Biden3bak
4 24
mma 4 24
Murdoch-owned media outlets are pushing a smear campaign to undermine President Joe Biden’s middle-out economic agenda, falsely claiming he is “going to raise taxes on the middle class” if re-elected this year. In fact, Biden has repeatedly promised to maintain lower and middle-class tax rates and to let scheduled expirations of Trump's 2017 trickle-down tax cut scheme go into effect only for individuals with incomes above $400,000.
Trump's tax plan — a giveaway that overwhelmingly benefitted wealthy individuals and highly profitable and powerful corporations — was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress on a party-line vote in both the House and Senate in 2017 as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Trump and the Republican Party own all of the effects of the legislation, including the scheduled expiration of the income tax cuts at the end of 2025, which Republicans wrote into the law. (The GOP-controlled Senate failed to pass a permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts for individuals in 2018.)
*Trump wants media to blame Biden for his own signature legislation
In an April 15 post on Truth Social, former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump misleadingly claimed that under Biden, “you will soon be facing colossal tax HIKES” due to the expiration of Trump’s 2017 tax cut legislation. FactCheck.org explained, however: “As he has since the 2020 campaign, Biden’s FY 2025 budget vows not to increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000.”
“In order to keep that pledge, Biden would have to extend most of the individual income tax provisions enacted in the [2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] that are set to expire at the end of 2025,” FactCheck.org further explained. “And that’s what Biden says he would do — but only for individual filers earning less than $400,000 and married couples making less than $450,000.” (As of 2022, an income of $400,000 was more than five times the median household income of nearly $75,000, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.)
This isn’t the first time Trump and his right-wing allies have run this playbook against Biden. In 2021, just a few months into his term, President Biden produced a budget proposal that did not include permanent extensions of Trump’s fiscally disastrous tax policies. In response, a chorus of right-wing media figures falsely claimed that Biden had broken his promise not to raise taxes on the middle class and framed the looming sunset of Trump's tax policies as “a Biden tax hike.”
The situation is reminiscent of a right-wing smear campaign directed at then-President Barack Obama in 2010 and 2012, when former President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were set to expire. At the time, Fox News warned viewers that the Obama administration would enact the “largest tax hike ever,” ignoring Obama’s promise (which is similar to the one Biden makes now) to preserve income tax cuts for all but the top 2% of earners. The resulting deal between Obama and a Republican-controlled House of Representatives in January 2013 preserved most of the Bush Era tax cuts, with the exception of those benefiting just the top 1% of incomes.
Murdoch media falsely claim that Biden “would raise taxes on most Americans, not just the wealthy”
- The Murdoch media empire — including Fox News, Fox Business, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal — are accusing Biden of breaking his promise to not raise taxes on households making under $400,000 by claiming that he will allow all of the Trump tax cuts to expire. In these instances they either ignore that his budget proposals actually keep that promise or dismiss his proposals as simply untruthful.
These outlets are also relying heavily on a blog post from March by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, which generally supports reducing taxes and government spending. That post, however, simply analyzed what would happen if all the tax cuts expired, as they were designed to do by the Republicans who drafted and enacted them, and did not include context about Biden’s proposals to allow them to expire only for the highest tax brackets. In another analysis posted this week, the Tax Foundation also noted as precedent that after the Obama Era fight over Bush's lingering tax policies in 2010 and 2012, “Ultimately, most of the tax cuts were made permanent, with the exception of the reduction in the top marginal tax rate.”
- New York Post: “Biden floats tax hikes for all, says Trump cuts will ‘stay expired’ if re-elected — prompting WH walk-back.”The article mischaracterized a speech Biden made to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, in which he described Trump’s tax cuts as having “overwhelmingly benefited” the wealthy, and further declared, “It’s going to expire. And if I’m reelected, it’s going to stay expired.” The New York Post dishonestly stated that Biden had proposed “tax hikes for all.” New York Post, [4/19/24; The White House, 4/19/24]
- The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman wrote that “failing to extend the expiring provisions of Donald Trump’s signature reform would raise taxes on most Americans, not just the wealthy.”Freeman claimed that the expiration of all the tax cuts was “a promise Mr. Biden will keep if voters give him another term,” with no mention of Biden’s long-standing commitments to preserve cuts for those making less than $400,000 per year. The Wall Street Journal, [4/24/24]
- Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy falsely claimed that the scheduled Trump tax cut expiration would break Biden’s “promise not to raise taxes on anybody making less than $400,000 a year.”Doocy continued: “According to the Tax Foundation that finds if President Biden lets the Tax Cut and Jobs Act expire at the end of next year, which he says he’s going to do, somebody making $75,000 a year is going to pay about 1,700 more every year in taxes.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [4/25/24]
- Fox White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich: “Biden also announced plans this week to let the Trump era tax cuts expire. Analysis from the Tax Foundation says that doesn't jive with his pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than 400 grand a year.” Fox News, *Special Report*, [4/25/24]
- Fox Business host David Asman: “President Biden says he plans to let Trump-era tax cuts expire next year. That would raise taxes for millions of Americans who earn less than $400,000, breaking his pledge.” Fox Business, *Varney & Co.*, [4/25/24]
- Fox Business anchor Dagen McDowell: “Biden thinks letting the Trump tax cuts expire — translation: the biggest middle class tax hike in modern history — is actually a good thing.”Fox Business correspondent Grady Trimble added: “President Biden has vowed for years that under his tax plan, middle class Americans wouldn’t have to pay more. Letting the Trump tax cuts expire at the end of 2025 does seem to contradict that promise, but the White House says that is not the case. Instead, it’s saying the president is proposing cuts for those making less than $400,000 a year while proposing hiking taxes on the wealthy and corporations.” Fox Business, *The Bottom Line*, [4/25/24]
- Fox Business host Elizabeth MacDonald: “President Biden wants to get rid of the Trump tax cuts and raise taxes. That's going to raise taxes on the middle class.” Fox Business, *The Evening Edit*, [4/25/24]
- Fox Business host Charles Payne: “Whatever happened to the promise? Remember? No one under 400,000, which is such a nebulous number to begin with.”Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones opened the segment by claiming, “President Trump’s tax cuts are set to expire and President Biden won't do anything to stop it, meaning tax hikes are on the horizon for many Americans.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [4/26/24]
- Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis claimed that the Biden administration would “spin” the news by claiming not to have raised taxes on incomes under $400,000, but only to have“let those tax cuts expire” for middle and lower-income families.Earlier in the segment, Fox correspondent Grady Trimble said the White House was “clarifying” that Biden does not want to raise taxes on lower income brackets, but DeAngelis seemed to ignore these remarks. Fox Business, *The Big Money Show*, [4/26/24]
- Trimble stated in a prepackaged report, “President Biden says if he’s reelected, he’ll kill the Trump era tax cuts … seemingly contradicting his campaign promise not to raise taxes on those making under $400,000 a year.”The report then included a comment from Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo declaring that Biden would not raise such taxes, but would instead “increase taxes modestly on the wealthy and also on corporations.” Trimble had already poisoned the rhetorical waters, however, by beginning with the false claim that Biden intended to raise taxes for middle class Americans. Fox News, *Special Report*, [4/26/24]
- Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo declared, “So much for middle-class Joe’s big campaign promise that he’s not going to raise tax on anybody making less than $400,000 a year.” Bartiromo then read out the Tax Foundation’s analysis of the increases that would take place if all of the 2017 tax cuts were to expire. She included neither context about the Biden administration’s plan to preserve the lower and middle-end tax cuts, nor the Tax Foundation’s own recognition that the 2012 fiscal cliff had resulted in tax increases for only the higher-end tax brackets. Fox Business, *Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street*, [4/26/24]
- Fox News anchor Dana Perino said, “President Biden is promising to let Trump-era tax cuts expire next year if he wins a second term, meaning that millions of Americans could soon face steeper tax bills.”Neither Perino, co-anchor Bill Hemmer, or Fox Business host Charles Payne even acknowledged Biden’s proposals to keep the tax cuts below the $400,000 income level. Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [4/29/24]
- Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner proclaimed: “So much for Scranton Joe, they say. President Joe Biden is now floating a tax hike for millions of working-class Americans.” Fox Business correspondent Edward Lawrence noted a response from the White House clarifying that Biden intends only for tax cuts for the wealthy to expire before rebutting, “But that’s not what he says, and he can't pick and choose what part of the law expires.” Lawrence failed to note that the 2017 tax cuts are set to expire because that is how the Republican-controlled Congress wrote the law in the first place, thereby requiring a new package to be passed in Congress in order to prevent the cuts’ expiration. Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [4/29/24]
- Fox anchor Sandra Smith claimed it was “the talking point from this White House, that those lower earners are not going to be affected, and it just does not appear to be the case.” Fox’s afternoon “straight news” program hosted Trump economic adviser Steve Moore, who asked rhetorically, “So how can Joe Biden say he's not going to raise taxes on people who make less than $400,000, at the same time that he wants to retire these tax cuts?” Fox News, *America Reports*, [4/29/24]
related
Fox falsely claims Trump’s trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy were directed at the middle class 04/16/24
04/11/24
04/04/24
biden3bak424
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see impeach
see laptop bs
no merri
bidenomics co-opted inflation 1/2 no real poll bump?
bak capt 4 24
mma 4 24
Murdoch-owned media outlets are pushing a smear campaign to undermine President Joe Biden’s middle-out economic agenda, falsely claiming he is “going to raise taxes on the middle class” if re-elected this year. In fact, Biden has repeatedly promised to maintain lower and middle-class tax rates and to let scheduled expirations of Trump's 2017 trickle-down tax cut scheme go into effect only for individuals with incomes above $400,000.
Trump's tax plan — a giveaway that overwhelmingly benefitted wealthy individuals and highly profitable and powerful corporations — was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress on a party-line vote in both the House and Senate in 2017 as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Trump and the Republican Party own all of the effects of the legislation, including the scheduled expiration of the income tax cuts at the end of 2025, which Republicans wrote into the law. (The GOP-controlled Senate failed to pass a permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts for individuals in 2018.)
*Trump wants media to blame Biden for his own signature legislation
In an April 15 post on Truth Social, former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump misleadingly claimed that under Biden, “you will soon be facing colossal tax HIKES” due to the expiration of Trump’s 2017 tax cut legislation. FactCheck.org explained, however: “As he has since the 2020 campaign, Biden’s FY 2025 budget vows not to increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000.”
“In order to keep that pledge, Biden would have to extend most of the individual income tax provisions enacted in the [2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] that are set to expire at the end of 2025,” FactCheck.org further explained. “And that’s what Biden says he would do — but only for individual filers earning less than $400,000 and married couples making less than $450,000.” (As of 2022, an income of $400,000 was more than five times the median household income of nearly $75,000, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.)
This isn’t the first time Trump and his right-wing allies have run this playbook against Biden. In 2021, just a few months into his term, President Biden produced a budget proposal that did not include permanent extensions of Trump’s fiscally disastrous tax policies. In response, a chorus of right-wing media figures falsely claimed that Biden had broken his promise not to raise taxes on the middle class and framed the looming sunset of Trump's tax policies as “a Biden tax hike.”
The situation is reminiscent of a right-wing smear campaign directed at then-President Barack Obama in 2010 and 2012, when former President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were set to expire. At the time, Fox News warned viewers that the Obama administration would enact the “largest tax hike ever,” ignoring Obama’s promise (which is similar to the one Biden makes now) to preserve income tax cuts for all but the top 2% of earners. The resulting deal between Obama and a Republican-controlled House of Representatives in January 2013 preserved most of the Bush Era tax cuts, with the exception of those benefiting just the top 1% of incomes.
Murdoch media falsely claim that Biden “would raise taxes on most Americans, not just the wealthy”
- The Murdoch media empire — including Fox News, Fox Business, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal — are accusing Biden of breaking his promise to not raise taxes on households making under $400,000 by claiming that he will allow all of the Trump tax cuts to expire. In these instances they either ignore that his budget proposals actually keep that promise or dismiss his proposals as simply untruthful.
These outlets are also relying heavily on a blog post from March by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, which generally supports reducing taxes and government spending. That post, however, simply analyzed what would happen if all the tax cuts expired, as they were designed to do by the Republicans who drafted and enacted them, and did not include context about Biden’s proposals to allow them to expire only for the highest tax brackets. In another analysis posted this week, the Tax Foundation also noted as precedent that after the Obama Era fight over Bush's lingering tax policies in 2010 and 2012, “Ultimately, most of the tax cuts were made permanent, with the exception of the reduction in the top marginal tax rate.”
- New York Post: “Biden floats tax hikes for all, says Trump cuts will ‘stay expired’ if re-elected — prompting WH walk-back.”The article mischaracterized a speech Biden made to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, in which he described Trump’s tax cuts as having “overwhelmingly benefited” the wealthy, and further declared, “It’s going to expire. And if I’m reelected, it’s going to stay expired.” The New York Post dishonestly stated that Biden had proposed “tax hikes for all.” New York Post, [4/19/24; The White House, 4/19/24]
- The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman wrote that “failing to extend the expiring provisions of Donald Trump’s signature reform would raise taxes on most Americans, not just the wealthy.”Freeman claimed that the expiration of all the tax cuts was “a promise Mr. Biden will keep if voters give him another term,” with no mention of Biden’s long-standing commitments to preserve cuts for those making less than $400,000 per year. The Wall Street Journal, [4/24/24]
- Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy falsely claimed that the scheduled Trump tax cut expiration would break Biden’s “promise not to raise taxes on anybody making less than $400,000 a year.”Doocy continued: “According to the Tax Foundation that finds if President Biden lets the Tax Cut and Jobs Act expire at the end of next year, which he says he’s going to do, somebody making $75,000 a year is going to pay about 1,700 more every year in taxes.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [4/25/24]
- Fox White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich: “Biden also announced plans this week to let the Trump era tax cuts expire. Analysis from the Tax Foundation says that doesn't jive with his pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than 400 grand a year.” Fox News, *Special Report*, [4/25/24]
- Fox Business host David Asman: “President Biden says he plans to let Trump-era tax cuts expire next year. That would raise taxes for millions of Americans who earn less than $400,000, breaking his pledge.” Fox Business, *Varney & Co.*, [4/25/24]
- Fox Business anchor Dagen McDowell: “Biden thinks letting the Trump tax cuts expire — translation: the biggest middle class tax hike in modern history — is actually a good thing.”Fox Business correspondent Grady Trimble added: “President Biden has vowed for years that under his tax plan, middle class Americans wouldn’t have to pay more. Letting the Trump tax cuts expire at the end of 2025 does seem to contradict that promise, but the White House says that is not the case. Instead, it’s saying the president is proposing cuts for those making less than $400,000 a year while proposing hiking taxes on the wealthy and corporations.” Fox Business, *The Bottom Line*, [4/25/24]
- Fox Business host Elizabeth MacDonald: “President Biden wants to get rid of the Trump tax cuts and raise taxes. That's going to raise taxes on the middle class.” Fox Business, *The Evening Edit*, [4/25/24]
- Fox Business host Charles Payne: “Whatever happened to the promise? Remember? No one under 400,000, which is such a nebulous number to begin with.”Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones opened the segment by claiming, “President Trump’s tax cuts are set to expire and President Biden won't do anything to stop it, meaning tax hikes are on the horizon for many Americans.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [4/26/24]
- Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis claimed that the Biden administration would “spin” the news by claiming not to have raised taxes on incomes under $400,000, but only to have“let those tax cuts expire” for middle and lower-income families.Earlier in the segment, Fox correspondent Grady Trimble said the White House was “clarifying” that Biden does not want to raise taxes on lower income brackets, but DeAngelis seemed to ignore these remarks. Fox Business, *The Big Money Show*, [4/26/24]
- Trimble stated in a prepackaged report, “President Biden says if he’s reelected, he’ll kill the Trump era tax cuts … seemingly contradicting his campaign promise not to raise taxes on those making under $400,000 a year.”The report then included a comment from Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo declaring that Biden would not raise such taxes, but would instead “increase taxes modestly on the wealthy and also on corporations.” Trimble had already poisoned the rhetorical waters, however, by beginning with the false claim that Biden intended to raise taxes for middle class Americans. Fox News, *Special Report*, [4/26/24]
- Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo declared, “So much for middle-class Joe’s big campaign promise that he’s not going to raise tax on anybody making less than $400,000 a year.” Bartiromo then read out the Tax Foundation’s analysis of the increases that would take place if all of the 2017 tax cuts were to expire. She included neither context about the Biden administration’s plan to preserve the lower and middle-end tax cuts, nor the Tax Foundation’s own recognition that the 2012 fiscal cliff had resulted in tax increases for only the higher-end tax brackets. Fox Business, *Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street*, [4/26/24]
- Fox News anchor Dana Perino said, “President Biden is promising to let Trump-era tax cuts expire next year if he wins a second term, meaning that millions of Americans could soon face steeper tax bills.”Neither Perino, co-anchor Bill Hemmer, or Fox Business host Charles Payne even acknowledged Biden’s proposals to keep the tax cuts below the $400,000 income level. Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [4/29/24]
- Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner proclaimed: “So much for Scranton Joe, they say. President Joe Biden is now floating a tax hike for millions of working-class Americans.” Fox Business correspondent Edward Lawrence noted a response from the White House clarifying that Biden intends only for tax cuts for the wealthy to expire before rebutting, “But that’s not what he says, and he can't pick and choose what part of the law expires.” Lawrence failed to note that the 2017 tax cuts are set to expire because that is how the Republican-controlled Congress wrote the law in the first place, thereby requiring a new package to be passed in Congress in order to prevent the cuts’ expiration. Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [4/29/24]
- Fox anchor Sandra Smith claimed it was “the talking point from this White House, that those lower earners are not going to be affected, and it just does not appear to be the case.” Fox’s afternoon “straight news” program hosted Trump economic adviser Steve Moore, who asked rhetorically, “So how can Joe Biden say he's not going to raise taxes on people who make less than $400,000, at the same time that he wants to retire these tax cuts?” Fox News, *America Reports*, [4/29/24]
related
Fox falsely claims Trump’s trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy were directed at the middle class 04/16/24
04/11/24
04/04/24
an 4 24
pres Joe Biden is taking action on Thursday that will close the “gun show loophole” by requiring tens of thousands of unlicensed gun dealers to perform background checks. It is an effort to reduce gun violence and mass shootings that lawmakers have attempted for a quarter-century, since the 1999 Columbine, Colorado High School massacre, the deadliest school mass shooting in U.S. history at the time. Next week marks the 25th anniversary of the Columbine massacre, where 12 students and one teacher were murdered.
Last August the Biden administration announced the new proposed rule to add an estimated 23,000 unlicensed gun sellers to the category that already includes approximately 80,000 dealers required to perform background checks, according to CBS News. Politico calls it “the most sweeping expansion of firearms background checks in decades.”
A bipartisan bill passed after the Uvalde, Texas elementary school mass shooting that left 21 people dead, including 19 children and two adults, made the rule change possible, Forbes reported last year.
The rule will become effective in 30 days.
In February, speaking at an NRA-sponsored event in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump vowed if elected in November he will immediately rescind all of President Biden’s efforts to curb gun violence.
“Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day,” Trump said, Reuters reported at the time.
READ MORE: Arizona Republicans Block Democrats’ Bills to Repeal 1864 Near-Total Abortion Ban
The American public strongly supports closing the gun show loophole and expanding background checks to include private sellers.
According to PolitiFact, a 2021 Pew poll found more than eight in ten Americans (81%) support expanding background checks to include private gun sellers. Two other polls that year found even stronger majorities (84% and 89%) saying they support background checks for all gun sales.
“I first heard about ‘closing the gun show loophole’ after Columbine. It’s finally been closed a quarter-century later, thanks to the bipartisan gun legislation Biden signed in 2022,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller noted Thursday.
“Weeks after the Columbine shooting,” the LA Times reported in 2008, Democratic U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg “introduced a proposal to close the gun-show loophole in federal law. It passed the Senate on Vice President Al Gore’s tiebreaking vote, but did not survive the House.”
“President Biden saved lives today,” said former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) on Thursday. “Gabby” Giffords was the victim of a 2011 assassination attempt, and was shot in the head. In that mass shooting, outside a local supermarket during an official public “Congress on Your Corner” event, six people were murdered and 12 others were shot.
“Since 2013, I’ve fought to close this loophole in our background check system,” said Giffords, who now heads the nonprofit “dedicated to saving lives from gun violence,” that bears her name. “Now, more gun dealers will have to conduct background checks and fewer people intent on doing harm will be able to buy guns, no questions asked. Thank you, @POTUS.”
READ MORE: Johnson Moves for Trump Protection Against Greene With Mar-a-Lago Joint Press Conference
President Biden in video announcing this new rule called on Congress to take additional action and pass universal background checks.
Watch below or at this link.
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224 fbi indict star witness impeach smirnoff, gop no back off russia disinfo
Informant’s arrest for allegedly lying to FBI could be bad news for Jim Jordan - Alternet.org
2 24 same day
benny j put biden in gitmo
How Biden is neutralizing the Big Lie - Alternet.org
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mma 1 24
on January 29, Newsweek published an article titled “Biden Military Draft Rumors Swirl After Iran Attacks” despite providing just four social media posts as evidence supporting this alarmist headline.
The article quotes posts to X (formerly Twitter) from former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell (who played a key role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Nevada and has spread misinformation online in the past) and from Robert J. O’Neill, a former U.S. Navy SEAL. Both of their posts speculate about the possibility of Biden reinstating the draft.
“Biden means more wars and a possible draft for young U.S. men and women,” wrote Grenell, “Trump means peace deals.”
:{While the piece finally notes in its 11th paragraph (of 13 in total) that “there has been no confirmation that Biden is interested in a military draft,” :{it goes on to claim that “a number of other social media users speculated on the idea.”}: As evidence for this, Newsweek cites two X users whose claims include that “Joe Biden wants a WW3 so the democrats can stay in power” and that “Biden's draft had better include men, women, and all of those letters Biden's America has dreamed up.” (These two posts have garnered a combined 27 likes as of Tuesday afternoon.)[twt]
the article was also shared by Arizona state House candidate Nick Kupper in a post to X. He wrote: “I’ve been saying it for a long time now. Biden will start a war & institute a draft this year before the election.”}:
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BS
an 1 24
Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX) served up wild accusations against President Joe Biden and his administration on Monday during a House Republicans’ press conference on the border. After making demands of the Biden Administration to send an ultra-conservative bill that includes funding and stringent policies for the U.S. border, and funding to support fighting in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, Republicans are now rejecting what they requested after decrees from Donald Trump.
Back in October, after far-right House Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy and were struggling to find a new Speaker, President Joe Biden requested a $105 billion aid package for the U.S. southern border, Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Of the $105 billion, $50 billion would go to U.S. defense industry manufacturers to “expand production lines, strengthen the American economy, keep us safe, and create new American jobs,” Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young said, CNBC reported at the time.
“Additionally,” CNBC explained, “the White House is seeking $6.4 billion for border operations, pushing back against Republicans who have criticized it for not doing enough to contend with migration from Latin America. The request also includes about $1.2 billion for efforts aimed at countering fentanyl, which has driven a wave of deadly overdoses in the United States.”
“Some in Congress have said a lot about doing something on border security while refusing to take up the $4 billion request we sent in August to Congress,” Young said. “We will not be lectured by those who refuse to act. As we’ve said repeatedly, Congress needs to take action to provide sufficient resources for the border.”
READ MORE: Tuberville Delivers Startling Military Analysis: ‘I Don’t Know Who’s Running Our Country’
Three months later, House Republicans under direction of Donald Trump have decided to reject any legislation that is not “perfect.” Just as he did when he launched his xenophobic presidential campaign in 2015, and throughout his 2016 campaign, Trump aims to use immigration as a wedge issue to win the White House in November.
But now, Trump has the support and influence of the Republican Party, and many – especially House Republicans – willing to obey him via often-angry rants he posts on his Truth Social platform.
Congresswoman Van Duyne, a Texas backbencher who failed at her attempt to be elevated into House leadership when Mike Johnson was made Speaker, on Monday in a little-noticed speech served up allegations of “traitorous acts,” “usher[ing] in a new era of slave trade,” and promoting the “endless rapes” of women and children and a “lifetime of sex trafficking enslavement,” against President Biden and his administration.
“Joe Biden and the extremists in his administration are arsonists,” Congresswoman Van Duyne declared. “From day one they have burned down every shred of strong, effective, Trump-era border security policy that was protecting America.”
“Their purposeful and persistent actions, the arsonists of the Biden administration have created a national security and humanitarian nightmare. By turning over control of our southern border to the Mexican cartels, Biden, the Democrats, have ushered in a new massive era of slave trade here in America that is cursing the lives of illegal immigrant women, little girls and little boys. But Biden, [DHS Secretary] Mayorkas, and the Democrats couldn’t care less about the lives of these small children. They’re condemning them to endless rapes in a lifetime of sex trafficking enslavement.”
READ MORE: Local Reporter Hammers House Republican Taking Credit for Biden’s Bills After Voting ‘No’
“And rather than using the power that they already have in existing law, to this end is utter catastrophe,” she continued. “Biden is salivating at the prospect of some staggeringly horrible Senate compromise bill to enshrine that this ongoing disaster continues.”
The Senate bill was drafted by hard-core conservative U.S. Senator Jim Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, and it is far more extreme than Democrats would ordinarily support, yet has the approval of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“I’ve got news for the Senate: You don’t reward arsonists by handing them gasoline. Instead, you do what Texas is doing: you dig in, you fight, you hold the line and you never give in when our national security is constantly being threatened by the traitorous actions of the executive branch. Stand with Texas. Hold the line and never back down.”
Watch Van Duyne’s remarks below or at this link.
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thefed says no increase rate maybe cut 3x next year; all indicators good
trump said wd collapse if biden elected (also K said US best in world history) but see chris hayes 12/14/23 did bogus ceo presser ambushed ggl 1700 engr covid website unlike fail dig at aca but no idea and 1700 engr # fabricated, then mon 3rd biggest drop when exposed?
//
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traitor nb/c no defend border?
