: "He has been a master of saying one thing and doing another. He has held up others to ridicule and then done the very things for which he shamed them."
But that's the thing. Whether or not you justify hypocrisy in politics, you have to admit that Trump-style hypocrisy is entirely different from previous examples. Sure, Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" while unashamedly owning slaves. Lyndon Johnson said "we will seek no wider war" in reference to Vietnam and then did just that. Richard Nixon said "I am not a crook" when he was. Bill Clinton stated he hadn't had sex with Monica Lewinsky when he had. But not one of the above examples of hypocritical presidents comes even remotely close to the hypocrisy of Trump.
Trump hasn't just been a hyper-hypocrite. He hasn't just mastered it; he has redefined the very meaning of it. Part of this shift lies in the fact that Trump may be the chief hypocrite, but every single one of his political allies and supporters is one too. You literally cannot support Trump or work alongside him and not be a hypocrite. In fact, if there is one recognizable element of the Trump party platform it is collective, weaponized hypocrisy. Without the hypocrisy, there literally is nothing else left.
Before we decide what to do about the new turn in political hypocrisy, we first have to understand it. Here are four key changes to keep in mind.
01 It's in your face.
To say that the hypocrisy of Trump and his supporters is flagrant, shameless and extreme is to state the obvious.
In April 2017, Chauncey Devega wrote an essay for Salon in which he called Trump's hypocrisy "flagrant." The trouble is that when you used a word like "flagrant" to describe excess Trumpist behavior in 2017, you ran out of effective adjectives by 2022.
But the in-your-face style of Trumpist hypocrisy isn't just limited to the hypocrite-in-chief. Perhaps there is no better example of the mass approach to Trumpist hypocrisy than its contradictions over health care. One day, pro-Trump Republicans are freaking out over needing to wear a mask during a pandemic; the next they are mandating control over women's health. One ad targeting the hypocrisy of the "pro-life" position pointed out that Republicans only care about policing women's bodies, not supporting them or their children.
So, we have both a spate of inconsistencies and a mass movement practicing them, but the additional in-your-face feature of Trumpist hypocrisy is the lack of shame. Think, for example, of all of those Trump nominated members of the Supreme Court who blatantly misled the public during their confirmation hearings about their position on Roe v. Wade, but also showed zero remorse, embarrassment, or even concern that doing so was not just hypocritical; it was deliberately deceptive.
Trumpist hypocrisy is just there all the time, in your face, and proudly on display.
02 It's invisible.
Here's where it gets really weird, because while it is on display, openly, all the time; it is also invisible. The difference is that some of us see it and some of us can't.
Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore argued in a 2017 essay for Foreign Affair that it was a mistake to consider Trump a hypocrite. "Trump's No Hypocrite," they claimed. Rather, they described him as inconsistent rather than hypocritical. "Hypocrisy requires a minimal degree of self-awareness," they argued, as well as "clear understanding of both one's own interests and of public norms." Their point was that Trump simply couldn't even "recognize" his hypocritical behavior, which meant he wasn't actually a true hypocrite.
Here's the catch — and it explains why some of us see the hypocrisy and why those who practice it don't. Farrell and Finnemore's point rests on the premise that hypocrisy depends on being aware of a moral compass and deliberately not using it. But that's the thing about the new hypocrisy:Its moral compass is its hypocrisy.
Once you recognize that the issue here isn't failing to effectively compare one's actions to an ethical code, but rather, embracing selfish, self-serving, irrational, inconsistent and illogical behavior as an ethical code, then you get why those who practice it can't see it. Inside the Trump hypocrisy bubble, nothing that is done by them can be judged against an external ethics. Therefore, they simply can't possibly be a hypocrite.
For the Trumpist hypocrite, everyone else who doesn't agree with you is the real hypocrite, but you never are. Sure, it's absolutely batshit logic and an ethical code that lacks anything resembling ethics, but that's how it works.
03 It's invincible.
In 2017, professors Emile Bruneau, Nour Kteily and Emily Falk published a groundbreaking study on the power of revealing hypocrisy. Studying how communities commonly resort to collective blame after mass violence — like when individuals blame all Muslims for acts of mass violence committed by a small group of Muslims — they tested a range of interventions that could be used to disrupt that habit. What they found was that showing individuals that it was hypocritical to blame all Muslims for the acts of a few, when they don't blame all Christians for the acts of a few, was a highly effective tactic.
The catch, though, was that the study wasn't looking at Trumpist hypocrisy but hypocrisy in general. What is important to note, though, from the study, is that for the average person, it is possible to become aware of one's hypocrisy and alter one's beliefs. That simply isn't true in Trumpland.
Sharat notes that one of the core problems with Trumpist hypocrisy is the fact that calling it out just doesn't make any difference. He points to a piece in the philosophy and politics blog, Vim, that argues that the reason why calling out Trumpist hypocrisy doesn't matter is because "charging a fascist with hypocrisy is especially pointless." This is so because fascism requires that exposing its inconsistencies and incoherence has no effect on its adherents. Whether we want to use the F-word to describe Trumpist hypocrites or not, we do have to agree that calling it out has made absolutely no difference whatsoever to its grasp on American society.
If you have any doubts, check out the work of Jordan Klepper, who has done brilliant work satirizing the absurdity of Trumpist hypocrisy. His recurring segment for ":{The :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Daily Show with Trevor Noah:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:" — "Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse" — has him out in the field interviewing Trump supporters and literally repeating their hypocrisy back at them. In every case, the interviewee hears Klepper ironically explain their hypocrisy. They then respond by unironically repeating it back to him. The contrast between Klepper cleverly exposing the hypocrisy and the hypocrite happily and obliviously owning it is stunning.
, "This would be so much funnier if it wasn't so existentially terrifying."
04 It is all there is.
When you think about it, Trumpism doesn't just practice hypocrisy — it needs it. How else do you explain defending democracy by literally trying to destroy it? Whether attacking pizza or the vice president, this is a politics grounded in unethical inconsistencies and immoral irrationality.
Hypocrisy has now become the signature feature of Trumpian politics. In fact, every single party platform is rife with it. There is literally nothing else.
But it's worse than that. Because Trumpist hypocrisy has also overtaken most anti-Trump politics as well. In race after race this primary season, non-Trumpy candidates have literally defined themselves over and against Trumpist hypocrisy to the detriment of offering alternative policy platforms.
It's not entirely clear how we escape the vicious cycle of constantly needing to respond to the latest hypocritical move of the Trump camp. It isn't wise to ignore it, but it's also problematic to let it take up the whole room. It sparks legitimate outrage but also sucks the air out of productive political engagement. And given the fact that signaling it isn't going to affect those who practice it, giving it too much energy isn't tipping any political scales.
It may well be that the most effective challenge to Trumpian hypocrisy comes from satire, like the Klepper segments highlighted above, since satire's creative use of irony is uniquely suited to revealing ironic behaviors. In one excellent example, Trevor Noah offered
of Trumpist media when he ran tape of Fox News covering Hillary Clinton, but paired it with footage of Trump.
There is a real benefit to allowing comedians to be the ones to skewer the hypocrites. They are experts in irony and they know the difference between the kind of inconsistency that sparks critique while getting a laugh and the kind that makes no sense. Even more important, they get that the best challenge to weaponized hypocrisy may well be to mock it. Since if there is one thing Trumpist hypocrites are worse at than recognizing their own hypocrisy, it is taking a joke. And that's pretty funny.
===
an 7 22
:{
Texas Congresswoman is the latest Republican to brag about infrastructure improvements she voted against
United States Representative Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas) speaking at the 2021 Young Women's Leadership Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas (Gage Skidmore).
Alex Henderson
July 07, 2022
When President Joe Biden signed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill into law in November 2021, the members of Congress who took a victory lap included centrist Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina — both of whom played a key role in the negotiations. But many GOP members of Congress, anxious to show how MAGA they were, opposed the bill and attacked it as “socialism.”
One of the bill’s critics was Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas. Van Duyne voted against it, but on July 7, she bragged about new funding for the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport — funding coming from the infrastructure bill she opposed in 2021:
Journalist Jamie Dupree called out Van Duyne’s hypocrisy, tweeting:
READ MORE: Marsha Blackburn slammed for confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence
But Van Duyne is hardly the only Republican who railed against the infrastructure package only to turn around and take advantage of it.
