06 February 20
When we get into trouble on donations the small donors are always the first to respond. The see the problem more clearly, they feel the urgency more personally.
Haven’t seen a 3 digit donation in 3 days.
Who can step up?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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05 February 20
Bhaskar Sunkara, Guardian UK
Sunkara writes: "Yes, the Iowa caucuses were a disaster, but Sanders supporters need to remember that if they organize and turn out to vote they can indeed win."
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Sunkara writes: "Yes, the Iowa caucuses were a disaster, but Sanders supporters need to remember that if they organize and turn out to vote they can indeed win."
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Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to the media after boarding a plane at the Des Moines international airport en route from Iowa to New Hampshire. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Trump's Speech Was a Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant, Socialism-Hating Game Show
Sam Brodey, Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The 2020 State of the Union didn't bother sneering at impeachment. Trump took a different sort of victory lap-one heavy on spectacle."
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Sam Brodey, Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The 2020 State of the Union didn't bother sneering at impeachment. Trump took a different sort of victory lap-one heavy on spectacle."
READ MORE
Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to tear up President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech after it ended. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty)
Donald Trump Will Be Acquitted. American Politics Will Be Convicted.
Ezra Klein, Vox
Klein writes: "Trump was never really on trial in the Senate. Not in the sense of a true trial, where the objective is to understand the truth."
Ezra Klein, Vox
Klein writes: "Trump was never really on trial in the Senate. Not in the sense of a true trial, where the objective is to understand the truth."
EXCERPT:
Trump was never really on trial in the Senate. Not in the sense of a true trial, where the objective is to understand the truth. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made that clear from the outset. “Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with White House counsel,” he said. “There’ll be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.”
Rather, it was America’s political system that faced the true trial. And the truth was revealed.
The Constitution’s framers did their job, in their time. They designed a system of government that worked to call the country, with all our flaws and all our potential for greatness, into being. But they did not design a system of government that is working in our time. That is our job.
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Feb. 14, 2018, Parkland shooting. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Parkland Father Removed From State of the Union Speech After Shouting at Trump
David Smiley and Alex Daugherty, The Miami Herald
Excerpt: "The father of a high school freshman killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was removed from the audience at President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night after shouting out during the president's speech."
David Smiley and Alex Daugherty, The Miami Herald
Excerpt: "The father of a high school freshman killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was removed from the audience at President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night after shouting out during the president's speech."
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting, was escorted calmly out of the balcony gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives chamber toward the end of Trump’s speech.
“Tonight was a rough night,” he wrote. “I disrupted the State Of The Union and was detained because I let my emotions get the best of me. I simply want to be able to deal with the reality of gun violence and not have to listen to the lies about the 2A [second amendment] as happened tonight.
As Trump finished a line saying, “So long as I am president, I will always protect your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms,” Republicans began to cheer and Guttenberg began to yell. As the cheers quieted, Guttenberg could be briefly heard in the chamber.
He is urging lawmakers to support “Jaime’s law,” a proposal to require background checks on the purchase of bullets. He has been supportive of Democratic candidates, and recently filmed a lengthy testimonial for former Vice President Joe Biden.
US troops stop and frisk Iraqi civilians. (photo: AFP)
US Taxpayers Each Spent More Than $8,000 on Iraq War, for Total of Trillion
Kenneth R. Rosen, Newsweek
Rosen writes: "The War in Iraq cost nearly $2 trillion, roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt."
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Kenneth R. Rosen, Newsweek
Rosen writes: "The War in Iraq cost nearly $2 trillion, roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt."
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Juan Carlos Perla embraces his wife, Ruth Aracely Montoya, in the entrance to their home in Tijuana, Mexico, on June 19, 2019. The Perla family of El Salvador has slipped into a daily rhythm in Mexico while they wait for the U.S. to decide whether they will win asylum. A modest home replaced the tent they lived in at a migrant shelter. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
Report: At Least 138 Sent From US to El Salvador Were Killed
Ben Fox, Associated Press
Fox writes: "At least 138 people deported to El Salvador from the U.S. in recent years were subsequently killed, Human Rights Watch says in a new report that comes as the Trump administration makes it harder for Central Americans to seek refuge here."
Ben Fox, Associated Press
Fox writes: "At least 138 people deported to El Salvador from the U.S. in recent years were subsequently killed, Human Rights Watch says in a new report that comes as the Trump administration makes it harder for Central Americans to seek refuge here."
EXCERPT:
“This report is a shameful reminder of the Trump Administration’s xenophobic policy of denying meaningful protection to vulnerable families fleeing a certain death in their home countries,” said Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, in a statement.
Leal Parker and other critics of the administration’s immigration policy say this report — and previous efforts that have documented violence against Salvadorans waiting in Mexican border towns for their claims to be processed — show the risks of the Trump administration policy.
“We are deeply concerned by the Trump administration’s effort to literally eviscerate the right to seek asylum in the United States,” she said.
