Thursday, September 21st, 2017
Lorraine Chow, - EcoWatch
Stephan: Yesterday I made the point that the way fascist governments deal with information they don't like is to suppress, or falsify it. Today the Trump administration could not be more blatant in demonstrating.
That's predictable, but what amazes me is that the United States currently has Houston, Florida, the American Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico in a state of crisis as a result of extreme weather events, and yet the administration is trying to delete information on the climate. It's a level of scumbaggery I would have found it hard to imagine in 2015.
Yet another U.S. agency has deleted climate change information from its website. This time, the U.S. Geological Survey’s “Science Explorer” website—a tax-payer funded online database for the public to browse USGS science programs and activities—has been purged of thousands of formerly searchable climate science links.
The startling discovery was made by Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and member of the U.S. National Academy of Science.
“I didn’t realize how badly Trump has eviscerated access to federal #climate data, so I went and looked at the USGS site,” he tweeted Sunday.
In a series of tweets, Gleick noted the extent to which climate-related links have been expunged from the site a month after Donald Trump took over the White House:
- In December, there were 5,932 climate science items linked there (9 were just pictures). Today there are 416 and 292 are just pictures.
- In December 2016, 320 of those items were links to #climate data. Today, 0 links to data. 5,271 were web links. Now, 0 web links. “And the USGS “Effects of #Climate Change” webpage had 2,825 items in December. […]
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Thursday, September 21st, 2017
Kall Holloway, - Alternet
Stephan: And here following the story about suppressing data, as if I had conjured it up to make the point, is today's proof of the Republican disinformation operation.
It's quite extraordinary. All of this is so blatant and transparent. Yet it goes on as if it were normal.
Republican Governor Scott Walker
Never underestimate Republicans’ willingness to pull out a shovel when it seems they’ve hit rock bottom. For proof one need look no further than the Free Telegraph, a website purposely constructed to look like a news publication that’s actually a hyperpartisan bit of propaganda launched by the Republican Governors Association.
The Associated Press [3] reports the website “blares headlines about the virtues of GOP governors, while framing Democrats negatively,” and instructs readers on how to receive “breaking news alerts.” The apparent motive is to fool voters into thinking they are reading a bonafide news outlet, and the site includes “no acknowledgement that it was a product of an official party committee whose sole purpose is to get more Republicans elected.”
Since the AP outed the site as partisan propaganda, MSNBC reports that [4] a note in tiny, hard-to-read type has been added at the very bottom of the page, indicating that the publication is “Paid for by Republican Governors Association.” The fake news site—to borrow a description Republicans use for authentic news organizations reporting […]
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Thursday, September 21st, 2017
Stephan A. Schwartz, Editor - Schwartzreport
Stephan: I have to make a correction. Yesterday I ran a piece on Bill Gates funding cannabis research. The piece was sent to me by a physician in a "clinic." It looked legitimate and came from a physician so I ran it. It turns out the whole thing was a scam, and I fell for it. I failed to double check and was duped as a number of you have written to tell me. I have deleted the piece, and I apologize.
-- Stephan
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Wednesday, September 20th, 2017
CRISTINA CABRERA, Social Media Editor - Talking Point Memo
Stephan: Jeff Sessions, in my view, is an even worse Attorney General than John Mitchell during the Nixon administration. His entire record in public life is that of a White supremacist Christofascist. Saying he is utterly unsuited and incompetent in his post, and should never have been appointed let alone confirmed is true but irrelevant. He was appointed, he was confirmed, and he is in the post, and he is doing real damage.
At a time when trust in law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. is at an all time low, when St. Louis has been in turmoil for days because of police brutality, what is Sessions' response. Here it is. Frighteningly tone deaf and dangerous.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions
Credit: AP Andrew Harnik
The Department of Justice announced on Friday that it will significantly scale back the Collaborative Reform Initiative, an Obama-era program aimed at improving police departments and their relations with the communities they serve.
The changes would end the program’s investigations into the departments and suggestions for reform, according to the
Washington Post.
Instead, the Justice Department will focus on “targeted assistance directly to local law enforcement based on their identified needs and requests.”
“This is a course correction to ensure that resources go to agencies that require assistance rather than expensive wide-ranging investigative assessments that go beyond the scope of technical assistance and support,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a press release.
Run by the DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), the Reform Initiative is a voluntary program created in 2014 in response to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Police departments that signed up for it worked with COPS to receive public reports outlining problems and solutions with regards their policing practices.
The announcement came on […]
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Wednesday, September 20th, 2017
AMANDA MARCOTTE, Politics Writer - Salon
Stephan: Once again it is at the operational level of departments and agencies that the major damage being done to American by the Trump administration is playing out. Here is the latest on Interior Secretary Zinke, and his attack on public lands. Like Sessions at Justice, Zinke is a man with an ideological agenda and very little real understanding of the issues addressed by his agency.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.
Credit: Gage Skidmore/flickr
In April, Donald Trump released an executive order calling on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review the national monument designations ordered by various presidents over the past two decades, to determine if those decisions were “made without adequate public outreach and coordination with relevant stakeholders.” On Sunday, The Washington Post leaked the memo that Zinke wrote, post-review, to the White House, which the administration has so far declined to release.
Reading the draft memo, what quickly becomes clear is that the only people Zinke considers “relevant stakeholders” when it comes to national monuments are various extraction industries, from timber to oil and gas to commercial fishing. Local residents, Native American tribes, businesses that rely on the tourism industry, environmentalists and future generations of Americans can all go jump in a polluted lake.
“It confirmed our suspicions that this will be the largest rollback of protections for public lands in American history,” said Kate Kelly,
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