14 August 20
We Need to Make Up Ground ASAP
We are WAY behind on donations this month. Who out there hasn’t donated in the past few months and can chip in?
Let’s turn a little attention to RSN’s budget.
Please.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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13 August 20
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Left-Wing Rankled by Choice of Harris for VP
Holly Otterbein, POLITICO
Otterbein writes: "Kamala Harris wasn't left-wing Democrats' first choice for Joe Biden's running mate - and not just because of her policies."
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United States Postal Service clerks sort mail at the USPS, just one of the many functions the USPS serves. (photo: John Gress/Reuters)
Trump Just Admitted He's Sabotaging the Postal Service to Steal the Election
Cameron Joseph and Paul Blest, VICE
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud, admitting he's intentionally withholding money from the U.S. Postal Service to undermine its ability to handle mail-in voting in the 2020 election."
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A crowd watches as a crane removes the Stonewall Jackson Monument in Richmond, Virginia, on July 1. Dozens of Confederate monuments have come down this summer. (photo: Eze Amos/Getty)
Report: 59 Confederate Symbols Removed Since George Floyd's Death
Camila Domonoske, NPR
Domonoske writes: "After George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis in late May, waves of anguished and outraged Americans took to the streets, to livestreamed city council meetings and to social media to denounce racism."
Protesters called for police reform, defunding or outright abolition; for an end to qualified immunity for officers; for reinvestment in underfunded communities; for schools, companies and communities to address their own complicity in racial inequity.
And they called for Confederate monuments to come down.
Some changes are hard to quantify. But that last one is easier to count.
Since Floyd died, 59 Confederate symbols have been removed or replaced, according to an updated report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. That's a significant increase over past years: Just 16 Confederate symbols were removed or renamed in all of 2019, according to SPLC data. Hundreds more monuments remain standing, the group says.
Some statues have been literally brought down by protesters, while other symbols were removed by local governments or institutions in response to the outcry.
All told, 38 Confederate monuments were taken down this summer, and five more relocated, while 16 schools, parks and other locations were renamed.
The state of Mississippi also retired its flag, which featured the Confederate battle flag, and a town in South Dakota has removed the Confederate battle flag from its police badge.
Confederate symbols are not the only ones that have come down as the nation turned renewed attention to symbols of bigotry.
In La Crosse, Wis., a statue of Hiawatha is being removed; local community members had long objected that the statue misrepresented Indigenous people. The Washington, D.C., football team will no longer use a racial slur for its team name. Statues of Christopher Columbus have been pulled down in multiple cities by critics characterizing them as monuments to violent colonization.
Boston has decided to remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln, commemorating emancipation, from Park Square, because of what Mayor Martin Walsh called a "reductive representation" of a kneeling black man. The original of that statue stands in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C.; it was funded largely by former enslaved people and has prompted local debate about what the monument symbolizes today.
The societal shift has stretched outside of America, too. In the U.K., a statue of a slave trader came down. In Belgium, monuments to King Leopold II, who brutally exploited the Congo, have been targeted. And the Netherlands is reevaluating "Black Pete," a racist Christmas character.
Even some uncontroversial monuments have been toppled, at least temporarily. A statue of Frederick Douglass was torn down by unknown vandals in Rochester, N.Y., and has since been replaced, while monuments to women's suffrage and abolition were torn down by protesters in Madison, Wis., with plans to replace them.
But the Confederate icons have received the most attention, in part because they are so widespread across the U.S. and have been the subject of many years of high-profile protest.
Critics of the monuments point out that most of these tributes to a defeated pro-slavery secessionist movement were erected well after the Civil War, either in the dawn of the Jim Crow era or at the height of the civil rights movement. Defenders of these monuments have said that removing or relocating them is an assault on history itself.
"Nearly 1,800 Confederate symbols remain on public land," The Southern Poverty Law Center writes in the updated report. "725 of those symbols are monuments."
The center has long been known for its work monitoring hate groups. But some conservative organizations have strongly objected to the SPLC designation of them as hate groups alongside neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
In addition, the Southern Poverty Law Center has faced controversy over its own practices. Last year, allegations surfaced that the center had a toxic culture that discriminated against women and people of color. After these allegations were made public, the SPLC co-founder was fired, and its president and legal director resigned.
The White House Rose Garden before the Coronavirus Task Force briefing on March 30, 2020. (photo: NBC News)
It's Illegal for Federal Officials to Campaign on the Job. Trump Staffers Keep Doing It Anyway.