Charlie Kirk: President Joe Biden “should be in Gitmo” | Media Matters for America
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https://www.alternet.org/biden-prices/ pharma PO'd
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an1123
Fox News host’s claim he spent $90 on a Thanksgiving turkey is getting tremendous pushback and mockery as economists note the price of turkeys, gas, airplane travel, and even complete Thanksgiving Day dinners have all dropped in what one jovially declared a “Thanksgiving miracle.”
“We went to go buy a turkey today — it was $90 for a turkey,” former Republican U.S. Congressman turned Fox News host Jason Chaffetz said Monday (video below).”The price of stamps is up 32% in the last four years. But it’s all a choice by Joe Biden. That is what Bidenomics is.”
The first of a first class stamp today is 66 cents. Four years ago, in 2019, it was 55 cents — that’s a 20% increase. (For the record, here’s the price 0f stamps since 1885.)
Chaffetz was roundly mocked, with many posting ads from their local grocers showing the price of turkeys this Thanksgiving, which CNBC and others report is actually lower than last year.
“On average, Americans can expect to pay $35.40 for a 15-pound turkey this year — an average of $2.36 per pound,” FinanceBuzz reports. “At more than $50 per bird ($52.85), Hawaii has the highest average turkey prices of all the states. In the contiguous U.S., Minnesota and California tie for the highest average price at $41.85.”
READ MORE: Republicans Push to Gut Food Aid Program That Helps Feed Half of All Infants in US
“Almost everything on the Thanksgiving menu is lower – prices for cranberries have dropped 18%,” CNBC reports. “But the main reason for the decrease is due to the star of the show — the turkey. This year, a 16-pound turkey is averaging $27.35, down 5.6% from a year ago.”
Inflation dropped from 9.1% annually in June of last year to 3.2% annually last month — inflation in the month of October was zero.
Indeed, prices are dropping, in some cases tremendously. The price of eggs is down 22%, TVs down 9.4%, butter is down 3.7%, and gas prices are “tumbling,” possibly to under $3/gallon before the end of the year.
Professor of economics Justin Wolfers, who often provides information in a more interesting form than some, served up several charts declaring “turkey prices are crashing,” heralding “turkey deflation,” and celebrating the “Thanksgiving miracle” that “Airfares are plummeting just in time for the holidays.”
Last week Wolfers noted that “Real wages are above pre-pandemic levels.”
Meanwhile, the Chaffetz mockery continues.
“We just bought a ginormous fresh local turkey (a lot pricier than frozen store turkey) and it didn’t cost 90 bucks, so apparently Chaffetz is buying turkeys covered in bling,” wrote The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols. “Because, you know, turkey and Halloween candy are why we need an unhinged dictator in the White House.”
READ MORE: ‘DC Gulag’: Possible Trump AG Wants to ‘Denaturalize’ and ‘Deport’ MSNBC Host
“WHAT?” snarked writer and filmmaker Melissa Jo Peltier. “You mean @POTUS is going around to ALL the poultry farms AND ALL the grocery stores in America, ordering them how to mark up their turkey prices? Phew! That must be exhausting. I couldn’t keep up a schedule like that. Joe sure has stamina!” [many twt ~
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~ bidenomics?
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-tried-and-failed-make-electric-bus-company-proterra-bidens-solyndra
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consolator in chief empathy his superpwr, plus climate denial --> attack? sleepy joe fail but recycled
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-falsely-claim-biden-fell-asleep-during-ceremony-honoring-victims-hawaii
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beaten 3x drill permit
biden pro?! def bill billions over his req
https://www.alternet.org/manchin-climate/
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biden win, tho mvp fail
dems hammer hostage BS on VA
https://www.alternet.org/biden-gop-veterans/
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mma 8 23
WATTERS (HOST): Joe Biden visited the Grand Canyon today to designate it a national monument. This would be the 130th national monument, but as always is the case with Joe Biden, you have to follow the money. When you designate something as a national monument, you automatically stop all industrial and commercial activity in the area, meaning what Joe Biden's really doing is blocking mining activity on a million acres bordering the Grand Canyon. What kind of mining? Uranium mining. Now, why would Joe Biden block uranium mining?
...
So you have to ask, why Joe Biden, who says he's anti-Russia, is funding Russia's dangerous uranium monopoly that puts America's national security and energy independence at risk? Why is our Secretary of State Antony Blinken giving Rosatom execs visas to come speak in DC? Why is the only major Russian company that Biden left off the sanctions list Rosatom? Russia is not only using the billion dollars to fund the Ukraine war, they're modernizing their own nuke arsenal and pointing more lethal weapons at us.Russia's Rosatom's building nuclear reactors in Iran and helping China ramp up its nuke program.
So, instead of mining uranium here at home -- remember made in America Joe, union jobs Joe, no emissions Joe -- why wouldn't he starve this dirty Russian company of cash?It's like Keystone all over again. His entire energy policy favors Russia and China, why is that?
Well, does it have anything to do with the three and a half million dollars the Russians paid the Biden's? Or the Porsche Panamera that the Kazakhstanis gifted Hunter? Does it have anything to do with the three and half carat diamond that the Chinese slipped the first son? There's something very mysterious going on in the international uranium market that involves the Biden's and the Russians.
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laptop i assume watters?
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-claims-house-gops-star-witness-said-exact-opposite-everything-he-said-0
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dark brandon coffee cup troll
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https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-joe-biden-should-be-put-prison-andor-given-death-penalty-crimes-against
CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): I know what you're thinking, we've got to get Joe Biden out of the way so we can run against Kammy. Oh my goodness, is she beatable. It's like Black Hillary on steroids. Is she Black? I guess she says she's Caribbean or whatever. ...
She would be a lot easier to beat than Joe Biden. Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia filled Alzheimer's corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.
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fox chyron wannabe dictator
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chris hayes 7/12/23 why ppl do not get econ improve (tech and media slump]
inflat 1/2 thead needle strong jobs
https://www.alternet.org/biden-economy-2662267942/
'Incredible drop': Economists thrilled as inflation falls to lowest level in more than two years
David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement
https://www.alternet.org/send/biden-fox-news/
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deep state BS
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-jesse-watters-claims-fbi-installed-joe-biden-president-intelligence-op-after
omg mm a 6 23
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): Powerful people installed Biden so that he can take orders, not give them. Joe Biden's been groomed his whole career to take orders. And now that he's literally slept his way to the top, they won't let him go anywhere. The FBI put their guy in the White House. "You think we're just going to, like, let voters decide if he should serve four more years? We can't afford to take that risk."
Joe Biden has been an intelligence op since he was vice president. One of the FBI's top informants, a guy with impeccable credentials, a great track record, reported an allegation that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe -- right under Barack Obama's nose -- from a foreign national in exchange for a policy decision. They've been blackmailing Joe Biden with this for a decade. Well, until a whistleblower came forward. And now, James Comer wants the document released to Congress and the FBI's caught in a cover-up.
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mma 5 23
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): So, what do you call it when a foreign power interferes in our election? Well, we used to call that election interference. Democrats used to be totally against it. They said Putin cost crooked the election. Well, now the Mexican president's on tape politicking against a Republican presidential candidate, urging Americans not to vote for him, and the media is silent.
So, what's the relationship here between Joe Biden and the Mexican president? Well, Joe Biden made the cartels more money than they've ever made in history. And the Mexican president, who's controlled by the cartels, interferes in our election on behalf of Biden. Hm. And Hunter got rich in Mexico when Biden was VP.
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an 4 23
during an appearance on CNN's "State of the Union" to praise House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for getting his budget proposal passed by a very slim margin, a member of his caucus was confronted by hostDana Bashabout how the proposal will hurt his own constituents.
Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) was on to make the case that it is up to President Joe Biden to meet with McCarthy to resolve their differences which led the CNN host to dig into the details of how the proposed budget will impact the state he represents
"Let me quickly look deep inside what you did get passed this past week," Bash began. "The bill would cut all non-defense discretionary funding by 22% — that is a lot of money and I want you to look at what the administration would say it would mean for your home state of Minnesota."
Putting a graphic up, she continued, "Thousands would lose food, rental assistance, and they would pay more for college. Outpatient VA appointments for veterans could be cut. This will make a big difference if, what you want, this bill actually would become law. A big difference in the lives of Americans, especially those living paycheck to paycheck. What do you say to them?"
"Well, I actually challenge it," Emmer bristled. "You know, you've got a president who was just told by the Washington Post that his claims on the deficit get 22 Pinocchios."
"They're just not true and what you just said is just not true either," he accused. "You should scrutinize what the administration is talking about."
Watch below or at the link:
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an 4 23
no lnx
Joe Biden extends student loan payment freeze as 'baseless political lawsuits' threaten aid
Jessica CorbettandCommon DreamsNovember 22, 2022
Student debt relief campaigners on Tuesday welcomed U.S. President Joe Biden's decision to yet again extend a temporary pause on federal loan payments in response to Republican lawsuits targeting his cancellation plan.
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"I'm completely confident my plan is legal. But right now it's on hold because of these lawsuits. We're not going to back down though, on our fight to give families breathing room," Biden said in a video, noting his administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in.
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Stressing that "it isn't fair to ask tens of millions of borrowers eligible for relief to resume their student debt payments" while waiting on a court ruling, the president explained that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is extending the freeze to no later than June 30, 2023. Payments would restart 60 days later.
Unveiled in August, Biden's plan would cancel up to $10,000 in debt for federal borrowers with incomes below $125,000 for individuals or $250,000 for households. Borrowers who received Pell Grants would have up to $20,000 forgiven.
After the GOP responded with a flurry of lawsuits, the Department of Education earlier this month stopped accepting applications for the relief program. However, tens of millions of Americans have already sent in their information, and the administration has pledged in emails to borrowers that "we will discharge your approved debt if and when we prevail in court."
Echoing Biden's confidence that the relief plan will ultimately take effect, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that the pause "gives student loan borrowers more opportunity to pay down their debt and reach important milestones in life like opening a savings account, purchasing a home, and saving for retirement."
Student Borrower Protection Center executive director Mike Pierce similarly stressed that "this extension means that struggling borrowers will be able to keep food on their tables during the holiday season—and the coming months—as the administration does everything it can to beat back the baseless and backward attacks on working families with student debt."
Peirce added that "the Republican politicians set on keeping their constituents in debt should take note: Borrowers made this happen and borrowers will continue to fight until student debt cancellation is won."
Accountable.US spokesperson Liz Zelnick also praised the administration's extension—which came amid growing calls for one—while slamming the right-wing interests attempting to kill the program.
"President Biden's repayment pause is a weight off the shoulders of millions of Americans dealing with crushing student debt," she said. "The baseless political lawsuits attacking the administration's relief policies could not come at a worse time as corporate greed continues to drive up prices and the economy heads towards a recession."
"As President Biden prioritizes average Americans in this moment of economic uncertainty, conservative judges and politicians are doing all they can to protect the bottom line of greedy special interests," she continued. "This is a welcome step towards stimulating the economy and providing some economic relief to millions of Americans."
Student Debt Crisis Center president Natalia Abrams praised the extension and warned of the expected impacts of resuming payments.
"Restarting student loan payments is simply not affordable for millions of Americans," she said. "Federal student loan payments must not resume during this critical time—and the pause should continue until the president's student debt cancellation plan is secured."
"We applaud the president for doing the right thing. Too many borrowers, parents, and students have yet to recover from the financial harm caused by the pandemic and the possibility of a winter surge in Covid-19 cases is proof that this crisis is not over," Abrams noted, calling cancellation "essential to helping borrowers recover from the pandemic."
Braxton Brewington, a spokesperson for the Debt Collective, said that "the least the Biden administration could do is not collect on a debt they promised they would cancel."
"This pause extension is necessary, but also the bare minimum," Brewington added. "What 45 million borrowers truly need is a Biden administration that won't allow fringe lawsuits and right-wing courts to undermine economic relief that's already been approved."
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
'Just kidding': Biden Administration yanks student debt relief for millions as GOP states sue ›
'Profits over people': House Democrat hammers Republicans for suing to stop student loan relief ›
Jim Jordan ignites fury against GOP lawmakers after complaining about student loan debt relief ›
Scholars, attorneys and advocates urge Supreme Court to block GOP efforts to tank student debt relief - Alternet.org ›
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
Republicans may try to block student loan forgiveness ›
How a GOP House could affect the student loan forgiveness plan ... ›
GOP states sue Biden administration over student loan plan ›
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-networks-fearmonger-over-biden-administrations-new-vehicle-tailpipe-emissions-proposal
on April 12, the Environmental Protection Agency introduced its strictest standards yet to curb planet-warming emissions from American cars and trucks. For automakers to be in compliance, over two-thirds of new vehicles sold in 2032 may have to be electric. Fox’s cable news networks, which for years have both bashed EVs and downplayed or outright denied the climate crisis, are of course not too keen on the proposal.
The EPA’s new standards apply to cars being manufactured in 2027 and beyond. Notably, they do not ban gas-powered vehicles; as NPR reported, the EPA is setting “a standard for emissions, on average, based on the size and type of vehicle being built.” These rules are stringent enough that auto companies will probably “need to produce 67% zero-emission vehicles to meet them.”
The EPA states that the standards would remove billions of tons of carbon emissions from the atmosphere in the coming decades, as well as improve the air quality for communities across the U.S. The standards still need to go through a public comment and review process before being finalized.
Throughout last week, programs on Fox News and Fox Business responded to the proposal by claiming EVs are prohibitively expensive, not popular among the U.S. public, and not environmentally friendly. They also complained about unnecessary federal regulations and blasted any efforts to transition to clean energy because, in their telling, it will only help China and weaken the U.S.
Fox is misleading about the cost and popularity of EVs
A common refrain from Fox is that electric vehicles are too expensive to compete with gas-powered cars, or that consumers in general just don’t want them.
While their upfront costs are currently more expensive than gas-powered cars, EVs are cheaper than gas-powered cars over their entire lifespan. Furthermore, the production costs of EVs continue to fall, and in the next decade EVs are projected to be cheaper to produce than gas cars.
In addition to long-term financial savings, EVs have numerous health benefits, as well. Reporting on the EPA proposal, The Detroit News noted that by 2055, the rules would reduce “fine particulate matter in the air that can have negative health effects and potentially saving up to $1.6 trillion.” Indeed, one recent study estimated that up to 20,000 people in the U.S. die each year due to vehicle pollution.
In terms of popularity, while EVs made up just 6% of total vehicle sales in the U.S. in 2022, this figure is double the amount from 2021 and likely only getting higher. By 2030, EV sales could make up nearly 40% of total passenger car sales in the U.S., according to analysis by S&P Global (without factoring in the proposed EPA standards). Research from Goldman Sachs estimates that EVs will constitute half of global car sales by 2035, and 60% of sales by 2040.
- Fox contributor and former Trump economic adviser Steve Moore: “Only 6% of the car sales are EVs, so they're basically telling the American consumers, ‘We're going to build the cars you don't want.’ I mean, how stupid is that?” Fox Business, :{The Bottom Line:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/10/23]
- Fox anchor Harris Faulkner: “Six percent of all new cars are EVs. That is a huge sign that people don't want this.” Frequent Fox guest Steve Forbes agreed that people don’t want EVs: “The fact they have to keep forcing people to do it shows that, again, people don't want it because they don't like the short distances, they don’t like having to charge an hour, hour and a half. People don't have garages to charge these things.” Fox News, :{The Faulkner Focus:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/12/23]
- Fox anchor Sandra Smith downplays the costs, popularity, and market share of EVs: “In these big American cities, people are scared to take public transportation because of rising crime rates coast-to-coast. … Why aren't we addressing that rather than pushing for these EVs that are not popular, they’re expensive, and the president’s own energy administration right now is forecasting they’ll only be a mere 10% of the American car market by the year 2050. So, if they were liked, if they were affordable, if they were efficient, wouldn't there just naturally be demand for these cars?” Fox News, :{America Reports:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/12/23]
- Fossil fuel shill and writer Robert Bryce: “This is very much a class issue. And it's not just about the affordability of the vehicles themselves, it’s about the upgrades to the grid that we’re all going to have to pay for through the rate base and through our taxes.” Fox News, :{The Ingraham Angle:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/12/23]
- President and CEO of Celebrity Motor Cars Tom Maoli suggests that car companies don’t even like EVs: “You know it’s interesting because while you’re saying that the car companies are trying to push EV, it's really the government that’s pushing it. The car companies don't want it. Nobody has figured out how to make money on this venture. … The consumer is not buying into it. They’re coming into the showrooms, they’re afraid of them.” Fox News, :{Fox & Friends:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/13/23]
Fox portends that it's strictly government regulations, and not market forces, that are pushing EVs on Americans
Whether Fox wants to admit it or not, major automakers including Ford, GM, Stellantis, Toyota, and Volkswagen already have aggressive goals for EV sales in the next decade. Additionally, climate-focused media outlet Heatmap reports that the EPA “expects that automakers are collectively on track for 44% of vehicle sales to be electric by 2030 without any changes to emissions rules.” Federal regulations will certainly prod automakers to manufacture more EVs, but to say that major automakers focused on the global market are moving to produce more EVs solely because of U.S. regulations is false. As part of this narrative, Fox figures are also claiming that this new rule is an affront to personal liberties. This is straight fearmongering, as the rule does not ban gas-powered cars or force people to give theirs up.
- Investment adviser Gary Kaltbaum: “We have a government now that’s coming out with some more dictates that are going to try to force you to maybe buy something you don't want to buy when there’s no demand there.” Fox News, *Your World*, [4/10/23]
- Fox Business host Sean Duffy denounces the Biden administration’s “attack on gas-powered cars.” “The Biden administration is back at it again using crazy regulations to push their radical green agenda,” Duffy claimed. “The EPA now reportedly getting ready to roll out some of the most aggressive climate regulations ever this coming Wednesday, continuing their attack on gas-powered cars.” Fox Business, *The Bottom Line*, [4/10/23]
- Fox News anchor Sandra Smith: “If you create the cars people want, they'll demand them. You don't have to mandate them.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [4/10/23]
- Fox Business anchor Larry Kudlow states that the EPA is “taking away our free choice.” Kudlow said, “You know the problem with EPA and radical climate change in general is? They are taking away our free choice. So, if you're fed up with a bunch of left-wing central planners jamming stuff down your throat, well, then vote no.” Fox Business, *Kudlow*, [4/11/23]
- Fox contributor Steve Moore suggests an ulterior motive to the emissions proposal: “So this isn't about cleaning up the atmosphere. This is about a radical climate change plan that is going to force people to buy cars they don't want to. I think the Biden people have really stepped in it on this one. Because, as I said, people don't want the government telling them what kind of car they can buy.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [4/13/23]
- Fossil fuel shill Steve Milloy: “Electric cars are so popular government has to mandate them and subsidize them. Look, this whole rule is a failure.” Fox News, *Fox News @ Night*, [4/13/23]
- Fox contributor Phil Flynn says that Americans are “not ready” for the EV transition. “We are not ready for it and they are coming for your car, Sandra, you better lock your garage,” Flynn said, later adding “When the government starts meddling in the free markets and starts to try to pit winners and losers, there is always going to be a backlash that hurts the American people and that's what we’re seeing right now.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [4/13/23]
- Fox Business host Brian Brenberg suggests this is not about EVs but rather controlling peoples’ movement: “Americans are not going to have the choices they have now about what they drive and how they do that. The fact is, Sean, what the president's actually trying to do is not get people into EVs but get them out of cars. He wants to control this whole supply chain. And the point is, the government's going to control how you get around, not you. And that, look, that's the stock and trade of every totalitarian government is to control the means of movement.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [4/14/23]
Fox is insinuating that EVs are worse for the environment than gas cars, and that only China benefits from this proposal
An MIT article from October 2022 stated that “although electric cars' batteries make them more carbon-intensive to manufacture than gas cars, they more than make up for it by driving much cleaner under nearly any conditions.” EVs also don’t have the deadly tailpipe emissions associated with gas-powered cars.
Additionally, claims that only China benefits from this proposal are overstated. While China does control much of the supply chain for EV materials, the U.S. is taking steps to develop its own domestic supply chains (thanks in part to the Inflation Reduction Act) to reduce its reliance abroad. Automakers are also rethinking their supply chain strategies and investing in mines to secure the resources needed for scaling up electric vehicle production.
Finally, in addition to the numerous health benefits that come with reducing gas-powered car use, a transition to EVs would mean drivers would be less vulnerable to high gas prices and the whims of the global oil market. Reporting on the EPA proposal, MarketWatch notes that it “would strengthen American energy security by reducing reliance on 20 billion barrels of imported oil.”
- Fox host Will Cain suggests this plan only gives power to China: “In China, either through its own domestic geography or through its colonization of the world like Africa, has control of those raw materials as well. … If we move in this direction, we're giving that power, we're taking it from ourselves and giving it to China because of their dominance of those raw materials.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [4/9/23]
- American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers states that we are “sacrificing American energy independence” to China.“Doing this the way that they're doing it, which is really just to focus on tailpipe emissions, rather than the emissions that actually exist when you create a vehicle from the very beginning, these electric vehicles, while great technology, most those key components continue to be made in China. We shouldn't just be looking at this from the perspective of emissions, but we should also look at it from a national security perspective. We should not be sacrificing American energy independence to a regime that is certainly hostile to American interests.” Fox Business, *Mornings with Maria*, [4/10/23]
- Fox co-host Brian Brenberg suggests this new proposal just gives China more power: “This is what I meaned, mixed up. We're talking about China's desire to dominate on the world stage, and we have a industrial policy by the Biden administration that wants to throw power to the Chinese by increasing emissions standards and, at the same time, handing all sorts of American taxpayer subsidies to Chinese companies in the U.S. for battery power and for battery production.” Fox Business, *The Big Money Show*, [4/10/23]
- Fox correspondent Jackie DeAngelis insinuates that only China will profit: “Basically with this EV push and the green push in general — our solar panels, a lot of them come from China, as well — you’re basically selling out this country so that China can profit from this. It’s absolutely insane to me.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [4/11/23]
- Fox host Brian Kilmeade: “You can sleep well at night knowing that you're driving an electric car and other people’s lives are being ruined and countries are being destroyed, while China pays them and profits.” Fox News, *The Story*, [4/12/23]
- Fox anchor Dagen McDowell: “We, by this electric vehicle boondoggle, are handing power and our borrowed money to China.” McDowell said: “We have taken a hammer to one of our greatest resources, our energy economy, our fossil fuel economy. We have lowered our standard of living, and so we have ceded power and prosperity to nations that hate us, to Iran and Russia, by reducing our energy output, our oil and natural gas output here, and then in turn we — to Sean's point, we, by this electric vehicle boondoggle, are handing power and our borrowed money to China.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [4/12/23]
- Fox host Sean Hannity: The electric car push only helps China. “The push for electric cars also threatens national security,” Hannity claimed. “Experts warning now it will make us more dependent on China giving them more leverage over this country. Now, as-powered cars, they are just the latest thing that they want to ban.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [4/13/23]
Fox is using good old-fashioned climate bashing to advance their anti-EV agenda
As usual, Fox is downplaying the seriousness of climate change by suggesting that these rules won’t do anything to help fight climate change. However, The Washington Post noted that the proposal is “large enough to avert the equivalent of two full years of nationwide carbon emissions, according to EPA estimates.” This proposal would thus go a long way in helping the U.S. — which is the world’s largest historical carbon emitter — to advance its climate goals. Additionally, as climate change requires a global, collective response, the U.S. would also be following in the footsteps of the European Union, which recently proposed even more-stringent requirements for tailpipe emissions.
- Fox host Greg Gutfeld: “None of their predictions have come true. None of them.” Gutfeld continued, “They are forcing America to do this crap over one, less than a percent Celsius. Less than a percent Celsius. It has no effect. And in fact, as this climate gets warmer, people's lives improve. That's a fact. That's a fact. People die from cold weather more frequently than warm weather.” Fox News, :{The Five:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/12/23]
- Fox host Jesse Watters suggests that climate change is like a religion: “It’s not going to lower the Earth's temperature at all. All it does is make the donors happy because this is a religion to them, and it makes my guys in Detroit happy because they sell these things, and we pay for half of it. It’s the taxpayers subsidizing this ‘green revolution.’” Fox News, :{The Five:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/12/23]
- Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz argues the proposal is part of a climate denial conspiracy theory related to the 15-minute city idea: “And the only thing they want to ramp up is their goal of limiting your mobility. This is not a mistake. As Laura [Ingraham] discussed last night with famed U.K. professor Norman Fenton, these moves are essential in order to bring about the end game of climate fanaticism — so-called 15-minute cities.” Fox News, :{The Ingraham Angle:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/12/23]
- Fox’s Dagen McDowell: “There is no climate crisis. This is all about removing your choice and ending your ability as an American to decide what the hell kind of car you want to drive.” Fox Business, :{The Bottom Line:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [4/12/23]
no lnx an 4 23
Economist Paul Krugman: America’s 'superyacht boom' underscores its 'extreme inequality'
Alex Henderson April 12, 2023
During the Joe Biden era, Paul Krugman has been quite bullish on the U.S. economy. The liberal economist and New York Times columnist has emphasized that under Biden, the United States has had some of its lowest unemployment rates in more than half a century.
But Krugman has also had a lot to say about U.S. inequality, complaining that the gap between America's haves and have-nots is still way too large. In his April 11 column, Krugman cites "superyachts" as a reminder of inequality.
"According to a 2022 article in The New Yorker," Krugman explains, "any yacht over 98 feet long is considered a superyacht within the yachting community. Which got me thinking about big yachts and what they tell us about the state of society. When rich people can afford to buy and operate big yachts, they do. Indeed, yachts are a highly visible indicator of inequality, the concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the few. The Gilded Age was marked by a proliferation of ever bigger, ever more elaborately furnished yachts; when J.P. Morgan built a large steam yacht, its 1898 launch was featured in The New York Times."