In Tennessee, Sen. Marsha Blackburn attacked the bill as a “gateway to socialism,” and Tennessee Republicans serving in the U.S. House of Representatives joined her in attacking it. But Tennessee hasn’t cut itself off from federal funding.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has been angrily railing against the Biden Administration’s economic policies — only to brag about the millions of dollars in federal stimulus money being used in his state. On May 17, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel’s Jeffrey Schweers reported, “Gov. Ron DeSantis has been on a spending spree for months, taking credit for millions of dollars in federal stimulus money he’s handing out to mostly rural Republican counties while at the same time, bashing President Biden’s big government spending. Federal bucks have bolstered the state budget for two years in a row, shoring up the state’s reserves, and funding such things as the governor’s job growth program, climate ‘resiliency’ against rising waters, road projects, broadband expansion, college training programs and tax cuts.”
In a January 25 op-ed for MSNBC’s MaddowBlog, journalist Steve Benen called out some of the Republicans who opposed the infrastructure bill only to brag when they used funding from it — a list that includes Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, Rep. Gary Palmer of Alabama, Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa and Rep. Kay Granger of Texas.
READ MORE: ‘The epitome of hypocrisy’: Ron DeSantis 'bashes' POTUS' tax policies while reaping the benefits
}:
==
OMFG
you can't make this up: https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/10/1/21497568/former-coal-ceo-robert-murray-files-black-lung-benefits-crandall-canyon-mine-robert-murray-energy
Former coal CEO Robert Murray files for black lung benefits
By Associated PressOct 1, 2020
[Robert Murray, founder, owner, president and CEO of Murray Energy Corp. gives a briefing on efforts to find trapped miners at the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah. Murray stated it would take a minimum of 3 days to get to the miners. A mine collapse trapped 6 miners about 1700 hundred feet below the surface. They believe the collapse was caused by an earthquake about a mile below where the miners were working. Aug. 7, 2007 Photo by Stuart Johnson], Deseret News]
CHARLESTON, W.Va. —Former coal CEO Robert E. Murray, who has fought federal regulations on the industry, has filed an application with the U.S. Department of Labor for black lung benefits, according to a published report.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Ohio Valley ReSource report the former head of Murray Energy said on the form that he is still board chairman of the company but can no longer serve as president and CEO due to his health.
Murray has fought federal mine safety regulations for years. His company filed an unsuccessful lawsuit in 2014 over regulations to cut the amount of coal dust in coal mines to reduce the incidence of black lung disease, saying they were overly burdensome and costly to the industry.
Murray owned the Crandall Canyon Mine in Emery County, Utah, where two collapses in 2007 killed nine men — six who were trapped and three trying to rescue them. In one volatile news conference outside the mine, Murray vehemently defended the mining industry, went off on global warming and called out by name reporters and news outlets whose stories on the collapse he deemed nonfactual.
The government later fined Genwal Resources, the operator of the mine at the time, $1.34 million for violations that contributed to the deaths of six miners plus nearly $300,000 for other violations. In 2012, Genwal Resources admitted in federal court to misdemeanor criminal charges of violating federal mine health and safety laws, though the charges weren’t directly related to the fatal collapses. The company was fined $500,000.
In the black lung claim, Murray, 80, says he is heavily dependent on oxygen and is “near death.”
Murray Energy Holdings emerged last month from federal bankruptcy protection under a new name and ownership group.
The new company, St. Clairsville, Ohio-basedAmerican Consolidated Natural Resources Inc., is the largest privately owned U.S. coal operator with active mines in Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and Utah.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Ohio Valley ReSource confirmed the authenticity of Murray’s claim documents by entering his last name, birthdate and a case ID number into an online portal maintained by the Labor Department. If the claim goes before an administrative law judge, some parts would become public.
Murray says in the claim that he worked underground while supervising operations for several years.
“During my 63 years working in underground coal mines, I worked 16 years every day at the mining face underground and went underground every week until I was age 75,” Murray wrote.
Murray declined to speak on the record with the news outlets, but said he has black lung from working in underground mines and is entitled to benefits. He also disputed that he fought regulations to stop black lung and threatened to file a lawsuit if a story was published indicating he fought federal regulations and benefits, the outlets said.
Murray told NPR last year that his lung disease was not caused by working in underground mines.
“It’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. IPF, and it is not related to my work in the industry. They’ve checked for that,” Murray told NPR. “And it’s not — has anything to do with working in the coal mines, which I did for 17 years underground every day. And until I was 76, I went underground twice a week.”
[[Ayn Rand Hypocrisy Award
sob, wheeler heads EPA minon
(corp feelings hurt, fu mr nutterbutter
Corporations gain when a coal company sues a public interest group for criticizing it allegedly causing the corporation to suffer mental anguish and emotional distress. People lose because the public interest group must spend big dollars defending itself against bogus claim . Murray Energy v. Public Citizen (2014).
you can't make this up: https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/10/1/21497568/former-coal-ceo:{-robert-murray-files-black-lung-benefits:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:-crandall-canyon-mine-robert-murray-energy
mofo:
epa coal regs 5/14
The National Mining Association, which represents large coal companies such as Peabody Coal Co, Arch Coal Inc, Alpha Natural Resources and Cloud Peak Energy Inc., “has spent $1 million on a radio and digital campaign in five states depicting shocked consumers opening expensive electricity bills,” Reuters reported. The advertisements claim that electricity bills will jump by 80 percent as a result of the Obama administration’s proposal to limit carbon pollution from new coal and natural gas plants, something the Washington Post’s Fact Checker recently said was “wholly unsupported” and reliant on “bogus, hyped evidence to make its claim.”
The NMA has spoken out against new coal dust regulations aimed at reducing cases of black lung disease in coal miners, claiming the administration’s long-awaited rule is unnecessary and criticizing multiple studies that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined were sound. The NMA also intervened in a recent court decision to restore a law overturned by the Bush administration designed to keep toxic coal mining spoil from entering sensitive waterways, saying they found the ruling “obviously very disappointing.”
===]]
gop backs corps and call anti-corp Dems elite?!
an 12 21
Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn't already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross "woke wars" going on in the Democratic ranks.
A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren't focused on the threat of gerrymandering, voter suppression, or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don't like the results. Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster. So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people."
In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that "Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals." (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that "working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics," and that many political strategists believe "Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues."
A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani's newsletter, in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day. "Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions," he griped.
Most Americans?
The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.
None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over "wokeness." I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they're mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing. No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn't need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn't skip a beat.
Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollettguilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree. I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO's opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.
Fox News is running with a bunch of "gotcha" attacks on prominent Democrats, such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. The bad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett's victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn't matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man's bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn't real, and that it's just something Democrats make up to score political points.
The umbrage over Smollett's fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a "hate crime," as multiple pundits at the network falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting.) And it certainly isn't comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as oneFox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson on "mothers who rape their daughters." But that didn't slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.
No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota national figures, but it's naive to think that it's really due to anything either of those women say or do. It's because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let's face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.
The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires.
Which isn't to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There's nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.
But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.
Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won't work. It won't stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won't stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people's worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.
We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about "critical race theory" took over the gubernatorial race, helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. "Critical race theory," at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse, the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe's campaign.
Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about "threats to traditional marriage" for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.
Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It's certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for. And it's a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.
But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.
no lnx many
GOP pushes strategy to prolong the pandemic
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott feels the heat: analysis
Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 12, 2021
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has once again proven his stalwart commitment to aiding the virus that causes COVID-19 in its goal of spreading as far as possible. Late Monday, the Republican state leader issued an executive order banning all entities in the state — including private businesses — from requiring employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. (All other vaccine requirements remain untouched, because the "principled opposition" to vaccine mandates is an inch deep.)
As many folks who wish hypocrisy still mattered have pointed out, Abbott's ban violates his party's supposed commitment to a low regulatory environment for businesses by interfering with private businesses who wish to institute vaccine requirements. When it comes to the conflict between being pro-business and pro-virus, however, it was never any contest with Republicans. All other GOP principles fall before the newfound Republican commitment to making sure COVID-19 infects as many human bodies as it can.
