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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.
Andrew Blankstein, Tom Winter, Brenda Breslauer and Rich Schapiro, Reporters - NBC News
Stephan: Remember when the United States leaders lectured nations in South America and the Middle East, and elsewhere, condemning them for violence during elections, and the failure of their democracies. Well, in less than four years Trump, and the morons who support him, have so destroyed our own democracy that other nations now view us with pity or contempt. All in less than four years, so much for Reagan's "shining city on a hill."
White terrorist Justin Hall of Roanoke stands guard with his firearm near the Smyth County Courthouse in Marion, Va., Credit: Andre Teague / Bristol Herald Courier/AP
The summer months were unrelenting for John Clair, a police chief in rural Virginia.
Clair’s normally sleepy town of Marion was the site of two Black Lives Matter protests where heavily armed militia members showed up in droves, alongside other counterdemonstrators, and engaged in tense standoffs with protesters.
“People would call me up and ask how I’m doing,” Clair recalled. “And what I’d say is, ‘I’m dealing with the most complex leadership challenge of my career in the midst of the most widespread social crisis in 100 years. But other than that, I’m doing OK.’”
Clair is now grappling with a different kind of leadership challenge: Election Day.
He’s spent the past several weeks trying to figure out how to provide security at the polls amid the threat of armed troublemakers without scaring away the kind of voters who might be put off by the sight of uniformed policemen.
Stephan: Dictators and authoritarians don't like a free press. Whenever they come to power journalists are suddenly at physical risk. I confess I never expected to see such a situation arise in the United States but, thanks to Trump's support and encouragement, White terrorist gun-obsessed thugs are threatening exactly the kind of violence we used to condemn. Now Dr. Fauci and journalists have to move around protected by guards.
Private security guard Matthew Dolloff, center, is seen in an altercation with demonstrator Lee Keltner, left, on Saturday, Oct. 10, 2020, in downtown Denver. Dolloff, hired to protect the 9News television producer seen at right, is expected to be charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Keltner following this altercation.
When protests turned violent in Denver in June, ABC national news hired local freelance video journalist Carl Filoreto to cover the demonstrations — and paid for armed security guards to accompany him as cops fired tear gas and projectiles at people angry over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
“I never felt threatened in Denver but knowing you have that extra set of eyes on you that are there for protection, it’s very reassuring when you’re out covering that kind of thing,” Filoreto said. “You just never know what spark is going to incite a major confrontation.”
The fatal shooting of a demonstrator by a security guard working for 9News following demonstrations in Denver on Oct. 10 illustrates just how quickly […]
Stephan: If Trump wins, I think we will see the end of America as a democratic republic, and 240 years of democratic republic history will come to an end. Even if Biden and Harris win, it is going to take a massive effort to restore the government to what used to be taken as a democratic norm.
Who remembers Tom Price? Gee, you might say, that name sounds familiar … he had something to do with the Trump administration, didn’t he?
You’re right! He was one of those guys who resigned from a cabinet position because he was abusing something … let me see … think I’ve got it … he was the one who took all those flights on private jets, something like a million dollars worth of flights, including on military aircraft during trips to Europe and Africa with his wife. He refunded $51,887 to the federal government, which he said accounted for the cost of his seat on private charter flights he took before he resigned from Trump’s cabinet. But that was just the cost of his seat. The total amount spent to fly old Tom Price around the world on private jets was more than $400,000 in taxpayer dollars.
What cabinet position did he hold that made it necessary for so many trips on chartered private jets and other business aircraft? What was he doing […]
Henry Jacoby, Gary Yohe and Richard Richels, William F. Pounds Professor of Management, Emeritus, in the MIT Sloan School of Management | Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University | Director Climate Change Research at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) - Yale Climate Connections
Stephan: The time is upon us to deal with climate change in a meaningful way or face the consequences. It will be very interesting to see how Trump and Biden address this issue in the coming debate.
Our essays in this series have presented compelling scientific evidence about the warming of the planet, reviewed the evidence that human activity is its principal cause, and discussed the resulting economic and environmental damages.
Now comes the question of what we are going to do about it. The options are clear:
– Nations can work toward eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the scale of future warming. – Governments and private actors can, and will, invest in measures to protect home and livelihood from effects of changes that cannot be prevented. – Or human societies and natural ecosystems will suffer the severe harms of inaction.
The more they (really we) do now and in the near future, the smaller will be the residual damages imposed on ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. The choice is ours.