READ MORE: US inflation was even lower than expected in March: CPI
Krugman continues, "Conversely, the Great Compression of income disparities that took place during the 1940s and made America a relatively middle-class society for the next four decades put an end to the first golden era of superyachts. In 1955, Fortune published a remarkable essay, 'How Top Executives Live,' which stressed how modest their standard of living had become compared with pre-War norms. Among other things, large yachts had 'foundered in the sea of progressive taxation'…. Now, superyachts are back. Indeed, according to that New Yorker article, we're living through 'the greatest boom in the yacht business that has ever existed'…. If you had any doubts about whether we're living in an era of extreme wealth concentration, comparable to or even surpassing the Gilded Age, the superyacht boom should quell those doubts."
In his April 10 column, however, Krugman focuses on some good economic news: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on unemployment for March 2023. According to the BLS, the U.S. had 3.5 percent unemployment in March —a figure that, Krugman emphasizes, explodes the right-wing myth that big chunks of the U.S. population are lazy.
"Americans, they said, just don't want to work," Krugman writes. "Socialism has made them lazy. They'd rather play video games.… Remember all that talk about Americans dropping out of the labor force?…. The overall unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent; we haven't had that spirit here since 1969. Black unemployment is at a record low. There's good news everywhere you look. So, whaddya know: Provide enough job opportunities, and lazy video-game-playing Americans will take those jobs and, apparently, demonstrate enough skill that employers want to keep them."
BLS figures for March, Krugman adds, show that Biden's economic policies are still working.
READ MORE: US inflation was even lower than expected in March: CPI
"It is worth noting that Republicans keep insisting President Biden's policies have been an economic disaster, and that even the mainstream news media has tended to emphasize inflation — which has been a nasty shock, even though it may be subsiding — rather than job gains," the economist/columnist observes. "So, it does seem worth pointing out that at this point, Biden is presiding over the best job market America has seen in a generation — specifically since the boom of the late (Bill) Clinton years."
READ MORE: 'Bank bailout': Robert Reich busts 3 myths the 'undeserving right' use to justify their wealth
Read Paul Krugman’s full New York Times columns at this link and this link (subscription required).
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
'Anyone who thinks this economy is in recession is bananas': Economists cheer 'hot' Biden jobs report ›
Economists stunned by 'breathtaking' job growth 'boom' as unemployment drops to level not seen since 1969 ›
History shows that Republicans are 'just plain bad at managing the economy': industry experts ›
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Inflation Is Making Poverty in the U.S. Even More Difficult ›
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'Inflation Inequality' Makes Life Harder for Workers - The Atlantic ›
vpence class docs
https://www.alternet.org/disturbing-and-disappointing-willow-oil/
3 23
https://www.alternet.org/Bank/biden-debt-ceiling/
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/laura-ingraham-says-joe-biden-will-do-more-damage-democracy-january-6-rioters
Ingraham gets torched on social media for for comparing Trump’s work ethic to Biden’s
https://www.alternet.org/laura-ingraham-2659497821/
an 3 23
President Joe Biden provoked laughter from a crowd in Virginia Beach on Tuesday after he told a joke about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
At an event about affordable health care, Biden recalled that he had openly "negotiated" with Republicans during his State of the Union address.
Mention of Biden's back-and-forth with Republicans on Social Security earned him cheers from the audience.
"I've been around for a lot of State of the Unions; I never saw one where the president got to negotiate in the open with everybody," the president said to laughter.
"Remember when Marjorie Taylor Greene was yelling, 'Liar, liar, Biden's a liar,'" Biden said mockingly.
At that point, Biden made the sign of a cross on his chest, presumably biting his tongue instead of criticizing Greene.
The crowd roared with laughter.
"I'm going to be good," Biden insisted.
Watch the video clip below from PBS.
an 2 23
House Oversight Committee Chairman **James Comer** is pushing baseless conspiracy theories about the Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon floating over the United States – currently, over Montana – that the Pentagon is tracking, and he’s being widely mocked for his unfounded fear-mongering.
Fox News host Harris Faulkner set the stage perfectly for the far-right Republican from Kentucky, declaring the balloon is “the size of three buses” and that “China says was taken by wind – wind that we can’t substantiate.”
The Kentucky congressman who has falsely described President Biden as “compromised,” and stated he is going to target and investigate him, told Faulkner, “I have concern this is going to be another example of the Biden administration’s weakness on the national scale.”
Comer, 50, a former agriculture commissioner, lamented about Biden’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, claiming it hurt the reputation of America’s military and Commander in Chief.
The balloon, he said, should “never have been allowed” to cross over into the United States.
“My concern is that the federal government doesn’t know what’s in that balloon. Is that bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan?” he asked, pushing unfounded theories while echoing the far-right’s false claims the COVID-19 virus was developed as a bioweapon and escaped the lab in Wuhan, China.
After suggesting it might have bioweapons, he then said it was “very concerning” the balloon was not shot down before reaching the U.S. – which could have spread the alleged bioweapon.
Faulkner, seen by some as a propagandist, then jumped in to exhibit her surprise that “people on Capitol Hill were not briefed” about the balloon.
READ MORE: Trump Spent 2020 Attacking Ballot Drop Boxes – but Now He’s Demanding They Be Deployed in Churches
“Calling for the president to ‘shoot down’ the craft,” The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona adds, “some in the GOP called the president ‘Beijing Biden’ while claiming this is further proof that ‘Communist China’ doesn’t ‘fear or respect’ Biden.” [ASK PUTIN, MIL --> PI]
https://www.alternet.org/irreparable-downright-shameful-environmental-destruction/
anwr
oil leases
https://www.alternet.org/spectacular-failure-of-climate-leadership/
1 23 an
Conservative pundit Sean Hannity claimed without evidence on Thursday that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have "hired" Special Weapons and Tactics units to hunt down and destroy their political detractors.
:{First, Hannity and his guest alleged that the Bidens conducted nefarious business with China. They agreed that there were secret recordings of the two men kanoodling with foreign nationals, and determined that the Bidens acted illegally based on what was left "unsaid" in the supposed clandestine phone calls. LACK OF EVIDENCE IS EVIDENCE
}:
Next, Hannity stated in a fake Russian accent that Libya may have "real compromising materials" about Hunter.He then transitioned into the Biden-SWAT conspiracy theory.
"The amount of money, the sheer amount of money, and a number of countries, andJoe's outright lie about never having discussed this with Hunterare now coming to light. Now there's going to be pushback because they have nowhired, you know, SWAT teams and are creating a war room to slander and smear and attack every single solitary person that either reports it or is investigating it," Hannity said.
He also accused Biden and Democrats of weaponizing investigations, which is what House Republicans are doing through their congressional committees.
"That's, you know, that's Democratic politics 101. That's who they are. That's what they do. So we have to know this, understand this fully," Hannity continued. "And, you know, I think it's pretty obvious what's going on."
Listen below viaMedia Matters for America or at this link.
https://www.alternet.org/maximal-transparency-joe-biden-offense/
an 1 23
**U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs** (R-AZ), the former chair of the far-right **House Freedom Caucus** and an extremist whose own family members called for him to be removed from office over his activities surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, on Monday labeled **First Lady Dr. Jill Biden** “compromised” and said she must be investigated.
Congressman Biggs, who just last month was one of 28 House Republicans voting against legislation to protect child sex abuse victims, has a long history of extremism.
Before his congressional career Biggs served as a policy advisor to **United Families International**, which for at least a decade has repeatedly appeared on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups. According to a 2012 article in the Phoenix New Times (archived), “Republican state Representative Andy Biggs is the former policy adviser to the group, and his wife Cindy Biggs is currently listed as the organization’s secretary and treasurer on its website.”
Far right activist and conspiracy theorist Ali Alexander, one of the organizers of the Stop the Steal campaign that promotes Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, credits three GOP Members of Congress with helping him start the movement.
“I was the person that came up with the Jan. 6 idea,” Alexander has said, “with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and then Congressman Andy Biggs.”
Arizona’s Copper Courier reports Biggs asked then-President Donald Trump for a preemptive pardon for his actions related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. It also reports Biggs “was one of two Congress members who voted against the COVID-19 bill. His reasoning was because he objected to the fact that the bill’s definition of “couples” included same-sex partners.”
Biggs “falsely claimed” that supporters of the bill “redefined family for the first time in a piece of federal legislation to include committed relationships,” according to GLAAD, which noted, “the same language has been included in proposed legislation as far back as 2015.”
As for Congressman Biggs’ attack on First Lady Biden, Monday night he tweeted, “The Biden family highly concerns me. Joe, Hunter, and even ‘Dr.’ Jill. They are compromised and must be investigated.”
The tweet apparently came in response to news that a small number of documents with classified markings had been found in a locked closet that was part of then-former Vice President Joe Biden’s offices. Those documents were reportedly immediately handed over to the National Archives and the Dept. of Justice was notified.
A Google search found no news reports that tie Dr. Biden to the documents in any way.
Biggs tweeted more lies, stating: “Biden stole classified documents and stored them at his think tank while he was VP. The VP does not have any authority to declassify classified documents. And this ‘think tank’ received $54 million in funding from the CCP.”
Although he did not support any of his claims, Biggs is likely referring to a sum total of $54.6 million given by Chinese donors not to the think tank but to the University of Pennsylvania, according to a New York Post report last year.
“The Ivy League college raked in a total of $54.6 million from 2014 through June 2019 in donations from China, including $23.1 million in anonymous gifts starting in 2016, according to public records,” The Post said. The school is home to a think tank named for President Joe Biden, the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
“A University of Pennsylvania spokesman denied any anonymous Chinese money had gone to the center,” the Post added.
mma 1020
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): Parents already have to deal with high crime and inflation and now they have to worry about demonic teachers turning their classroom into a drag show? You would think Biden, who is almost 80, would know better. But he doesn't. Maybe that's why they call him creepy Joe. The president, who is already in over his head, wasted his day chatting with a transsexual activist Dillon in the Oval Office about why children should be getting sex changes without their parents' permission.
an 12 22
Roger Stone is now spinning a bizarre claim about the existence of a so-called "demonic portal" that opened above the White House after President Joe Biden took office.
Stone even appears to believe the portal is visible to those who are searching for it. During a recent appearance on"The Eric Metaxas Radio Show," conservative radio host Eric Metaxas asked Stone about his thoughts on the existence of the "supernatural."
That's when Stone claimed to have seen the "portal" himself. “I think that… a portal, a demonic portal, opened above the White House around the time that the Bidens moved in,” Stone said.
He added, "This was brought to my attention by a Christian who lives in north Florida who sent me a bunch of documents and also a bunch of notations from the Bible about portals.”
Stone admitted that he was initially skeptical before saying:
So, I was skeptical about it but I looked at the photos. Also, there’s a live cam where you can actually see in real-time and there does appear to be something above the White House…At first you say, “Oh, maybe it’s a reflection. Maybe it’s an aerostat balloon. Maybe there’s a logical [explanation.]”
Out of concern, Stone also claims to have called a friend in law enforcement who works for the police department in Arlington, Va. According to Stone, his friend claims he found something.
“He called me back about two-and-a-half hours later and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but there’s definitely something there. Other people were there photographing it,'” Stone claims he was told.
Per Mediaite, Stone said, "if one zooms in on whatever is floating above the Biden White House, it can be seen 'swirling like a cauldron.'”
READ MORE: At least 3 members of a pro-Roger Stone group are facing charges in connection with Jan. 6 riot
aha earth2 facts do not matter, reductionism; a kind of leverage for gop in that inordinate effect for tiny effort [gop legacy as good on biz?] // inflation
an ah 10 22
YIKES 2nd strategy res weeks before midterms
With the United States seeing its worst inflation since the early 1980s, Republicans are blaming President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party — and failing to mention that inflation isn’t just a problem in the U.S., but is a global problem. Some European countries have higher inflation rates than the U.S.; the EU’s inflation rate was 10.9 percent in September compared to 8.2 percent in the U.S.
Americans are especially resentful of high gas prices — an issue that, according to various polls, is a higher priority for some Americans than protecting democracy. Liberal economist andNew York Timescolumnist Paul Krugman, in his October 20 column, argues that it is “ludicrous and terrifying” that gas prices could determine whether or not the U.S. continues to be a democracy.
:{
“Will the price of gasoline — a price that has very little to do with which party controls the government — nonetheless determine the outcome of the midterm elections, and quite possibly the fate of American democracy?}:” Krugman writes. “I wish that were a silly question, but it isn’t. This year, there has been a strong correlation between the price of gasoline and political polls.”
READ MORE: Wages are dampening inflation, not supercharging it
Krugman continues, “Earlier this year, when gas reached an average of $5 a gallon, everything seemed to point to a Republican blowout. By mid-September, with gas prices down almost $1.50, the election looked much more competitive.And some apparent recent deterioration in Democrats’ prospects coincided with an upward tick in prices in late September and early October.”
The economist goes on to make some “important points about gasoline prices.”
“First,” Krugman writes, “the most important determinant of prices at the pump is the world price of crude oil, over which the United States has little influence…. Second, smaller fluctuations are usually driven by technical issues at the refineries that turn crude oil into gasoline and other products. The mini-surge in gas prices that began in September, and now seems to be over, was caused by shutdowns of several refineries for maintenance and a fire at one refinery in Ohio. Again, this has nothing to do with policy.”
:{
Krugman adds that in 2022, gas “isn’t expensive compared with the fairly recent past.”
“It’s hard to think of a worse metric for judging a president and his party than a price determined mainly by events abroad and technical production issues here at home, a price that isn’t even high compared with, say, a decade ago,}:” Krugman argues. “Yet gas prices may sway a crucial election — a fact that is both ludicrous and terrifying.”
READ MORE: Pete Buttigieg torches those who criticized Joe Biden for rising gas prices
reverse teflon? gop attack 8 22 a n
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/biden-terrorist/
https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-are-outraged-biden-spent-tenth-his-un-speech-climate-change
Right-wing media are expressing outrage that President Joe Biden mentioned climate change during his September 21 speech at the United Nations General Assembly.
Biden’s
, which focused mainly on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, also included calls for global cooperation on important issues including food insecurity, human rights, and climate change. The climate part of his speech lasted roughly 3 minutes and included celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. He also touched on recent climate disasters and the need for global emissions reductions, as well as promising billions of dollars in international climate finance.
Despite the relatively modest amount of time he spent on climate change, many in right-wing media were outraged that he even mentioned climate at all. Their comments included climate denial and falsehoods about the importance of climate change to the global community.
Right-wing media falsely claimed that the global population doesn’t care about climate change
Climate change is a serious concern around the world. For example, a January 2021 survey found that a majority of people around the globe want greater climate action. And a September 2021 Pew poll found that the world’s population increasingly views climate change as a personal threat. In August of this year, another Pew survey found that a “median of 75% across 19 countries in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region label global climate change as a major threat.”
Additionally, people from the global south — those who have contributed the least to the climate crisis but disproportionately suffer its effects — are often some of the loudest voices for climate action. Around the same time that Biden gave his UN speech, indigenous peoples from around the world were protesting in New York for climate justice. The president of Kenya made climate change a key part of his UN speech, and the prime minister of Pakistan, a country that has seen over 30 million displaced due to climate-fueled monsoon flooding, thanked Biden for “highlighting the plight of the flood victims.”
Climate change and poverty, meanwhile, are inextricably linked, as are climate change and global hunger. These facts, however, were still not enough to convince right-wing commentators in the U.S. that climate change is a significant threat to the global population.
For example, on the September 22 edition of Newsmax’s Wake Up America, host Rob Finnerty stated that “there's 193 sovereign nations in that room right there. … And nobody cared about that part of the speech. They needed a lot more from the American president, with everything going on in the world right now, and they get climate change.”
On Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy insinuated that people living in poverty don’t care about climate change, stating, “Suddenly he’s talking about climate change. And, you know, there are 675 million people living in poverty around the world. And for the president of the United States to be talking about climate change rather than trying to figure out a way to feed them.”
Doocy also entirely missed the fact that Biden did discuss food in his speech; he mentioned the term “food insecurity” 6 times, while also mentioning “feeding the world.”
The editorial board of the right-wing New York Post also claimed that the world's poor don’t care about climate change. They referred to climate change as part of a “laundry list of left-liberal shout-outs,” before writing that the speech focused “on climate change, which Biden claimed lists first among the ‘challenges that matter most to people’s lives.’ The planet’s 674 million people living in abject poverty don’t agree, Joe.”
Right-wing media also dipped into one of their favorite overused talking points when it comes to climate change: U.S. action is worthless because China is the biggest polluter
There were also criticisms claiming China does not care about climate change. Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade remarked about Biden’s climate comments that “climate change is unbelievable. The fact is that China could not care less.” On Wake Up America, The Daily Caller’s Briana Lyman took this China criticism a step further, stating that if “you want to talk about climate change, then you need to talk about China because China is responsible for more than double the emissions of the United States. … I think it's a dereliction of duty when he doesn't tie China and climate change together.”
Kilmeade’s comments ignore the fact that China is by far the largest market for clean energy in the world, and that its pledge to become carbon neutral by 2060 came about a year before the U.S. passed major climate legislation. Yes, its coal plants (and emissions) are a huge problem, but to say that the country doesn’t care about climate change (especially when an unprecedented heat wave just hit the country) is absurd.
Regarding Lyman’s comments, Biden did mention that the United States “will work with every nation, including our competitors, to solve global problems like climate change.” Immediately after this, he referenced China and said the U.S. will not seek out conflict with them.
Lyman also touched on a longtime right-wing trope about climate change: that countries like China are the problem because they currently emit the most carbon, and because of this, it’s foolish to think that the U.S. should act on climate change. But the United States is the largest historical emitter; per capita emissions in the U.S. vastly outweigh those of China; and many of our products are manufactured in China.
Solely blaming China while absolving the U.S. for its own pollution problems and its outsized role in spreading climate denial does nothing for solving climate change in the long run.
Right-wing media also exaggerated the time Biden spent talking about climate change, and they threw in some good-old-fashioned climate denial
Three minutes out of 30 is arguably not enough time to devote to a problem that has led to a summer of destructive extreme weather across the globe. But it was still enough to annoy right-wing media figures.
Again on Wake Up America, host Rob Finnerty stated that “the president spent a lot of time talking about climate change during his speech. … This, of course, coming at a crucially important time. We’re seven months into the worst war in Europe that we've seen since World War II, and the president took the opportunity to campaign for Democrats and talk about climate change.” Additionally, on the September 21 edition of Kudlow, guest Steve Moore falsely claimed that “he spent half the time talking about climate change.”
Perhaps the worst reaction came from Newsmax host Eric Bolling, who went on a climate denial rant on the September 21 edition of **Eric Bolling The Balance**. He called climate change “another made-up crisis lurking just around the corner,” adding, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” He then blamed Al Gore for supposedly inaccurate predictions about climate change and chastised former President Barack Obama for buying a house near the sea despite being concerned about rising sea levels.
The right-wing blow-up over Biden’s climate comments is not surprising. To these figures and outlets, any action on climate, big or small, is akin to a radical socialist takeover of the U.S. economy. In particular, the right has increased its climate denial and criticism of climate policies in recent months. As climate change worsens and global citizens come together to clamor for climate action, right-wing media will continue todouble down on denial and lies to protect their polluting interests.
Related
Fox News’ vicious response to the California heat wave is a harbinger of things to come
09/16/22
As a climate-fueled heat wave stresses California's electric grid, right-wing media are disingenuously attacking electric vehicles
09/02/22
The Inflation Reduction Act is not the Green New Deal no matter what Fox News says
08/19/22
mma 922
not sure what to say beyond fox job 1 trash dems; tails you lose? if pandemic still, it is b/c dems failed to fix, or claim lockdn --> perm power tyranny
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): People on the left are freaking out because Biden claimed the pandemic is over, regarding covid. Pandemic's over. We still have a problem with covid, we're doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over.
Don't viruses mutate, and aren't there some things called new variants? Can anyone say scientifically with any degree of certainty that new variants, more virulent variants aren't possible?
I'm not so sure I'm trusting doctor Joe on anything, or the NIH, or Doctor Fauci, or the CDC, which finally admitted, "We were wrong about those vaccine things we were telling you to take day in and day out."
w/ trump pol is just kneejerk reverse BO; w/ bannon it is assign evil motive for all actions
https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-says-biden-administrations-initiative-cure-cancer-covert-operation
NOTE AS W CONSPIR THE LACK OF EVIDENCE IS PROOF
CHICOM PTY MODEL WEF admin state pol central bank plus state owned ind converge for totalitarian power; all godless, so want to live forever;
tpusa in person
STEVE BANNON: This is the biggest inflection point in human history. In the lived experience of half of this room, or maybe more, we're going to get to a point where you're going to have human 2.0. Right? They're telling you that. They're funding that. This is not science fiction, this is fact.
They talk about they’re going to save kids, and they’re going to do this -- that’s all crap. They want to be immortal. Right?And they also say there's too many people, the carrying capacity of this planet– there's too many people, right? So we gotta figure out how we're going to do here. You know, they're all over Tucker and the Great Replacement theory and about the thing. Hey, the Great Replacement theory is homo sapiens. That's what they're trying to replace.
They’re going to have their deal and devil catch the hindmost. And people say well hold it I haven't heard about that. Of course you haven't heard about it. They don't want to talk about it. They're just going to do it. And they're going to call it theCancer Moonshot. This is what we have to stop.
sci can brk down]
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/epa-forever-chemicals-hazardous-substances/
https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/desperate-for-a-scandal-reporters/
an 822
The early morning crew at **Fox News** lashed out at **President Joe Biden** Friday morning, just hours after he held a fiery rally in Maryland Thursday night and made the stakes for the November midterms clear: It’s democracy or fascism.
“What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” President Biden, aware he was entering dangerous territory, declared as he steamrolled ahead.
“America must choose. You must choose — whether our country will move forward or backward,” Biden told the audience at the fundraising event that looked more like a Trump rally, packed to the gills with thousands of screaming fans of the president. “Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans have made their choice — to go backwards full of anger, violence, hate and division.”
READ MORE: [Biden White House Smacks Down Marjorie Taylor Greene in a Tweet
“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” Biden said. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”
“I want to be crystal-clear about what’s on the ballot this year,” Biden said. “Your right to choose is on the ballot this year. The Social Security you paid for from the time you had a job is on the ballot. The safety of our kids from gun violence is on the ballot.”
“MAGA Republicans don’t have a clue about the power of women. Let me tell you something: They are about to find out.”
“I respect conservative Republicans,” Biden added. “I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.”
It was President Biden labeling Trump’s “Make America Great Again” philosophy “semi-fascism” and how he defined “MAGA Republicans” that infuriated the Fox News “Fox & Friends First” hosts.
“President Biden just trashed 70 million Trump supporters again!” one Fox News host screamed. “Boy that seems very familiar, a little like Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ comment, doesn’t it?”
In fact, it seems nothing like former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 remarks, which were almost never fully reported, although Buzzfeed’s Ruby Cramer captured them and NPR published the transcript in full, which is below.
READ MORE: [Watch: Megyn Kelly Unleashes Profane ‘F’ Word Attack on Dr. Fauci
It’s important to note how Clinton expressed great compassion for GOP voters, and called on all Americans “to understand and empathize” with them:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America,” Clinton said barely months before the 2016 election.
“But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
Watch Fox News’ Friday morning response to President Biden’s remarks below or at this link:
quite a lot of RW BS on student loan forgive, bannon called reparations?; mebbe a string of dem wins/bills ~ 2022 red wave;
also try culture/class war BS rich college kids vs hard working real am, socialism
https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-rails-against-student-debt-forgiveness-then-brags-about-his-ivy-league
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/biden-has-one-of-the-best-economic-records-of-any-post-war-president-business-professor/
an 8 22
Experts are weighing in on Monday evening’s historic news that under the direction of President Joe Biden Americans have killed the top leader of al-Qaeda, the top terrorist who succeeded Osama bin Laden and was a top architect of the 9/11 terror attacks.
“A CIA drone strike has killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Afghanistan, according to five people familiar with the matter,” the Associated Press reports. “Current and former officials began hearing Sunday afternoon that al-Zawahri had been killed in a drone strike, but the administration delayed releasing the information until his death could be confirmed, according to one person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.”
The killing of the top terrorist is said to validate President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which he received tremendous criticism for more than one year ago.
RELATED: Watch Live: Biden to Address Nation on Counterterrorism Operation Killing Top al-Qaeda Leader
“To kill Americans and their allies — civilian and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in every country in which it is possible to do it,” The Washington Post reports “Zawahiri wrote in a 1998 manifesto.”
“Three years later, he would put words into action by helping to plan the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”
“My first reaction: tears of relief,” said counterterrorism expert, former Republican, and former Trump administration DHS official Elizabeth Neumann. “Justice for 9/11 families and all of the many men and women that have been fighting since to keep us safe at home and abroad. The threat remains. But tonight we can be soberly grateful for justice.”
Neumann served in several roles at the Trump DHS including as Deputy Chief of Staff to DHS Secretary John Kelly and Acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke, and DHS Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy to their successors.
National security attorney Bradley Moss tweeted, “Trump was taking Saudi blood money to host a golf outing this weekend. Biden was killing terrorists.”
Former DOJ spokesperson under Eric Holder and special advisor to the National Security Council at the Biden White House, and MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller wrote, “Build Back Better is alive and Ayman al-Zawahiri is dead.”
“This is a success,” says CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security who has an extensive background on terrorism and national security, “both because of the target, al-Zawahiri, but also because the Biden Administration had claimed that leaving Afghanistan would not impact counterterrorism efforts. They still would have ‘over the horizon’ capability. That appears to be true.”
SiriusXM Progress host Dean Obeidallah, an attorney, journalist, and contributor to CNN and MSNBC writes, “”Most people who get Covid quarantine quietly by watching TV or reading books. President Biden spent his Covid quarantine killing the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri!”
an 7 22
Just before U.S. President Joe Biden's speech at a shuttered coal plant, nine U.S. senators on Wednesday demanded that he stop weighing his options and urgently declare a climate emergency.
The call was led by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) along with Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
Their letter to Biden came after the White House confirmed Tuesday that an emergency declaration would not be included in the climate actions announced in his Wednesday address—leading one campaigner to charge that "in the midst of shocking and unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires, and drought in America, Europe, and across the globe, President Biden has failed to meaningfully act on climate."
