RSN: Barbara McQuade | House Should Impeach Trump to Keep Him From Running in 2024

16 July 20

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16 July 20

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Barbara McQuade | House Should Impeach Trump to Keep Him From Running in 2024

Barbara McQuade, Just Security
McQuade writes: "It is time to impeach President Donald Trump again, and this time, it might even result in conviction. And it is necessary to protect the future of our country."
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The Trump administration is requiring hospitals to report COVID-19 data to a new system, sidestepping the CDC. (photo: David Degner/Getty)

White House Power Grab of COVID-19 Data Deeply Worries Experts
Pien Huang and Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR
Excerpt: "The Trump Administration has mandated that hospitals sidestep the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send critical information about COVID-19 hospitalizations and equipment to a different federal database."
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US Rep. Steve Watkins. (photo: John Hanna/AP)

Kansas Republican Congressman Steve Watkins Charged With Three Felonies in Voter Fraud Investigation

Elise Viebeck and David Weigel, The Washington Post

Excerpt: "Rep. Steve Watkins was charged with three felony counts in Shawnee County, Kan., late Tuesday, nearly eight months after a newspaper investigation found that he listed the location of a UPS Store as his address for voting purposes on government forms."

Watkins, a freshman Republican from Topeka, faces two felony charges related to unlawful voting and one related to interference with law enforcement and providing false information, according to a news release from Shawnee County District Attorney Michael F. Kagay. The charges stem from a 2019 local election, the release stated.

The case emerged after an investigation of a Topeka Capital-Journal report from December, which stated that Watkins may have committed felony voter fraud by allegedly misstating his address on a voter change-of-residency form, an application for a mail ballot and another official document. A fourth charge, described as an “unclassified misdemeanor,” claimed Watkins failed to notify the Department of Motor Vehicles of a change of address.

With just three weeks until his primary, Watkins shrugged off the announcement Tuesday, calling the errors an innocent mistake and saying he looks forward to “setting the record straight.”

“This is clearly hyper-political,” he said during a televised debate that began shortly after news broke about the charges. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Watkins is set to face the state’s treasurer, Jake LaTurner, a candidate recruited by Republican officials, in a competitive race on Aug. 4.

“This is a key issue in this election,” LaTurner said at the debate. “We need to put our best foot forward. Clearly, our current congressman — with three felony charges and a misdemeanor charge — is not the person to do that.”

Watkins’s path to Congress was rocky, with Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale writing a pre-election op-ed warning voters not to choose him. A Harvard- and West Point-educated Army veteran who had never sought office before, Watkins was boosted by a super PAC largely funded by his father, a physician in Topeka. The candidate’s own ties to the district were tenuous, and rivals pointed out that he had never voted there in a partisan election there.

The general election brought more controversy. An Associated Press investigation revealed that he had falsely claimed to lead and grow a small business, and inflated a story about heroism during a climb of Mt. Everest. While President Trump had carried the 2nd District by 19 points in 2016, Watkins would win the race against Democrat Paul Davis by less than 3,000 votes two years later.

“We’re just talking two years,” a local GOP county chair told McClatchy shortly before the midterms. “If we come to find out that stuff’s true and he’s really not what he says he is, we’ll replace him in two years, I guess.”

At Tuesday’s debate, Watkins said that as soon as he realized he listed his mailing address instead of his physical address on the voting forms, “We fixed it.”

“We’ve cooperated with the DA completely. I haven’t seen the charges. I simply know that I look forward to clearing my name,” he said.

Kagay said the investigation into Watkins’s actions by the county sheriff’s office, which he requested after “news of the alleged conduct was brought to his attention in December,” was “delayed significantly due to the COVID-19 shutdown.”

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Twitter user. (photo: Omar Marques/Getty)

Accounts of Politicians, Billionaires, Corporations Hacked in Unprecedented Twitter Attack
Nick Statt, The Verge
Statt writes: "Twitter has shed some light on the unprecedented attack on Wednesday that resulted in numerous takeovers of high-profile accounts including those of President Barack Obama, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk."
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The police in Louisville, Ky., said 87 demonstrators were arrested outside the state attorney general's house on Tuesday. They were charged with intimidating a participant in a legal process, a felony. (photo: Matt Stone/Courier Journal)

Dozens of Breonna Taylor Protesters Were Charged With Felonies After Sitting on the AG's Lawn

Paul Blest, VICE

Blest writes: "Dozens of peaceful activists are facing years in prison after protesting on the front lawn of the Kentucky attorney general's house to demand he bring charges against the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor." 

On Tuesday afternoon, a protest march through Louisville ended at the home of Daniel Cameron, the state’s top law enforcement official. Louisville Metro Police Department officials arrested 87 people in total, charging them with felonies for “intimidating a participant in a legal process,” as well as misdemeanors for trespassing and disorderly conduct.

