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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Stephan: Tonight as I was preparing dinner I was listening to MSNBC cover the funeral of officer Brian Sicknick who was killed by the Trumpian insurrectionists on 6 January. Lawrence O'Donnell, who had worked for years as a Senate staffer almost broke up as he reported on what we were seeing as President and Dr. Biden come to honor the fallen officer.
My wife came into the kitchen and said, "How do you think Fox is reporting this?" So we changed the channel to Fox, and they weren't covering it at all. Lou Dobbs, whom I find a particularly odious propagandist was whining about how the Senate Republicans were not being aggressive enough in stopping Trump's impeachment trial. Not a word or a single image covered the ceremony in the Capitol -- only the third time in history such a thing has ever happened.
Juliet Eilperin, Senior National Affairs Correspondent - The Washington Post
Stephan: More good news from the Biden administration. They went to court so that the EPA could get back to operating on science and not the Trumpian crap of the last four years. This is an essential change.
Trumpian orc and former -EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler at the White House in May 2019. Credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
The ruling by Judge Brian Morris, chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, Great Falls, marked a victory for environmental groups and public health advocates. Just two weeks before Biden’s inauguration, EPA finalized a rule requiring researchers to disclose the raw data involved in their public health studies before the agency could rely upon their conclusions.
The rule, which was made effective immediately, would assign less weight to studies built on medical histories and other confidential data from human subjects where the underlying information was not revealed. That sort of research — including dose-response studies, which evaluate how much a person’s exposure to a substance increases the risk of harm — have been used […]
Stephan: A few weeks ago I posted a paper, The Failure of Conservative Politics to Foster Wellbeing, I had written for a peer reviewed journal showing factually that Republican state governance, based on social outcome data, is universally inferior to Democratic governance. Here is the same comparison at the presidential level. The facts are clear: Republican governance at both the state and federal level is inferior. Anyone who votes Republican is voting against their own wellbeing.
Presidents and their economic performance. Graphics by Yaryna Serkez
A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.
It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”
Annual G.D.P. growth rate
Starting president’s economic clock…Start of the termSix months laterYear later0%2468RooseveltKennedyJohnsonClintonReaganCarterFordNixonEisenhowerObamaG.H.W. BushTrumanG.W. BushTrumpNote: Real G.D.P. adjusted for inflation and seasonal fluctuations.·Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under […]
Stephan: If you read me regularly you know I have been telling you since the 1990s that there would be three internal migrations in the United States: Away from the coasts because of sea rise, out of the Southwest because of lack of water, and rising temperatures, and out of the central states because of catastrophic weather events like tornadoes, and that not even a fraction of what needed to be done was being planned for.
Well, here is a story about the Southwest that confirms my predictions. Greater Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque are all doomed by the end of the century, and we still aren't doing anything substantive to prepare for this.
View of the downtown Phoenix, Arizona city skyline as seen from South Mountain Park Credit: Robyn Beck/AFP/ Getty
“There will come a day when the temperature won’t fall below 100 degrees in Phoenix during the nighttime,” Dr. Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University who wrote “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,” told Salon. “That will be a threshold of some kind.”
The American Southwest has long been a refuge for those seeking the health benefits of warm, dry air and sunny days. But too much of a good thing is not a good thing — for human health or for the natural ecosystem. Now, the Southwest is facing a reckoning: decades of human development, coupled with rising global temperatures as a result of carbon emissions, means that many major cities in the Southwest may become uninhabitable for humans this century.
The reason has to do with something called the Heat Island Effect, a concept that describes the effect in which the densely-populated, central parts of a city with lots of concrete and asphalt will have higher temperatures […]
Stephan: How stupid is the Fox disinformation operation? How about finding it nefarious that the White House Press secretary actually does research to make sure she is giving a reporter an accurate answer? So different from the incompetent liars of the last administration.
Fox News host John Roberts on Tuesday suggested that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had “nefarious” motives because she reportedly tried to research her answers before facing reporters on camera.
Roberts hosted a nearly 5-minute on-air discussion with conservative pundit Joe Concha about a Daily Beast report that claimed Psaki had asked reporters for their questions in advance of the briefing.
“This idea that the White House is inquiring of reporters what’s on their minds and maybe sort of what direction their questions are going in, how much of this do you think is nefarious and how much of this do you think is simply click-bait on the part of the Daily Beast?” Roberts wondered.Tired of ads? Want to support our progressive journalism? Click to learn more.
“This is the way things have always worked,” Concha admitted, “in terms of gaggles beforehand with the press secretary. Basically a way to have an informal conversation around where these correspondents’ heads are at in terms of topics.”
But Concha argued that Psaki was wrong to follow the tradition.
“Shouldn’t the press secretary be able to defend the policies and perspectives of the White House without […]
Stephan: In today's edition, I have chosen to run only a single story. I do this because I think it is very important that every American, and certainly all my readers, read this report, and absorb what it is saying. We came within a hairsbreadth of losing our democracy. I don't think that has fully sunk in for many yet, and it needs to if we are ever to find our way out of the darkness of the Trump years. Please read this, and pass it on to your friends and family. It is going to take the collective intention of all of us to get what needs to be done accomplished.
Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan: Lest you have any doubts that Donald Trump fomented insurrection, and deserves to be convicted in his second impeachment and then, in my opinion, tried and convicted in a court of law and sent to prison, this extraordinary act of investigative reporting should dispel them. Never since the Constitution Convention of 1787 has any sitting president behaved in this manner.
By Thursday the 12th of November, President Donald J. Trump’s election lawyers were concluding that the reality he faced was the inverse of the narrative he was promoting in his comments and on Twitter. There was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough “irregularities” to reverse the outcome in the courts.
Mr. Trump did not, could not, win the election, not by “a lot” or even a little. His presidency would soon be over.
Allegations of Democratic malfeasance had disintegrated in embarrassing fashion. A supposed suitcase of illegal ballots in Detroit proved to be a box of camera equipment. “Dead voters” were turning up alive in television and newspaper interviews.
The week was coming to a particularly demoralizing close: In Arizona, the Trump lawyers were preparing to withdraw their main lawsuit as the state tally showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. leading by more than 10,000 votes, against the 191 ballots they had identified for challenge.
As he met with colleagues to discuss strategy, the president’s deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, was urgently summoned to the Oval Office. […]
Stephan: The ICE detention centers -- a benign euphemism -- are a part of the American Gulag that doesn't get much media attention, and that many Americans don't even fully understand exists. It is a particularly morally culpable part of the gulag, where humans are held in detention for profit. Like the illness profit system it is a glaring example of the principal moral cancer confronting the country -- that the only social priority in the United States is profit.
South Texas Detention Complex, Pearsall, TX. Photograph: David Taylor
“Imagine how it feels there, locked up, the whole day without catching the air, without … seeing the light, because that is a cave there, in there you go crazy; without being able to see my family, just being able to listen to them on a phone and be able to say, ‘OK, bye,’ because the calls are expensive.”
That’s how Alejandro, an asylum seeker from Cuba, described his time in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center.
His account is one of dozens captured in a collection of audio recordings as part of a project aiming to show how the US immigration detention system, the world’s largest, has commodified people as part of a for-profit industry.
“We’ve commodified human displacement,” said artist David Taylor, who has used drones to take aerial photography and video of 28 privately run Ice detention centers near the US southern border, in California, Arizona and Texas.
While accounts of abuse and exploitation from inside facilities appear in the news media, the detention centers are usually in isolated, underpopulated areas with […]