The senators wrote that "while we will continue to fight for whatever climate and clean energy proposals can pass in a divided Senate, congressional action to address the climate crisis appears to have stalled."
"As a result, we urge you to put us on an emergency footing and aggressively use your executive powers to address the climate crisis, create good-paying union jobs in the United States, and liberate hard-working American families from volatile energy prices," they continued....
says he will save big chunks of BBB incl climate after voting rights beat?
XO on cops 2 yr geo floyd anniv
XO urged ~ west va v EPA loss
mma 7 22
no lnx twit pix vid
misleading manipulated video of President Joe Biden awarding the Medal of Honor to a veteran has received millions of views on social media platforms. The video has spread on multiple platforms, including Twitter, even though the platform seemingly prohibits this kind of deceptive content.
On July 5, Biden awarded the Medal of Honor to four veterans for their service during the Vietnam War. He bestowed the honor by putting the medal around their necks, as is normal procedure for awarding government medals.
:{
A grainy and blurry version of a clip in which Biden put the medal around one of the veterans, Dwight Birdwell, started circulating on social media platforms, with users falsely claiming that the president put the medal on backwards. A Media Matters review has found that the video has received more than 3.4 million views on mainstream platforms.
The vast majority of those views have been on Twitter, where just one upload of the video had at least 2.3 million views. Other uploads on the platform have also received hundreds of thousands of combined views. Multiple right-wing figures have also shared the video on Twitter as an accurate depiction of the ceremony, including thechairperson of the Texas Republican Party, a Newsmax host, and Infowars personality Paul Joseph Watson.}:
[Drebonacci Twitter video]
Twitter rules prohibit “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” If the platform does not remove the content, then it “may provide additional context on Tweets sharing the misleading media where they appear on Twitter,” which includes applying “a label and/or warning message to the Tweet.” Thus far, the uploads of the video have not been removed, nor has a label been put on them. Twitter has previously struggled to consistently enforce its labeling policy.
The spread of the video was not limited to Twitter. Multiple uploads of the video have gone up on YouTube, including a YouTube Short of the video with more than 170,000 views. YouTube rules prohibit “content that has been technically manipulated or doctored in a way that misleads users (beyond clips taken out of context) and may pose a serious risk of egregious harm.”
YouTube Short Biden medal video views
omfg sev countries boycott lat am talks b/c exclusions, but ?!
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/record-deforestation-amazon-tipping-point/
jake j cmn dr
the Brazilian government published data Friday showing that more than 2,500 fire hotspots were recorded in the Amazon rainforest last month, the highest number for June since 2007—one of the worst years ever for the critical ecosystem.
The latest report from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research showed that the Brazilian Amazon has lost 1,450 square miles of jungle since the start of 2022.
Greenpeace Brazil said in response to the alarming figures that the far-right Bolsonaro government's systematic rampage against basic environmental protections is responsible for the surge in rainforest fires and overall deforestation, which have helped transform parts of the Amazon—long known as a key carbon "sink"—into sources of planet-warming greenhouse gas.
"Agribusiness is hitting new records for forest destruction as the dry season arrives in the Amazon," said Cristiane Mazzetti, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Brazil. "Illegal burnings and deforestation have accelerated over the last three years as a direct result of the Brazilian government's anti-environmental agenda that encourages the destruction of the forest."
"If this trend does not change," Mazzetti added, "we will approach the tipping point of no return in which the Amazon could fail as a rainforest."
Brazilian academics have warned in recent months that a Bolsonaro victory in the October presidential election would mean total demise for the Brazilian Amazon. Recent polling shows that Bolsonaro is trailing leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has vowed to pursue "net-zero deforestation" if elected.
"If Bolsonaro remains in the power of presidency, it's hopeless in terms of the environment," Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the São Paulo-based Climate Observatory, told HuffPost in April, a record-shattering month for Amazon deforestation.
"There will be more deforestation," said Astrini. "The Amazon will fast forward to its collapse point."
Environmental groups have voiced dismay at the Biden administration's failure to confront Bolsonaro on the international stage over his government's assault on the Amazon. The U.S. is Brazil's second-largest trading partner.
Last month, during the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, President Joe Biden went as far as to praise Bolsonaro for trying to "protect the Amazon."
"In addition to being divorced from reality, Biden's statement is remarkably tone-deaf," Maria Laura Canineu and Luciana Téllez Chávez of Human Rights Watch wrote on the final day of the summit, where the two leaders met for the first time. "Biden has shamefully squandered the opportunity to leverage his meeting with Bolsonaro to support the courageous defenders of the Amazon."
"These defenders are putting their lives on the line to protect the world's largest rainforest and a vital bulwark against climate change," they continued. "Biden should correct this mistake and press Bolsonaro to reverse his damaging policies, urging Bolsonaro to get Brazil back on track in fighting deforestation and protecting forest defenders from violence."
Diana Ruiz, the head of forests at Greenpeace USA, said in a statement Friday that "up to now, the Biden administration has only legitimized the Brazilian government's anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental agenda."
"The U.S. has a responsibility to act and stop making deals with President Bolsonaro, who continues to wage an assault against Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders," Ruiz added.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-use-bidens-green-economy-comments-launch-full-scale-defense-fossil-fuels
at a joint press conference with the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo on May 23, President Joe Biden was asked by a reporter if Americans should expect a recession as gas prices currently remain high. After initially responding that he did not think so — as the U.S. is growing economically and unemployment is at a pandemic low — Biden then noted that when it comes to gas prices, “we're going through an incredible transition that … when it's over, we'll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.”
The mere suggestion that gas prices are helping drive the transition away from fossil fuels was enough to send right-wing media into a frenzy,illustrating both the utter contempt they hold for a future that is not dominated by polluting industries and their penchant for falsely claiming Biden is responsible for high gas prices.
Right-wing media predictably twisted Biden’s comments to advance their attacks on the Biden administration’s climate agenda
The right-wing media backlash to Biden’s comments was swift. Predictably, conservative outlets and commentators zeroed in on the “incredible transition” phrase and disregarded his other comments, where he noted his concern for high gas prices and laid out some of the things the administration is attempting to do to alleviate them, including a release from the strategic oil reserve.
One common line of attack suggests that Biden is somehow celebrating high gas prices. Articles published by the Murdoch-owned outlets New York Post and Foxnews.com, as well as The Washington Times, Breitbart, and The Federalist, ran with this framing that Biden is celebrating high gas prices. Fox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino also suggested this on Twitter. Meanwhile, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner also led viewers to this conclusion on the May 24 edition of The Faulkner Focus, stating that "President Biden is getting called out for appearing to cheer on the high gas prices. While he says it's an incredible transition that would likely be going green faster.”
The framing that the Biden administration is somehow celebrating high gas prices is not new. For example, on the May 20 edition of Fox News’ America Reports, Fox anchor John Roberts said that there is “a growing sense out there among some people … the White House and people on the left are looking at these gas prices going, ‘This is great because it’s going to push people into the green energy sector. It’s going to get people buying electric cars.’”
Earlier, on the April 1 edition of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson had pushed a conspiracy theory that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an excuse for the Biden administration to raise energy prices “to get a Green New Deal.”
In line with the “celebration” framing, right-wing media also twisted Biden’s comments to suggest that high gas prices are “intentional.” For example, the Daily Caller tweeted, “So the high prices are intentional, Joe?” while Glenn Beck’s website wrote, “Did Biden just let slip that record-high gas prices were PLANNED?” Paid polluting-industry shills and longtime Fox News guests Daniel Turner and Steve Milloy also insinuated the same on Twitter.
Right-wing morning news shows on May 24 also followed this line of attack — on Fox & Friends First, Fox News contributor Brian Brenberg stated in regard to gas prices that “higher prices are part of the plan. They have always been part of the plan for him. He wants you to pay for his green dream transition.” On Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria, host Maria Bartiromo stated that Biden “just admitted it … this is all intentional. It’s a plan.” Will Cain, co-host of Fox & Friends, stated that Biden’s transition comments were an “absolutely outlandish statement that we are going to be talking about more this morning. Because it also plants the idea, confirms the idea in many people's minds, that this isn't an accident.”
Right-wing media’s “intentional” framing is absurd given that the president has very little control over gas prices, which are high right now for a number of reasons, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rapidly surging demand for oil. It also contradicts Biden’s own position on the issue, as he recently promised to “work like the devil to bring gas prices down.” In fact, right-wing media have been making this claim even before Biden’s Tokyo comments. For example, on the May 20 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy implied that Democrats “want to inflict some pain upon people” to get them to stop using fossil fuels. On the May 19 edition of Fox Business’ Kennedy, Fox Business host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery aired clips of Republican senators accusing Biden of deliberately raising gas prices to force a transition to clean energy.
As usual, right-wing media took Biden’s transition comments and used them to attack any and all efforts to transition to clean energy. Fox News anchor David Asman tweeted that “Nothing is more dangerous” than Biden’s goal to transition away from fossil fuels. Longtime climate denier and Fox News regular Marc Morano tweeted, “The climate policies of the Biden administration are not only disastrous to the economy and are imposing maximum pain on the American people, but they areanti-human and anti-freedom." On Fox News’ Outnumbered, Republican businessman John James stated, “This is the modern day equivalent to let them eat cake … the agenda that Biden is pushing forward that's crushing American jobs and crushing our wallets.”
Right-wing media are carrying water for the fossil fuel industry
In the wake of these comments, some right-wing media commentators defended the oil and gas industry and called for increased fossil fuel use in the future.
On Fox & Friends First, Texas Republican congressional candidate Wesley Hunt stated about Biden’s comments: “He's got his words wrong. It's not about energy transition; it's about energy addition. … The bottom line is this — it's an all-hands-on-deck approach to fulfill the energy needs of this country. … This administration is trying to kill our industry but we are not going to allow that to happen.” On Fox & Friends, Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney blamed Biden for high gas prices and admonished him for ending America’s so-called energy independence. On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., Fox Business anchor Larry Kudlow called the idea of transitioning away from fossil fuels “woke” and then made the baffling claim that “there's all kinds of new technology that makes fossils very low carbon — we have the lowest emissions in the world.” Immediately following this segment, investment portfolio manager and frequent Fox guest David Bahnsen stated “You could have an incredible transition, you could admit you need natural gas, you could … admit that wind, solar is not going to get it done. He said it's not going to happen overnight — he’s right about that. It is also not going to happen in the next 30 years.”
Any and all climate and clean energy issues are attacked with fervor across right-wing media, which have historically been staunch defenders of the fossil fuel industry and willing collaborators in promoting climate change denial. This defense of the fossil fuel industry has only worsened throughout the Ukraine crisis. Even though oil companies are making record profits, and refusing to drill for more oil because high oil prices allow them to return more money to shareholders, and oil and gas production is close to hitting all-time highs under Biden, right-wing media perceive any criticism of the industry or any comments on attempting to transition away from the industry (as Biden suggested in 2020) as an affront to all that is good and holy.
Transitioning to a clean energy economy is the only way for consumers, in the long run, to feel less pain at the pump
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is largely financed by fossil fuels, as Russia is a major exporter of natural gas as well as a global supplier of oil and coal. Luckily, there are many prominent voices pointing this out and saying that Russia’s invasion should hasten the transition to clean energy. The European Union is speeding up its plans to adopt renewable energy. The International Energy Agency is also calling for a transition away from a fossil fuel economy. And climate scientists are urgently spelling out the need to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels in order to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
Consumers will be more insulated from gas price volatility the less beholden they are to the global oil market. Rather than heeding right-wing media’s calls for increased drilling, and giving in to their fears that a clean energy economy will be devastating for the U.S. (quite the contrary), now is the time to begin the transition.
Related
Fox News dominated coverage of congressional hearing on Big Oil and gas prices
04/08/22
Fox News heaps praise on the fossil fuel industry as the Russian war in Ukraine rages on
03/17/22
Fox is using the Ukrainian crisis to suggest the Biden administration’s climate policies emboldened Putin
02/24/22
an 5 22
Republicans just voted against two bills to ease the **baby formula shortage** they have spent weeks falsely trying to pin on President Joe Biden.
In tweets and in floor speeches, Republicans have been attacking President Biden for the nationwide baby formula shortage caused by one manufacturer’s recall and closure of its plant for bacterial infection after two infants died.The shortage has been exacerbated by a trade agreement signed by then-President Donald Trump that makes it extremely difficult and expensive to import formula from other countries, and the fact that 90 percent of baby formula in the U.S. is manufactured by just four companies. Also, hoarding, and price-gouging.
Last week President Biden sat down with manufacturers and retailers to map out a plan to get more formula onto store shelves immediately and directed the Food and Drug Administration to help get the plant reopened. This week he went two steps further: he invoked the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula and produce it ahead of other products and created a program to use federal planes to import baby formula from other countries.
House Democrats last week also opened an investigation into the baby formula shortage.
On Wednesday the House voted on two emergency bills to further ease the shortage.
One example of Republicans falsely attacking President Biden and the left is House GOP Caucus chair **Elise Stefanik**‘s now-infamous tweet accusing Democrats of having “no plan” as she labeled them “pedo grifters.”...
one bill would give FDA $28 million to add staff, work to help get more formula to consumers, and create a long-term strategy, including increased safety inspections so this cannot happen again. The second would dramatically increase supply from foreign sources to consumers using the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program.
192 House Republicans voted against giving FDA $28 million to help fix the crisis and ensure it does not happen again.
Nine House Republicans voted against making it easier for WIC customers to get access to baby formula.
Many Americans are becoming outraged as the news from last night’s votes is spreading online.
[Here’s the list of 9 members of Congress (all Republicans)who voted NO:
Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Gaetz Louie Gohmert Lauren Boebert Paul Gosar Thomas Massie Andy Biggs Clay Higgins Chip Roy.]
XO. had to back off gas price ukraine war?
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/**2021/02**/biden-climate-change-actions-anger-big-oil/
President Joe Biden signed executive actions last week prioritizing solutions to the “existential threat” of climate change, drawing the ire of many key players in the politically powerful oil and gas industry.
Biden’s actions pressed pause on the leasing of federal lands and waters for oil drilling, set a goal of keeping 30 percent of federal lands for conservation purposes and announced the electrification of the federal government’s fleet of vehicles. The move comes a week after Biden revoked the permits for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline just hours after his inauguration, following through on a campaign-trail promise.
Leading up to the 2020 election, the oil and gas industry contributed around $1.6 million more to former President Donald Trump than to Biden. Trump painted himself as an ally to the industry on the stump and throughout his presidency — though industry insiders told Politico in 2020 that the Trump administration was “a mixed bag” and “more like ‘meh’” than the windfall they had hoped for in 2016.
The oil industry spent millions in 2020 to try to keep a GOP majority in the Senate. Valero, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, among the few corporations that give to super PACs, gave at least $1 million each this election cycle to the Senate Leadership Fund, a conservative super PAC that spent $271 million to campaign against Democrats vying for the Senate.
Pausing land and water leases ‘to the extent possible’
Biden’s decision to halt future leases of federal land, pending a comprehensive review of the climate impact, caused an uproar among oil and gas companies and trade associations. Just hours after Biden formalized the order, theWestern Energy Alliance announced it would sue the Biden administration, alleging the move violates existing law.
Most drilling occurs on private land, rather than federal property. In 2017, approximately 24 percent of oil and 13 percent of natural gas extracted in the United States came from federal lands. According to analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey, around a quarter of U.S. emissions come from the combustion and extraction of resources from federal lands.
Oil and gas companies rushed to stockpile drilling permits during Trump’s lameduck period — doubling the number of permit requests over the same period in 2019, according to an AP report.Under Biden’s order, oil and gas companies can continue to obtain new permits to drill on land that has already been leased.
Experts say the executive action likely won’t immediately impact rates of oil extraction in the U.S. As of 2019, there were 38,294 leases active across the country, concentrated mostly in the American West. Once a lease has been issued, companies have 10 years to begin production on the land before the lease terminates.
The oil and gas industry’s leading trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, came out against the order. API President Mike Sommers criticized Biden’s suspension of federal agencies’ authority to issue leases of federal land to drilling companies in a Jan. 21 statement.
“Restricting development on federal lands and waters is nothing more than an ‘import more oil’ policy. Energy demand will continue to rise—especially as the economy recovers—and we can choose to produce that energy here in the United States or rely on foreign countries hostile to American interests,” Sommers said.
In 2020, API’s PAC spent $88,200 to support Republican candidates, giving $5,000 to the Great America PAC, a Trump-aligned Carey committee. API also dropped $5.3 million to employ 40 lobbyists, reporting lobbying 66 individual bills. The institute’s lobbying spending fell during Trump’s administration after trending upward throughout former President Barack Obama’s two terms in office.
Another leading oil and gas industry association, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, has also come out in opposition to the action.
“We think it was really misguided,” Senior Vice President for Government Relations Dan Naatz told an Arkansas TV news team. “It impacts jobs and economies through the inner-Mountain West, all the way through the country.”
In 2020, the organization’s PAC spent $215,300 in campaign contributions, giving $10,000 each to Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), and former Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Martha McSally (R-Ariz.).
Biden framed the executive action as a jobs package,remarking, “today is climate day in the White House which means today is jobs day at the White House,” just before he signed the executive actions. Labor leaders say they are waiting to hear how exactly Biden will replace jobs lost in energy sectors.
“It’s too glib and easy to say someone working in the mines can get a solar job. That is too simplistic,” Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, told the Washington Examiner. “There is a mismatch between where energy jobs are getting lost and where they are created. We have to close that gap, but we also have to be real and help economies diversify their economies in ways based on their own assets.”
Oil corporations emphasize that gap. The Global Energy Institute, a subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, came out against some of Biden’s climate actions, claiming it would lead to widespread unemployment.
“Without the prospect of future leases, investment and planning will begin to dry up immediately, thwarting job creation and the economic growth at the worst possible time,” the Institute’s President Marty Durbin said in a statement.
The Chamber of Commerce perennially favors Republicans and dropped $5.7 million in outside spending in 2020.
Keystone canceled, frustrating some oil companies
The Chamber of Commerce also condemned Biden’s action to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, a project widely opposed by environmental advocates, indigenous communities and scientists.
“This is a politically motivated decision that is not grounded in science. It will harm consumers and put thousands of Americans in the building trades out of work,” Durbin said.
The Keystone XL pipeline was proposed in 2008, vetoed by Obama in 2015 and promptly re-initiated by Trump in 2016 along with another controversial project, the Dakota Access Pipeline. Environmental and indigenous rights advocates are now calling on Biden to cancel the latter pipeline, which abuts the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
That pipeline is owned by Energy Transfer Partners, an oil and gas conglomerate that gave more in campaign contributions than any other company in the industry. Ninety-nine percent of its donations went to Republican candidates and committees. In 2020, the company’s co-founder and board chair, Kelcy Warren, donated a whopping $10 million to America First Action, a Trump-affiliated super PAC.
Biden’s climate actions are also drawing criticism from Republican lawmakers from oil-rich states who have benefited from industry contributions. Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) announced Jan. 22 that they would introduce legislation to overturn Biden’s executive action and re-issue permits to the Keystone XL Pipeline, which was slated to pass through Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska before connecting to an existing pipeline in Kansas.
“We came so far during the last administration – from prioritizing American energy development to ending the far-left’s war on fossil fuels,” said Inhofe in a statement announcing the legislation.
Throughout his career, Inhofe has received in excess of $2.2 million in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies. Daines and Barrasso have each received $1.2 million from the industry.
The group’s bill is a symbolic gesture to the industry and its supporters without any real hope of passing the Senate, where Democrats wield a majority, albeit narrowly. The oil and gas industry spent heavily to prevent the upper chamber from swinging blue, giving around $600,000 each to Republican Senate candidates in Georgia Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who both lost narrowly to Democratic challengers in January runoffs. The American Petroleum Institute donated $5 million to the Senate Leadership Fund in late November, after every Senate campaign had concluded save the two ultra-expensive Georgia races.
Faced with pressure from Washington, other corporations look to adapt
Some energy companies are taking a different tact, announcing plans to adapt their business model to thrive in a Biden administration that prioritizes conservation and climate action.
Industry giant Exxon Mobil announced Feb. 1, just days after Biden’s executive order, that it would initiate massive investments in carbon capture technology aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The company, whose employees favored Biden over Trump in 2020 campaign contributions, will spend $3 billion over the next five years to build up a new subsidiary business: ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions.
General Motors has committed to only manufacturing zero-emissions vehicles by the year 2035, inline with Biden’s commitment to electrifying the government’s fleet. Ford’s new CEO has also pledged to restructure production plans, prioritizing the addition of electric vehicles to its portfolio, which currently features only one fully-electric model.
The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, an oil-refining trade association that spent $3.2 to lobby the government in 2019, responded to that provision by reaching out to an unlikely ally: biofuel manufacturers. AFPM reportedly hopes to create an alliance with the competitor industry to lobby Biden to revise his fleet electrification plans in order to include cars powered by low-emission gasoline made from a mix of gasoline and ethanol.
twt https://twitter.com/BonginoReport/status/1522648982585065474
[pix of garland]
Bongino Report on Twitter: "Woke Biden Admin. Unleashes New "Green ...
Bongino Report @BonginoReport. Woke Biden Admin. Unleashes New "Green Police" To Target YOU [emoticons eyeballs, thumb?] rumble.com. Woke Biden Admin. Unleashes New "Green Police" To Target YOU. What does "environmental justice" even mean? 6:46 PM · May 6, --> qanon
aug 21? biden senile russ disinfo
chris hayes 3/22 no clash of civs with islam, but there is w/ putin authoritariANISM
just kneejerk rubber glue now?
tucker ticks off all the phobes boxes now?
no lnx
Tucker Carlson issues weird warning as he aims to protect Putin
[Tucker Carlson's story about the NSA spying on him is filled with holes ?]
Meaghan Ellis March 30, 2022
Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently issued a bizarre warning about the possible adverse effects of removing Russian President Vladimir Putin from office.
On Monday, March 28, Carlson expressed concern about the looming discussions during his recent segment of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."The conservative TV host claims he's concerned about the possibility of Islamic extremists seizing Russia's nuclear weaponry and using it on the United States if Putin is removed from power.
“So, Russia has a large and restive population of Islamic extremists. Do we think it’s possible that with no one running the country ― because of course we have no chosen successor to Putin ― is it possible, if we did that, that one of those 6,000 nuclear weapons might wind up in the hands of some anti-American terror group and be used against our civilian population here?” he asked. “A nuclear weapon! Well, it’s not just possible, it’s likely.”
Carlson's latest remarks follow multiple attempts he's made to defend the Russian authoritarian. Since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Carlson has echoed talking points from Russian state media circulating Kremlin propaganda. Like other Russian propagandists, Carlson has also made calls for the 25th Amendment to be invoked so President Joe Biden could be removed from office.
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During the same segment, Carlson said, "The joke is over. Too much is at stake. If there ever was a time — if there was in U.S. history ever a time to invoke the 25th Amendment, it is now. As Joe Biden himself put it, 'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.' For all of our sakes."
Carlson’s bizarre remarks were reportedly in response to Biden's speech made while in Poland. Speaking of Putin, Biden called for Putin to be striped of his presidential powers saying, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/to-us-oligarchs-majority-views-on-taxing-the-rich-count-for-little/
noah b
With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.
That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth.
Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent.
At some point, corruption stops being a bug in democracy and starts becoming a feature of oligarchy.
Has the US passed that threshold?
Based on the sweeping and effective resistance to commonsense solutions to reign in wealthy tax scofflaws, the answer is not encouraging.
Since the 1970s, the United States has become steadily and inexorably more economically unequal. According to Pew, upper income families have brought in a larger and larger share of total income.
US income inequality is the highest of all G7 nations. Its Gini coefficient is .434, well above second highest UK at .392.
In 1968, the top 20 percent of households earned 43 percent of national income. By 2018, the top 20 percent of households earned 52 percent.
In 1989, the richest 5 percent of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second poorest income tier. In 2016, they had 248times as much wealth.
In 2020, the 50 richest Americans had almost as much wealth as the poorest half of the US population.
This massive concentration of wealth is also a massive concentration of power. The wealthiest people have access to the best lawyers, the best tax attorneys and the most powerful politicians.
That means that it is very difficult for the government to restrain them, or to create a more equitable economy and society against their wishes.
That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth. [amp fdbk]
An example of oligarchical power is billionaire tax evasion. A recent IRS study found that wealthy Americans conceal more than 20 percent of their earnings. They are able to do this because of complex accounting scams involving offshore tax shelters.
The lost tax costs the government at least $175 billion a year in revenue. The top 1 percent of earners are responsible for a third of unpaid federal taxes.
In addition to these straightforwardly illegal accounting tricks, the very wealthy also benefit from at least nominally legal loopholes.
For instance, wealthy people have many assets that increase in value over time, but they do not pay taxes on those assets until they sell them.
They can borrow against those assets without paying taxes, since again the assets aren’t considered income. Then, if they die before selling the assets, they can pass them on to their heirs using trusts and other accounting shenanigans to avoid the estate tax.
ProPublica called this strategy Buy, Borrow, Die. It’s a key method for hoarding generational wealth, and entrenching oligarchy.
The Biden administration, led by Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, have proposed strong measures to rein in billionaire corruption. In part, they want to restrain inequality. In part, they hope to fund other priorities like climate mitigation and anti-poverty measures in the administration’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan.
To address billionaire tax evasion, BBB included $80 billion to boost capacity and staff at the IRS. That would help make up for the steady budget-cuts under Republican administrations. Those have led to a 60 percent decrease in audits of taxpayers who earn more than $1 million. Biden said the investment would allow the IRS to collect $400 billion in taxes.
Biden, Yellen and Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden have also been pushing for a billionaire tax to force the very wealthy to pay taxes on the increased value of their assets.
This would strike at the heart of the oligarchic “Buy, Borrow, Die” lifestyle. It would force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share, like everyone else, every year, year after year.
Policies that prevent the rich from escaping a tax burden everyone has to pay should be easy to pass in a democracy. You’d think preventing billionaires from cheating on their taxes would be a popular policy.
