turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalThe Next Likely EPA Chief Has Almost Completed His Former Coal Client's Wish List
Senators can ask Andrew Wheeler all about it during his confirmation hearing Wednesday.
REBECCA LEBER JANUARY 16, 2019 6:00 AM
Bob Murray is a 79-year-old coal baron who brags to news outlets that he calls many of the shots after “eight years of pure hell” under the Obama administration. Murray thinks most environmental, health, and worker safety protections are unlawful, often putting him at odds with other industry interests that appreciate some regulatory oversight.
Murray was an early supporter of President Donald Trump’s, campaigning with him, donating $300,000 to his inauguration, and another million dollars when he wanted Trump to prop up the industry. Shortly after Trump’s election, Murray submitted an action plan in two memos to the Energy Department and Vice President Mike Pence in the White House laying out almost 20 changes to existing policy. His target was primarily the Environmental Protection Agency, but also the DOE and the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration. After only one year, Murray boasted that the Trump administration had already “wiped out” the first page of his almost four-page plan.
And that was months before now-acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler arrived at the EPA. Before he took this post, Wheeler was a lobbyist for Murray Energy Company. “He worked for me for 20 years,” Murray told Politico last year. “Didn’t want to lose him. But the country has him.”
The country may have him as Scott Pruitt’s successor and the 15th administrator of the EPA should his confirmation hearings on Wednesday go as planned. He will be pressed on industry influence, the drop in enforcement, and the shadow left by Pruitt’s scandals, but Democratic protests are unlikely to keep him from the job. Meanwhile, 95 percent of the agency is furloughed thanks to Trump’s fight for a border wall, leaving important inspections undone.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/andrew-wheeler-bob-murray-confirmation-hearing/
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He’s also proposed removing California’s waiver for stricter fuel efficiency standards that effectively sets higher standards for the nation. He proposed a replacement last month for the 2015 Clean Water Rule that removes millions of acres of waterways from federal oversight. One of his greatest strengths is that Wheeler is more adept at operating behind the scenes than his scandal-plagued predecessor, which is what makes him a frustrating target for environmentalists asking the Senate to delay his confirmation until the government reopens.
He’ll still face questions at his hearing about the influence Murray has had at the EPA, though helping his former client is the last thing Wheeler likes to admit he is doing. He told The Columbus Dispatch just before Pruitt resigned, “Yes, I represented a coal company, but I also represented a cheese company.” One of his former clients was Sargento.
November 3, 2020 cannot get here fast enough.......................
GOP ratchets up case to seat Mark Harris by questioning election fraud investigation
Source: Charlotte Observer
BY JIM MORRILL AND
BRIAN MURPHY
JANUARY 15, 2019 03:56 PM,
UPDATED 1 HOUR 10 MINUTES AGO
North Carolina Republicans ratcheted up their drive to put Mark Harris in Congress on Tuesday, questioning “the entire legitimacy” of a state investigation into allegations of election fraud in the 9th Congressional District.
North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Robin Hayes accused elections officials of “one stalling pattern after another,” in a meeting with reporters in Charlotte.
“When there (isn’t) evidence that irregularities would change the outcome of the election, Mark Harris should be certified,” Hayes said. “If they had discovered a shred of evidence, they would have made it public.”
State law, however, allows for the board to call for a new election if “Irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.” The McCready campaign, in a legal brief filed Monday in Wake County Superior Court, called that finding “an inevitable conclusion” to the case.
Read more: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article224556845.html
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But the hearing, originally scheduled for Jan. 11, was delayed indefinitely after a three-judge panel dissolved the board on Dec. 28 as part of a separate legal dispute. Since then, the elections staff has continued its investigation.
A new board is scheduled to be named on Jan. 31.
Board spokesman Patrick Gannon said in the meantime, the staff “continues to conduct a thorough investigation into absentee voting irregularities in the 2018 election.”
“We look forward to presenting a full picture of the investigation to the public when a new State Board is seated,” he said.
And the fascist republicans are still trying to "RatFuck" democracy.....................
November 3, 2020 cannot get here fast enough................
The emerging divide between the Supreme Court's Republicans
The Republican justices are at a crossroads.
IAN MILLHISER
JAN 14, 2019, 12:59 PM
The Supreme Court handed down an easy-to-miss order on Monday holding in favor of Larry Lamont White, a Kentucky man sentenced to death for a 1983 murder. The order in White v. Kentucky is just one paragraph long and it is paired with a dissent from Justice Samuel Alito that is also only a paragraph long.
Neither the Court’s order in White nor Alito’s dissent offer much guidance on how lower courts should handle death penalty cases in the future — the order merely requires the Supreme Court of Kentucky to reconsider its holding that Mr. White is not intellectually disabled in light of the Court’s 2017 decision in Moore v. Texas. But the White order does offer a fascinating window into the internal politics of the Supreme Court.