Abbott, of course, did not admit that he was preventing businesses from enacting basic health and safety standards. Instead, he presented the ban as a defense of business, accusing President Joe Biden of "bullyingmany private entities into imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, causing workforce disruptions that threaten Texas's continued recovery." That's is just a small taste of the doublespeak that the entire executive order is written in.
Abbott is not standing up for businesses or the economy.
:{
}:
Biden's vaccine mandate was quietly welcomed by many businesses who want to have normalcy-returning mandates but want someone else to blame when Trumper employees whine about it.And their worry about worker shortages was unfounded, as most vaccine resistant workers will get the shot rather than lose their job. Abbott's claims about economic recovery are also hot air. The sluggish recovery is due to the ongoing pandemic and will only bounce back if more people get vaccinated.
No, it's quite clear what's going on and has been going on with Republicans fighting every effort to get the pandemic under control: The GOP wants to prolong the pandemic because they think doing so will help them in the 2022 midterms.
Abbott himself is up for reelection in 2022, and, at first blush, it might seem a weird strategy to practically make the virus his running mate. (Though the coronavirus has tough competition in an "ew, gross" contest with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.) But Abbott is making a smart, if deeply evil and downright murderous, bet. Voters, especially fairweather voters, tend to blame everything on the party that controls the White House, even if the blame for any problem actually falls on the opposition. If the pandemic is still a problem in November 2022, then there's a very real chance that large numbers of Democratic voters, already demoralized by the lack of legislative progress on other fronts, simply won't show up to vote. That will make it easier for Republicans to sweep the midterms.
A new Axios-Ipsos poll demonstrates that the "prolong the pandemic" strategy is working for Republicans. Trust in Biden on the pandemic has fallen to 42%, down 10 points from where it was 6 months ago. Most of the trust has slipped with Democrats and independent voters. Americans are also getting depressed, with 30% saying it will be more than a year before life returns to normal, which is triple what the number from June.
The COVID-19 culture war isn't just demoralizing Democratic and potential Democratic voters. It appears GOP leadership sees this issue as a way to invigorate their own base, whose entire political reason for existing is increasingly just to "own the liberals."
Anti-vaccine and anti-mask protests, which are getting rowdy and even violent, started off as a classic right-wing Astroturfed phenomenon, but it's since gained a lot of traction among ordinary conservatives who aren't getting paid to throw tantrums at perplexed school board members. Culture war provocations over Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head floated earlier this year by Fox News weren't getting the job done — but freaking out over masks and shots really gets the juices going for the worst Americans, i.e. the people the GOP needs to turn out at the polls.
Vaccine mandates are a threat to the "victory through infecting our own voters with COVID-19" strategy for Republicans, for one simple reason: They work. As a White House report released last week details, "organizations with vaccination requirements have seen their vaccination rates increase by more than 20 percentage points and have routinely seen their share of fully vaccinated workers rise above 90%." Despite conservatives floating threats of mass walkouts, the paper-thin "principled" opposition to vaccines disappears the second that conservatives face an actual consequence for refusing to vaccinate.
The Biden administration has fallen far short of where it should be in terms of vaccine mandates, both slow-walking the employer mandates and completely sidestepping the possibility of banning the unvaccinated from planes before the holidays. Still, even the threat of vaccine mandates is starting to have an impact. As the report notes, the rate of unvaccinated Americans has been cut by one-third since Biden first started issuing mandates.
Republicans are in a race against time in their efforts to reduce vaccination rates to the point where the pandemic is still a live issue next November. COVID-19 rates are falling, down 24% in the past 14 days nationally and down 39% in Abbott's home state, which continues to have one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation. This is mostly because of vaccination, but also because so many Americans have been infected that it's adding to herd immunity. It's still unclear if there will be another winter surge or if the virus is finally running out of the unimmunized bodies it needs to remain a serious threat. There is a strong possibility that the end of the pandemic is closer than many Americans think.
So by making it as hard for Biden to get shots into arms faster, Republicans are keeping COVID-19 cases high to keep Biden's approval ratings low.
If that doesn't change — or if it gets worse with another surge — there's a very real chance that this pandemic makes the already dim prospects for Democrats in 2022 even worse. And that, in turn, sets the stage for Donald Trump to cheat his way back into the White House in 2024. So it's no wonder that power-hungry Republicans are betting big on their prolong the pandemic strategy, even if it comes at the cost of killing their own voters. Big risks lead to big rewards. For the Republicans, setting themselves up for permanent one-party minority rule is the biggest prize.
// candidate trump; fox req vax early on
anti-legalization GOP Congresswoman cashing in on marijuana stocks
May 30, 2021
Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican with an influential post on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, has spent her Congressional career advocating against the legalization of marijuana — wh
hypocrisy
Former Associated Press reporter Emily Wilder was fired from the international media company late Thursday following a pressure campaign by right-wing media, including publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon working in tandem with the Standford College Republicans. Wilder was "canceled," if you will, for pro-Palestinian activism during her years in college — not at the AP.
The campaign to have Wilder fired started on Monday with the Stanford College Republicans taking to Twitter to bill the reporter's past pro-Palestine demonstrating as controversial, coming to the verdict that she would never be able to be impartial while covering national news.[twt pix]
"Recently, we discovered that theAssociated Press has hired former Stanford anti-Israel agitator, Emily Wilder, who referred to the late Sheldon Adelson as a 'naked mole rat' as one of their 'journalists,'" the college Republican organization tweeted. The series of tweets from the Standford Republican chapter went onto claim that the reporter, who is Jewish, during her college years belonged to a "Students for Justice in Palestine," on-campus group. The college Republicans — who appear to have their own questionable Twitter activity — also took offense to Wilder calling right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro a "little turd" and Sheldon Adelson a "naked mole-rat."
From there, the right-wing outrage machine got ahold of the story, including The Federalist, The Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News, which billed the reporter as being "anti-Israel." Notably, the Free Beacon ran their hit-piece with no attached byline and didn't return Salon's request for comment as to why.
On Thursday, an all-staff email from AP News director Peter Prengaman to employees read: "A note to say that news associate Emily Wilder is no longer with the AP[twt pix]
but the Associated Press claims it wasn't her activism in college. "While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder's comments on Thursday thatshe was dismissed for violations of AP's social media policy during her time at AP," an AP spokesperson told The Wrap.
"Amazing how quickly a talented young reporter's career can be snuffed out by a Twitter mob that decided to feign outrage over some college tweets. And if @vv1lder somehow violated @AP's social media rules, the solution is to offer guidance, not termination, to a new reporter," TheWashington Post's Glenn Kesslerwrote on Twitter following the ouster.
[twt pix] responding to her firing, Wilder told SFGATE that her firing was nothing more than a right-wing outrage mob that reportedly disdains "cancel culture," doing what they claim to resent.
"There's no question I was just canceled," told SFGATE reporter Eric Ting on Thursday following the news of her firing. "This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around 'cancel culture.' To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture — specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine — it's always the same side."
in her interview with SFGATE, Wilder noted an "onslaught of absolutely vile messages" she received after right-wing media began running with the story. Wilder didn't immediately return a request for comment from Salon.
While The Associated Press might have folded to the demands of the right-wing mob, many journalists on Twitter voiced their support for the young journalist. "Shame on @AP @peterprengaman. I stand with Emily. Her reporting at our newspaper was excellent. Reverse your decision NOW," The Arizona Republic's reporter Rebekah Sanders wrote. The Washington Post's Dave Weigel responded: "'Hire @vv1lder' is something more and more people are saying."
"Every journalist should be outraged about @AP firing [Wilder] over college activism in favor of freedom for Palestinians. The industry is rife with clear double-standards on this," Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek commented on the firing. The Daily Beast's senior politics reporter Will Sommer replied, "It's crazy that editors are still falling for these bad-faith campaigns from right-wing media."
