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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: The EPA has been gutted by Trump and turned into an agency in support of the carbon energy industries. Here is the latest obscenity from EPA. As this article reports, even people in those industries are appalled.
A gas flare in Loving County, Texas. By some estimates, methane has 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide, though it dissipates faster. Credit: Angus Mordant/Reuters
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected in the coming days to lift Obama-era controls on the release of methane, a powerful climate-warming gas that is emitted from leaks and flares in oil and gas wells.
The new rule on methane pollution, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, has been expected for months, and will be made public before Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke anonymously to avoid publicly pre-empting the official announcement.
The rollback of the methane rule is the latest move in the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to weaken environmental standards, which has continued unabated during the coronavirus pandemic.
In April, the E.P.A. weakened rules on the release of toxic chemicals from coal-fired power plants, loosened curbs on climate-warming tailpipe pollution and opted not to strengthen a regulation on industrial soot emissions that have been linked to respiratory diseases, including Covid-19.
JOSIAH BATES (CAMDEN, N.J.),and KARL VICK (MINNEAPOLIS) , - TIME
Stephan: In my opinion, the entire American law enforcement system needs to be taken apart and reconstituted, and the sheriff’s departments should be eliminated altogether. I say this on the basis of objectively verifiable evidence. My views have nothing to do with politics, which I see only as a way of implementation. Like all my views they are based entirely on wellbeing. What does and does not produce it. There is no other developed Western nation that has anything like the American law enforcement social outcome data. We are number one, for sure, on police shootings, deaths, incarceration, racism, and a host of other trends. Here is a good exegetic essay arguing this.
Credit: WIDLINE CADET (CAMDEN, N.J.) and RAHIM FORTUNE (MINNEAPOLIS)/ TIME
In Minneapolis, the first days after George Floyd’s killing exist in memory as kind of a blur. Even so, the burning of the Third Precinct police station on May 28 was a signal event, and not only for residents of the south side, where Floyd was killed and so many buildings went up in flames. Five miles to the north, residents of the city’s other substantially Black area worried the chaos was coming their way. That night, Phillipe Cunningham, a city-council member representing part of North Minneapolis, drove around for 2½ hours without seeing any cops at all. They were hunkered in their stations.
In the void they’d left, a community stepped up. On Emerson Avenue, gang members took pride of place in the phalanx guarding the So Low Grocery Outlet, one of the north side’s only two super-markets. “We locked it down for seven nights,” says the Rev. Jerry McAfee, a Baptist preacher who works with gangs. Members of his patrol were identifiable by green […]
Troy Wolverton, - Reader Supported News/ Business Insider
Stephan: I am always amused when I hear or read some corporate millionaire whining about socialism. The truth that dare not speak its name is that America is, and for decades has been, an overwhelmingly socialist nation. There is no other developed Western nation that even approaches the level of American socialism. It's just that it is socialism for the rich, not in support of societal wellbeing. Bernie Sanders has always been very clear about this, which is one of the reasons I have supported him
Bernie Sanders showed Friday he isn’t afraid to call out hypocrisy — particularly when it comes from someone like Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Musk on Friday tweeted out a meme critical of Sanders and his brand of socialism. The tweet was in response to an article about a bill Sanders introduced Thursday that would place a 60% tax on the wealth gained by billionaires such as Musk during the coronavirus pandemic. The meme, dubbed the “Official Bernie Sanders drinking game!” showed a picture of Sanders along with the text: “Every time the Bernster mentions a free government program, chug somebody else’s beer.
Rachael Bade and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: Thursday's Republican Scum Report shocks even me. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who will be the Republican candidate from Georgia, from a district so Red she will almost certainly win, even by her party's appalling standards is an outlier. She is openly a White Supremacist anti-semite. That men and women and Georgis would vote for such a person is depressing enough, but the loud embracement of her by Trump and Republican Congressional leaders is just gob-smacking. It think it is telling us that this election over the next 83 days is basically going to be a contest between White racists and the rest of America. The Republicans are betting they can suppress or sabotage the voting process to the point that even though they are a minority, they can win -- if not the vote, the electoral college.
Construction executive Marjorie Taylor Greene, third from left, claps with her supporters at a watch party in Rome, Ga., on Aug. 11, 2020. Credit: Mike Stewart/AP
President Trump and Republican leaders’ embrace of a House candidate who has made racist statements and espoused the QAnon conspiracy theory is again highlighting the party’s willingness to tolerate extreme and bigoted positions.
Trump on Wednesday tweeted that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her Georgia primary Tuesday evening, was a “future Republican Star,” who was “strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” The office of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who ignored multiple pleas from his members to wade into the primary to stop Greene — has said that he will seat her on congressional committees.