Many protesters sat down on the lawn, some stood with arms linked, and some chanted "How do you spell murderer? LMPD" and "Whose streets? Our streets,” according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Kentucky law defines the felony as using “physical force or a threat directed to a person he believes to be a participant in the legal process.” A Class D felony, Kentucky’s sentencing guidelines mean that if convicted, the protesters could face a maximum of five years in prison. Those arrested Tuesday included activist Linda Sarsour and Minneapolis NAACP President Leslie Redmond, according to Washington Post. NFL wide receiver Kenny Stills of the Houston Texans was also arrested, the Courier-Journal reported.

Those arrested were held at a local jail before beginning to be released early Wednesday morning.

In a tweet, the state ACLU called the charges an “overblown, outrageous, and inappropriate reaction” to the protest.

Cameron, a Republican who last year became the first Black attorney general of Kentucky, said in a statement that the goal of the protest was to “escalate.”

“That is not acceptable and only serves to further division and tension within our community. Justice is not achieved by trespassing on private property, and it’s not achieved through escalation,” Cameron said. “It’s achieved by examining the facts in an impartial and unbiased manner. That is exactly what we are doing and will continue to do in this investigation."

Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was shot and killed in her apartment while she was sleeping during a no-knock raid by Louisville Metro police in March. So far, just one of the police officers involved in Taylor’s death has even been disciplined, as LMPD officer Brett Hankison was fired in June, more than three months after Taylor’s killing. None of the officers have been charged.

VICE News reported in June that in New York City, while 44 percent of those arrested between May 29 and June 7 were white and 39 percent were Black, 16 percent of Black arrestees were charged with felonies as opposed to just 3 percent of white arrestees.

“The only folks who were being held were the kids of color, who were being charged with these ridiculous, trumped-up felony cases,” New York County Defender Services’ Jessica Heyman told VICE News at the time. “And that was just really, really enraging.”

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Deaths of Migrant Children in US Custody in 2018 Were Preventable, Parents and Doctors Tell Congress
Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS News
Montoya-Galvez writes: "The deaths of two Guatemalan migrant children in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody in 2018 could have been prevented, two doctors told lawmakers during a House hearing Wednesday that also featured written testimony from parents of the minors."
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A humpback whale breaches in the warm water of Monterey Bay, California. (photo: Paul Nicklen/National Geographic)

The Pandemic Quieted the Waters: Less Boat Traffic May Mean Improved Health and Reduced Stress for Whales
Craig Welch, National Geographic
Welch writes: "The pandemic had quieted the waters of Monterey Bay. Gone were the speedboats, the yachts, and the whale-watching tours. Closed restaurants and shuttered docks kept commercial fishing boats away. Cruise-ship travel was on hiatus." 

Scientists have a rare chance to study a marine world largely free of humans and their noisy machines.

Earlier this year, with the first coronavirus lockdowns in full swing, whale scientist and National Geographic Explorer Ari Friedlaender spied an opening. He’d returned from studying whales in Antarctica to find few cars on the road, virtually no vessels on the water, and humpbacks arriving in central California from their winter calving grounds in Mexico. One of the Golden State’s most popular coastal recreation spots was suddenly free of the human noises known to hurt sea creatures.

So Friedlaender got permission to boat into the waters of Monterey Bay. While humpbacks fattened up on sardines and anchovies, he quickly took flesh samples from 44 whales. He will use them to study their hormone levels, which rise and fall with the marine mammals’ stress.

From California to Alaska to the swampy bays of south Florida, disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic are offering marine scientists a once-in-a-lifetime shot at directly tackling a question many have pondered for decades: Just how much does our noisy life at sea really alter the world for marine creatures?

Cacophony in the seas

It’s no secret that human noise can spell trouble for an array of ocean life. Navy sonar has been shown to cause embolisms in beaked whales as they rapidly ascend to flee the pulses, while the low hum of container ships so thoroughly drowns out whale calls that the cacophony pushes some animals into silence. Dall’s porpoises quickly changed swimming patterns to avoid the racket of passing vessels.

But scientists in recent years have learned that the impact of ocean noise isn’t limited to cetaceans. Auditory stress can affect seals, fish, squid—even simple creatures like oysters. Outboard motors prompt some damselfish to stop fleeing the scent of predators. Loud sounds can give scallops deformities that may reduce survival, drive Arctic cod from their feeding grounds, and send schools of tuna scattering, potentially shifting migratory patterns.

Even half a mile away, the low-frequency boom of seismic air-guns used in ocean mapping and oil and gas exploration can outright kill the tiny zooplankton at the base of the ocean food chain, including larval shrimplike krill.

These discoveries have only become more important as globalization has driven a dramatic rise in shipping traffic over the past half-century. In fact, so much has been learned about the impact of noise on sea life in the last two decades that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2016 adopted a 10-year plan to map and study the growth in the ocean’s cacophony.

“Almost all life underwater relies on sound,” says Michelle Fournet, an acoustic ecologist at Cornell University who also directs a non-profit group of wildlife noise experts, the Sound Science Research Collective. “We certainly know that a lot of very vital functions are compromised when it gets too noisy.”

And unlike light, sound moves efficiently through water. Hydrophones in Monterey Bay can detect rain spattering on the ocean’s surface thousands of feet deep. In water, the bang from a tiny noisemaker called a “seal bomb,” which commercial purse seiners toss to drive away seals and sea lions raiding their nets of squid and anchovies, can travel astonishingly far.