The decision to out Wilder comes on the heels ofright-wing pundits cheering the Israeli airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza on Saturday, housing several international news outlets, including The Associated Press.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
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not sure this is eg but compl diff criteria on joe cabinet vs djt
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/ted-cruz-merrick-garland/
can't come close to keeping up in Bizarro-world
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/house-gop-vows-to-investigate-biden-for-campaigning-on-amtrak/
Republican Office of the Subcommittee on Rail, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials
gibbs smucker, scott perry crAWFORD delay covid supplies?
effing hypocrisy eg state rights except swing states rights to ct own votes; trump pass one bill rest XO
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/biden-republicans
Ross Ramsey, The Texas Tribune
Jan. 22, 2021
"Analysis: Top Texas lawyers skipping the honeymoon with the Biden administration" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Have a look at what the top attorneys for the state of Texas were offering on the day Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as president and vice president.
“My statement on Inauguration Day," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxtontweeted from his agency's official account. “Congrats, President Biden. On Inauguration Day, I wish our country the best. I promise my fellow Texans and Americans that I will fight against the many unconstitutional and illegal actions that the new administration will take, challenge federal overreachthat infringes on Texans' rights, and serve as a major check against the administration's lawlessness. Texas First! Law & Order always!"
One of his deputy attorneys general, Aaron Reitz,retweeted that with his own topspin on the new chief executive of the United States: “Excited for the fight ahead. We will fight Joe Biden and the Democrats at every turn, because virtually everything they do is unconstitutional, illegal, bad for Texas, and bad for America."
Warms your little red, white and blue heart, doesn't it?
While the Republican attorney general and his deputies were suiting up for fights that haven't had time to start and tagging the newly seated Democrats as lawless before those Democrats have actually done anything, the new president was calling for unity.
“The answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don't look like you or worship the way you do or don't get their news from the same sources you do," Biden said. “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural vs. urban, conservative vs. liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts. If we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we're willing to stand in the other person's shoes, as my mom would say, just for a moment, stand in their shoes."...
// grover
no twt
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/aoc-twitter-abc-veritas/
walter kos
Racial disparities in society are only accentuated by emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, all inequities in our society have just been exposed that much more by the current crisis. Our system is a capitalist one that has relied on racism and concentration of capital and wealth to control a massive population of have nots. One of the symptoms of this racism is that small businesses owned by Black and Latino Americans have been frozen out of an already rigged process of COVID-19 stimulus relief. This is due in part to the fact that historically and presently, people of color have a considerably harder time getting loans from banks.
Not having a relationship with a bank makes getting Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) stimulus money considerably harder and as a result, while small businesses in general have been mostly kept out of the Republican, big business-focused package, it has been much harder on businesses of color. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) Already undercapitalized, Black-owned businesses weren't going to ask for the large amounts that other bigger small businesses were going to ask for—and banks make bigger fees on bigger loans. NBC News' Olivia Solonpointed out that while fiscal conservative, anti-"welfare" crusaders like the fake news makers over at Project Veritas decry the big government spending of the CARES package, they didn't seem to have an issue with taking more than half a million of taxpayer money to keep their lights on.
The "non-profit" organization, most recently known for hyping up a completely empty and veryquickly debunked election fraud "exclusive," received $558,900 in PPP stimulus, according to searchppp.com.The right-wing, make-em-up investigative organization is fronted by James O'Keefe—a sort of older version of pathetic GOP fraudster Jacob Wohl. He's best known for hiring people to say they were sexually assaulted in order to discredit real victims of sexual assault. It's this kind of dirtbaggery that gets Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' ultra right-wing wife to present you with an award at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. (True story.)
democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez boosted this story, synthesizing the racism and hypocrisy wrapped up in a holiday season bow.
This led to some right-wingers rubbing their tiny braincells together to attack Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for selling $58 "Tax the Rich" sweatshirts on her campaign's website. Unfortunately, there's math and the small factor of paying workers living wages. Not everything can be made for cheap in China, guys who seem to want to have a trade war with China but don't understand how costs work....
aoc: Black-owned small businesses were widely shut out from accessing PPP loans, yet right-wing disinfo org PV took half a million in public money while decrying direct federal assistance as “radical socialism.”
Republicanism in a nutshell.
tex lt gov patrick 1m$ reward for voter fraud, PA? dem turnpike send 2 cases of gop dead parent welch
https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/voice-of-america
no twt
President Donald Trump's appointed head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media is barred from making any further editorial or personnel decisions following a series of injunctions issued by a federal courtlate Friday, in what journalists called a major rebuke of the Trump administration's attempt to reshape government-funded news broadcasters.
In Washington, D.C., Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howellruled in favor of five USAGM executives who were fired or suspended in August at the direction of CEO Michael Pack, who took the helm of the agency in June and promptly dismissed several career officials in what was called a "Wednesday night massacre."
Current and former USAGM employees applauded the ruling, with chief strategy officer Shawn Powers tweeting that Pack "has repeatedly and intentionally violated the First Amendment rights" of journalists at the agency.
twt]
the five former employees sued to stopPack, a close associate of former White House adviser and Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon, from interfering in the editorial affairs of Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia, and other broadcasters which operate under the USAGM.
The lawsuit was filed after Pack opened an investigation into VOA's chief White House reporter, Steve Herman, over unspecified concerns that he displayed an anti-Trump bias. The plaintiffs and many other critics inside and outside of the agency saidPack violated the "firewall" between political appointees and the broadcasters' newsrooms which is meant to keep the organizations from becoming mouthpieces for the White House.
Progressive critics have long considered VOA a vehicle for U.S. government propaganda overseas, promoting American-friendly coverage of world events. However, the overt takeover by a Trump loyalist has raised alarm since June.
A month after being confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a party-line vote to run the agency, the USAGM announced it would not renew visas for foreign journalists, potentially sending dozens of reporters who have worked for VOA and other broadcasters for years, back to countries where they could be persecuted. The decision was attributed by many critics to the Trump administration's "xenophobia."
Under Howell's order, Pack will no longer be able to make personnel decisions for the remainder of his tenure, which is set to end in January when President-elect Joe Biden takes office. He also will not be permitted to communicate directly with editorial teams or investigate editors or their news stories.
Howell said Pack's investigation of Herman imposed "an unconstitutional prior restraint not just on Herman's speech, but on the speech of [Herman's editors] and journalists at VOA."
NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik called Howell's ruling a "tremendous rebuke" of Pack's actions during his five months at USAGM.
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==
hypocrisy and irony are dead? 9/20 way beyond 2 santa deficit BS:
mma 920
March, Sean Hannity said he wasn’t concerned about coronavirus because “we’re all dying” anyway. In April, Laura Ingraham said that while “every life is precious, we want to keep everybody safe and we — of course, that's a given. But we also have to understand the cost of American lives on the other side of this.” The attitude of Fox hosts towards the pandemic that has now killed more than 200,000 Americans with Donald Trump in the White House is strikingly different from their attitude towards several events that occurred during Barack Obama’s presidency.
We've talked about the obvious comparison to the Ebola scare of 2014 before (though it is still worth revisitingin light of the Supreme Court nomination fight).
The most prominent right--wing media lie of the Obama years was probably the one about "death panels." Fox News and right-wing media writ large stoked fear for years that the Affordable Care Act would implement “death panels.” Hannity said that it was “chilling” that Obama had “so little respect for life” and was trying to “encourage … inconvenient people to consider ‘alternatives to living.’” Ingraham scaremongered about the creation of “death camps” for the elderly should the bill become law.
Fox similarly fearmongered over other incidents during the Obama Administration, including the death of four Americans killed in Benghazi, and the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009.
Now as a major pandemic has killed more than 200,000 Americans, Fox has done everything it can to defend the Trump administration, and push aside public health concerns.
Simply put by Media Matters’ Parker Molloy, “When the president is a Democrat and he’s advocating for health care legislation that includes optional end-of-life counseling, it’s a four-alarm emergency. When the president is a Republican and thousands of people -- particularly the elderly -- are dying from a pandemic, it’s no big deal (and actually, he’s doing a great job).”