And you’d be correct.
A 2019 poll, for example, showed that 76 percent of Americans agreed that the wealthiest should pay more in taxes. Proposals to tax income over $10 million at 70 percent — a huge increase over current rates — obtained more than 50 percent support.
In an oligarchy, though, public support doesn’t necessarily count for all that much.
A notorious 2015 study found that politicians were much more likely to listen to and follow the political preferences of economic elites than those of the less affluent.
You can see that playing out in the politics of billionaire taxation.
Build Back Better, which included the beefed-up IRS funding, was scuttled by millionaire West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, in large part, reportedly, because he was worried that poor parents would spend money on drugs.
A wealthy politician refused to enforce the law against billionaires because he was worried that poor people are natural criminals.
That is what you call class consciousness.
Wyden’s proposal to end “Buy, Borrow, Die” also failed after opposition from Manchin.It was of course opposed by Senate Republicans, whose main goal is to shovel as much money as possible to the rich in as short a time as possible.
Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent. This would make it harder for businesses to escape tax burdens by moving their corporate offices. Congress still has to pass the treaty, but Yellen said she was confident they would do so.
The corporate minimum tax is a substantial achievement. But it’s also a small dam erected against the tsunami of inequality in the US.
With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.
The wealthy have been expanding their power and influence for decades in the US. The result is that the US regularly chooses to make the rich richer rather than helping the poorest feed their children.
The outlook for change is likely to be even bleaker if Republicans recapture one or both legislative chambers in November.
Yellen and Biden are to be commended for fighting an ongoing rearguard action against corruption. But if government inability to restrain corruption is a feature of oligarchy, then the US is already well down a path that it is very difficult to retrace.
aha: kerry use strength ~ !? trump kushener etc sen as psychopaths who let Am die, Biden very compassionate so must be twisted to nurture mo or worse:
this rachets up on builds ond'souza BS about how dems are predatory on POC AA?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/free-base-pipe/
no lnx vid twt?
Right-wing website made up viral fake claim Republicans like Marco Rubio are now pushing: report
[Marco Rubio embarrasses himself again by doubling down on false attack of defense secretary]
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 10, 2022
This week Republican lawmakers and voters have had a great time pushing a false claim that the Biden administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to pay for "free crack pipes" for drug abusers. The claim came from a report by the right-wing website Washington Free Beacon, including a quote falsely attributed to an HHS spokesperson, according to The Daily Beast.
It's no surprise The Daily Beast is calling "a lie" made its way to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator's Twitter account.
"The Washington Free Beacon seemed to take a big leap to assert that free crack pipes would be part of a harm reduction package," The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberg reports, calling it "a lie rocketed around conservative media."
The report, published Monday and titled “Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity,’” cited an HHS spokesperson as confirming that a sweeping harm reduction package “will provide pipes” to smoke, quote, “any illicit substance.”
The Free Beacon's article reads: “A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and ‘any illicit substance.’”
The Daily Beast reviewed the email chain between the Washington Free Beacon and HHS. It's unclear how the Free Beacon made the "any illicit substance" claim, given the HHS email specifically states no federal laws would be broken.
In fact, The Daily Beast reports the HHS spokesperson says the Free Beacon “omitted the information shared with him about the grantees needing to comply with federal, state, and local laws—the very language that would prohibit crack pipes.”
The damage has already been done. The "free crack pipes" claim is now one more myth in conservatives' false reality.
Arizona far-right Republican U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Lesko made the false claim on the floor of the House of Representatives:
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Florida Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, linking to an article literally titled: "Biden administration denies funding programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote 'racial equity'" says in a video posted to his Twitter account, "The Biden administration is going to be sending crack pipes and meth pipes, targeting minority communities," a claim he knows is a lie.
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Fox News entertainers Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity both made the most of the claim, with The Daily Mail reporting: "Tucker Carlson slams policy to hand out free crack pipes and needles warning it 'will result in addicts shooting up on the streets.'"
The genie is out of the bottle, and no one on the right has any intention or desire to put it back.
no lnx
On Tuesday, at Royal Dutch Shell’s AGM in The Hague, one man − supported by a growing army of shareholders − will tackle Europe’s highest grossing company from within when he seeks approval for a resolution, opposed by directors, for a speedier and more ambitious transition to green energy. If the planet survives to tell the tale, Dutch national Mark van Baal might one day be remembered as the man who had the greatest impact on reversing climate change. The former energy journalist’s draft novel about a CEO of an oil firm changing the course of history by steering the company towards renewables struck a duff note, but sparked the idea for Follow This, a movement he founded in 2015 based on shareholder activism within some of the world’s most polluting companies, including Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and BP.
Striking at the top
‘The oil industry can make or break the Paris Agreement,’ says Van Baal (52), who believes striking at the heart of pollution powerhouses is the most effective way to reverse climate change. Follow This’s counter-intuitive approach invites changemakers to buy a share in Big Oil (from €9) via their website and then send an email to the CEO, introducing themselves as their newest shareholder and pledging their support to help them make the switch to green energy. Inspired by TCI − who in 2007, with a mere 1% stake in ABN Amro, got the backing of shareholders to split the bank into three parts − Van Baal saw an opportunity to significantly reduce global emissions by building shareholder support for green resolutions in our most polluting corporations, while garnering media interest.
His strategy to take on multinationals from the grassroots raised a few eyebrows and was widely dismissed as ‘a sympathetic initiative’. But when his wife showed him a viral video of a lone dancer in a park evolving into a huge dance party, he recognised such doubt and derision as part of the journey to success, and the name ‘Follow This’ was born. ‘One of the lessons [I learnt],’ he says, ‘is that to get something like this off the ground, you just have to do it and run the risk of being ridiculed in the beginning.’ Follow This founder Mark van Baal addresses the board of directors at the Shell AGM in The Hague in 2018. Photo: Follow This
Transforming from within
Big in ambition, but small in stature, he cut a lonely figure when he rose nervously from a seat at the back of Shell’s packed AGM in 2015 and introduced himself to CEO Ben van Beurden, telling him: ‘I believe you can change the world.’ A David squaring up to Goliath, he urged the panel of directors not to devalue shareholders’ investments by making Shell ‘the next Kodak’, and ‘to put their brains and their billions behind renewable energy’ instead. ‘We are not asking you to stop paying dividends. I would be lynched in this place,’ Van Baal tells the room with a smile, stressing the strong business case for the transition (fossil fuels are becoming scarcer and more expensive to extract, while renewables are falling in price).
And when told the transition is harder than he thinks, he quips: ‘We have more confidence in you than you have in yourself, apparently.’
Investment
As for confidence in Follow This, support was snowballing, bolstered by deep-pocketed investors with a green agenda and the backing of key players such as environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, and Jan Rotmans, the founder of Urgenda, who in 2015 won a landmark case ruling that the Dutch government had a legal responsibility to act immediately to reverse climate change. Today, over 6000 individuals have donated a total of around €20m in shares to the cause. ‘It’s amazing how many people want to contribute to this,’ says Van Baal, who believes solar panels, vegetarianism and not flying are all very well, but are not enough to stop global warming. ‘People feel pretty powerless against climate change. They thought: this can make a difference.’ The world’s biggest oil and gas companies. Source: Statista Biggest polluters
It takes guts, but engaging with Big Oil may be our best hope of keeping temperature rises to below 2 degrees as the burning of fossil fuels accounts for 87% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Research undertaken by the Climate Accountability Institute ranked Shell the 7th highest polluting company in 2019. A ruling is due later this month for a case brought against them by Milieudefensie for violating Dutch liability law by producing double the Netherlands’ legal limit of carbon emissions. In the Netherlands, greenhouse gas emissions per capita are still 34% above the EU average due to our reliance on fossil fuel.
In 2019, just 8.8% of the energy used in the Netherlands was sustainably sourced, one of the lowest in the EU. Iceland, by contrast, was powered by 78% renewables. ‘The fossil fuel interests are very big in the Netherlands,’ says Van Baal. ‘The story was always that we have so much natural gas in the north of the Netherlands that the government is dependent on it so we can’t change it so fast. Now, because of the earthquakes in Groningen, now suddenly it’s possible to do without the income.’ Carbon dioxide emissions in the Netherlands are gradually declining but our dependence on fossil fuels, say environmentalists, limits our progress. Source: CBS Shortcomings Dutch lawmakers have also tightened their grip on shareholder activists like Follow This, who now require a 5% stake to table motions in the Netherlands. Of course, Big Oil does not always appreciate being told home truths about an industry which has − until recently − served investors so well.
The atmosphere at some AGMs has been hostile at times, with Van Beurden accusing Van Baal of trying to take leadership at Shell’s 2018 AGM. Follow This, he reminds him with headmasterly authority, must ‘Follow us’. And sometimes the pressure group itself can inadvertently hinder progress. Campaigns without ambitious, concrete targets can end up functioning as fig leaves for CEOs, says Van Baal, citing Climate Action 100+’s softly-softly approach as an example. Concrete results Despite the challenges, Follow This’s impressive results suggest that the method is working. The inclusion of Scope 3 emissions in Shell’s 2017 climate targets, for example, was an unanticipated success which Van Baal says still gives him goosebumps. Creating traction in the US has been harder, but just last week, a record 58% of shareholder voters in Alaskan oil giant ConocoPhillips supported a motion brought by Follow This to reduce all of the company’s direct and indirect emissions – a huge endorsement for the resolution, whose equivalent at Shell has taken five years to creep from 2.7% to 14.4% of voters.
Citing the risk of litigation that polluters now run, as well as the prospect that fossil fuel projects become ‘stranded assets’ in a fast-changing energy landscape, the motion marked a turning point in North American big oil, which, since Biden, has seen the Securities and Exchange Commission grant greater freedom to shareholders to make climate proposals. Shareholder support for Follow This’s climate resolutions has grown steadily since the NGO’s inception. Source: Follow This Optimism
Whether the scales will also tip at Shell on Tuesday, remains to be seen. Shell has written to all shareholders advising them to support the directors’ climate resolution over Follow This’s more ambitious alternative. Though Shell asserts that its carbon production peaked in 2018, the company’s 2030 targets, say Follow This, still fall short of the Paris Agreement, and the rising demand for energy is being met by further oil exploration in the Arctic with no more than 1% of revenue invested in renewables.
Whatever happens, Big Oil − believes Van Baal − will in time burn itself out. ‘If we leave them alone, they will eventually go bankrupt, but it will take too long. It will put too much CO2 in the air,’ he says. And, despite some harsh criticism from his wife, he still thinks his novel is a good read and that the plot is realistic. ‘I’m quite optimistic, but I have to be,’ he says. ‘This is the only thing that’s going to work.’
Read more at DutchNews.nl:
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1/22 an
reality is that Biden has done a great job — but the pundits can't admit it
January 21, 2022
As President Biden marked the anniversary of his first year in office Wednesday, the reviews have come in. A raft of pundits and pollsters describe him as “limping,” “struggling” even “failing"...
==
1/22
...Lauren Kurtz, our director, and Romany Webb, a Senior Fellow and Associate Research Scholar at Columbia's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, wrote an op-ed for The Hill evaluating how the Biden administration has approached science during its first year.
We documented 328 anti-science actions taken by the Trump administration; a year in, the Biden administration has reversed or reconsidered only nine of these. Biden has made some important strides forward, but the pace must pick up, especially to protect against a future science-hostile administration. ...
==
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/biden-climate-goals/
5 items
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/trump-biden-2655782871/
"attack" on oil reserves (shambolic but at least coord w/ other countries?)
==
okla?
pentagon to order military members to comply with Biden federal employee COVID vaccination requirements
David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement August 01, 2021
The Pentagon said Thursday evening it will order members of the military to comply with President Joe Biden's requirement that all federal employees get vaccinated against the coronavirus or face a regime ...
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/infrastructure-bill-unions/
BBB passes house; jayapal holds line
omfg
no lnx an 11 21
'Pro-death cult strikes back': Right-wing judges block Biden’s vaccine rule for big companies
Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams November 08, 2021
Progressives concerned about workplace safety and public health responded with dismay after a federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily blocked the Biden administration's attempt to require workers at companies with 100 or more employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 or tested weekly.
Citing "grave statutory and constitutional" problems with the rule, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued the stay in response to a joint petition filed Friday by a coalition of businesses, conservative advocacy groups, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah.
That legal challenge, and separate lawsuits from Republican-led states, came just one day after President Joe Biden announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would begin enforcing its newly unveiled Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) in the coming weeks. Companies with at least 100 employees have until December 5 to require unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors, and by January 4, they must require vaccinations or administer weekly tests.
Decrying the decision of the "right-wing Fifth Circuit," labor journalist Steven Greenhouse said on social media that "it's terrible for worker safety and public health that three conservative activist judges have suspended Biden's... new rule requiring workers at companies with more than 100 workers to get vaccinated or tested."
"OSHA's mission is to protect workers' health," Greenhouse continued, "but the appellate judges seem to forget that Covid has killed thousands of meatpacking, retail, and other workers."
More than 750,000 people in the U.S. have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic started last March, and the disease continues to kill nearly 1,100 people per day, most of them unvaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Recent studies confirm that vaccines save lives.Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services analyzed the relationship between county-level inoculation rates and Covid-19 outcomes among U.S. seniors and found that vaccines helped ward off 265,000 infections, 107,000 hospitalizations, and 39,000 deaths during the first five months of 2021.
And in September, CDC researchers found that individuals in the U.S. who were not fully vaccinated last spring and summer were 11 times more likely to die after being infected with the coronavirus—and over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized—than those who were fully inoculated.
Greenhouse said that "the judges evidently sympathize with [Texas Republican Gov.] Greg Abbott's let-people-die stance—that it'soverreachfor OSHA to act strongly to protect workers from Covid."
David Michaels, a leader of OSHA during the Obama administration, also rebuked the federal appeals court, describing its decision as legally dubious and politically motivated.
"The same activist court that refused to stay Texas' law that permits bounty hunters to sue anyone who aids an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy has stayed an OSHA rule that is clearly within OSHA's authority, will save lives, and make workplaces safe," he told the New York Times.
According to the Times, "At the core of the legal challenge is the question of whether OSHA exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and whether such a mandate would need to be passed by Congress."
The newspaper reported:
The suit against the mandate stated that President Biden "set the legislative policy" of substantially increasing the number of Americans covered by vaccination requirements, and "then set binding rules enforced with the threat of large fines."
"That is a quintessential legislative act—and one wholly unrelated to the purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety," the suit said. "Nowhere in OSHA's enabling legislation does Congress confer upon it the power to end pandemics."
Corporate executives asked, and the Biden administration agreed, to delay implementation of OSHA's new ETS "until after the New Year, citing concerns about worker shortages during the important holiday season," Reuters noted.
Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda, meanwhile, said in a statement that the Labor Department, home to OSHA, is "confident in its legal authority" to issue vaccine requirements.
The vaccine rule for companies with 100 or more employees "applies to 84.2 million workers at 1.9 million private-sector employers," Reuters reported. "OSHA estimates that 31.7 million of [those] workers are unvaccinated and 60% of employers will require vaccinations, up from 25% today, resulting in another 22.7 million employees getting vaccinated."
Several million additional workers are covered by the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for employees of the executive branch, federal contractors, and staff at healthcare facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding. OSHA officials say they are considering expanding the jab-or-test rule to include companies with fewer than 100 workers.
"The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," Nanda said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court."
The Fifth Circuit panel's two-page order directs the Biden administration to respond to the request for a permanent injunction against the rule by 5 p.m. ET Monday.
As the Times noted, it remains unclear whether the court's stay "would be a procedural blip for the Biden administration or the first step in the unwinding of the mandate."
The newspaper explained that "after both sides have filed briefs, the court will decide whether to lift the temporary injunction, allowing the rule to proceed as planned, or whether to grant a permanent injunction. OSHA could then take the case to the Supreme Court."
While some legal experts argue that the Labor Department has the regulatory authority to compel private employers to protect the health of workers and the broader public through mandatory vaccination amid a deadly global pandemic,Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, told Reuters that "there will be so much litigation it will never see the light of day."
Twenty-four attorneys general threatened to sue the Biden administration over the rule back in September, and several followed through immediately after it was published in the federal register on Friday.
In addition to the petition filed with the Fifth Circuit, attorneys general in 11 states—Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming—filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
And in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia sued, with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis saying at a press conference that "the federal government can't just unilaterally impose medical policy under the guise of workplace regulation."
Roughly 70% of U.S. adults are fully inoculated against Covid-19, and about 80% have received at least one shot, according to the CDC. Recent polling shows that a majority of U.S. adults favor Covid-19 vaccination requirements, with only about one-fifth to one-quarter of respondents opposed.
OSHA, Reuters pointed out, is "fighting history. The agency has issued 10 ETS over its 50 years. Of the six that were challenged in court, only one survived entirely intact."
Donald Verrilli, U.S. solicitor general during former President Barack Obama's administration, however, told the news outlet that the Biden administration "wouldn't move forward unless they thought that they could defend it legally... I think the constitutional challenges are all going to fail."
no lnx twt
US climate movement takes aim at Biden White House 'to change course of history'
Jon Queally and Common Dreams October 11, 2021
Organizers for climate justice are making final preparations Sunday ahead of five days of planned actions this week to confront President Joe Biden over the urgent need to declare a climate emergency, ditch fossil fuels, and move swiftly to create a green energy economy that can create millions of new jobs in the process.
"As fires burn, oceans rise and cities flood, we're mobilizing to Washington D.C. to demand that President Biden act on climate justice right now," said Joye Braun, a frontline community organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), a key member of the coalition behind the week-long mobilization dubbed "People vs. Fossil Fuels" which will kick off Monday, include daily civil disobedience at the White House, and culminate Friday with a march on the Capitol Building for a mass sit-in.
"The fossil fuel industry has brought devastation to our homelands and it's time that we bring this fight to Biden's doorstep," said Braun.
The coalition—which includes IEN, 350.org, Sunrise Movement, Center for Biological Diversity, Zero Hour, Friends of the Earth USA, Oil Change International, Climate Justice Alliance, and many others—is calling on the U.S. president to "declare a climate emergency, stop all new fossil fuel projects, fight for climate justice, and launch a just and renewable energy revolution."
The group's detailed and complete list of demands can be found here and those who wish to get involved can visit this page on the coalition's website.
In their invitation to join the cause and back the demands put forth by front-line organizers from around the country, the coalition said: "We are asking you to stand with us. As representatives of communities who have carried the brunt of the harm from fossil fuels for generations, we ask you to join us in solidarity. If we all come together, put our bodies on the line in the name of climate justice, we may be able to change the course of history."
The 'Build Back Fossil Free' coalition organizing this week's mobilization says that Biden has both the executive authority and the popular mandate to act aggressively to address the climate crisis but so far has not acted with nearly enough urgency.
"Biden is faced with a momentous decision, and I and others will be gathering in Washington to encourage that decision: to declare a climate emergency, stop the petrochem build-out, and usher in a just transition to a clean, green renewables economy," said John Beard, director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, a Texas group fighting the oil and gas industry in the Gulf Coast.
"President Biden came into office promising bold action to transform our economy with renewable energy and good jobs, but he passed the buck to a dysfunctional Congress," said Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Energy Justice program. "Biden has immense executive powers to speed the end of the fossil fuel era and ignite a just, renewable-energy revolution. Without executive action on fossil fuels, there's no way for the president to protect us from the climate emergency. We're calling on Biden to reclaim his power from coal- and gas-state Senators and show us he can be our Climate President."
According to organizers:
By refusing to stop major fossil fuel projects, President Biden has broken his promises to protect Indigneous rights, prioritize environmental justice, and fully address the climate crisis.
Despite the President's rhetoric, his administration has failed to stop major projects like the Line 3 tar sands pipeline, defended oil drilling in the Arctic, promoted fossil fuel exports, and allowed drilling, mining and fracking to continue on Native and public lands.
Meanwhile, the impacts of the climate and pollution crisis have only grown worse. Hurricanes have devastated communities from New Orleans to New York City. Wildfires have burned millions of acres across the West. Historic droughts and heatwaves have gripped most of the country. And every day, millions of Americans, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous People, breathe air and drink water poisoned by fossil fuel pollution.
As Common Dreams reported, over 300 scientists last week backed the demands of the coalition and said that to avert 'uncontrollable climate chaos,' Biden must move more swiftly and concretely to end the age of fossil fuels.
"U.S. scientists are done speaking calmly in the face of inaction," saidSandra Steingraber, a biologist and co-founder of the Concerned Health Professional of New York, who signed a letter alongside 337 colleagues. "Terrified by our own data, we stand in solidarity with the People vs. Fossil Fuels mobilization and its demands. President Biden, listening to science means acting on science. It means stopping new fossil fuel projects, opposing industry delay tactics, and declaring a national climate emergency."
Dr. Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversitywho also signed the letter, said, "When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels, it's time to listen."
Biden lifts Trump abortion 'gag rule' that targeted women using family planning clinics
David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement
The Biden administration is lifting a Trump-era rule imposed on family planning clinics receiving federal funding, which banned them from referring patients to abortion services...
new fox BS some guy has kill switch on biden mic 24/7 an 921
aha-ish biden basically runs/appeal based on competent mgmt/govt so gop must degrade image, plus war is their turf?
A far right wing U.S. Congressman hijacked the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Afghanistan on live TV Monday, accusing the President of the United States of treason then trying to block the Secretary of State from responding to his attacks.
After accusing President Joe Biden of manipulating intelligence coming out of Afghanistan, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) declared, "in my opinion that's absolutely aid and comfort to the enemy," which is the definition of treason.
"I absolutely wonder if you were complicit in this as well. I find it hard to believe that President Biden would do that without you being aware of this and these are things that we deserve to know, better answers, have better hearings on this, I do not believe a word that you're saying on this. Simply put, I do not wish to hear from you," Congressman Mast told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
As Blinken tried to respond, Mast took over the hearing, talking over Blinken and repeatedly telling him he did not want to hear him, calling him a liar, and announcing he would not listen to him.
"I do not believe a word that you're saying on this," he interjected. "I do not wish to hear from you. I'm not yielding you a moment of time. I don't wish to hear your lies."
Mast's time had already expired, and Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) tried to get it back under control.
"What the Congressman said is simply wrong," Blinken replied. "Period."
"I think every member of this committee has been apprised of or had access to the intelligence assessments throughout the year – and you know what they were, and you know what they are," Blinken charged.
The Florida congressman did manage to introduce lies into the record, including the common GOP-told falsehood that the U.S. forfeited tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban.
"Unprecedented': Ted Cruz accused of 'undermining' America's national security
October 03, 2021
According to a report from the New York Times, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is taking withering fire for delaying dozens of appointments to the State Department and leaving multiple ambassadorship appointees in...
dump if BBB
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/fed-chair-powell/
1st said w/ prog dems both bills, then caved? exxon lobby?!
https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/biden-infrastructure/
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/companies-lobbying-against-infrastructure-tax-hikes-have-dodged-millions-in-taxes-report/
ah
President Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan proposal would raise the United States' corporate tax rate to 28% in order to pay for infrastructure projects. Some large corporations, journalist Akela Lacy stresses in an article published by The Intercept on September 6, have been aggressively lobbying against that proposal — and they include everything from pharmaceutical companies to financial firms, some of which dodged a fortune in taxes.
"Companies that…. lobbied earlier this year on issues related to tax rates in Biden's American Jobs Plan include Walmart, Oracle, Accenture, Bristol Myers Squibb, Shell and Walgreens, according to an analysis by Accountable.US, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on public corruption," Lacy explains. "Executives at companies that have historically avoided paying taxes, like Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and DuPont, have spoken out publicly against Biden's proposed tax increases."
Lacy continues, "Shell and Walgreens lobbied earlier this year on corporate tax issues in the American Jobs Plan. Walmart hired a lobbying firm tasked with 'monitoring of tax proposals related to infrastructure' in the plan and proposed legislative efforts related to Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts. Accenture hired another firm to 'monitor the American Jobs Plan as it relates to corporate taxes.' Oracle and Bristol Myers Squibb, a multinational pharmaceutical company, used the same firm hired by Accenture to monitor and lobby on similar issues in the proposal."
Lacy goes on to note how successful some of these mega-corporations have been when it comes to dodging taxes — and not only in the United States.
"A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes," Lacy writes. "In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years' worth of taxes the company did not pay. The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits."
Lacy points to Walgreens as another company that knows how to dodge taxes.
"Between 2008 and 2014," Lacy explains, "Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report. In an arrangement internally known as Project Flex, the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary, Quartz reported, which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75."
an 721
Biden applauded for executive order targeting 'insidious' anti-worker practices
Among the 72 initiatives packed into the far-reaching executive order President Joe Biden signed Friday are steps that labor advocates welcomed as important victories for U.S. workers, including a provision calling for the limitation of noncompete clauses that drive down wages by preventing employees from quitting for better-paying jobs.
Presented as an effort to promote competition in a...
500 million vax WHO
an 621
According to Politico, Republican lawmakers are ruffled by nearly every decision President Joe Biden makes — and they're spending a lot of money to make sure the public knows it.
"Over the last three months, Republicans and affiliated groups and committees have spent nearly $2.5 million trying to paint Biden and his priorities in a negative light," Politico reports. "That's more than three times what they've spent on Facebook ads targeting other leading Democrats — from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and former President Barack Obama — and issues like socialism, fake news, and 'defund the police' combined."
"Americans deserve to know the compounding failures of the Biden administration, which the mainstream media continues to ignore," Republican National Committee spokesperson Emma Vaughn told Politico.
According to the report, Democrats see Republicans' ad rollout as an example of the "spray and pray" strategy which involves trying to "weaken the president before the midterms."
Despite Republicans' efforts, the White House has given them very little energy or attention.
"We are laser focused on putting an end to the virus, on improving the lives of Americans, and on getting our economy back up and running," deputy press secretary Chris Meagher said.
You can read the full report here.
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621 ding dong XL! line 3 same capacity and mission tar sands
Which side are you on?': Protesters call on Biden to stop Line 3
In what organizers are calling the largest-ever demonstration of its kind in Minnesota history, more than 2,000 Indigenous-led water protectors on Monday continued nonviolent, direct...