Alito’s dissent was joined only by Justice Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. That means that at least one, and possibly both, of the Court’s remaining Republicans voted with the majority to order a reconsideration of White’s death sentence (under existing Eighth Amendment precedents, an intellectually disabled person may not be sentenced to die).
The White order, moreover, fits into an emerging pattern within the Supreme Court. Three of the Court’s Republicans — Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch — embrace a will-to-power approach to judging. Republicans control the Court right now, and these three men urge their fellow Republicans to use that power to achieve conservative ends.
https://thinkprogress.org/roberts-and-kavanaugh-versus-the-supreme-court-nihilists-2f4f182c5594/
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For the time being, the Court has not taken up these politically fraught cases. One possible explanation for the Court’s cautiousness is, as I wrote shortly after the Court turned aside the Planned Parenthood cases, is that “Roberts and Kavanaugh want to give the nation some time to forget about how Kavanaugh got his current job before they declare outright war on reproductive choice.”
If this theory is correct, the Court’s period of relative silence is likely to come to an end very soon. Maybe Roberts doesn’t want to relitigate a relatively minor case involving a limited subset of death row inmates, but it is unlikely that he’ll be willing to take a pass forever on issues such as abortion, or whether LGBTQ people should be safe from discrimination.
USA Today publisher targeted for buyout
Source: Associated Press
DENVER (AP) — The publisher of USA Today has received a $1.36 billion buyout bid from a media group with a history of taking over struggling newspapers and slashing jobs.
MNG Enterprises, better known as Digital First Media, said in a letter to Gannett Co. Monday that its leadership team has failed to show that it can run the company effectively.
The newspaper industry has shrunk and consolidated as readers ditch print papers and go online. Estimated U.S. daily newspaper circulation, print and digital combined, fell 11 percent to 31 million in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. As recently as 2000, weekday subscriptions totaled 55.8 million.
In just the last three years, employment in newsrooms has fallen 15 percent.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report that the hedge-fund backed MNG has built up a 7.5 percent stake in Gannett, and that it has been rebuffed repeatedly by the company about a sale.
Gannett said Monday that it has received the offer and it’s under review.
Read more: https://apnews.com/037f74f32f1346978593b80e5bbedae2
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In April, The Post published the editorial headlined “As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved,” calling on Alden Global Capital to sell the newspaper after it cut 30 more positions in the newsroom, leaving it at a fraction of its size just a few years ago.
Then in May , three top figures at the Denver Post, including its former owner, resigned amid budget and staff cuts.
But jobs are being slashed all over at newspapers.
In July media company Tronc Inc. cut half of the New York Daily News’ newsroom staff, including the paper’s editor in chief.
Standing Rock inspired Ocasio-Cortez to run. That's the power of protest
Press on for what you believe in – a young woman’s election to Congress shows climate activism can have unforeseen results
It’s hard right now to remember how hot it was last August on the long sandy beach where the Colorado River meets the Green River in southern Utah. I was a few days into a rafting trip through Cataract Canyon with a bunch of young climate activists, and one of them, Will Munger, was telling me that since his months at the Standing Rock resistance camp, he had been encountering young Native people whose experiences at the protest site had encouraged them to dream of new possibilities and take actions that might otherwise have seemed out of reach.
Wandering back and forth along the edge of the water, we began to discuss how, often, the consequences of an uprising or a movement are not linear. Success and failure are often premature measures and oversimplifications; actions, interventions and conversations change beliefs and create new values, alliances and possibilities. We’d seen this dynamic from many unanticipated uprisings and movements: the indigenous movement Idle No More that began in Canada in 2012, Black Lives Matter, the feminist insurgencies since 2013 and the anti-gun movement in the hands of the Parkland youth.
On a cold day this January, I was thinking again about that conversation as I contemplated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to run for office. “I first started considering running for Congress actually at Standing Rock in North Dakota,” she said late last year. “It was really from that crucible of activism where I saw people putting their lives on the line … for people they’ve never met and never known. When I saw that I knew that I had to do something more.”
In 2016, when LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and others launched the camps protesting the Dakota Access pipeline, they could not have known some of the indirect consequences of their actions – including prompting a young woman from New York City to run for office. Sometimes the results that matter are not direct or intended – though four tribes continue to litigate over the pipeline, and they had a modest court victory on 8 January.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/14/standing-rock-ocasio-cortez-protest-climate-activism
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Cataract Canyon is where the Colorado River pours into the reservoir of stagnant water backed up from Glen Canyon Dam. When Glen Canyon Dam was completed, a little more than 50 years ago, most people – whether they loved or hated this massive intervention in the wilderness – imagined that the reservoir would stand for centuries. But the dam is failing, thanks to over allocation of the river’s water and to the way climate change has reduced rainfall and snowfall in its watershed.