9/20 aha, fash-y, strong man acting alone: trump loves signing things foto op with fawning followers (he leaches gravitas, assent/ applause from them) maybe experts who look like they know what they're doing, but congress deadlocked/polarysys (in pocket of corps that want to continue extract $ HMO] and does not want to ACT, just make it look like he HAS many eg neglected but typical: gop beat up bad 2018 blue wave on pre-existing conds, to trump pretends to defend AT THE SAME TIME still trying to kill ACA that actually provides, fox fans fall for it
trump mocked for finally releasing ‘health care plan’ — which is really a ‘toothless’ executive order
David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 25, 2020
For at least four years President Donald Trump has been promising the American people a health care plan. He famously sat for the “60 Minutes” cameras just days after the…
==
on steroids/overdrive:
| As reported by NPR's Nina Totenberg, Ginsburg's dying wish was to be replaced by a new president. A number of right-wing figures attacked that wish, and Fox News' Tucker Carlson even said that :I'm going to choose not to believe" it. Fox's Tammy Bruce absurdly claimedthat Trump appointing a new justice ASAP is the way to "really honor" Ginsburg's legacy. |
Right-wing media want immediate SCOTUS appointment right-wing media are in lockstep: Republicans must move immediately to confirm a Donald Trump nominee to the Court this year, even after Republicans obstructed President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland for months in 2016. Every attempt they are making to draw a distinction between Garland's nomination then and the situation now is transparently ridiculous. The bottom line in both cases is power politics. The one truly troubling difference is that there are indications that some Republicans want a new Supreme Court justice to help Trump steal the election. On Fox News last night, Jesse Watters hinted at such, saying that a justice needs to be confirmed before the election, because (emphasis added): "If the election is razor thin and the Democrats sue, which they probably will, the case would go to the Supreme Court with an empty seat on it. John Roberts can't be trusted. So it's only 4-4. Republicans need a full court to ensure radical lawyers don't steal the election -- so they need to confirm the nominee sooner rather than later." Watters went on to call Democrats "bloodthirsty political killers" who need to be stopped. This morning, Fox News host Mark Levin ranted about the election and an urgent need for Republicans to appoint a justice: "we have a mob, and the mob has a home, and it's called the Democrat Party, and I'm going to tell you something. This mob, one way or another, will be crushed. If they're not crushed at the voting booth, they will be crushed otherwise." Let's be clear: In 2016, Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were blunt in arguing that there should not be a Supreme Court nomination during a presidential election year. If you're not expecting rank hypocrisy from them in the coming days, you haven't been paying attention. |
city rules neutralized by state/ fed?
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-coronavirus-pandemic-has-exposed-what-the-gops-anti-tax-rhetoric-is-really-all-about/
ewt Gingrich is usually, and rightly, blamed for destroying American politics, even more than Donald Trump. The former House Speaker didn’t go to Washington in the 1970s to strike deals. He went there to wage soft civil war against the United States.
But if there’s a close second to the title of America’s Worst Person, it probably goes to someone you never heard of. He’s not a politician. He’s not a pundit or bureaucrat. When it comes to influencing the GOP’s attitude toward taxing, spending and budgets, however, it would be hard to find someone more influential than Grover Norquist.
Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform. The name is a misnomer. It doesn’t want to “reform” taxes so much as get rid of taxes on the very, very rich. Norquist is probably most famous for saying, in 2001, that he doesn’t want to abolish government per se. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can … drown it in the bathtub."
while Gingrich was on the front lines of the soft civil war, armed with lies, slander and disinformation as his weapons of choice, Norquist was in the backrooms, pulling strings, pressing Republicans to pledge to never ever—never ever ever—raise taxes or be punished. The last Republican to raise taxes for the purpose of balancing responsibly the federal budget was George H.W. Bush, the last one-term president.
At some point, it’s hard to say when, Gingrich’s focus on language and Norquist’s focus on policy merged so that the Republicans always sounded like they were being responsible when calling for balanced budgets, but they were in fact being reckless. Why? Responsible budgets consider expenses as well as revenues. You can’t just ignore one if you’re being serious or responsible. Thanks to pressure from Norquist, however, the Republicans pretended revenues didn’t exist. And, alas, the Democratic Party usually went along. The result has been that for years most debates over budgets turned on the question of how much to starve a government of, by and for the people.
To be sure, this pretending was collective. Norquist’s group doesn’t care about the size of government. What it cares about is shoving the tax burden off the shoulders of the very, very rich while at the same time seeing the rich enriched with lucrative contracts. If that means huge deficits, so be it. Similarly, the Republican don’t care about deficits when Republicans are president. (Yes, Ronald Reagan raised taxes but he left office with the books well in the red.) Deficits only matter when Democrats are in charge.
All of this was clear to anyone paying close attention. Even so, Norquist in particular had plausible deniability on his side. Though budgets were swollen to bursting on account of irresponsible Republican attitudes, he and others could always say, well, we’re spending too much on wasteful expenditures. If we didn’t spend so much of what people don’t need—or on what people have grown dependent on—budgets and the government would be smaller and better. Plausible deniability meant his group always seemed to be at least somewhat principled, even to people paying close attention.
It seems to me the age of plausible deniability is over. Americans for Tax Reform, which was at the center the tea party movement that took over the Republican Party, applied for and received a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan as part of an effort to stimulate the economy as it reels from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The guy who wanted to drown the government in a bathtub cried to help while drowning.
You could say, well, that’s OK. Everyone’s facing hard times. But everyone faced hard times during thefinancial panic of 2007-2008, too. Indeed, Barack Obama, after winning reelection, wanted George W. Bush-era tax cuts on the rich to expire in order to fund a multi-billion dollar jobs program. After 2012, when the GOP lost seats in the Senate, some Republicans felt pressure to play along—until Norquist stepped in. “We’ve got some people,” he said, “discussing impure thoughts on national television.”
The jobs program was shelved, almost certainly prolonging the Great Recession.Yet amid another historic crisis, here we see Grover Norquist of all people with his hand out. It’s not a lot, just $350,000 in forgivable loans. It’s the principle of the thing in that there are no and never have been principles guiding the fiscal conservative project. Only the idea that government is for the very, very rich, not of, by and for the people.
Norquist isn’t alone, of course. The Republicans were so hostile toward Obama’s economic agenda that they brought the country to the brink of insolvency by refusing to lift the debt limit. And yet Republican members of Congress and the president’s family business got access this month to $660 billion in forgivable PPP money, as did 90,000 well-connected businesses that promised to save zero jobs in the bargain.
Sabotage was good politics when Obama was in charge. With Trump, it’s belly up to the trough. This should matter to white swing voters after the election. The Republicans will try reupping the con. They will say they fight for them. They don’t. They are waging soft civil war. While that was never obvious, it should be clear now.
John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of the Editorial Board, a newsletter about politics in plain English for normal people and the common good. He’s a visiting assistant professor of public policy at Wesleyan University, a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative, a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly, and a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches.
==
==
an 520
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel repeatedly voted by mail — before suing California for expanding the practiceIgor Derysh / Salon
==
5/20 kid killer HYPOCRISY
Mick M is opus dei? PRO-LIFE?!
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trumps-epa-moves-jettison-any-regulation-of-a-chemical-linked-to-child-brain-damage-report/
no lnx
trump’s EPA moves jettison any regulation of a chemical linked to child brain damage: report
[ June 3, 2019: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler speaks at the National Press Club.
Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams May 15, 2020
Environmental campaigners vowed to fight President Donald Trump’s EPA Thursday after the agency said it would propose that the rocket-fuel chemical perchlorate does not need to be regulated, despite its links to cognitive damage in fetal and child development.
According to the New York Times, theEPA plans to tell the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that it is “not in the public interest” to regulate the chemical at all, a year after the agency recommended the allowable amount in drinking water be limited to 56 parts per billion (ppb).
The 2019 proposal was already 10 to 50 times higher than what water safety experts recommend, the Times reported.
The new recommendation defies a court order, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said, which was issued in 2018 after the group sued over the Obama administration’s inaction on regulating perchlorate....
==
==
...520 an
As states like Georgia and Florida seek to return to business as usual, they not only risk a new wave of coronavirus infections, they will begin driving people off the unemployment rolls, treating workers concerned about a possible trip to the ICU as indolent bums who lack “personal responsibility.”