621 an
A huge victory': Advocates cheer the end of Trump's cruel 'Remain in Mexico' asylum policy
Migrant rights advocates on Tuesday welcomed an announcement by the Biden administration that it is ending the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols—commonly known...
...https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/buoyed-bidens-climate-summit-broadcast-and-cable-tv-networks-provided-strong" ...
buoyed by Biden’s climate summit, broadcast and cable TV networks provided strong Earth Day coverage<...https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-war-earth-day...https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/how-broadcast-tv-networks-covered-climate-change-2020
How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2020
03/10/21 11:00 AM EST
biden 1b$ disaster season
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/western-fires/
many graf
The Western U.S. appears headed for another dangerous fire season, and a new study shows that even high mountain areas once considered too wet to burn are at increasing risk as the climate warms.
Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. West is in severe to exceptional drought right now, including large parts of the Rocky Mountains, Cascades and Sierra Nevada. The situation is so severe that the Colorado River basin is on the verge of its first official water shortage declaration, and forecasts suggest another hot, dry summer is on the way.
Warm and dry conditions like these are a recipe for wildfire disaster.
In a new study published May 24, 2021, our team of fire and climate scientists and engineers found that forest fires are now reaching higher, normally wetter elevations. And they are burning there at rates unprecedented in recent fire history.
While some people focus on historical fire suppression and other forest management practices as reasons for the West's worsening fire problem, these high-elevation forests have had little human intervention. The results provide a clear indication that climate change is enabling these normally wet forests to burn.
As wildfires creep higher up mountains, another tenth of the West's forest area is now at risk, according to our study. That creates new hazards for mountain communities, with impacts on downstream water supplies and the plants and wildlife that call these forests home.
Map showing how high-elevation forest fires advanced uphill.
Forest fires advanced to higher elevations as the climate dried from 1984 to 2017. Every 200 meters equals 656 feet.
Mojtaba Sadegh, CC BY-ND
Rising fire risk in the high mountains
In the new study, we analyzed records of all fires larger than 1,000 acres (405 hectares) in the mountainous regions of the contiguous Western U.S. between 1984 and 2017.
The amount of land that burned increased across all elevations during that period, but the largest increase occurred above 8,200 feet (2,500 meters). To put that elevation into perspective, Denver – the mile-high city – sits at 5,280 feet, and Aspen, Colorado, is at 8,000 feet. These high-elevation areas are largely remote mountains and forests with some small communities and ski areas.
The area burning above 8,200 feet more than tripled in 2001-2017 compared with 1984-2000.
One of Colorado's largest wildfires, 2020's East Troublesome Fire, crossed the Continental Divide and was burning at elevations around 9,000 feet in October, when snow normally would have been falling.
AP Photo/David Zalubowski
Our results show that climate warming has diminished the high-elevation flammability barrier – the point where forests historically were too wet to burn regularly because the snow normally lingered well into summer and started falling again early in the fall. Fires advanced about 826 feet (252 meters) uphill in the Western mountains over those three decades.
The Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado in 2020 was the state's largest fire in its history, burning over 208,000 acres (84,200 hectares) and is a prime example of a high-elevation forest fire. The fire burned in forests extending to 12,000 feet (3,650 meters) and reached the upper tree line of the Rocky Mountains.
We found that rising temperatures in the past 34 years have helped to extend the fire territory in the West to an additional 31,470 square miles (81,500 square kilometers) of high-elevation forests. That means a staggering 11% of all Western U.S. forests – an area similar in size to South Carolina – are susceptible to fire now that weren't three decades ago.
Can't blame fire suppression here
In lower-elevation forests, several factors contribute to fire activity, including the presence of more people in wildland areas and a history of fire suppression.
In the early 1900s, Congress commissioned the U.S. Forest Service to manage forest fires, which resulted in a focus on suppressing fires – a policy that continued through the 1970s. This caused flammable underbrush that would normally be cleared out by occasional natural blazes to accumulate. The increase in biomass in many lower elevation forests across the West has been associated with increases in high-severity fires and megafires. At the same time, climate warming has dried out forests in the Western U.S., making them more prone to large fires.
On average, fires have spread 826 feet (252 meters) higher into the mountains in recent decades, exposing an additional 31,400 square miles (81,500 square kilometers) of forests to fire.
Mojtaba Sadegh, CC BY-ND
By focusing on high-elevation fires, in areas with little history of fire suppression, we can more clearly see the influence of climate change.
Most high-elevation forests haven't been subjected to much fire suppression, logging or other human activities, and because trees at these high elevations are in wetter forests, they historically have long return intervals between fires, typically a century or more. Yet they experienced the highest rate of increase in fire activity in the past 34 years. We found that the increase is strongly correlated with the observed warming.
High mountain fires create new problems
High-elevation fires have implications for natural and human systems.
High mountains are natural water towers that normally provide a sustained source of water to millions of people in dry summer months in the Western U.S. The scars that wildfires leave behind – known as burn scars – affect how much snow can accumulate at high elevations. This can influence the timing, quality and quantity of water that reaches reservoirs and rivers downstream.
High-elevation fires also remove standing trees that act as anchor points that normally stabilize the snowpack, raising the risk of avalanches.
The loss of tree canopy also exposes mountain streams to the Sun, increasing water temperatures in the cold headwater streams. Increasing stream temperatures can harm fish and the larger wildlife and predators that rely on them.
Climate change is increasing fire risk in many regions across the globe, and studies show that this trend will continue as the planet warms. The increase in fires in the high mountains is another warning to the U.S. West and elsewhere of the risks ahead as the climate changes.
Mojtaba Sadegh, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, Boise State University; John Abatzoglou, Associate Professor of Engineering, University of California, Merced, and Mohammad Reza Alizadeh, Ph.D. Student in Engineering, McGill University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/biden-speech-gop/
President Joe Biden's plans are ambitious. I know this because every headline Thursday morning after Biden gave his first speech to a joint session of Congress said so...Biden Just Gave the Most Ideologically Ambitious Speech of Any Democratic President in Generations,"...https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-speech-congress/2021/04/28/f33615ac-a7a2-11eb-bca5-048b2759a489_story.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The Washington Post described Biden's "sweeping agenda" and the New York Times called it a "risky gamble."
Except that none of this actually feels risky. On the contrary, Biden was able to frame everything he said in convincingly reasonable tones. Put at ease by his patented "c'mon, man" approach, so far, it seems like the public can't be bamboozled into feeling angry, scared or worried about Biden's surprisingly progressive aspirations. Snap polls after the speech showed that 85% of viewers approved of Biden's speech, out of a crowd that was only 54% Democratic. This comports with previous polling that shows that,while Biden's approval numbers are stuck in the low 50s because of GOP voters who will never say they like him,**an overwhelming majority like his actual policy ideas**. Demonizing him as "tax-and-spend" isn't working, because voters are increasingly keen on the idea that we should be taxing corporations and wealthy people and spending it on the programs that Biden has successfully — and correctly — identified as investments in our nation's future: infrastructure, child care, jobs.
"We have to prove democracy still works," Biden said during his speech. [=] "That our government still works– and can deliver for the people."
It all feels so reasonable. Why shouldn't Americans get to have democracy and get to have a functioning government, especially since we pay for it? Why shouldn't we want, as Biden said, "the wealthiest 1% of Americans to pay their fair share"? Why shouldn't we try to eliminate child poverty, an idea that made Republicans in the chamber so salty they refused to clap for it? Why shouldn't the wealthiest country in the world be able to provide its citizens with the same standard of living so many other less wealthy countries do with ease?
The thing is, these are the same exact arguments that progressives have been making for decades, and yet Republicans — aided by a loud right-wing media, the racism of the majority of white voters, and a mainstream media addicted to false equivalencies — were successful at demonizing such reasonable points as basically communism. Why then does it seem like Republicans suddenly can't land a glove on Biden?
Part of the credit should go to Biden himself, who is rising above what doubters like myself thought of him. He was able, as John Harwood of CNN said, to speak "in plain, non-political, non-ideological language invoking the people he wants to help."
But let's face it: Republicans also did this to themselves.
For decades, Republicans have increasingly abandoned policy debate in favor of culture war antics, race-baiting and raw tribalism. From Monica Lewinsky to Barack Obama's birth certificate, the modern GOP has turned politics into conflicts about personality and identity, not policy. Even during the height of the debate over the Affordable Care Act — the biggest policy agenda Democrats had pushed since the 1960s — the Republicans were mired in culture war theatrics. Their response was to freak out about abortion and birth control, as well as the "death panels" nonsense, which was always a barely coded conspiracy theory about Democrats taking away health care from old white people so younger, more racially diverse people could have it. They created a political environment of style over substance because, of course, they know that they can't win debates about policy on the merits.
The result is a situation where voters think Biden is more moderate than Obama was, even though the reverse is true, simply because Biden looks and sounds like more people's idea of a moderate. Those stereotypes are racist, to be clear. As Paul Waldman of the Washington Post points out, Obama "was young, Black, cosmopolitan, hip and the hero of young people across the country," and Biden "has always been the establishment," a "folksy guy with a bottomless supply of bromides."
No wonder right-wing media has, in desperation, grasped for a bizarre conspiracy theory accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of being the "real" president.They don't know how to do oppositional politics that isn't about base racism and sexism. But it is also an increasingly losing proposition. The forces that allowed Obama to get elected in the first place — Americans growing more relaxed about racial diversity and more urbane in general — are only growing stronger as time goes by.
One line during Biden's speech Wednesday night really jumped out at a number of pundits: "Trickle-down economics has never worked." It was a notably explicit repudiation of Reaganism. But it's also likely that large numbers of Americans, especially younger Americans, have no idea what "trickle-down economics" even is or was supposed to be. Not just because it is a failed economic theory that was always nonsense, though it is that. The phrase is more so a relic from a time when conservatives used to pretend to have serious policy ideas.
"Trickle-down economics" never made sense, but it sounded smart and gave Republicans a thing they could say to voters to explain why cutting taxes and government investment would somehow lead to prosperity. But mostly, they've given up even that kind of argument in favor of screeching about Dr. Seuss and "cancel culture," hoping these tactics would distract voters from their more substantive concerns. Even when Republicans half-heartedly try to argue against Biden's policy ideas, it's through lame tactics like arguing over the semantics of what constitutes "infrastructure."
Of course, a big part of the reason that Republicans want to avoid talking policy is that, increasingly, voters can see what decades of doing things their way has done to this country.
Low taxes on corporations and rich people, coupled with low levels of government investment, did not, as promised, produce a robust economy where private interests pay for all that stuff people want and need. Instead, our roads and buildings are falling apart, health care is a nightmare, and childcare and education are unaffordable. Food is cheap, in part because it is one sector government quietly subsidizes. But as Biden pointed out in his speech last night, so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck that the economic downturn meant "nice cars, lined up for miles, waiting for a box of food to be put in their trunk."
Republicans are grumpy, extremely grumpy. Republican Senators watching the speech last night collectively looked like they smelled a fart, and not just because they were wearing masks. They're mad, not just because they know he's right. They're mad because they know he's popular and what he's saying is popular. They'll block as much of his agenda as they can and hope that voter suppression and gerrymandering do the rest. But on the merits of the argument itself? They're toast.
It's not because Biden is some super-politician. It's because Republicans spent decades making politics into a reality TV show. Now that we're facing a real crisis, the public is turning its eyes towards the comfort of a real politician who wants to do real policy. And Republicans have nothing to say in response.
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overperformed on promises targets eg vaccine
no lnx twt an
Right-wingers erupts after Biden declares Jan. 6 'worst attack on democracy since Civil War'
Zachary Petrizzo and Salon April 29, 2021
President Joe Biden declared Wednesday night that the U.S. Capitol siege by a mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6 was "the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War," a claim that angered many right-wing and pro-Trump pundits online.
Biden made the statement during his first address in front of a joint session of Congress, noting in his speech the numerous crises facing America as he wraps up his first 100 days in office.
"While the setting tonight is familiar, this gathering is very different – a reminder of the extraordinary times we are in," Biden said, from the same chamber that a pro-Trump mob breached just three months ago.
"As I stand here tonight — just one day shy of the 100th day of my administration. 100 days since I took the oath of office, lifted my hand off our family Bible, and inherited a nation in crisis," Biden continued.
Joe Biden declares Jan. 6 “worst attack on democracy since Civil War"
"The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation: America is on the move again. Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Set back into strength. Life can knock us down. But in America, we never stay down. In America, we always get up. And today, that's what we're doing: America is rising anew. Choosing hope over fear. Truth over lies. Light over darkness."
The "civil war" comment in particular sparked anger among right-wing pundits and Trump allies, who were quick to point out various foreign attacks that have taken place on American soil.
"Biden says the January 6 protest was the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. Surprisingly, the room did not break into uncontrolled laughter at this ridiculous claim," pro-Trump pundit Dinesh D'Souza tweeted, along with a video where he calls the Jan. 6 ransacking of the Capitol a "walk-through."
Right-wing radio host Eric Metaxas responded, "FACT: The "worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War" was when Democrats STOLE AN ELECTION from #WeThePeople--and then dared to pretend WE were the threat to democracy. Shame on them. They will not get away with this. Many are praying. God sees."
Trump campaign flack Steve Cortes added: "So...Pearl Harbor, presidential assassinations, 9-11...all less threatening to our democracy than a bunch of unarmed fur hat hooligans?"
Daily Wire founder and conservative pundit Ben Shapiro snarked, "He should know better than this, considering he's old enough to remember all the intervening events since the Civil War."
"Worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War? Not 9/11? Not Pearl Harbor???" disgraced Trump spokesperson Jason Miller tweeted.
The far-right website Breitbart "fact-checked" the claim as "false." "Not only wasn't it the worst attack on our democracy; it wasn't even the worst attack on the Capitol," the site opined.
One other noteworthy right-wing reaction to Biden's evening address came from American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp, who proudly tweeted about having lead pipes in his home after Biden called for lead pipe replacement:
"I have lead pipes in my 100-year-old house. Some are impossible to take out. Joe Biden is going to replace them? Cool," Schlapp stated, which was quickly blasted by Twitter users who pointed out his attempt to "own the libs" had backfired.
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litmus union
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/biden-pro-act/
1/21 mma NOT DAPL?
| As Biden takes climate action. Fox News and Sinclair respond with lies |
Some of President Joe Biden's first actions were in response to climate change -- like rejoining the Paris accords and canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline once and for all. Fox News responded to Biden's executive actions by hosting climate deniers and climate "contrarians." One Fox host declaredthat climate activists just want to "fight the weather." Contrary to claims aired on Fox, taking action on climate change will create jobs. It wasn't just Fox. Sinclair Broadcasting also aired claims on local news stations across the country that canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline would destroy jobs. Longtime readers will remember these accusations being debunked repeatedly, but they've again gained steam on the right in the early days of the Biden administration, with some inflating the number to tens of thousands of jobs. The actual number is a few hundred jobs to construct the pipeline, and a few dozen to maintain it after that; the number is dwarfed by the number of clean energy jobs that already exist, much less ones that could exist with further investment. Additionally, the jobs number doesn't take into account the risks of oil spills or threats to drinking water. For instance, the already-existing Keystone Pipeline (that is, the non-XL version) has already seen at least 21 oil spills and leaks. |
socialist iceberg
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-news-begins-new-scare-campaign-against-biden-pandemic-relief-plan
121
person of year time w. kamala (newsweek --> rw]
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/merrick-garland/
huh?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/william-barr-trump-mueller/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/hunter-biden-2649459491/
irs bs on hold before election protocol, rudy bogus?
Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani reportedly met with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agents in Delaware who were investigating Hunter Biden's finances while President-elect Joe Biden was on the campaign trail.
Now, more questions are looming about the FBI. An editorial published by The New York Times lays out how the latest Pittsburgh inquiry raises questions about politicization among FBI agents.
While Hunter Biden did admit that there is a current tax investigation underway, there is speculation that the entire basis of the latest investigation stems from Giuliani's farfetched attempts to throw a curveball at the Democratic presidential candidate prior to Election Day.
It has been reported that U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr personally requested for top Pittsburgh federal prosecutor Scott Brady to review the investigative material Giuliani had gathered on the Biden family. Back in January, Brady met with Giuliani for nearly four hours to discuss the findings.
Due to the election and Giuliani's affiliation with Trump, the meeting is said to have "raised alarms within the F.B.I. and the Justice Department." There were also concerns about the politicization of the bureau in the middle of an election year.
Mr. Giuliani had served as Mr. Trump's attack dog during the Russia investigation before becoming the face of an effort to tarnish Hunter Biden during President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s campaign. If Mr. Brady's investigation became public, the agents feared that the F.B.I. could be drawn into a politically toxic battle in the midst of the presidential election, just as it was in 2016.
Giuliani's track record before and after the election has also been a factor taken into consideration which raises questions about the credibility of the latest investigation.
Mr. Giuliani had tried to promote scrutiny of Hunter Biden's work for Burisma, which had been mired in a corruption scandal. He accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of corruptly pushing for the ouster of Ukraine's top prosecutor, who had been investigating Burisma, as a favor to his son while he was vice president. No evidence of wrongdoing by the president-elect has emerged.
As of Saturday, Dec. 12, Hunter Biden has not been charged with any financial crimes.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/joe-biden-climate-fossil-fuel-industry-cedric-richmond
Biden Just Appointed His Climate Movement Liaison. It’s a Fossil-Fuel Industry Ally.
BY
DAVID SIROTA JULIA ROCK ANDREW PEREZ
Joe Biden says confronting climate change is one of his top priorities. But today, he appointed as his liaison to the climate movement a congressman who has raked in big money from the fossil fuel industry while voting to help oil and gas companies.
...
following a campaign promising bold climate action, president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team named one of the Democratic Party’s top recipients of fossil fuel industry money to a high-profile White House position focusing in part on climate issues.
On Tuesday, Politico reported that Biden is appointing US Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) to lead the White House Office of Public Engagement, where he is “expected to serve as a liaison with the business community and climate change activists.”
During his ten years in Congress, Richmond has received roughly $341,000 from donors in the oil and gas industry — the fifth-highest total among House Democrats, according to previous reporting by Sludge. That includes corporate political action committee donations of $50,000 from Entergy, an electric and natural gas utility; $40,000 from ExxonMobil; and $10,000 apiece from oil companies Chevron, Phillips 66, and Valero Energy.
Richmond has raked in that money while representing a congressional district that is home to seven of the ten most air-polluted census tracts in the country.
Richmond has repeatedly broken with his party on major climate and environmental votes. During the climate crisis that has battered his home state of Louisiana, Richmond has joined with Republicans to vote to increase fossil fuel exports and promote pipeline development. He also voted against Democratic legislation to place pollution limits on fracking — and he voted for GOP legislation to limit the Obama administration’s authority to more stringently regulate the practice.
Overall, Richmond has received a lifetime rating of 76 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, and he scored 46 percent in 2018 — one of the lowest ratings of any Democrat in Congress....Richmond, who served as a co-chair of the Biden campaign, has not committed to supporting a Green New Deal. In a postelection interview with CBS Face the Nation, Richmond said: “When we govern, we will govern with our values but when we can’t pass legislation, we shouldn’t be out there talking about it.”
“Cedric Richmond has taken big money from the fossil fuel industry, cozied up w/oil and gas, & stayed silent while polluters poisoned his own community,” the Sunrise Movement, a grassroots group pushing for a Green New Deal... “How will young people & frontline communities trust our voices will be heard louder than Big Oil in a...;in a statement: “Today feels like a betrayal, because one of President-Elect Biden’s very first hires for his new administration has taken more donations from the fossil fuel industry during his Congressional career than nearly any other Democrat.”
Prakash called Richmond’s selection “an affront to young people who made President-Elect Biden’s victory possible.”...$1.7 trillion plan to combat climate change, and has said the cause is one of his top priorities. During the Democratic primary, his campaign was criticized for working with an energy adviser linked to the fossil fuel industry while promoting a “middle ground” climate policy and opposing a ban on fracking. He was also criticized for attending a major fundraiser by a fossil fuel investor, even as he pledged to reject campaign money from fossil fuel industry sources....Biden is reportedly considering former Obama energy secretary Ernest Moniz for a cabinet spot or for a new international climate envoy post, according to the New York Times. Climate groups have called on Biden to reject Moniz for any position because he joined the board of directors at the electric utility Southern Company after his time in the Obama administration. Moniz has also been a fracking advocate.
6m$ ad buy texas
see hunter disinfo
https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/biden-transition-team/
Among the many challenges Joe Biden's administration will have to confront after Donald Trump ends his temper tantrum is deciding what posture to take toward big business.
There will be a battle for the soul of the new president as corporate Democrats vie with progressives to influence policy in areas such as regulation and antitrust.
Initial signs are encouraging.
The Biden transition just released a list of some 500 individuals who will be staffing the Agency Review Teams charged with preparing the way for a transfer of power in all parts of the executive branch.
Most of the people are from academia, state government, law firms, non-profits, unions, think tanks and foundations.
Surveying the list of affiliations,I found only about 20 for large corporations. Most of the people are from academia, state government, law firms, non-profits, unions, think tanks and foundations.
It is likely some of the law firms are there to represent specific corporate interests, but the numerous representatives from progressive public interest, environmental and labor groups should serve as an effective counterweight.
Unions in Labor Department
In the Labor Department list there are no law firms or corporations; in their place are representatives from five different unions along with people from the National Employment Law Project and other progressive groups.
What is particularly significant is the near absence of people affiliated with Wall Street banks.
The Defense Department list has someone from JPMorgan Chase; Homeland Security has a representative from Capital One; and the International Development group includes someone from U.S. Bank. There is no one from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo or Morgan Stanley.
The Treasury Department group is led by someone from Keybank, which is based in Cleveland and ranks about 29th among U.S. banks. Fortunately, the Treasury group also includes representatives from places such as the Center for American Progress, the American Economic Liberties Project and the AFL-CIO.
Environmentalists at EPA
Other balancing acts include the list for the Environmental Protection Agency, which includes a representative from Dell Technologies but also from Earthjustice (the lead person) and The Sierra Club.
Some of the corporations show up in surprising places. Walt Disney is represented on the Intelligence Community list. The cosmetics firm Estee Lauder has someone on the State Department list. Someone fromAirbnb is in the National Security Council group.
Tech Companies at OMB
Looking at current corporate villains, the one that stands out is Amazon.com. It shows up on two lists—the one for the State Department and the one for the Office of Management and Budget.
Lyft and Airbnb are also on the OMB list, along with some academics, a consultant, state officials and someone from Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe-based non-profit that produces immersive art experiences.
Given that OMB oversees regulatory policy, the absence of public interest, union and environmental people raises a concern. Otherwise, it appears that the Biden team is limiting corporate influence in the emerging administration.
Let's hope it stays that way.
how BlackRock is on track to infiltrate a Biden administration
Max Moran Independent Media Institute
October 22, 2020
The Democratic base, still scarred from the 2016 election, is frantic not to count its chickens before they hatch. But Wall Street and corporate America have no such qualms. As Joe Biden leads in national polls and swing states, the most powerful firms in the country are seeking assurances that his administration won't crack down on their crimes.
For many, that means tapping the Obama-era alumni...
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
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/how-to-not-be-a-useful-idiot-for-the-rights-smear-machine/
Trump is trying hard to recreate the perfect storm that landed him in the White House in 2016 despite being the most unpopular candidate in the modern polling era. That year, the Clinton campaign's hacked emails were dribbled out over the final six weeks of the race. There wasn't much to them, but internal campaign communications tend to be frank and are easily mined for scandalettes. Having established the storyline that Clinton was as corrupt as Trump, they provided a steady stream of stories with "emails reveal" in the headlines which served to reinforce the right's narrative.
We can expect a similar stream of stories of ostensible "smoking guns" stemming from Hunter Biden's emails (whether hacked or fabricated) to come our way in the final weeks of this race.And some people who want to see themselves as fair will inadvertently amplify the right's preferred narratives by assuming that there must be something there.
So it's very important to keep in mind that the "scandal" is supposed to be that then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed for the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to stave off an investigation into Burisma Holdings--the Ukrainian gas company whose Board Hunter sat on--in order to protect his son. It is supposed to be a story about conflict of interest--of the elder Biden using the office of the Vice Presidency to help his son.
There is not a shred of truth to those claims. The effort to get Shokin fired "was prompted by a push for anti-corruption reforms developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund," The Washington Postreported. Andaccording to CNN, a bipartisan "letter from 2016 shows that Republican senators pushed for reforms to Ukraine's prosecutor general's office and judiciary, echoing calls then-Vice President Joe Biden made at the time."
Shokin was corrupt, and that was a problem. Vitaliy Kasko, a former deputy of Shokin's who resigned over his boss's habit of stymieing corruption probes, toldBloombergthat Shokin was not investigating Burisma during the period in question. "There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against" the firm or its owner. "It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015," Kasko said. And Daria Kaleniuk, a prominent Ukrainian anti-corruption crusader, told The Washington Post that"Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation."
Without some impropriety on Joe Biden's part, Hunter Biden's business ventures aren't a story. He isn't running for office. Like many, if not most children of the powerful, the younger Biden leveraged both his family name and the connections he'd made at Yale to land various business deal and secure a cushy, high-paying position on a corporate board. Both Hunter and Joe Biden have acknowledged that associating himself with a shady Ukrainian gas company--as opposed to, say, a reputable American or Western European firm--was an error of judgment, but it was neither illegal nor unethical. This isn't a meritocracy, and this is one way that wealth and power are reproduced from one generation to the next. It's distasteful and unfair, but that's a class issue, not a scandal. Hunter isn't running for office and his judgment, or lack thereof, isn't a matter of public concern.