The suffering is already here, of course. In some places, it is almost impossible to bear despite growing investments in adaptation. So what is missing? A commitment to emissions reductions appropriate to the special nature of the climate change threat. Fortunately, with a smart choice of policy measures, […]
Henry Fountain, Climate change journalist - The New York Times
Stephan: Water is destiny as I have been telling you for decades.
Salt flats of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Government forecasters said drought conditions are expected to worsen this winter across much of the South and Southwest.Credit…Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock
Nearly half of the continental United States is gripped by drought, government forecasters said Thursday, and conditions are expected to worsen this winter across much of the Southwest and South.
Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said a lack of late-summer rain in the Southwest had expanded “extreme and exceptional” dry conditions from West Texas into Colorado and Utah, “with significant drought also prevailing westward through Nevada, Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.”
Much of the Western half of the country is now experiencing drought conditions and parts of the Ohio Valley and the Northeast are as well, Mr. Halpert said during a teleconference announcing NOAA’s weather outlook for this winter.
This is the most widespread drought in the continental United States since 2013, he said, covering more than 45 percent of the Lower 48 […]
Stephan: Water is destiny, whether there is too much or too little.
The coastal town of North Wildwood, N.J. experienced this flooding from a mix of high tide and a winter storm in 2016. Credit: Getty
As if municipalities and muni-bond investors don’t have enough to worry about with a recession and dropping tax revenue because of the coronavirus, a recent report from Moody’s Investor Service suggests coastal state and local governments face increased credit risks from rising sea levels as more frequent and severe flooding threaten coastal communities’ economies, property values and critical infrastructure.
These increased credit risks could hurt municipalities from smaller towns economically dependent on fishing and shipping to even rich beach towns looking to borrow in the $3.85 trillion muni bond market to pay for everything from road repaving to a seawall.
To be sure, insurers and other credit-ratings firms have pointed out climate-change risks for municipalities before, but that was before COVID-19 weakened their finances. States and local governments have seen tax revenues drop and expenses rise because of the coronavirus pandemic. Some states, such as New Jersey, were already in bad shape […]
Stephan: This is the best exegetic essay I have read in quite a while that addresses a central principle of the right; we are not a democracy. This explains a great deal about why the Right behaves as it does, and the choices it makes.
Republican Senator Mike Less of Utah
If the most urgent questions raised by this election season have been “What kind of democracy do we live in?” and “What kind of democracy do we want to live in?,” then Senator Mike Lee, of Utah, has an answer. Just hours before the F.B.I. revealed a plot by members of a white-supremacist militia to kidnap the governor of Michigan, the Republican senator let loose a volley of tweets that could be interpreted as a shorthand version of the gospel of many on the right. “Democracy isn’t the objective: liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are,” Lee wrote. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” Earlier, he had written, “We’re not a democracy.”
As shocking as this sounds, especially from a sitting member of Congress, it is a point of view that comes from a hidebound reading of the Constitution and stems from a selective interpretation of the Framers’ intent, articulated most directly by James Madison in the Federalist Papers. “We may define a republic to be, […]
John Fabian Witt, Professor of Law, Yale University - The New York Times
Stephan: If Biden and Harris win, God willing, and the Senate is flipped, I think the first priority Biden and Harris should have is cleaning house, firing everyone appointed by Trump, and reconstructing our democracy, and that includes impeaching a long list of judges appointed and confirmed by the Republicans. Your good health, and the good health of your family, may depend on this. Here is why I think this.
Chief Justice John Marshall Credit: Associated Press
Alongside growing controversy over judicial nominations, court reform and Covid-19 policies, American law is in the midst of a little-noticed paradigm shift in courts’ treatment of public health measures.
The Republican Party’s campaign to take over the federal and state courts is quietly upending a long and deeply embedded tradition of upholding vital public health regulations. The result has been a radically novel and potentially catastrophic sequence of decisions blocking state responses to the coronavirus pandemic.
For centuries, American constitutional law granted state governments broad public health powers. “Salus populi suprema lex,” the old saying went: The health of the people is the supreme law. Such authority went back to the beginning of the Republic. In the famous 1824 case of Gibbons v. Ogden, Chief Justice John Marshall defended the “acknowledged power of a State to provide for the health of its citizens.” States, he explained, were empowered to enact “inspection laws, quarantine laws” and “health laws of every description.”
Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, who was arguably the most […]