All this suffering is necessary, say Republican politicians and pundits, to save “the economy” — a term with no actionable meaning in the lives of people who would rather save their lives. Fearless defenders of the supposed rights of an unborn fetus continue to call themselves “pro-life,” even as they make cold calculations on which lives have value according to their own bizarre criteria of marketability. Popular right-wing “intellectual” Ben Shapiro recently said this to a typically blank-eyed Dave Rubin: “If grandma in a nursing home dies at 81, that’s tragic and terrible. Also, the life expectancy in the United States is 80.”
After all the years of feigning outrage over the nonexistent “death panels” that Barack Obama had supposedly proposed to ration health care, the right wing is suddenly comfortable with sacrificing the elderly for the sake of economic prosperity — a phenomenon, by the way, that is disproportionately concentrated among the top few percent of income earners.
Cavalier disregard for the lives of their elders reveals that self-proclaimed “conservatives” are anything but that. No political party can call themselves the keepers of tradition if they are not willing to make sacrifices to save the lives of the elderly. Prioritizing life over money would require the American right to accept that their country is more than an economy, and that their religion of corporate capitalism is modern-day idolatry.
For a measurement of the absurd lengths these anarchists masquerading as conservatives will go to protect their claims, consider Dennis Prager — a popular talk show host who often leads his listeners through his studies of the Torah and the Bible. In defiance of all known traditions of Jewish and Christian ethics, Prager actually wrote, “The lockdown is the greatest mistake in the history of humanity.”...
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/what-are-the-reopen-protesters-really-saying/
5. ‘Tyranny’ depends on who governs, not how
In many of the events across different states, protesters objected to what they called “tyranny,” and held up the Revolution-era “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flag to symbolize their resistance to government rules. They were not objecting to President Donald Trump’s April 13 declaration that, as president, his “authority is total” over the nation.
Instead they were objecting to governors’ lockdown rules, which they highlighted as overreaching their power. Many protesters likened the government’s behavior to Nazis, with protesters adding “Heil” before Democratic governors’ names.
No male governor was targeted as viciously and overtly as female Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. A widely circulated poster depicted her dressed as Adolf Hitler, giving a Nazi salute beside a swastika. Other demonstrators talked about Whitmer as though she were mothering them instead of governing them, like one who insisted, “We’re not her children!”
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pow hypocrisy MICK
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/mulvaney-and-other-trump-confidant-got-tested-even-as-the-publicly-downplayed-coronavirus/
==
NB DESMOG TRACKING IMPENDING BANKRUPTCY? KEPT AFLOAT BY BANKS?
aha ish // disaster cap'l, never waste a crisis to dustoff wishlist
Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/will-an-oil-tycoon-who-donated-500000-to-support-trumps-re-election-get-bailed-out-by-his-administration
no lnx
Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon March 12, 2020
With oil prices plunging during the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration is weighing a federal bailout for oil and natural gas companies, according to a new report.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted a fracking boom under his administration, but oil and gas companies have seen profits drop amid an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia.
“Alarmed” by the prospect that some of these companies, many of which are already in debt, [see desmog]could go out of business, White House officials have pushed for a federal bailout in the form of low-interest government loans, The Washington Post reported.
Among those pushing for the bailout is Harold Hamm, a billionaire Trump adviser who owns Continental Resources, an energy company which lost half of its market value Monday.
Hamm told The Post that although he had not made “direct” contact with the president, he advised the administration to consider “any action that the administration might take to protect and preserve American interests at this time from being unfairly disadvantaged.”
Hamm has given more than $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election effort since 2017, the government watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington noted.
Some Trump advisers told The Post that the administration was eyeing “targeted assistance” for the companies. Though under consideration, another official warned that “political blowback over the idea may eventually lead campaign advisers and others in [the] administration to talk Trump out of it.”
Chris Rupkey, the chief economist at MUFG Union Bank, told the outlet that he expects significant political backlash.
“It’s difficult when governments selectively target individual industries,” he said. “And there’s going to be pushback on it, because it’s political and may be tied to the administration’s contacts and the people it knows.”
Cornell University professor Robert Hockett, who has advised Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on economic policy, added that it was ridiculous to look out for big fracking companies while millions need relief.
“We are in the midst of a crisis where people are literally having to skip work and may miss paychecks or face medical debt,” he said. “The idea you would look to help out shale companies now is like something out of a satire or a bad movie. It’s absurd.”
Trump also said that he was looking at bailing out airlines, cruise lines and the hospitality industryTuesday, as they reel from the impact of COVID-19, the disease spread by the novel coronavirus. But the bailout proposals have received public pushback from Republicans.
“They can take care of themselves,” Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., told The Washington Examiner. “Why do you overreact just when there’s a little pain? That doesn’t make sense.”
Nick Loris, an economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, said such a bailout “would not sit well” with fiscal conservatives.
“Not only would it potentially put taxpayers on the hook for future potential losses and bankruptcies, it would distort the risk-taking process that is so critical in making these investments,” he told the outlet. “We’ve seen the resiliency in the industry before, and I believe we’ll see it again.”
However, Alex Doukas, the lead analyst for advocacy group Oil Change International, predicted that Trump’s big-money donors would heavily pressure the administration to ignore the criticism.
“With oil prices in free fall, expect oil companies to turn to their age-old tactic of bullying governments for even more subsidies on top of the hundreds of billions they benefit from annually,” Doukas said. “Instead of more handouts to polluters, governments should make big investments in high-quality green jobs that will put people to work and ultimately end our dependence on the volatile fossil fuels that create climate chaos.”
Journalist David Cay Johnson described the lobbying effort as “corporate socialists” seeking “welfare from the Trump administration.”
“Bailing out the oil industry won’t help the workers who have to choose between their health and their paychecks. It won’t help the people who could go into medical debt from COVID-19,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., tweeted. “We need paid family leave and Medicare expanded to every American.”
“The American people are worried about missing paychecks, affording coronavirus tests, & being able to afford healthcare period. But [Trump] wants to bail out the oil industry?” Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., added. “Leave it to Trump to prioritize his friends over the American people.”
Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.
==
==
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/opinion/lindsey-grahams-curious-military-career.html
aha 1/20 new pension tag:
RWI is a [target-] rich ecosystem [JOK seeks targets proxy?]; ideological entre look for niche; revolving door part of this system, also incubator which might expose young ppl to ideas and opportunities/funding otherwise not; pension plan also signals to ideol entre new incubator recruits that it's a hood/smart bet because fail does not matter, we got your back / gig; [fe given mktpklace meritocrisy BS]
aha_let: this is not just gotcha stuff, but tracks rightward shift overton window? trump takeover of party requires abandoning principles, but whiplash on BO federal overreach on XO for green regulation vs trump "absolute immunity" exec priv.
==
mcconnell refuse clinton impeach rules?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-naked-lie-that-republicans-are-the-party-of-fiscally-responsibility-has-been-completely-demolished/
no lnx graf
The naked lie that Republicans are the party of ‘fiscally responsibility’ has been completely demolished
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 27, 2019
One of the ways that Republicans demonstrate that they are the “post-truth” party is that, when Democrats are in office, they prioritize federal deficit reduction, but when they’re in charge, the deficit soars. Right on cue, the Wall Street Journal reported back in October that the federal deficit was about to reach $1 trillion.
A strong economy typically leads to narrower deficits, as rising household income and corporate profits help boost tax collections, while spending on safety-net programs such as unemployment insurance tends to decline.
The U.S. economy has been growing for 10 years as of July, the longest economic expansion on record. Yet annual U.S. deficits are on track to exceed $1 trillion starting this year, due in part to the 2017 tax law, which constrained federal revenue collection last year, and a 2018 budget deal that busted spending caps enacted in 2011.
When even Rupert Murdoch’s paper credits the Republican tax cuts as a contributor, you can take that one to the bank. Steve Benen put together a helpful chart to demonstrate what has happened to the deficit over time.
[graf]
The blue bars during the Obama years were a result of the Great Recession when federal revenues plummeted, the demand for safety net programs like unemployment insurance rose, and one-time stimulus spending was required to kick-start the economy. But as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, we are now in the midst of the longest economic expansion on record, which means that the deficit should be shrinking. Instead, it is ballooning. In a world where truth mattered, that would mean the end of the Republican line about how tax cuts pay for themselves.