At the end of my journey with Will and the other climate activists, I saw over and over how the river was cutting new channels through the silt that had built up when the reservoir was higher; how what was stagnant was now active again. This was never supposed to happen, or it was supposed to happen hundreds of years hence.
“Let us never, ever, ever give up,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez the day after her swearing-in, adding “It wasn’t long ago that we felt our lives were over; that there were only so many do-overs until it was too late, or too much to take…. I honestly thought as a 28-year-old waitress I was too late; that the train of my fulfilled potential had left the station.” Climate change tells is there is no time to waste. But history tells us that social change works in indirect and unpredictable ways, and that it’s worth pressing on for what you believe in.
• Rebecca Solnit is a Guadian US columnist, and author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions
Rather than consider bills to reopen government, McConnell keeps Senate arguing about Israel
The GOP-controlled Senate may take its third vote on proceeding to a likely unconstitutional bill that won't reopen government.
JOSH ISRAEL
JAN 14, 2019, 9:29 AM
America’s longest-ever partial government shutdown gets longer and more harmful by the minute, but the one man with the power to bypass the president and resolve the situation is too busy focusing of arguing about Middle East politics to do anything.
Monday marks the 24th day of the government shutdown, making it the longest in U.S. history by three days. Trump’s refusal to fund large portions of the government unless Congress gives him billions of dollars to pay for a border wall he’d repeatedly promised would be funded entirely by Mexico has already cost the nation’s economy billions of dollars, left hundreds of thousands of federal workers struggling to make ends meet without paychecks, and left vital government services like food safety inspection effectively on pause.
The Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives (along with a dozen fed-up Republicans) has passed multiple bills to reopen all or parts of the government immediately. While these bills could become law with a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate, notwithstanding any potential Trump veto, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has repeatedly blocked attempts to even give them a vote on the senate floor, calling them a waste of time.
While McConnell believes debating legislation to fund TSA screeners, border security agents, and the federal court system to be unnecessary, he has supported further debate about the Middle East. For the third consecutive week, the Senate is scheduled to spend Monday considering S. 1, the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019.
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-shutdown-smashes-record-for-longest-ever-mcconnells-senate-will-argue-about-israel-b43abf20f25f/
Rubio did this same stunt, when he injected a bill in the debate to gut the ACA, to deflect from the present issue........................... .
November 3, 2020 cannot get here fast enough......................
Prior to Louisiana trip, the orange one, who earlier thought he was going to Tennessee was asked
Have you ever worked for Russia...............his answer was No.............
I just gotta ask...................he has lied over 6, 400 times, what makes everyone think he is telling the truth now.................not much.....................what else do you think he is going to say.......................well yeah................
And I just caught part of the rambling............but what I did hear was not one questions about the minutes or the linguists notes from the Helsinki meeting...............if he had them..............anyone else hear that question, and a answer does anyone have the feed from MSNBC .........................
Amazing.................
AM JOY REID MSNBC BREAKING NEWS .......................1/12/2019
The Media talking heads should be bringing this shut down and placing this
partial shut down on two people......................the orange hair narcissistic malignant psychopath, and the head cheese in the senate.....................at the top of every hour and a half hour they should be saying that the orange hair malignant psychopath ( trump) caused this , and that "guy" leading the senate can bring the bills from the House to the floor to vote on ( McConnell t) to vote up or down on the bills that's it...................place this issue squarely at these two hypocrites feet.................end of story.
And if twinkle toes un-indicted individual #1 vetoes the bills then let's see if they override the veto.....................
Because I am not in the mood to have these two and others in the fascist libertarian right wing party give me the two Santa Claus bullshit plan again........................this is there debacle, it is not the government, but two elected rat fucking "REPUBLICAN" henchmen and there "ALLIES" in the senate and house that have caused three shutdowns in the last year...........................end of story........................they alone have broken my government...............no one else...................
November 3, 2020 cannot get here fast enough..........................
I just went to my CREDIT UNION my great CREDIT UNION....................
and they have a note on the page that if any of there members are effected by the shut down to give them a call and they will work with those that are effected by this looming economic disaster, that is in full display now, because of the orange narcissistic malignant ass, and the senate Majority leader McConnell laps..................
Hey McConnell you and him and your libertarian fascist party now own this disaster, lock stock and barrel................
So I will send out a shout out to my Credit Union in the Pittsburgh area, they are still at the Pittsburgh airport under a different name since the merger.......................
November 3, 2020 cannot get here fast enough................
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