Stephan: Benjamin Franklin, during the colonial period the Deputy Post Master General, during the Constitutional Convention convinced the other Founders of the importance of the Post Office and made such an impression that they literally wrote its importance into the Constitution. At the other end of the spectrum two centuries later we have Trumpian orc and grifter Louis DeJoy, who is doing his best to privatize the Post Office completely and to sabotage it in its present configuration.
The price of a first-class stamp will go up 3 cents later in August to help pay for service changes. Credit: Jenny Kane/AP
Two of the newly confirmed members of the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors spoke out Friday against Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to slow delivery of first-class mail.
But the board took no steps to stop or even modify the 10-year plan despite the concerns expressed by the board members and regulators.
Ronald Stroman, one of three new governors named by President Biden, said that intentionally slowing first-class mail and package delivery by changing service standards is “strategically ill-conceived, creates dangerous risks that are not justified by the relatively low financial return, and doesn’t meet our responsibility as an essential part of America’s critical infrastructure.”
Stroman, a former deputy postmaster general, noted at the Board of Governors open meeting that the country was “only beginning to emerge from a global pandemic” and is now struggling with the delta variant and that mail delivery was below pre-pandemic levels.
He added that the changes “disproportionally impact our seniors, middle- and low-income Americans, [and] small […]
Stephan: Louis De Joy, major Trumpian orc and grifter, is so blatantly corrupt it is amazing to me that he is still the Postmaster General this long into Biden's administration. I see it as a demonstration of how corrupt American government has become. Write your Representative and Senators please and tell them it is time DeJoy was thrown out of office and prosecuted.
Major grifter, Trump orc, and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy
U.S. lawmakers and ethics advocates on Friday reiterated calls for firing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy after The Washington Post revealed that the United States Postal Service awarded a $120 million contract to XPO Logistics, a company he helped run and “with which his family maintains financial ties.”
“Louis DeJoy is a walking conflict of interest,” declared Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). “He had no business being named postmaster general, and he has no business continuing to serve.”
“It’s long past time to #FireDeJoy,” added Connolly, chair of the House Subcommittee on Government Operations, which has legislative jurisdiction over the Postal Service.
Connolly was far from alone in responding to the report by calling for DeJoy’s removal.
“How in the world is Louis DeJoy still the postmaster general?” asked Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.). “It is long past time to #FireDeJoy.”
DeJoy’s personal spokesperson referred most of the newspaper’s questions to USPS—whose spokesperson “said that DeJoy did not participate in the procurement process for the XPO contract, which was competitively bid.” The company’s spokesperson noted that XPO was not awarded some other contracts […]
Stephan: I just don't think most Americans realize how diligently and purposefully the leaders of the Republican Party are developing a strategy and tactics to overturn the democracy of the United States and to render your vote meaningless if they don't like the way you voted. This party is seeking to replace democracy with White supremacist christofascism and they are pursuing this with great earnestness. Part of the problem, I think, is that corporate media are not covering what is going on appropriately or accurately, nor with enough emphasis. Here is an essay that makes these points.
The press and pundit corps are overwhelmingly stocked with products of elite colleges and universities. This is acutely the case with the Ivy Leagues, from which ambitious students can jump directly to the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the networks. (Josh Barro, a member of the Very Serious Debate Club, is a textbook example.) They are not normal, which is not to say bad. But because they were born to power, they tend to reflect power’s views, even as they claim to hold it accountable.
Again, this is not to say bad. (Though it can absolutely be bad.) It is, however, to say that normal people are seeing things that people in power, and that people who come from power and sympathize with its views, are not seeing clearly. To give you an example, normal people might see that the GOP, up and down the party, has made lying central to its objective of ruling without democratic accountability. Members of the press and pundit corps, on account of knowing that lying is just something you do when […]
Jonathan Patz MD MPH, Director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor and the John P. Holton Chair of Health and the Environment with appointments in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Population Health Sciences. - Ideas.TED.com
Stephan: Every day as I read the latest climate change and sea rise reports in the media and academic literature, I come away with the conviction that people all over the world, and particularly in the United States simply have no idea how violently their lives are going to be upended by this restructuring the earth's environmental meta-systems. Jonathan Patz, on the other hand thinks about little else, and is very well qualified to do so. He served as a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC)—the organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. He also co-chaired the health expert panel of the U.S. National Assessment on Climate Change, a report mandated by the U.S. Congress.
When you think about climate change, what’s the first image that comes to your mind?
Most of us think about a stranded polar bear in a far-flung Arctic landscape, and as a result we humans often feel disconnected from the threat.
But it’s not your imagination — nor the polar bears’ — that the Northern Hemisphere is heating up. In the US alone, by mid-century, almost all cities in the eastern half of the country will have a tripling in the number of extremely hot days above 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
And it’s not just warming land surfaces.
The oceans are heating, we’re seeing more category 4 and category 5 hurricanes, and sea levels are rising. We’re also experiencing disruptions of the hydrologic cycle — the movement of water on, above and below the Earth’s surface — which means we’ll see more severe droughts, floods and fires.
Together, these climate extremes will affect human health through many pathways. From heat waves and pollution to vector-borne diseases and water contamination, here’s why climate change is a public health crisis that affects all of us.
Extreme heat threatens our food supply
Consider the below projections of future summer […]
Stephan: Listening to the lies spewing out of Fox, or reading the disinformation published on Infowars or Breitbart always makes me angry. It is so deliberate, so dishonest, and it is so obvious that the Republicans doing it know very well what they are doing. The latest is their bald-faced lies that the Covid crisis is not due to anti-vaxxers Republicans but is due to immigrants.
Three Republican fascists Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson spreading lies Credit: Salon/Getty
The GOP strategy to tank Joe Biden’s presidency was supposed to be a simple one: jack up COVID-19 rates by convincing Fox News viewers that only filthy liberals get vaccinated, then blame Biden for the surge while a media plagued by bothsidesism plays along.
But the plan hit one little, unforeseen snag: The mainstream media, which did play along for a bit with headlines blaming Biden, suddenly switched gears in mid-July. The severity of the delta variant surge pushed the media to actually start covering both the anti-vaccine propaganda apparatus at Fox News and the fact that COVID-19 hot spots appeared concentrated in parts of the country where people mainline such propaganda. Now, the whole evil scheme has gone sideways. Polling shows Americans are blaming right-wingers and the unvaccinated instead of Biden — and now Republicans are in a panic.
And what do Republicans always do in a panic? Old-fashioned race-baiting.
Rather than blame the obvious culprits for the pandemic — Fox News-addled anti-vaxxers — Republicans are […]