When Republicans were negotiating among themselves over their tax cut plan in 2017, they made it clear that their main goal was to reduce corporate tax rates. At the time, they complained that, at 39 percent, corporate tax rates in the U.S. were among the highest in the world. What they didn’t want you to know is that the effective corporate tax rate (what was actually paid after all of the loopholes were incorporated) was around around 29 percent, right in the middle of the pack for industrialized countries.
After a full year of implementation, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy documented the effects of the Republican tax cuts, which lowered the corporate tax rate to 21 percent. Here are theirkey findings.
* The 379 profitable corporations identified in this study paid an effective federal income tax rate of 11.3 percent on their 2018 income, slightly more than half the statutory 21 percent tax.
* 91 corporations did not pay federal income taxes on their 2018 U.S. income. These corporations include Amazon, Chevron, Halliburton and IBM…
* Another 56 companies paid effective tax rates between 0 percent and 5 percent on their 2018 income. Their average effective tax rate was 2.2 percent.
The richest corporations are now paying an effective tax rate of 11.3 percent, while most of the huge monopolies are paying nothing at all. Rather than trickling down, those reductions are causing the federal deficit to soar.
Meanwhile, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went on a spending spree—literally bragging about his efforts to buy off Kentucky voters with what Mitt Romney once referred to as “free stuff” (emphasis mine).
Senate Majority LeaderMitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is delivering more than $1 billion worth of federal spending and tax breaks to his Kentucky constituents, just in time for Christmas and ahead of a potentially tough reelection campaign…
McConnell’s wins in the spending legislation included coal miners’ pension benefits; $410 million for the construction of the new Robley Rex Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Louisville; $314 million for cleanup of Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a $40 million increase over last year’s funding level; a tax break for spirits distillers worth an estimated $426 million in 2020 alone; and $65 million for the construction of the Forage Animal Production Lab at the University of Kentucky.
“I was directly responsible — directly responsible — for these items,” McConnell declared at the press conference.
He also secured a tax break for Kentucky’s thoroughbred horse racing industry, $16.5 million for the Department of Agriculture to implement the pro-hemp provisions McConnell got into the 2018 farm bill and $61.3 million for new military construction projects at Fort Campbell.
We can have reasoned debates about federal deficits, taxes, and spending programs. But the naked lies from Republicans demonstrate that their approach has nothing to do with what is best for the American people. They have made it abundantly clear that their priorities are all about more money for the wealthy elite and an obvious power grab for those in office. It is beyond time to bust the myth that the GOP is the party of fiscal responsibility. They are nothing if not reckless and irresponsible.
==
interesting impeachment commentary: unit exec --> divine rt of kings?! what happened to limited govt?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-the-trump-presidency-is-reversing-history
no lnx
How the Trump presidency is reversing history
Written by Common Dreams December 22, 2019
History never exactly repeats itself. But sometimes it reverses itself. It is doing that now. As Thucydides, the father of scientific history, observed, history can provide us with a road map to travel forward and backwards as we try to understand why human beings and human societies act as they do. In the hands of a Thucydides, the markers for our travel with history are fixed and clear. But mostly we move through our lives with little certainty, seeing the past dimly in front of us, even if we use history carefully and wisely, but mostly with the future behind us, unseen and unforeseeable.
Right now the reversal we have in mind is the movement from late twentieth-century liberal democracy to seventeenth-century autocracy. Moving forward from 2019 is looking a lot like moving backward from 1689. In that year 330 years ago, King William III became the first undeniably limited or constitutional monarch of England through the creation and promulgation of the English Bill of Rights.
When Barack Obama was president of the United States, countless Republicans — especially those in the Tea Party — denounced him as a tax-and-spend Democrat and complained bitterly about the…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/gop-hypocrisy-and-impeachment-hearings-lindsey-graham-and-devin-nunes-once-sang-different-tunes
...
Graham isn’t the only Republican whose past comments sound very different in light of the Trump impeachment hearings. Earlier this week, Politico reporter Ryan Lizza re-published an excerpt of an interview he conducted with Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who has turned the Trump impeachment hearings into a forum for right-wing conspiracy theories, as he did with the House investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“This may surprise people who only know Devin Nunes’s recent record, but in late 2015 Nunes told me during a long interview in his office that he was extremely concerned about the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party,” Lizza tweeted.
The interview showed Nunes complaining that he used to get messages from constituents about policy details, with only a small number of them referring to every “conspiracy theory that’s out there.”...
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-right-wings-massive-free-speech-hypocrisy-bret-stephens-and-mo-brooks-are-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/
no lnx
The right-wing’s massive free-speech hypocrisy: Bret Stephens and Mo Brooks are the tip of the iceberg
Written by Sophia Tesfaye / Salon September 1, 2019
Last week’s embarrassing “bedbug” saga, in which a harmless joke finally drove New York Times columnist Bret Stephens off Twitter, is a perfect example of the incredibly thin skin possessed by most of the vocal “free speech warriors” who have used fear-mongering over the supposed silencing of discourse on college campus to leapfrog from the right wing into the mainstream. The hilarious anecdote also usefully breaks down the false premise upon which this particular battle in the culture wars is built on.
After it was reported this week that the New York Times headquarters has a bedbug infestation, David Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University, tweeted: “The bedbugs are a metaphor. The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”
Without even being tagged in a tweet that had initially garnered zero retweets, Stephens noticed. He then wrote an email to Karpf to bemoan his lack of civility, sending a copy to the provost of Karpf’s university.
“I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they’ve never met — on Twitter,” Stephens wrote in a now-infamous email to Karpf. “I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face.”
Stephens later explained on MSNBC that he snitched to Karpf’s boss not in an effort to get him fired, but because “managers should know” about their employee’s private speech. This is the same Bret Stephens who has warned against trigger warnings in the classroom: “If you can’t speak freely, you’ll quickly lose the ability to think clearly.”
A day before Stephens’ Twitter-induced meltdown, aright-wing Republican congressman called for a university professor to be fired for his speech.
After Allen Frances, former chair of the Duke University department of psychiatry, appeared on CNN last weekend, Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., took to Twitter to call for his firing. Brooks objected to Frances’ argument that “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century.”
Brooks, who has previously compared Democrats and the media to Hitler, declared in a recent press release: “I support freedom and free enterprise. I oppose free speech suppression and Socialism.”
Both calls for suppression of speech from prominent voices on the right come about a week after a targeted campaign by right-wing media resulted in a professor actually losing his job because of political speech and association.
Conservative websites piled on Jeff Klinzman, an adjunct English professor at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, over a post on a Facebook page named“Iowa Antifa.”After someone shared a tweet in which Trump referred to antifa protesters as “Radical Left Wack Jobs who go around hitting … people over the heads with baseball bats,” Klinzman commented, “Yeah, I know who I’d clock with a bat,” ABC affiliate KCRG reported.
Trump said in July that his administration was considering designating anti-fascists as a terrorist organization after GOP Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a non-binding resolution to label members of antifa groups as “domestic terrorists.”
Klinzman was forced to resign from his teaching position following the national outcry.
Few so-called free speech advocates came to Klinzman’s defense. Not New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who once wrote, “Political correctness on college campuses has run ridiculously riot,” or his colleague Ross Douthat, who complained about the “fainting-couch politics of recent campus and online progressivism.”
Even fewer have taken up the cause of Ismail B. Ajjawi,a 17-year-old Palestinian student recently detained at Boston’s Logan Airport on his way to Harvard University. The Harvard Crimson reported that U.S. officials interrogated Ajjawi, who was arriving to begin his freshman year at Harvard on a full scholarship, for eight hours. After searching his phone and computer, authorities eventually revoked his visa and sent him home to Lebanon, where he had lived as a refugee. Ajjawi’s visa cancellation came just days before the U.S. State Department removed Palestine from its official list of countries.
According to a written statement by Ajjawi, an immigration officer claimed she “found people posting political points of view that oppose the U.S.,” though she discovered nothing Ajjawi had posted himself.
Not enough details are available on Ajjawi’s case to know whether any of his friends’ offensive posts were threatening in nature. But since there was no official boasting about having stopped a potential terrorist, it seems highly unlikely there was any imminent threat or any apparent history of radicalism. Indeed, Ajjawi is not even being punished for something he said — but for something his friends apparently said.