Andrea Bernstein, ProPublica
Bernstein writes: "There is a law, called the Hatch Act, that prohibits most government officials from engaging in politicking in the course of their official work. The law does not apply to the president or vice president."
Trump administration officials have been cited 13 times for violating the Hatch Act, a New Deal-era law prohibiting government officials from engaging in campaigning.
resident Donald Trump’s recent musings about staging his Republican National Convention speech at the White House drew criticism from government ethics watchdogs and even one Republican senator, John Thune of South Dakota.
The suggestion wasn’t an isolated blending of official presidential duties and the campaign. It was part of a yearslong pattern of disregarding such boundaries in the Trump White House. There is a law, called the Hatch Act, that prohibits most government officials from engaging in politicking in the course of their official work.
The law does not apply to the president or vice president. While other presidents took campaign advantage of the trappings of the office, something that came to be known as the “Rose Garden strategy,” they typically refrained from explicit electoral appeals or attacks on their opponents at official presidential events. Federal election law and measures governing appropriations prohibit using taxpayer dollars for electioneering.
Since resuming official travel at the beginning of May after a coronavirus-imposed pause, Trump has held 25 presidential out-of-town events. Of these events, transcribed on the official White House website, the president spoke about the election or attacked his opponent, Joe Biden, at 12 of them, nearly half. His presidential stage provided a venue for supporters to urge others to vote for Trump in November at three additional events.
Administration officials have been cited for breaking the Hatch Act 13 times by federal investigators at the Office of Special Counsel (not to be confused with special counsel Robert Mueller). Twelve more investigations are underway. The law dates from the New Deal era, enacted after a scandal where employees of the Works Progress Administration were pressured to work on the campaigns of candidates friendly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Neither the White House, the campaign or Trump’s campaign treasurer, Bradley Crate, responded to requests for comment.
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, violated the Hatch Act so many times that the OSC took the drastic measure of recommending she be fired, calling her actions “egregious, notorious and ongoing.” (Trump refused to do so.)
The special counsel, Henry Kerner, is a Trump appointee and member of the conservative Federalist Society. He previously worked for Republicans Darrell Issa and Jason Chaffetz on Capitol Hill.
When asked about the OSC’s recommendation, Conway said, “blah blah blah,” adding, “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.” Hatch Act violations are not criminal. The most significant result of a violation is dismissal.
Hatch Act violations were relatively rare in the previous two presidential administrations. Two cabinet officials were cited for Hatch Act violations during the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Some half-dozen senior officials in the Obama and Bush administrations said that they were frequently advised to avoid even the appearance of electioneering at official events.
“There was a very bright line between what was a campaign event and what was an official event,” said Greg Jenkins, the director of advance for President George W. Bush during the period that included the 2004 reelection campaign. “If you could stretch things and say, yes, it’s perfectly legal to do this, but it has the appearance of impropriety — you don’t do it.”
Kathleen Sebelius, the former secretary of health and human services under Obama, was cited for making a statement urging his reelection during a gala for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights group. Sebelius apologized, and the Treasury was reimbursed for the cost of the trip.
“I’d prefer that it not be on my record,” Sebelius said in an interview from her home in Lawrence, Kansas. Given that she was on the Kansas ethics commission and was a national board member of Common Cause, “it’s kind of a black mark.” She added: “But I did what they say I did,” and said that “it puts into perspective what goes on every day in this current administration that just makes the top of my head come off.”
Previous campaigns have reimbursed taxpayers for costs associated with politicking while on official travel. And while disclosures do show that campaign committees associated with Trump have paid $896,000 to the Treasury and the White House Military Office in May and June, federal law doesn’t require an accounting of what those expenses were for.
Trump would not violate the Hatch Act if he chose the White House for his nomination acceptance speech, but executive branch employees in the White House and agencies might be in jeopardy if they support or attend the event, experts said.
“There are several laws that prohibit the use of federal funds and resources for partisan political events like the president’s RNC speech,” said Donald Sherman, deputy director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. “Trump’s predecessors scrupulously avoided mixing official conduct with politics in this way, but President Trump has routinely used the apparatus of the government to try to boost his electoral prospects.”