Joe Biden spent years in the Senate, and year after year he ranked among the least wealthy members of that body. We know how he came into his wealth--mostly through a multi-million dollar book advance and speaking gigs after leaving office. Biden may not be everyone's cup of tea, but there's no evidence that he's corrupt.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/john-bolton-rudy-giuliani/
When Former National Security Adviser John Bolton received a warning about President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani due to his suspected ties to Russian operatives, he wasted no time heeding the warning and urged his staff to steer clear of having any involvement or interactions with
The Daily Beast compiled a report based on what the publication described as "interviews with 11 knowledgeable sources" detailing Bolton's repeated attempts to maintain distance between his department and Giuliani.
It has been reported that in January of 2019, the intelligence committee warned Capitol Hill and the White House that Giuliani was "a target of Russian intelligence operation to feed disinformation to Trump." As months passed, the warnings about Giuliani are said to have "intensified."
"Officials said the warnings about Giuliani intensified in the spring and summer of 2019 as the president's personal attorney appeared on television propagating disinformation about the Bidens and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Masha Yovanovitch. One ex-NSC official said that Giuliani, as a U.S. citizen, was neither named nor referenced in contemporaneous intelligence reports about Russian disinformation efforts. But Giuliani's alarming role was the subject of informal discussions between White House and intelligence officials." - The Daily Beast
A former official also raised concerns about Russia's server hack of the Ukranian energy company Burisma—where Hunter Biden once served on the executive board. It reportedly led to "informed speculation among professionals that this would be the entrée to fabricate material connecting Hunter Biden to corruption inside Burisma, and it wouldn't take more than 10 percent truth."
Bolton even warned his subordinates to refrain from being in meetings with Giuliani present. In fact, Bolton's directives were so specific he even advised against his staff attending Trump's Oval Office meeting May 23, 2019 following the Ukrainian inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky.
An unnamed Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee also weighed in as he admitted that Giuliani had been a big topic of discussion.
"Rudy's been the topic of conversation a lot," said the other source, a Democratic member of the House intelligence committee. "Wittingly or unwittingly, Rudy seems to care more about what he can gain politically from his relationship and discussions with Russian assets than he does about how he might be being used."
When contacted about the latest debacle, Giuliani claimed he was unaware of Bolton's opposition toward him.
"I didn't find out that John was unhappy with me or opposed to me until he left [the administration]…I've known him for ten years," and claimed that "when I was being considered for Secretary of State, I told him I'd consider him for deputy."
senile attack fail so now not manly? biggest mask?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/fox-nation-host-blasted-for-promoting-toxic-masculinity-in-attack-against-joe-biden/
1020
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/even-in-deep-red-south-carolina-biden-has-become-shockingly-competitive/
will this maTTER?
--> IMPEACH
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democrats-say-the-gops-attempt-to-smear-biden-accidentally-exposed-a-trump-officials-corrupt-scheme/
igor salon
the Republican report aimed at raising questions about the dealings of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Ukraineappears to have accidentally implicated former Energy SecretaryRick Perry in an energy scheme in the foreign nation, according to the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., released their much-hyped report on Hunter Biden’s role at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma on Wednesday. However, it found no evidence of actual wrongdoing and relied largely on debunked claims, old statements and narratives pushed as part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
But the report did find new evidence related to Perry’s actions in Ukraine while he served in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
Amos Hochstein, a member of the supervisory board at the state-owned Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, told lawmakers that Perry “inappropriately pressured the Ukrainian government” to place Texas oil executive Robert Bensh on the board of the company while officials at the Department of Energy pressured the government to sign a deal with a “private business entity connected to Mr. Bensh,” according to a :{letter Wyden:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: sent to Department of Energy Inspector General Teri Donaldson.
perry also pressured the Ukrainian government to place one of his longtime campaign supporters, Michael Bleyzer, on the board during a trip to Ukraine for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration in 2019, Wyden wrote. Bleyzer and his partner were later awarded a drilling contract in the country.
“Mr. Bleyzer’s contract that he was awarded was despite the fact that he was not the highest bidder in the process,” Hochstein told lawmakers. “Other . . . bids were higher, and therefore, Ukraine chose a bid that paid itself less.”
The heads of the state-owned Naftogaz conglomerate have since filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the contract, arguing that the Ukrainian government acted “illegally and with bias” in agreeing to the deal, Wyden noted.
“Witness testimony in this investigation has directly implicated former Secretary Rick Perry in alleged wrongdoing, and the department more broadly, in a scheme to undermine anti-corruption efforts that were implemented by Ukraine in partnership with the international community,” Wyden wrote.
Politico reported last year that Perry — who along with then-Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker were the “three amigos” who pushed a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine — played an active role in the Trump administration’s pressure on Zelensky, which ultimately led to thepresident’s impeachment.
ProPublica reported earlier this month that Perry repeatedly pushed deals that “were potentially worth billions of dollars to Perry’s friends and political donors” and could “stand to benefit” the secretary himself. Two of the deals, including one worth $20 billion, went to the Texas firm Energy Transfer. Perry served on the company’s board before and after his stint at the Energy Department and bought shares now worth about $800,000 three months after leaving his post, according to the report.
Ethics experts told the outlet that Perry’s efforts were violations of federal regulations. His actions also caught the attention of federal prosecutors, though he is reportedly not the target of any investigations.
The interview with Hochstein was part of the Senate Republicans’ investigation into whether Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma affected U.S. foreign policy. The report asserted that his position was “problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.” However, it did not include any new evidence suggesting his role affected the Obama administration’s policy. It also acknowledged that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”
Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the probe pushed “Russian disinformation.” He further described it as “an attempted political hit job facilitated by the State Department.”
A Finance Committee aide told Talking Points Memo that finding new evidence against the Trump administration “was certainly not Republicans’ goal.”
“While Republicans’ Ukraine investigation showed Vice President Biden did nothing wrong,” the aide said, “it succeeded in implicating former Secretary Perry in a corrupt scheme to pressure the Ukrainian government to change the board of Naftogaz.”
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an 920
ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley drop their Biden bombshell — and it’s an absolute dud
Mark Sumner / Daily KosSeptember 23, 2020
For months, Republican Senator Ron Johnson has promised to deliver a body blow to Joe Biden. Like the report being put together by William Barr and John Durham, this was one…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democrats-mock-the-gop-for-climate-denialism-but-theyre-addicted-to-fossil-fuel-cash/
the recent chorus of Democratic Party leaders lining up to denounce President Donald Trump’s climate science denial is deafening. As the West Coast of the United States burns relentlessly, taking lives and land, spewing ash and smoke, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden denounced Trump’s refusal to acknowledge climate science, saying in a speech, “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” He added, referencing hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, “If you give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater?”
California Governor Gavin Newsom during his meeting with Trump was more polite, saying, “climate change is real and that is exacerbating” the fires. Newsom’s predecessor, former Governor Jerry Brown, told the New York Times, “we have a global crisis that has been mounting and the scientists have been telling us about. For the most part, it’s been ignored.”
Listening to these Democratic leaders, one might imagine that during their years in office they have done their level best to address the climate crisis. True, the Obama administration was far more active than Trump on admitting that climate change is real, that greenhouse gas emissions are the culprit, and that somewhere down the line society has to end its reliance on fossil fuels. Under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the Environmental Protection Agency began regulating carbon dioxide emissions, which helped accelerate the retirement of coal power plants. The former president also signed the modest Paris Agreement, thus joining most of the world’s nations in promising action on climate change.
But Obama—with Biden by his side—also championed the hydraulic fracturing or fracking industry, which led to so much oil and gas production within the United States that the nation was drowning in the very fossil fuels that spark climate change. Oil production rose by a historic amount under the Democratic president, leading him to boast two years after he left the presidency: “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas [producer thing]—that was me, people."
In California, Brown and Newsom engaged in similar double-speak, claiming to take climate action but overseeing a massive boom in oil and gas production through fracking.
Once in office, Trump overturned both Obama’s Clean Power Plan and the U.S.’s participation in the Paris Agreement. However, blaming Trump for the climate crisis we are in today is akin to focusing on the very last car in a giant pileup. That last car, barreling at top speed toward the fiery crash, does indeed bear some blame, but hardly all of it.
The public knows this. Four years ago, a Yale University poll found broad support for climate action, with 75 percent of voters backing a reduction in fossil fuel emissions and 84 percent supporting investments in renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. This past June, a Pew Research poll found large majorities of Americans backing climate actions that include restrictions on carbon pollution and the boosting of alternative energy. Sixty-five percent of voters found that the federal government was doing too little to tackle climate change. In 2019, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll even found that 63 percent of Americans back a Green New Deal (GND), which the pollsters described as a plan “to address climate change by investing government money in green jobs and energy efficient infrastructure.”
The Green New Deal is a congressional resolution backed by most environmental organizations today that outlines a bold vision for transforming the nation’s energy system through an ambitious jobs program.
Sensing the public desire for action, Biden has thankfully made bold overtures on climate. While he has not admitted his culpability in the Obama administration’s role in the historic rise of domestic oil and gas production, Biden’s campaign has said he, “believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” His platform includes a powerful promise of working toward “a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
But the climate advisers whom Biden has brought into his campaign offer a more honest assessment of his position on the issue. According to the Intercept, Biden has surrounded himself with, “veterans of the Obama administration’s ‘all of the above’ strategy, which embraced fossil fuel development and technologies like fracking while publicly trumpeting clean energy commitments.” The outlet speculated, “If appointed to key energy and environmental jobs, they could pose an existential threat to even the most ambitious climate plans.” Biden has also made it clear that he opposes a ban on the fracking industry.
If Biden continues the standard Democratic Party approach of championing climate action while promoting fossil fuel production, his double-speak will fuel voter skepticism toward a liberal party that continually fails to live up to its stated goals. Democratic leaders suffer from an “enthusiasm gap” compared to their Republican counterparts whose ideals and actions are far more consistent with one another. Democratic Party leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have failed to grasp the public desire for strong climate action. Pelosi derisively dismissed the GND in an interview earlier this year, saying, “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
Modest regulations to curb emissions such as a carbon tax that many Democrats have backed are laughably weak in the face of the climate catastrophe unfolding today. The liberal party would do well to enthusiastically embrace bold climate action and go far beyond what Obama did. In matching their climate actions to their rhetoric, Democratic leaders like Biden, Pelosi, and Newsom could eschew domestic oil and gas production. Further, they could tackle the twin crises of the climate and the economy with the GND as a courageous idea to capture the imagination of American voters. The chorus of opposition to the high costs of the GND is easily countered with the mounting price tag of doing nothing.
As California, Washington, and Oregon burn so severely that the smoke and gas from the infernos have spread to the nation’s opposite coast, voters are perhaps more primed than ever for strong action. Simultaneously, as massive hurricanes pummel the East Coast, churning in the Atlantic in record-breaking numbers and ferocity before slamming into coastal communities, half measures are not just weak—they are a show of negligence. If the liberal party were to actually embrace strong climate action that goes beyond rhetoric, it could distinguish itself enough from its opposition party in ways that matter. And that would offer the clearest evidence that the “hope and change” that Democrats offer every four years is meaningful.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Sonali Kolhatkar
see disinfo note dems not getting briefings/ reports?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/classified-cia-report-putin-probably-directing-disinformation-campaign-against-biden-with-gops-help/
russian president Vladimir Putin is “probably directing” a disinformation campaign against Joe Biden ahead of November’s election, according to a top-secret CIA assessment.
Two unnamed sources told the *Washington Post* the Kremlin was attempting to interfere with the 2020 presidential election through a Ukrainian parliamentarian with ties to President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
“We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. vice president, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November,” the report states in its first line.
The highly classified report was reportedly published for agency use at the end of last month, and is based on intelligence gathered by the FBI and the NSA. ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach,who has been working publicly with Giuliani and was recently sanctioned by the Treasury Department for election meddling, has been spreading disinformation about Biden through Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
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ron j wi ukraine rudy BS resurrected oct surprise? schumer and pelosi demand corrective ctr-measures briefing for house/ sen?
delaware conn plus 3 climate lawsuit 9/20
nyt no lnx
At a briefing in California, Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom disagree, as politely as possible, on climate change.
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‘Climate Change Is Real,’ Newsom Tells Trump at Briefing
During a meeting with local and state wildfire officials in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom politely disagreed with President Trump’s view on climate change.
“Your administration just entered into a first-of-its-type commitment over the next 20 years to double our vegetation management and forest management.” “Right.” “I want to thank you for supporting that effort, funding that effort. We acknowledge our role and responsibility to do more in that space. But one thing is fundamental: 57 percent of the land in this state is federal forest land. Three percent is California. So we really do need that support. We need that emphasis of engagement. And we are fully committed to working with you to advance that cause. We’ve known each other too long, and as you suggest, the working relationship I value — we obviously feel very strongly that the hots are getting hotter. The dries are getting drier.When we’re having heat domes, the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history: The hottest August ever in the history of the state, the ferocity of these fires, the drought — five-plus years — losing 163 million trees to that drought. Something’s happened to the plumbing of the world.
And we come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident that climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this. And so I think there is an area of, at least, commonality on vegetation, forest management. But please respect — and I know you do — the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue, on the issue of climate change.” “Absolutely.” “Appreciate it, thanks.”
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During a meeting with local and state wildfire officials in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom politely disagreed with President Trump’s view on climate change.CreditCredit...Doug Mills/The New York Times]
President Trump arrived in California in a smoky haze on Monday and promptly blamed the wildfires ravaging the West Coast not on climate change but on the failure by western states to properly manage their forests.
“When trees fall down after a short period of time, they become very dry — really like a matchstick,” the president told reporters after disembarking from Air Force One at Sacramento McClellan Airport, where the stench of smoke filled the air. “And they can explode. Also leaves. When you have dried leaves on the ground, it’s just fuel for the fires.”
The president brushed off a question about climate change, suggesting that the query be put to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California instead.
During a briefing for the president by state and local officials fighting the fires or representing communities affected by them, Mr. Newsom pushed back on climate change, though he made a point of doing so exceedingly politely.
He offered thanks to Mr. Trump for federal assistance and agreed with him that forest management needs to be better, but he noted that only 3 percent of land in California was under state control while 57 percent was federal forest land under the president’s management.
“As you suggest, the working relationship I value,” Mr. Newsom said. But he said climate change clearly was a factor in the fires.
“Something’s happening to the plumbing of the world,” Mr. Newsom said. “And we come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident that climate change is real and that is exacerbating this.”
He went on: “And so I think there’s an area of at least commonality on vegetation, forest management. But please respect — and I know you do — the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue on the issue of climate change.”
Rather than argue the point, Mr. Trump deferred. “Absolutely,” he said, and then turned the floor over to another briefer.
But after another speaker also raised climate change, Mr. Trump made clear that he remained unpersuaded. “It will start getting cooler,” he said. “Just watch. I don’t think science knows, actually.”
The president’s comments reflected a longstanding assertion on his part whenever flames erupt in California or elsewhere in the west. But environmentalists, state officials and scientists said the scarred countryside and ashen clouds are the predictable consequence of climate change that has gone largely unchecked by Mr. Trump, who has instead rolled back environmental regulations.
“Raking the leaves and forest floors is really inane; that doesn’t make sense at all,” said Ralph Propper, president of the Environmental Council of Sacramento. “We’re seeing what was predicted, which is more extremes of weather.”
Nearly two years ago, federal government scientists concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels could triple the frequency of severe fires across the Western states.
But the president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.
Now, as he battles for a second term in the White House, Mr. Trump has doubled down on his anti-climate agenda as a way of appealing to his core supporters. At a rally in Pennsylvania last month, he blamed California’s failure to “clean your floors” of leaves, threatening to “make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”
“Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “It seems like this administration are the last vestiges of the Flat Earth Society of this generation.”
— Peter Baker, Michael D. Shear, Coral Davenport and Kellen Browning
‘We have to act as a nation,’ Biden says, addressing the wildfires and climate change.
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Biden Calls Trump a ‘Climate Arsonist’ in Remarks on Wildfires
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During a speech in Wilmington, Del., Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, attacked the Trump administration’s response to climate change.
The fury of climate change everywhere, all this year, and right now. We stand with our families who have lost everything, the firefighters, the first responders, risking everything to save others, and the millions of Americans caught between relocating during a pandemic or staying put as ashes and smoke pollute the air they breathe. The past 10 years were the hottest decade ever recorded — the Arctic is literally melting. Parts are actually on fire. What we’re seeing in America, in our communities, is connected to all of this. If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires? How many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out, how many suburbs will have been blown away in superstorms? If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze? If you have a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater? We need a president who respects science, who understands that the damage from climate change is already here, and unless we take urgent action will soon be more catastrophic.
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During a speech in Wilmington, Del., Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, attacked the Trump administration’s response to climate change.CreditCredit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times]
As wildfires raged across the West Coast, Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday attacked President Trump’s record on climate change, calling the president a “climate arsonist” whose inaction and denial had fed destruction.
In a speech in Delaware, Mr. Biden directly connected the blazes that have displaced thousands of people to climate change, and he also spoke about flooding in the Midwest and hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. He sought to paint a second Trump term as harmful to the suburbs, flipping an attack waged against him by the president.
“If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires?” Mr. Biden asked. “How many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out? How many suburbs will have been blown away in superstorms?”
:{
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He continued: “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze? If you give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater?”
Mr. Biden’s speech, delivered outdoors at the Delaware Museum of Natural History in Wilmington, came as Mr. Trump traveled to California and met with Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials for a briefing on the devastating wildfires.
Mr. Trump has come under intense criticism for failing for several weeks to mention the blazes that have ravaged parts of California, Oregon and Washington. The president, who has called climate change a hoax, has frequently expressed skepticism about the scientific consensus that warming global temperatures are worsening wildfires.
In his speech, Mr. Biden criticized Mr. Trump over his “disdain for science and facts,” presenting climate change as another area where the president had failed to provide leadership in the face of a crisis. He made a case for treating the reduction of fossil fuel emissions as a nonpartisan issue that could create manufacturing jobs while preserving the planet.
“We have to act as a nation,” Mr. Biden said. “It shouldn’t be so bad that millions of Americans live in the shadow of an orange sky, and they’re left asking: ‘Is doomsday here?’”
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/democracy-wilts-on-the-vine-trump-campaign-resorts-to-lies-conspiracy-theories-and-disinformation-as-biden-leads-in-the-polls/
Reporter Ashley Parker, in an article published in the Washington Post over Labor Day Weekend, discusses some of the ways in which President Donald Trump’s campaign and its allies have been aggressively promoting disinformation — from “doctored and misleading videos” to bogus conspiracy theories.
For example, Parker notes, Trump recently “retweeted footage of a black man violently pushing a white woman on a subway platform under the caption, ‘Black Lives Matter/Antifa’ — but the man was not affiliated with either group, and the video was shot in October (2019).” And according to Parker, “White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino shared a manipulated video that falsely showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeming to fall asleep during a television interview, complete with a fake TV headline.”
In addition to those things, Parker notes thatHouse Minority Whip Steve Scalise — a Louisiana Republican and Trump ally — “released a video splicing together quotes from activist Ady Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and uses computer voice assistance — to falsely make it sound as if he had persuaded Biden to defund police departments.”
Whitney Phillips, a communications professor at Syracuse University, told the Post, “When you have this disinformation and it’s introduced to one side of the forest, for example, it can travel so quickly through so many different communities and does so many unintentional things before you can even do a fact-check. He’s able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that democracy wilts on the vine."
trump, Parker points out, has “repeated a false claim that just 6% of the nation’s death toll” in the coronavirus pandemic “was actually caused by the novel coronavirus itself — part of his ongoing effort to portray the virus as less deadly or pervasive than it actually is.” That conspiracy theory has been promoted by QAnon and has no basis in reality, but that hasn’t prevented Trump and other Republicans from promoting it.
Trump is hardly the first candidate to play hardball during a presidential race. From President Lyndon B. Johnson’s infamous “daisy ad” of 1964 to President George H.W. Bush’s racist Willie Horton ad of 1988 to the Swift Boat Veterans ads that helped President George W. Bush defeat Democrat John Kerry in 2004, presidential candidates — both Democrats and Republicans — have dealt some harsh blows to their rivals over the years. But Lily Adams, a Democratic National Committee senior adviser, argues that Trump’s campaign is taking disinformation to another level.
Adams told the Post, “Spin has been something that folks in politics have come to expect,but this is the invention of a totally new reality. Because they can’t run on the reality that every American is seeing, they’re inventing a new one.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-campaign-s-biden-for-going-to-church-and-his-sons-grave/
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~ kamala on fracking; just trying to derive of club? drill nbaby drill, Am indep/doninace?
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920 wow 2nd aleckochalypse gov to flip, Kasich longish video at DNC
ormer GOP governor calls Trump a ‘bully’ — and endorses Biden for president
Matthew Chapman / Raw Story September 3, 2020
On Thursday, The Detroit News reported that former Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI) announced he would be voting for Joe Biden in November — blasting President Donald Trump as a “bully.” “As a proud…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/dhs-withheld-publication-of-intel-bulletin-showing-russian-plot-to-bidens-mental-health-report
according to ABC News, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security withheld publication, in early July, of an intelligence bulletin describing a Russian scheme to push “allegations about” Biden’s “poor mental health.”
ABC News has obtained a copy of the bulletin, titled “Russia Likely to Denigrate Health of U.S. Candidates to Influence 2020 Election.” And ABC reporters Josh Margolin, Lucien Bruggeman, Will Steakin and Jonathan Karl note that the document was submitted to the DHS’ office of legislative and public affairs for review on July 7.
“The analysis was not meant for public consumption,” according to the reporters. “But it was set to be distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement partners two days later, on July 9, the e-mails show.”
However, an e-mail obtained by ABC News shows that DHS Chief of Staff John Gountanis intervened, asking DHS employees to “please hold on sending this one out until you have a chance to speak to” Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf. And almost two months later, according to ABC News, the bulletin has yet to be circulated.
the bulletin stated that DHS analysts believed, with “high confidence,” that “Russian malign influence actors are likely to continue denigrating presidential candidates through allegations of poor mental or physical health to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.”
Right-wing Republican Elizabeth Neumann, who formerly served as a DHS assistant secretary under the Trump Administration but recently voiced her support for Biden in a Republican Voters Against Trump video, told ABC News, “High confidence means what it sounds like: that they are highly confident that their assessment is accurate. And they don’t use that language very often.”
John Cohen, a former undersecretary of intelligence at DHS under President Barack Obama, expressed concerns that the Trump Administration is blocking intelligence information for political purposes.
Cohen told ABC News, “We are hearing concerns being raised publicly that, in this administration, intelligence community reporting is being modified or blocked for political reasons — or to not anger the president. By blocking information from being released that describes threats facing the nation, it undermines the ability of the public and state and local authorities to work with the federal government to counteract the threat.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/biden-ukraine-recordings-oan/612454/
many lnx
Is OAN the Leading Edge of Russian Misinformation?
The Biden campaign says Trump’s favorite TV network is peddling the Kremlin’s lies.
EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
JUNE 11, 2020
In what appears to be a signal of intensifying political warfare ahead of the November election, One America News Network, the Trump-supporting cable channel that has been promoting anti-Biden conspiracies for several months, says it has obtained several hours of secret recordings of then–Vice President Biden’s conversations with Ukrainian officials. If such recordings exist, they’re likely linked to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine and a Russian intelligence operation, two former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine and a former ambassador to Russia told me. The OAN employee who claims to have the tapes would not say what was on them, other than suggesting that they will be revelatory.
In the audio that has been released elsewhere so far, Biden is heard dangling the promise of financial aid to Ukraine if its government ousted a prosecutor who was seen as corrupt—which Biden has previously said publicly was his goal, as part of a push for widespread reforms. Conspiracists have alleged that this was intended to help his son Hunter escape charges of corruption, but an audit by Ukraine’s former top prosecutor released last week found no evidence of illegal activity by Hunter in his capacity as an energy-company board member.
[MORE STORIES
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Democracy Versus Kleptocracy
FRANKLIN FOER
The Press Is Embracing False Equivalence—Again
JAMES FALLOWS
Rudy Giuliani: ‘You Should Be Happy for Your Country That I Uncovered This’
ELAINA PLOTT]
What is most remarkable here is that none of this is particularly surprising. Russian interference in the 2016 election has been closely studied over the past four years, and America’s vulnerabilities have only worsened in that time. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote recently, “Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.” That OAN is now a player in such interference suggests an escalation that the Biden campaign has been bracing for.
Indeed, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul—who has recalled being secretly recorded himself, among other forms of harassment, when he was posted in Moscow—told me, "There’s never been a moment like this in American history.”
[Read Putin is well on his way to stealing the next election
That includes 2016. McFaul said what he’s seeing now reminds him of tactics the Kremlin has used against its domestic political opponents. “It’s not to convince you of a different point of view. It’s to convince you that there is no truth,” he said. “When it feels like nobody’s telling the truth and there is no truth, the reaction to that is despondency and demobilization.”
It’s hard not to feel some déjà vu here. In 2016, Russian intelligence agents hacked the emails of Democratic National Committee staffers and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and delivered them to WikiLeaks, as a way to get them into the American media. Some outlets learned a lesson from that episode, and have treated new Biden recordings out of Ukraine with care. Others have not. Andriy Derkach, who released the Biden tapes that have already come out, is a former member of a pro-Russian political party who graduated from a KGB-run academy in Moscow. OAN lends his efforts a veneer, however thin, of journalistic legitimacy.
The person now claiming to have more tapes is OAN’s Chanel Rion, the on-air personality who went with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, on his December trip to Ukraine in part to find information on Biden to help Trump. Rion, who has become famous for her conspiracy-inflected questions at White House briefings, emailed the Biden campaign May 29 claiming that she was working on an “in-depth report” aboutrecordings that appear to be of Biden speaking with Petro Poroshenko, then the president of Ukraine. “We have over five hours of these recordings (beyond what has been posted online by Nabu Leaks),” she wrote, referencing a Ukrainian website suspected of Russian links.
Derkach, a politician known as the “Ukrainian Putin,” has been a proponent of the conspiracy theory that Ukraine was really behind the interference in the 2016 election instead of Russia. And he has previously been eager to provide damaging material about Biden for Trump’s sake. Derkach released a batch of recordings three weeks ago, claiming that they had been made by Poroshenko and given to him by “investigative journalists.” (Poroshenko has said the audio is “fabricated.”) Most mainstream-media outlets have decided that the recordings that have emerged so far offer “little new insight into Biden’s actions in Ukraine,” as The Washington Post’s Carol Morello wrote after the recordings were first released.
