Friday, September 20th, 2019
Stephan: I have been telling you for more than a decade that one of the great internal migrations facing America is going to be people pouring out of the Southwest because of lack of water and the rise of temperature to unliveable levels. How bad is it going to get? Here's a pretty good take. It is horrifying, and it is happening. This is not theory or speculation. This is reality.
In 2017, PetSmart sold new elastic booties, used as protective coverings to protect dogs’ paws from the hot pavement, as temperatures in Phoenix were forecasted to hit 120 degrees.
Credit: Angie Wang/AP
In every case, these “Big Ones” could be huge disasters not just because of geography and proximity to threats, but also because of decisions to build homes and offices in certain places, ignoring nature. Many other communities in the same regions have similar vulnerabilities.
For too long, we’ve been complacent about climate change and the really scary possibilities of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more of average warming. Two degrees is the amount of warming we are likely to experience by midcentury, and it’s double the warming we’ve experienced to date. As David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, put it in a Vox interview, “being scared about what is possible in the future can be motivating.”
Californians have long been taught to fear and prepare for the next big earthquake — and the state now has stronger infrastructure […]
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Friday, September 20th, 2019
Sophia Tesfaye, Deputy Politics Editor - Salon - AlterNet/Salon
Stephan: The Republican Party from top to bottom, on the basis of their actions and statements, not speculation or partisan bloviation, has become a racist criminal cult attempting to dismantle American democracy. Literally every day there is yet another scandal, another crisis, another example of the Party's corruption. And they make no attempt to hide what they are doing. This report is one of a hundred examples.
Credit: White House
Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Ireland — or more precisely his curious stay at one of President Trump’s hotels — has prompted multiple congressional probes. But the Democrat-led oversight investigations have already drawn complaints and pushback from Trump’s loudest Republican defenders on Capitol Hill, including the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.
Democrats in both the House of Representatives and Senate have sent official letters of inquiry to the vice president’s office seeking specific information on the costs of Pence’s recent stay at Trump International Golf Club in Doonbeg, Ireland. They have imposed a Sept. 19 deadline for the administration and the Trump Organization to turn over relevant documents. Democrats have raised concerns that Pence’s stay at Trump’s resort could have violated the emoluments clause in the Constitution. They’ve asked for details like the cost of the stay, Secret Service protection, and comparable rates for hotels nearby as well as across the country in Dublin, where Pence held meetings with Irish officials and business leaders.
The vice […]
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Friday, September 20th, 2019
Ian Reifowitz, - Daily Kos
Stephan: In the midst of yet another gobsmacking crisis created by Grifter Trump, and his argument that basically he of all the people in the United States is simply above the law, and that neither he, nor any of the companies he controls can even be investigated, I checked Nat Silver's Fivethirtyeight and discovered that Trump's approval rating has actually gone up slightly and is now at 42.1%.
What that tells me is that while yes, we have what Constitutional scholar and Harvard Professor Lawrence Tribe calls "a criminal in the White House," that is just part of the problem. Equally important over 40% of Americans are just fine with this behavior. Here is a review of a book that addresses this issue.
Credit: Getty
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland,
by Jonathan M. Metzl
Trevor was dying. Liver disease and hepatitis C were the causes. Tennessee had not accepted the expansion of Medicaid provided for in the Affordable Care Act, and thus Trevor, a 41-year-old white Tennessean, had gone without health coverage. He strongly supported the decision of his state’s Republican officials on this matter. Had he lived a few miles away, in Kentucky—whose then-governor, a Democrat, had expanded Medicaid with an executive order—he would have been eligible for coverage and thus care that might well have saved his life.
But Trevor wouldn’t have accepted it. He “would rather die” than “support Obamacare or sign up for it.” Why? “We don’t need any more government in our lives,” Trevor answered, before fleshing out his response and fully revealing his thinking: “And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” And there you have […]
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Friday, September 20th, 2019
Carol Rosenberg, - The New York Times
Stephan: It is my view that Guantanamo like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan represents the complete geopolitical failure by successive American administrations both Democrat and Republican. Guantanamo is a moral obscenity, as this report describes.
A communal cellblock for some of the 40 prisoners who are detained at Guantánamo Bay.
Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, CUBA — Holding the Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess as the lone prisoner in Germany’s Spandau Prison in 1985 cost an estimated $1.5 million in today’s dollars. The per-prisoner bill in 2012 at the “supermax” facility in Colorado, home to some of the highest-risk prisoners in the United States, was $78,000.
Then there is Guantánamo Bay, where the expense now works out to about $13 million for each of the 40 prisoners being held there.
According to a tally by The New York Times, the total cost last year of holding the prisoners — including the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — paying for the troops who guard them, running the war court and doing related construction, exceeded $540 million.
The $13 million per prisoner cost almost certainly makes Guantánamo the world’s most expensive detention program. And […]
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Thursday, September 19th, 2019
ANNA M. PHILLIPS, Staff Writer - Los Angles Times
Stephan: While the rest of the world is moving out of carbon powered vehicles as fast as it can because of climate change, Grifter Trump has something quite different in mind. How about we stick with petroleum relax pollution regulations and make the air even dirtier? Is this a case of being stupid, or being owned by the petroleum industry, or doing it to spite Obama, or a combination of all three?
California’s unique authority to set its own tailpipe emissions standards has made the state an environmental leader and irked the Trump administration. Credit: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump is expected Wednesday to revoke a decades-old rule that empowers California to set tougher car emissions standards than those required by the federal government — putting the state and the administration on a path to years of fighting in court.
The move, which has been in the works for much of the last three years, would overturn the foundation for California’s role as an environmental leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality. By revoking a special waiver the state has relied on for years to set its own standards, the administration will be saying that no state can impose more ambitious pollution controls than those adopted by the federal government.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which will formally make the announcement, had no official comment on the plan, which is […]
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