Black working women experience disparities in nearly all fields and at every socioeconomic level. (photo: WOCinTech Chat)
This Black Women's Equal Pay Day, Addressing the Gender Gap Is Essential Work
Maiysha Kai, The Root
Kai writes: "It's once again Black Women's Equal Pay Day-the day that marks approximately how much longer a Black woman must work to earn as much as her white, non-Hispanic male counterparts earned the previous year."
Lebanese army soldiers are deployed during a protest in the aftermath of last week's deadly blast in Beirut. (photo: Thaier al-Sudani/Reuters)
Lebanon's Parliament Approves Sweeping Powers for the Army
Timour Azhari, Al Jazeera
Azhari writes: "The state of emergency allows the army to curb free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press, as well as to enter homes and arrest anyone deemed a security threat."
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A hydro fracking tower used for gas drilling in Pennsylvania. (photo: Alamy)
Trump Rolls Back Methane Climate Standards for Oil and Gas Industry
Emily Holden, Guardian UK
Holden writes: "The Trump administration is revoking rules that require oil and gas drillers to detect and fix leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas that heats the planet far faster than carbon dioxide."
Methane is a greenhouse gas that heats the planet far faster than CO2 and addressing it is critical to slowing global heating
Methane has a much more potent short-term warming effect than CO2 and addressing it is critical to slowing global heating as the world is already on track to become more than 3C hotter than before industrialization.
The Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Andrew Wheeler, will announce the rollback from Pennsylvania, which has major oil and gas operations and is also a politically important swing state. The rule change is part of what Trump calls his “energy dominance” agenda.
The Trump administration’s changes apply to new wells and those drilled since 2016, when President Barack Obama enacted the regulation in an effort to help stall climate change during a boom in fracking – a method of extracting fossil gas by injecting water and chemicals underground. The regulations required companies to regularly check for methane leaks from valves, pipelines and tanks.
Large oil companies have argued for keeping the rules, saying they are needed so the industry can limit its climate footprint as it markets gas as a smart alternative to coal – which emits far more carbon dioxide.
Roughly a quarter of global warming the planet has experienced in recent decades has been due to methane, said Robert Howarth, a researcher who studies methane at Cornell University. The oil and gas industry is the biggest source of the pollutant.
“Methane is the second most important gas after carbon dioxide,” Howarth said. “For the time it’s in the atmosphere, it’s about 120 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide. There’s nowhere near as much of it in the atmosphere so it ends up being not quite as important overall, but it’s very powerful.”
Methane emitted today is largely gone in 30 years and totally gone in about 60 years, but it has a big effect on the climate in the meantime. That effect is most significant in the first months methane is released, when it is about 120 times stronger than carbon. That drops to around 86 times more powerful over 20 years and 33 times more powerful if compared with carbon over 100 years, Howarth said.
US methane emissions have become more concerning as scientists have begun to better understand their prevalence and impacts, and as gas production has continued to grow rapidly, increasing 10% last year.
Average global temperatures are already more than 1C higher. And they are expected to be 1.5C to 2C higher within the next 10 to 25 years, Howarth said. Reductions in carbon have a delayed effect on temperatures. But reductions in methane have a more immediate impact.
The world essentially cannot meet the near-term goals nations agreed to in an international climate agreement without reducing methane, Howarth said.
Some experts have warned that gas could be an even bigger contributor to climate change than coal, depending on how much of its methane is leaked into the atmosphere.
Progressive states and environmental groups will sue over the decision.
If Joe Biden wins the White House in November, he could move to rewrite the rules, although that will be made more difficult by the Trump administration’s arguments that they were not justified in the first place. In either case, reinstating the regulations could take years.
The methane rollbacks are part of a broad deregulatory campaign by the Trump administration, which has weakened environment and climate standards.
Caitlin Miller, a lawyer with Earthjustice – one of the groups that plans to sue – said the rollback will also prevent broader action on methane emissions from existing oil and gas operations.
Under US environment law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must first regulate air pollution from new sources within a category before regulation emissions from existing ones.
By 2021, methane emissions from existing oil and gas operations could total 9.8m metric tons, Miller said, citing a report from the Environmental Defense Fund. EPA could cut that amount by 37%, or 3.6m metric tons.
“By removing these pollution regulations, the Trump administration is just completely undermining EPA’s duties to protect public health and welfare – particularly for black and brown communities that bear the disproportionate burden of air pollution,” Miller said. “Now is not the time to be rolling back these regulations when these communities in particular are embattled by the two major health crises at the moment, both coronavirus and climate change.”
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