Giuliani, reached by text, did not comment on suspicions that the recordings have ties to Russian interests or intelligence, or on whether he was involved in getting any of them to OAN.
Rion was until recently an illustrator. She has said she joined members of the Trump family in 2016 for the New Hampshire primary’s victory party; she has also tweeted a drawing of Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein with the hashtag #spiritcooking, which is often associated with the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. On her website, she describes herself as “a fierce foe of anything Clinton, of everything Obama, and as a total and unrelenting enemy of academic left-liberalism and political correctness anywhere.”
In March, she cited a “monitored source” on air who’d said that the coronavirus had been linked to a lab in North Carolina; that source turned out to be a person who’d tweeted at her. She has asked wild questions at White House briefings, including one about whether Trump would pardon Barack Obama for unspecified crimes, and another about whether Trump’s lawyers would like to depose Joe Scarborough, after Trump floated a baseless accusation that he’d murdered an aide.
Rion’s email, which the Biden campaign forwarded to me, suggests that OAN is “producing an in-depth report on these recordings for OAN's Special Investigates series.” In a phone call on Sunday, she told me that she now expects to acquire much more than the five hours of recordings she mentioned in her email. Rion said that Derkach was just one of the people who have been giving her material. She said she has verified, with the help of “a couple of sources on the ground,” and with sources in the U.S. as well, that the recordings have no ties to Russian intelligence or interests. She would not explain her verification process, saying, “I don't want to tip off anybody.”
It was once unusual for the public to gain access to top-secret government documents, let alone private conversations between the American vice president and a foreign leader. But as countries around the world increase their cyberwar capabilities and their willingness to interfere in one another’s domestic politics, and as the democratization of publishing allows for the rapid spread of misinformation, media leaks of hard-to-verify and potentially doctored documents and recordings of government officials are becoming commonplace.
“It is common practice for Russian intelligence to help put out information in skewed forms in Ukraine, and forensic experts have seen that this information is doctored,” said John Herbst, a former career Foreign Service officer who served as the American ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006.“The Kremlin is a master at this sort of practice, and the sources in Ukraine providing this sort of information are known to be well connected in Moscow.”
Herbst was one of seven former ambassadors to Ukraine who wrote an open letter to Ukrainians two weeks ago, prompted by the already-public recordings. They said they are “disheartened by efforts to involve Ukraine in America’s domestic politics as the 2020 US presidential election approaches.”
“This all just confirms what we knew,” said Steven Pifer, another former ambassador to Ukraine, who signed the letter.
David A. Graham: What happened in Ukraine?
Russia would love to “somehow inject Ukraine back into American politics,” Pifer said. “There will be people on the American side who play into it—OAN is one.”
The Biden campaign says OAN’s willingness to play along is exactly why the network received the recordings. “In 2016 and ever since, hostile foreign actors have perpetrated insidious efforts to disfigure and poison American democracy. Yesterday’s hacked emails are today’s bugged phones and deepfakes,” Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesperson, told me.
An OAN spokesperson, Krista McClelland, did not respond to a request for comment about the suggestion that the recordings have links to Russian intelligence. Nor did she respond to the Biden campaign’s charges.
Other countries are stepping up their own efforts to get involved in this year’s elections; Iran and China, for example, have been linked to attempts to hack Biden and Trump campaign computers. But Russia continues to lead the misinformation game. The day after Rion reached out to Biden’s team, Sputnik—the Kremlin-owned propaganda service, which American intelligence has accused of being involved in the 2016 misinformation efforts—ran an interview with a former Poroshenko aide who claimed that he was the one who’d made the recordings, and that he’d given them to his lawyers to give the Trump administration. “Because of the coronavirus,” he said,” they are waiting. But in September, closer to elections, they will begin to use them more.”
There’s no evidence to support this. But the Trump campaign doesn’t seem to have much interest in dampening ideas like it: The communications director, Tim Murtaugh, didn’t respond to multiple emailsI sent about whether the campaign has more materials from Ukraine featuring Biden, and neither did White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley.
Election Day is in five months. And the people best positioned to knock down the Russian misinformation apparatus seem most interested instead in propping it up
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DNC conv biden did great speech, so Sleepy Joe won't work, so Rush said not live but many taped segs strung together
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/climate-change-took-stage-democratic-national-convention-right-wing-media-pushed-3-lies
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During last night’s Democratic National Convention, the issue of climate change received attention from more than a dozen speakers and an entire portion of the night was dedicated to making the case for urgent climate action, including a video on presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden’s climate plan.
In response, right-wing media figures and Fox News pushed out two persistent lies and one new falsehood about Biden’s climate plan, falsely claiming that it will ban fracking; that his climate plan is the Green New Deal; and that Biden’s plan will spread the blackouts California is currently experiencing across the country.
1. FALSE: Biden’s climate plan will ban fracking
Since Democratic nominee Joe Biden unveiled his climate plan on July 14, right-wing media and Fox News in particular has pushed the false narrative that Biden will ban fracking if he is elected, which they claim will result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in critical battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas. Over the course of one month following the announcement of Biden’s plan, from July 14 to August 14, Fox pushed out this lie at least 37 times.
In reality, Biden is calling for an end to new federal oil and gas permits for drilling on public land. The majority of U.S. production is done on private land, and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management says production on federal land accounted for less than 10% of oil and gas in 2018. Despite this, Fox and other right-wing outlets have insisted that Biden will capitulate to what they have characterized as the “radical” figures in the Democratic Party who are calling for a ban on all fracking, including Biden’s running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) -- already a frequent target of such attacks from conservative media.
While the case for an urgent and bold response to the climate crisis was being made at the Democratic National Convention, Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity claimed that Harris “will eliminate fracking” and posed this question to guest Eric Trump:
From the August 19, 2020, edition of Fox News’ *Hannity*:
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): How is ending fracking and eliminating all fossil fuels, how is that going to fly in Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin and in Ohio and Midwestern states where your dad did bring the jobs back that Biden and Obama said weren’t coming back?
Other right-wing figures and institutions echoed this false narrative throughout the night:
2. FALSE: Biden’s climate plan is the Green New Deal
Akin to the false narrative that Biden will ban fracking is the right-wing media lie that his climate plan was cut and pasted from the proposed Green New Deal. This deliberate mischaracterization of his plan also relies on suggesting that because one of the Green New Deal’s sponsors, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), was a co-chair on the panel advising Biden on climate policy, then his climate plan is the same as the Green New Deal.
While sharing some of the same elements intended to shift to a clean energy economy, Biden’s plan is narrowly focused on addressing climate change and job creation, while the Green New Deal is a sweeping proposal that also seeks to address economic inequality and includes policy proposals around health care, education, and housing, among other issues.
It also conveniently allows right-wing media to leverage a more than yearlong campaign to vilify the Green New Deal and equate the proposal with radical socialism and supposed economic destruction. In fact, Fox News wasted no time branding Biden’s climate proposal as the Green New Deal in its initial coverage.
Here are examples of how right-wing media figures pushed this idea on day three of the Democratic National Convention:
During the July 19 edition of :{America’s Newsroom:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniels told Fox anchor Sandra Smith:
RONNA MCDANIEL (RNC CHAIR): I think last night was about Joe Biden of 2004 or 2008. And they aren't talking about the Joe Biden [of] 2020 who has embraced AOC and Bernie Sanders, the Joe Biden who has said we're going to kill every energy job in this country, the Joe Biden who is embracing the Green New Deal, the Joe Biden who last night said we're going to give free four-year college to everybody. What does that mean? Your taxes are going to go through the roof and he is going to bankrupt this country as he is a bridge to socialism. They aren't highlighting the policies he is running on, they're talking about what a good guy he is. Well, he’s not a good guy when he’s raising taxes on 82% of American households.
In an exchange between co-hosts Jesse Watters and Juan Williams, on the July 19 edition of Fox News’*The Five*, Watters dismissed the fact that the Green New Deal is not part of the Democratic platform:
JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): Trust me. He is going to get strong-armed into doing whatever the far left wants on the environment. He already had to walk back what he said about fracking because he knows how insane that was.
During the DNC on Wednesday, other right-wing figures and institutions spread this idea on Twitter:
3. FALSE: Biden’s climate plan will spread the blackouts in California across the country
Another false narrative about Biden’s platform that was re-upped last night was the right-wing media’s weaponization of California’s blackouts.
When the state began experiencing rolling power outages on Friday, right-wing media falsely claimed that California’s embrace of renewable energy was to blame and seized on the opportunity to claim that Biden’s climate plan would bring these types of blackouts to the rest of the country. On August 18, the Washington Examiner’s Abby Smith turned a tweet by the president into an article titled “Trump says Biden climate plans would replicate California blackouts across the country.” Similarly, conservative writer James Delingpole published a piece in Breitbart on August 19 titled “Like the California Blackouts? Then You’ll LOVE President Joe Biden’s Green Energy Plans.”
On the August 18 edition of Fox News’ *Outnumbered Overtime*, Fox contributor Lisa Boothe pushed this narrative during a discussion of Ocasio-Cortez’s role at the convention:
LISA BOOTHE (CONTRIBUTOR): Biden has already embraced left -- progressivism. We have seen that picking Kamala Harris, the most liberal senator to be his VP, and also embracing Bernie and AOC on his climate agenda, which is going to hurt him immensely in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where you look at Pennsylvania alone could lose hundreds of thousands of jobs as a result of Biden wanting to eliminate fossil fuels. Or looking at states like California who are facing millions of Californians are facing losing power because the state has diverted billions of dollars to renewable energy which doesn't work, is inefficient, and is not even environmentally friendly.
On *The Ingraham Angle*, Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that Democrats are “incapable of offering a positive agenda,” linking it to fracking in Pennsylvania and blackouts in California:
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (HOOVER INSTITUTION): If you are a fracker in Pennsylvania, you didn't hear what's in it for your future. Here in California, it’s 109 today and we've had these rolling blackouts because of voluntarily retiring 4,000 megawatts to have our new green deal -- it’s here in California. Is that what the rest of the country wants?
Here are examples of other right-wing media figures who used the night’s convention as opportunity to push this misinformation:
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-mark-levin-pushes-fringe-climate-denial-unhinged-rant-biden-sanders-unity
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MARK LEVIN (FOX NEWS HOST): Do you know what this is? It's akin to The Communist Manifesto. This is the Bernie Sanders-Biden manifesto. They put this out. Nobody is discussing it. No newsroom has actually read it. It's not discussed at the Democratic convention. And by the way, liberty is not discussed. Electricians aren’t discussed, plumbers aren’t discussed --it's just a big hate fest.But I want to go through this very briefly, because that’s all the time I have anyway, I want people to know what is in thisdocument. It's 110 pages long, how they’re going to destroy your country. They want to retrofit millions of American homes and buildings to prevent carbon dioxide emissions and use. What’s carbon dioxide? Well if you’re in third grade and you’re taking a science class, it’s what you exhale and then plants use it to create oxygen. That’s third grade stuff.
…
Retool assembly lines for zero emissions vehicles. Bye, Detroit. All 500,000 school buses in America transitioned to zero emissions vehicles within years. Massive expansion of public transportation. Massive regulation of fossil fuels leading to blackouts and brownouts you can see in California right now. In other words, they want to end natural gas, coal, and oil.
…
Climate. “National goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions from all new buildings by 2030” -- by the way, do you know what greenhouse gas emissions are? You ever drive by the road and you see a greenhouse in the winter and flowers are growing and tomatoes are growing? It's called the atmosphere!-- “In an attempt to create a 100% clean building sector.” You can see how they’re going to demolish our economy, destroy our smokestack industries. “Commit to eliminating carbon pollution” -- carbon dioxide is not pollution. We don’t get oxygen but from giving carbon dioxide to plants-- ”from power plants by 2035, through new technologies and neutral standards for clean energy and energy efficiency.” They want to install 500 million solar panels, 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines. You’ll never get any sleep. “Commit that all jobs in the clean energy economy will be unionized. Pursue environmental and climate justice.” I have no idea what any of that means
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mcmahon
https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-allowed-pro-trump-pac-run-hundreds-ads-false-information-about-joe-biden
pro-Trump PAC America First Action ran at least 397 ads on Facebook and Instagram since July 24 featuring a video that falsely suggests Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden supported efforts to defund the police. While Facebook finally removed many of the ads on August 4, a number of them had already run for over 10 days, earning more than 5.7 million impressions -- and the false information will still be allowed in other posts on the platform.
The false claim that Biden supports defunding the police has been repeatedly promoted by President Donald Trump and right-wing media, seemingly meant to inspire fear about supposedly radical policies among centrist voters.
PolitiFact, which is one of Facebook’s trusted fact-checking partners, fact-checked the video in America First Action PAC’s ad on July 29, five days before Facebook reportedly removed the ads:
The 15-second ad, from conservative super PAC America First Action, selectively edits a clip from Biden’s interview with liberal activist Ady Barkan. While the text on the screen reads, “Defund the police?,” Biden is seen on a TV saying, “Yes. Absolutely, yes.”
Using Facebook Ad data from the Dewey Square Adwatch tool set, Media Matters found 397 ads that America First Action PAC ran with versions of the misleading video since July 24. The PAC spent at least $87,900 on these ads, most of which specifically targeted Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania -- states which are part of Trump’s reported priority list. At the time of publication, at least 17 of the ads are still active on Facebook [pix]
[pix: six of 397 Facebook ads from America First Action PAC with false information about Joe Biden]
Facebook has repeatedly allowed political ads with misinformation to run on its platform. In fact, Media Matters has previously reported on hundreds of Facebook ads with misinformation and hate speech from the Trump campaign, including 529 ads with false claims of voter fraud and 88 ads with an infamous Nazi symbol; and hundreds of misleading ads from pro-Trump PACs, including Judicial Watch and The Committee to Defend the President.
Facebook has reportedly considered banning political ads leading up to the 2020 U.S. election, but that move wouldn’t prevent organic posts containing political misinformation from spreading on the platform.
Case in point: Even though Facebook removed America First Action PAC’s ads after they were fact-checked and labeled as false information, a Facebook spokesperson reportedly told Fox News that “the videos can, instead, run as original content on the group's page.”
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mma
note attack at strongest pt empathy: also emotion/vuln is wimpy/womanly, trump want to have all xian, joe a commie who hates god[tho photoshop him at prayer --> hide in basement
Limbaugh attacks Biden’s faith: Discussing tragedies like his son dying is “a crutch”
08/07/20 5:04 PM EDT
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an 820
...That is particularly true as the president seems to have simultaneously launched an initiative to suggest that Biden is against the Bible and God. For example, during a “telerally” with Pennsylvania voters on Sunday, Trump said, “Joe Biden, the radical Democrats are against fracking, they’re against guns, and they’re against the Bible, essentially, they’re against God.”Here is what he said in Ohio on Thursday
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an 820
Trump launches delusional and bewildering rant against Biden: ‘He’s against God!’Cody Fenwick
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chris hedges not a fan
an 820
pro-Trump media websites have been trying to pull the same trick on Joe Biden that they pulled on Hillary Clinton in 2016 — but so far, none of their attacks on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee have gained traction.
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*Axios* reports that data from right-wing news websites shows that reader engagement on three key anti-Biden stories — his alleged mental decline, his son Hunter Biden’s former job with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade — have all fizzled.
“Unlike other storylines that right-wing publishers have feasted on in the past — where new morsels of information reinvigorated news cycles — there have been no new revelations in the Burisma story, and Tara Reade stopped giving press interviews,” Axios reports. “By contrast, the drip-drip of information about Hillary Clinton’s email server and the DNC leak fueled news cycles for months during the 2016 campaign.”
This lack of interest in Biden stories comes as Trump has struggled to settle on narrative about his presumptive opponent, whom he’s accused both of being a racist who wants to put Black Americans in jail and of being a wild-eyed radical who will let Black Lives Matter demonstrators lawlessly overrun American cities.
820 an
While appearing on “New Day,” Dale dissected images of Biden in Trump’s new ad and showed how the campaign used Photoshop to put the photos in a completely different context.
“[The ad] uses three misleading images, one of which is egregiously altered,” Dale said. “That first image shows Joe Biden speaking at a town hall in Iowa outdoors at a nature preserve… what the ad does is remove the microphone from his hand and remove the trees, replacing it with a wall to make him seem like he’s alone and not talking to anyone.”
Dale also said that Trump campaign manipulated a photo of Biden praying at a church to make him look weak.
“A third misleading use of an image in that ad, they also show Biden sort of looking down, hands clasped, looking defeated,” he said. “Well, he was actually praying at an African-American church in Delaware after the death of George Floyd. This wasn’t him looking downcast because he’s being beaten by Donald Trump, it was a solemn moment used to make him look bad.”[vid]
CNN fact checker Daniel Dale on Thursday showed how President Donald Trump’s campaign has been blatantly manipulating photos of former Vice President Joe Biden to make it look like he has spent the last year sitting in his basement.
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GOP chairman won’t confirm or deny receiving Biden ‘materials’ from foreign sources — even as Ukrainians say they’re passing him dirt
Matthew Chapman / Raw Story July 22, 2020
On Wednesday, NBC News reported that Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI), who is currently running a probe into the financial dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s family in…
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james defects
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/rupert-murdochs-son-and-daughter-in-law-drop-more-than-2-million-to-help-elect-biden-and-democrats/
fox News founder Rupert Murdoch’s son and daughter-in-law are two of the biggest backers of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign, federal filings show.James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn Murdoch each contributed $615,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in June, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
The Biden Victory Fund splits donations between Biden’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and 26 state parties. The couple has also contributed to other candidates aiming to unseat Republicans. Kathryn Murdoch is “increasingly giving to Democrats this cycle, including $1 million to help Senate Democrats,” The Washington Post reported.
James Murdoch has long been the more liberal of the conservative media mogul’s sons, backing Democrats like former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Democratic primary. He and his wife also issued a statement earlier this year criticizing his father’s outlets over climate change denial.
James Murdoch told The New Yorker last year that “there are views I really disagree with on Fox.” He also discussed internal family tension, revealing that there are “periods” of time when he and his father do not talk.
The couple are not the only Murdochs to back Biden. Rupert Murdoch’s wife Jerry Hall sent a $500 check to Biden’s campaign in May after previously donating $1,000 to Buttigieg in the primary.
Rupert Murdoch himself has been fairly quiet this campaign cycle, though he has made several donations to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
The media mogul has reportedly soured on Trump’s chances of winning re-election as polls show Biden surging ahead.
“Rupert thinks Trump is going to crash and burn,” a person who spoke to Murdoch about the election told Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman. “It’s a clear-eyed assessment, just based on just looking at the news.”
The newly-released FEC filings show that numerous wealthy donors powered the Biden Victory Fund to an $86.4 million haul in its first 68 days. The fund can receive donations up to $620,600, with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson among the maximum donors.
Several Republicans contributed to Biden’s fundraising operation, including former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who donated $500,000.
Prominent Democratic donor George Soros also contributed $500,000, while Walt Disney Chairman Bob Iger and filmmaker Steven Spielberg each gave $250,000. Former Democratic presidential rival Tom Steyer donated $360,000, and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker gave another $300,000.
The fund was launched after Biden officially clinched enough delegates to secure the nomination. The fund, Biden’s campaign and the DNC raised a total of $282 million between April and June compared to a $262 million haul by Trump’s operation.
Anti-Trump super PACs also raised plenty of money in the second quarter. The Lincoln Project, a group co-founded by George Conway, the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, raised $16.8 million, up from $2 million in the first quarter. The AB PAC, part of the American Bridge 20th Century Foundation, which was founded by former conservative David Brock, raised another $10 million.
Hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel contributed $2.5 million between the two PACs, while Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein and his wife each gave $375,000 to AB PAC, Bloomberg reported.
The biggest contributors to the Trump Victory Fund included Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter and his wife Laura, who gave $1.15 million, and Jet Support Services CEO Robert Book and his wife Amy, who gave $1.16 million, according to The Washington Post.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/read-the-letter-trumps-campaign-sent-to-tv-stations-threatening-the-fcc-could-pull-their-licenses-over-coronavirus-ad/
no lnx
Read the letter Trump’s campaign sent to TV stations threatening the FCC could pull their licenses over coronavirus
Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement March 26, 2020
Lawyers for President Donald Trump’s official Super PAC, America First Action, tried to get TV stations in key battleground states to stop airing an anti-Trump ad that focuses on his horrific mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis. The TV stations refused to pull the ad, placed by the pro-Biden Super PAC Priorities USA (PUSA), which rightly noted that the pro-Trump Super PAC did not even have standing to make the demand.
So President Trump’s official campaign stepped in to do what his Super PAC could not.
Attorneys for the Donald J. Trump for President campaign sent a Cease and Desist letter to those TV stations demanding they stop airing the anti-Trump ad.
Not only did they make that demand, but they threatened that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which the President controls in that he appoints its commissioners, could pull their broadcast licenses if they did not comply.
The letter reads in part: “your station has an obligation to cease and desist from airing [the ad] immediately to comply with FCC licensing requirements, to serve the public interest, and to avoid costly and time-consuming litigation.”
It also says “we formally demand that your station refuse to continue airing it to meet your responsibilities not to broadcast false information,” which is ironic given the number of falsehoods and lies Trump tells on a daily basis which are often broadcast by news networks.
It adds, “your station has a responsibility to ‘protect the public from false, misleading or deceptive advertising,’” and threatens that “your failure to remove this deceptive ad … could put your station’s license in jeopardy.”
This is the ad the Trump campaign claims is “patently false, misleading, and deceptive,” says he did not call the coronavirus a “hoax,” and essentially claims the ad says he did.
Trump refused to take the threat of the coronavirus seriously, now he won’t take responsibility as his administration has been totally unprepared for this crisis. pic.twitter.com/Jdh1GY9HHS
— Priorities USA (@prioritiesUSA) March 23, 2020
The letter can be read on the Trump campaign’s website.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trumps-usual-tactics-will-fail-against-coronavirus-and-thats-when-things-could-really-get-dark/
no lnx
Trump’s usual tactics will fail against coronavirus — and that’s when things could really get dark
President Donald J. Trump addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House Wednesday evening, March 11, 2020, on the country’s expanded response against the global Coronavirus outbreak. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly March 13, 2020
Dan Diamond, who writes about health issues for Politico, exposed the way that sycophants in the Trump administration have failed to respond effectively to the coronavirus. Of particular concern is the battle underway between Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Seema Verma, the administrator for Medicare and Medicaid Services. They appear to be in competition to gain the president’s favor. During a conversation about that with Terry Gross on NPR, he revealed how it has affected the federal government’s response to a pandemic (emphasis mine).
I think they are both trying to show that they’re incredibly active and aggressive in public, but some of the decisions behind the scenes haven’t always reflected the best judgment of career professionals. In the case of Alex Azar, he did go to the president in January. He did push past resistance from the president’s political aides to warn the president the new coronavirus could be a major problem. There were aides around Trump – Kellyanne Conway had some skepticism at times that this was something that needed to be a presidential priority.
But at the same time, Secretary Azar has not always given the president the worst-case scenario of what could happen.My understanding is he did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear — the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.
That not only explains the lack of tests that have been made available, it tells us why the administration has so consistently lied about the spread of the virus in the United States. But the president had already signaled his obsession with keeping the number of cases low during remarks to the press last week.
Trump was addressing the question of what his administration would do about passengers on the Grand Princess cruise ship, where an outbreak of coronavirus had occurred.
[My experts] would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay, but I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision. I would rather—because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.
While the coronavirus was spreading all over the country, the president wanted to keep the numbers artificially low because it served his own interests. So they lied, which is what Trump always does. But as Kevin Drum noted, it’s not working this time.
You can get away with this for a while, especially if you have Fox News and talk radio to back you up. And the longer you get away with it, the more convinced you become that it will always work, that everything in politics is marketing. So eventually you go too far: you try to deny the reality of an epidemic that even your most fervent supporters know is real. You double down by quoting obviously bogus testing numbers. But unlike your previous delusions, this one has real consequences: since testing and tracing are the backbone of infectious disease control, a lack of testing makes the epidemic even worse.
You might remember that Trump didn’t just lie about what was happening, he joked about the Democrats politicizing the crisis and called it a hoax. That was an attempt to distract his supporters and get them focused on how he had been under siege from the beginning of his presidency. It allowed him to compare the criticisms of his handling of the situation to the Russia investigation and his impeachment.
But ultimately, whenever Trump feels challenged, he becomes obsessed with finding someone to blame. You can see him attempting to deflect blame during his remarks about the cruise ship. Even though it had absolutely no bearing on the situation, he felt the need to point out that the coronavirus outbreak on the ship “wasn’t our fault.”
Perhaps because he recognizes that he can’t lie or distract his way out of this crisis, the president went into full blame mode on Twitter Thursday night.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record. Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record. His was lowest!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2020
Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
“The Obama White House had to immediately issue an apology for Joe Biden’s remarks, and any alarm that he might have caused, an alarm about a Swine Flu outbreak that took 6 months for President Obama to declare a National Emergency, and that killed 12,000 Americans.” @LouDobbs
#]
“The Obama White House had to immediately issue an apology for Joe Biden’s remarks, and any alarm that he might have caused, an alarm about a Swine Flu outbreak that took 6 months for President Obama to declare a National Emergency, and that killed 12,000 Americans.” @LouDobbs
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2020
In case you’re wondering, nothing in either of those tweets resembles the truth. But using lies to blame an opponent for your own failures is typical of the current leader of a party that once billed itself as a proponent of “personal responsibility.”
Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, he has always resorted to his pattern of lie, distract, and blame when challenged. While that has been apparent to those of us who live in the reality-based world, it has often worked to maintain the loyalty of his most ardent followers. As the coronavirus reaches the stage of exponential growth in this country, will it continue to work? That is doubtful. It is at that point that we’re likely to see him ramp up the divisiveness of xenophobia to defend himself—which is when things will really get dark.