Human Rights Watch urged the administration to repeal the policy that requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico along with the agreements that allow Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Hondurans to be settled in other countries of Central America while seeking refuge. They also want the attorney general to reverse restrictions that made it harder for them to claim U.S. asylum because of threats posed by gangs or gender-based violence.
President Trump and Emanuel Macron plant a tree in front of the White House in 2017. (photo: AP)
Trump's Vow to Help Plant a Trillion Trees Is Worse Than Stupid
Dharna Noor, Earther
Noor writes: "Ever since visiting Davos for the World Economic Forum last month, Trump has been obsessed with trees. He continued going on about them at the State of the Union on Tuesday night."
Dharna Noor, Earther
Noor writes: "Ever since visiting Davos for the World Economic Forum last month, Trump has been obsessed with trees. He continued going on about them at the State of the Union on Tuesday night."
“To protect the environment, days ago, I announced that the United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and the private sector to plant new trees in America and all around the world,” he said said at his State of the Union on Tuesday night.
Since Trump first mentioned the initiative, Republican legislators have started drafting a bill to fund it and the founder of Salesforce launched a slick platform to manage the project all as part trying to position themselves as searching for climate solutions. That’s nice and all, but President Trump and Congressional Republicans’ other actions to-date show they don’t give a shit about trees or the climate crisis, really.
The administration has gone hard after conservation rules protecting forests. Last summer, Trump proposed opening the Tongass, America’s largest national forest and one of the world’s most important carbon sinks, to logging, mining, and development. If the administration succeeds in rolling back protections, some 9.5 millions of acres of Alaskan forest land could be lost.
Before that, Trump floated a policy proposal which would open 90 percent of Utah’s national forests—that’s 4 million acres of trees—to deforestation. The administration quietly issued an executive order ahead of last year’s government shutdown to expand the logging on public lands, arguing that increased timber harvesting would help reduce wildfire risk.
All this doesn’t even get into Trump’s mangled understanding of forest management and the impact of climate change. And let’s not even start on how his regulatory rollbacks are making climate change worse, which in turn is weakening forests around the world and increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
Since the One Trillion Trees initiative aims to plant, restore, or conserve a trillion trees, you’d think he’d start with just taking back some of his proposed rollbacks and putting policies in place to reduce carbon emissions. But I’m sure he won’t.
The Trump administration hasn’t been a friend to trees abroad, either. As the Brazilian Amazon burned last year due to widespread deforestation, Trump defended Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro. His administration made it possible for the logging, mining, and industrial agriculture industries to chop down far more trees and burn the forest. So Trump’s record on trees is pretty damn dismal.
But say he’s trying to turn all that around. Maybe Trump has seen the light on environmental policy! The world is losing some 10 billion trees a year to human activities, and everyone likes trees, so it seems this project sounds kind of great.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of even more bad news, but this project is still not the real deal. As Greta Thunberg said at Davos, “planting trees is good, of course, but it’s nowhere near enough of what is needed, and it cannot replace real mitigation, and rewilding nature.”
And as the New York Times pointed out, using trees to absorb all the carbon the U.S. emitted in 2019 alone would require planting 371 million acres of forest, or an area roughly four times the size of California. It would almost certainly require turning over land for agriculture to land for carbon sequestration. For context, the entire Tongass National Forest is just 16.7 million acres.
Even if Trump found a place to plant a bunch of new trees outside the U.S., the results could be awful. One World Bank and United Nations carbon offsetting program was complicit in land grabs in Kenya and Brazil, where governments forced thousands indigenous people from their ancestral homes.
To be clear, trees are dope and important. They help regulate the climate by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, protect soil from erosion during heavy rains, and provide nutrients, shelter and shade to countless species. Plus, they are beautiful and majestic and wonderful. And yes, there are just ways to plant trees and not screw people over.
But reforestation is no replacement for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Trees take decades to grow tall enough to sequester any real amount of carbon, and can get killed by floods, droughts, or disease before they even grow enough to do so. Greenhouse gas emissions won’t just sit around and wait for trees to grow before they wreak havoc on the atmosphere. That’s why we have to make corporations stop emitting them in the first place. And Trump has no plans to do that, as he once again showed during the State of the Union. When he wasn’t talking about this trees program, the president bragged about his U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement—which will facilitate massive natural gas expansion and pollution—and his “bold regulatory reduction campaign”—which has helped the oil and gas industry expand.
“The United States has become the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world, by far,” he said. “With the tremendous progress we have made over the past three years, America is now energy independent, and energy jobs, like so many elements of our country, are at a record high.”
(Side note: that last part is actually very not true).
All those fossil fuels are driving catastrophic climate change (which he didn’t mention in his State of the Union address), perpetuate environmental injustice (which he also didn’t mention), and threatening access to clean air (do I even have to say it) and clean water (you already know). In the face of all that, touting the trillion trees program is a joke.
It’s no surprise that Trump is embracing the trillion trees initiative, because it doesn’t actually require the industries responsible for fueling the climate crisis, like the oil, gas, and logging industries, to change their business models. That’s exactly what makes it a false solution.
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