And his case comes the same week an inspector general released a report on political targeting within the State Department.
That investigation was launched following media reports of political retribution and the administering of a sort of loyalty test after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The State Department inspector general’s office found a pattern of inappropriate actions by Kevin Moley, assistant secretary of state for the department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, and his senior adviser, Mari Stull.
According to Foreign Policy, Stull’s job had been to “scour the social media accounts of employees, diplomatic staffers, and employees of international organizations connected to the US, to determine if they’re devoted and dutiful to Trump and his agenda.”
Moley and Stull were also accused of deciding not to fill a bureau role that dealt with human rights because they did not like the leading candidate for the role, possibly because of the person’s relationship with the LGBTQ community. The person’s past work with a UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees was also said to have bothered Stull, who felt the agency was anti-Semitic.
The IG’s report found that Stull had referred to her colleagues in the IO Bureau as the “swamp” on her personal Twitter account. On the allegation that Stull retaliated against career officials perceived as politically disloyal, the inspector general “found evidence of leadership and management deficiencies and mistreatment of career employees in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.”
The majority of the employees the inspector general’s office interviewed, the report stated, “either directly experienced hostile treatment or witnessed such treatment directed at others.”Many of the bureau’s staffers said Stull “made positive or negative comments about employees based on perceived political views,” including referring to career employees as “‘Obama holdovers,’ ‘traitors,’ or ‘disloyal.’”
Stull told Foreign Policy that the inspector general’s “report is politically motivated payback for my efforts to implement President Trump’s agenda over the resistance of Deep State bureaucrats who opposed his reform agenda.”
Free speech is just a tool for conservatives, who have no serious commitment to the First Amendment or any other doctrine of basic human rights. The moment such freedom doesn’t further their ideology, it magically disappears.
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AN cody f
When the Tea Party movement arose in response to President Barack Obama’s presidency, it represented a loose coalition of activists, conservative leaders, and Republicans who voiced furious opposition to the federal government and the Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. But as the movement coalesced into a group with actual power, it promoted politicians to Congress who primarily committed themselves to cutting government spending and reducing deficits as their primary raison d’être.
But now, as conservative writer Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner wrote, President Donald Trump has thoroughly given up on that central tenet of the movement.
“President Trump once vowed to drain the swamp, but by joining with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the latest budget deal, he has merely drained it of the Tea Party,” Klain wrote.
The new deal doesn’t cut spending at all, and puts the country on track for a trillion-dollar deficit, as Politico reported. There were previous signs, of course, that Trump had no real interest in reducing deficits, despite his contrary promises. The 2017 GOP tax cut was itself a deficit-buster, and its Republican defenders only made half-hearted efforts to pretend that it would create so much growth that it would pay for itself. But the hypocrisy of not counting tax cuts toward the deficit was actually a feature of the Tea Party’s double-talk, too. By agreeing to a budget with a large spending increase, Trump is forcing the Republican Party to give up even this thinnest of pretenses.
This is particularly ironic, given that Trump’s Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was a prominent member of the Tea Party and opponent of spending in the House of Representatives. Politico suggests that Mulvaney pushed back against the increase in spending, but his views didn’t prevail. The fact reveals that, as many have argued, the “Tea Party” as it was conceived of by the rank and file — who never really care about deficits — was quite different from the way politicians in Congress portrayed it.
And ultimately, almost no one but handwringing D.C. pundits will care. There’s little sign that the deficit poses a major burden to the country at the moment.
Klein wrote that “Trump’s Republican Party may want to dismiss the importance of the debt, but the numbers don’t lie.” But the “numbers” he cites are just the high debt and deficit, which in themselves don’t prove that there’s anything worth worrying about. It’s possible at some point that interest rates will spike and the American debt burden will get drastically more serious, but deficit hawks have been screaming about this risk for a decade, and it hasn’t happened yet.
The biggest worry, though, is that Republican hypocrisy hasn’t gone away for good. As soon as a Democrat is in control of the White House again, deficit paranoia is certain to overcome the GOP once again. They’ll fight tooth and nail about every minor spending increase the Democratic Party wants, to say nothing of how they’ll react to ambitious spending programs like a Medicare for All proposal. Worst of all, if the next Democratic presidency happens to coincide with another recession, Republicans are guaranteed to point to the deficits that Trump himself expanded as a reason to do nothing to ameliorate the harm. They’ll likely even call for austerity, which would exacerbate the crisis. cf 2 santas
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hypocrisy: ff corps buy them / gop off
aha: transparency lowers corruption, info is a signal that allows us to react/ compensate to restore balance; use invisible hand mkt to make smarter decisions
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/07/17/sec-climate-risks-disclosure/
Karen Savage
A bill that would require public companies to disclose the risks posed to their business by climate change passed a crucial committee vote in the House on Wednesday.
The House Financial Services Committee passed the Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019, which was introduced by Illinois Rep. Sean Casten in 2018. The bill would require the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to develop and implement guidelines for companies on disclosing climate risks. The SEC would be required to make the information available to the public on its website.
“Climate change is a risk to the stability of the global financial system,” Casten said. “This bill presents a market-based solution to understand the impact of a changing climate on companies and provide investors, lenders, and insurers with better information.”
The bill now moves on to a vote by the full House, and if it passes, on to the Senate. With the Senate still controlled by Republicans, it is unlikely to have enough support.[odd given fundamentalist mkt faith]
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NB gop uses pvt email ALL THE TIME b/c they are doing illegal and unehtical stuff (maybe remembering enron death star emails, monkey NAm)
see imperial prez
remember federal overreach prutt BS on XO? now feds fight blue states on green issues eg NY CA:
icn 419
President Donald Trump is seeking to boost domestic fossil fuels production over the objections of Democrats and environmentalistsconcerned about pollution and climate change. On Wednesday he issued a pair of executive orders targeting the power of states to delay energy projects.
“We started working on it in advance, so we hope to have something out soon,”EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in an interview. He was unable to provide a precise timeline.
Based on Trump’s orders, Wheeler’s EPA has been tasked with clarifying a section of the U.S. Clean Water Act that has allowed states like New York and Washington to delay projects in recent years....
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/explosive-new-letter-reveals-trump-aides-unsecured-scheme-to-transfer-sensitive-u-s-nuclear-technology-to-an-authoritarian-state/
Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland and other aides in the White House appear to have worked on a plan to “transfer sensitive U.S. nuclear technology” to Saudi Arabia over unsecured emails,according to a new letter from the House Oversight Committee chair sent on Thursday.
The detail is one of many allegations in a broader letter about the White House’s compliance with the Presidential Records Act, which has strict requirements about how administration officials should conduct and record official business. The letter, signed by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), said that the committee has been investigating concerns about the White House’s use of private emailand messaging apps, including use by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top aide Jared Kushner.
Trump and his supporters emphasized the issue of administration messaging and recordkeeping practices in the 2016 campaign in light of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private email when she was secretary of State.
But the new revelation that Trump administration officials were working on a plan to transfer “nuclear technology” to Saudi Arabia is a remarkable development, given the continuing scandal of the White House’s twisted relationship with the authoritarian regime.
The letter noted that McFarland’s discussion of the plan, using an AOL email address, was done in coordination with Tom Barrack, who is described as “a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President Trump’s inaugural committee.”
Cummings also said that Steve Bannon, the president’s former top strategist who has left the White House, may also have been involved. One email “appears to show that Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist, received documents pitching the plan from Mr. Barrack through his personal email account,” according to the letter.
The letter continued:
These communications appear to be sent while Mr. Bannon worked at the White House in order to inform Mr. Bannon’s official work relating to developing “broader middle east policy.”
These communications raise questions about whether these officials complied with the Presidential Records Act and whether the White House identified this personal email use during its internal review and took steps to address it. The Committee has jurisdiction over the Presidential Records Act and our oversight over compliance with the law will inform whether additional changes to strengthen the law are necessary.
McFarland no longer works at the White House. At the time of the emails in question, she served under National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was since ousted, indicted, and charged with lying to the FBI by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and accused of working as an unregistered foreign agent.