The decision has left many House Republicans privately griping about irresponsible leadership, even as they do little publicly to challenge the party’s position or to state their opposition to Greene’s joining their conference if she is elected in November, as is expected, in a reliably Republican district.
Stephan: This is what the Republicans have been working on, underneath the Trumpian fecal storms, and it will take a generation to cleanse the American judiciary of toxic choices.
Obama inherited a country in sharp decline as a result of Bush, Cheney, and the Republicans in Congress and pulled the country back together again. Now Biden and Harris are going to have to do the same thing all over again. Any historian can tell you that Republicans from Reagan on have always harmed the nation more than they have helped it, and Democrats have always left the country in better condition than the found it. That isn't partisan, that's just facts.
President Trump arrives at the U.S. Capitol to attend the Republican’s weekly policy luncheon on March 10, 2020, in Washington, D.C. He is flanked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Sen. Roy Blunt. Credit: Samuel Corum/Getty
After Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate in early 2015, they set out to pack the federal courts with radical right-wing judges. Mitch McConnell said, “My goal is to do everything we can for as long as we can to transform the federal judiciary, because everything else we do is transitory.” Under Article III of the Constitution, federal judges serve for life, so a 50-year-old appointed today could serve 30 years or even longer.
McConnell and his sidekick, Sen. Lindsey Graham, started by refusing to confirm President Obama’s judicial appointments. Most notably, they wouldn’t even consider Obama’s appointment of moderate Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court. When President Trump took office, there were more than 100 empty federal judgeships waiting to be filled with Trumpian favorites.
In today’s hardball politics, the federal courts are especially important. Even if […]
Agence France-Presse, - Raw Story/Agence France-Presse
Stephan: I am always trying to look for good news trends, but they are very hard to find. But here, at least, is some good news. I just liked the story, that's why I'm running it.
Beluga whale Credit: Agence France-Presse
Two beluga whales from a Shanghai aquarium have returned to the sea in an Icelandic sanctuary, conservationists said Monday, expressing hopes of creating a model for rehoming some 300 belugas currently in captivity.
Little White and Little Grey, two 13-year-old females, left behind their previous lives entertaining visitors at the Changfeng Ocean World in June 2019 when they were flown to Iceland’s Klettsvik Bay in the Westman Islands, in specially tailored containers.
On Friday, they were moved from their landbased facility to care pools in the sea at Klettsvik Bay — the first time the two belugas have been in the sea since they were taken from a Russian whale research centre in 2011, the conservation charity Sea Life Trust said in a statement on Monday.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
They will stay in the care pools “for a few weeks” before they are released into the bigger sanctuary, a 32,000-square-meter (344,445-square-foot) sea pen that will become their home, organizers said.
Stephan: An SR reader who is an epidemiologist and part of a coronavirus research team sent me this and asked me to publish it, which I am happy to do. If obesity is an issue for you or someone in your family I would take this very seriously.
For a world crippled by the coronavirus, salvation hinges on a vaccine.
But in the United States, where at least 4.6 million people have been infected and nearly 155,000 have died, the promise of that vaccine is hampered by a vexing epidemic that long preceded COVID-19: obesity.
Scientists know that vaccines engineered to protect the public from influenza, hepatitis B, tetanus and rabies can be less effective in obese adults than in the general population, leaving them more vulnerable to infection and illness. There is little reason to believe, obesity researchers say, that COVID-19 vaccines will be any different.
“Will we have a COVID vaccine next year tailored to the obese? No way,” said Raz Shaikh, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
“Will it still work in the obese? Our prediction is no.”
More than 107 million American adults are obese, and their ability to return safely to work, care for their families and resume […]
Stephan: This is Wednesday's Republican Scum Report. It describes how Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley are both operating as Russian agents seeking to sabotage American democracy. It is unspeakably shameful.
Republican senator and Trumpian orc, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin
Senator Ron Johnson’s investigations involving Ukraine have become a conduit of Russian disinformation.
Earlier this month, Johnson defended himself on a local Wisconsin news station saying, “What have I published, what have I reported on, that is not true, that is any form of Russian disinformation? There has been nothing.” Similarly, in his 11-page letter, Johnson asserted, “It is neither me, Chairman Grassley, nor our committees that are being used to disseminate Russian disinformation.”
The senator surely knows better, and his 11-page defense of his actions reveals it. Published on Monday, Aug. 10, the letter itself contains apparent products of Russian disinformation. And while Johnson denies taking information directly from two specific Ukrainians linked to Russia and its disinformation efforts, he makes no mention of his staff taking information directly from one of those individuals’ principal collaborators, which reportedly occurred over the course of several months.
Fellow Republican Senators — including the previous and current Chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sens. Richard Burr and Read the Full Article