“If you’re standing on the deck of your ship, all you hear is a muffled little bit of nothing,” says John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Below the surface, however, the sound of those underwater firecrackers detonating can wrap around the continental shelf and plunge deep into Monterey Submarine Canyon.

Yet understanding how all this sound may harm individual species is complex. Speed boats and outboard motors create piercing high-pitched sounds, while large commercial vessels, like tankers and massive cargo ships, create a low-pitched din, like the throbbing background noise of a city. Sounds that may be harmful to one species may be completely inaudible to another. Blue whales communicate using some sounds below the frequency humans can hear. Dolphins can make sounds high above our hearing range.

To resolve these issues, most ocean noise research has been conducted either in laboratories or marine waters swamped by human sound.

Until now.

A monumental shift to silence

Fournet, for one, studies tropical ecology and works with a team that has placed underwater listening devices in Florida Bay in Everglades National Park. There, she tracks the impact of noise on spotted sea trout, snapping shrimp and gulf toadfish, a squatty little mudfish that sings to its mate, which then comes and lays eggs in the male’s nest.

But this year she’s particularly excited about her work in Southeast Alaska. For a decade, Fournet has studied the impact of large vessel noise on humpback whale communication in that region. This year, though, because of coronavirus risk, cruise-ship visits and whale-watching in Juneau were canceled. The change, she says, “is monumental.”

The last time scientists were able to find a quiet stretch to listen to whales along the Inside Passage was three days in 1976, when the number of then-endangered humpbacks had plummeted to about 250 animals. Now the population have rebounded to between 3,000 and 5,000 individuals. “What that means is that for whales born between 1970 and now, this will be their first quiet summer,” she says. It will be the first time a healthier number of whales has communicated undisturbed as scientists listened in.

Humpbacks are famous for their beautiful songs. Although breeding-age males steal the show, females and babies also communicate using a rich repertoire. Humpbacks moan and groan and growl and produce noises that sound like droplets of water. There are “wup” calls that resemble purring or “swops,” which sound like human laughter. Another call resembles the squeak of a wet squeegee on glass.

So this year, Fournet had Alaska colleagues install a hydrophone in the waters off the whale-watching capital, Juneau, where it’s usually too loud for her to listen to humpbacks at all. The goal is to understand what the conversations are like when humans and their noisy machines are not present.

She suspects that the nature of the acoustic interactions will change. She hypothesizes that the whales, no longer drowned out by boat noise, may actually have more complex communication.

“If you are at a rock concert and trying to have a meaningful conversation, you will talk loudly, slowly, and use simple words,” she says. If you’re chatting over tea on your living room couch, you may attempt to convey more sophisticated thoughts. “You’re afforded much richer language and the ability to convey more information in that exchange.”

Less stress for whales?

In Monterey Bay, Friedlaender is after something a little different. He’s not trying to gauge whether whales are changing their songs or their movements. He’s interested in their general well-being. Does human silence allow them to live a bit healthier—and can scientists measure it?

Scientists have long assumed that noise is increasing whale stress. And they know chronic stress can be just as dangerous for many animals as it is for humans. It has been shown to suppress growth, reproduction, and immune-system function, leading to early death and population declines in species as diverse as ring-tailed lemurs and marine iguanas.

“Just because you don’t see a behavioral response doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences,” says Friedlaender’s colleague Brandon Southall, a whale scientist who worked for NOAA in Washington, D.C., for years, dealing directly with the Navy on underwater noise impacts on marine life.

But while they regularly sample whale cortisol levels, rarely have scientists had an appropriate “low-noise” control group with which to compare hormone levels. Perhaps the most significant control group to date was created as a result of a tragic coincidence.

During the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, two separate groups of scientists happened to be at sea in Canada’s Bay of Fundy—one to take audio recordings of right whale calves and their mothers, the other collecting right whale fecal samples. They stayed at sea even after ship and air traffic ground to a halt.

The researchers were able to show a significant drop in hormone levels in whale feces immediately as the waters went ghostly silent. In subsequent years, as noise levels rose, the scientists learned that the animals’ stress rebounded.

Friedlaender plans to return to Monterey Bay next spring to take more flesh samples as ship traffic presumably returns to normal. And since he also has photographs of many animals’ unique dorsal fin and fluke, he will even attempt to collect samples from the same individuals. As the aquarium research institute already operates a hydrophone in the bay, his team will be able to correlate differences in stress levels with changes in vessel noise.

Friedlaender expects his findings will be similar to what scientists learned after September 11. But his results may prove a bit more complicated because the two traffic shutdowns aren’t identical. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, everything stopped—all boat traffic, all air traffic. In the spring of 2020 in Monterey Bay and elsewhere, small boats and tankers stopped, but shipping traffic continued offshore.

“You can’t tell from looking at a whale, but these animals are affected by what we do,” Friedlaender says.

This year, he, Fournet, and other scientists around the world may finally get a better handle on just how much.

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