Ex-San Francisco Official Accused of Bear Macing Homeless People
"The former San Francisco fire commissioner who said a homeless man brutally attacked him with a metal pipe has been accused of initiating the April 5 altercation.
Attorneys representing the homeless man, Garret Doty, said video evidence shows that former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani was the aggressor and that he doused Doty with bear spray. They further alleged that Carmignani may be involved in other incidents in which homeless people were sprayed in the Cow Hollow and Marina District neighborhoods.
The former San Francisco fire commissioner Don Carmignani is being accused engaging in attacks against the unhoused community as video just came to light showing him spraying a homeless man with bear spray.
Carmignani’s attorney, Nick Colla, said his client was "repeatedly beaten with a metal rod" by Doty as he retreated nearly two city blocks from the initial point of contact."
Yusef Salaam, who was among five teens wrongfully convicted of a brutal rape attack for which Donald Trump purchased a full page newspaper ad calling for their execution, is now exonerated and watching Donald Trump facing accusations of rape and other crimes and has purchased a full page newspaper ad of his own.
We await a verdict in the trial of five members of the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys for their role in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. We discuss how Jan. 6 continues to be a drag on the Republican Party, as their likely nominee, Donald Trump, continues to literally embrace insurrectionists. Rep. Eric Swalwell and former deputy assistant attorney General Harry Litman join Joy Reid with their analysis.
All eyes were on former FoxNews angerman Tucker Carlson yesterday, as his owners pushed him from the nest. They offered the tersest of statements and no explanation, but coming on the heels of the giant settlement in the Dominion voting systems case, it seems plausible that the Murdochs had decided he was a liability, not an asset. A $787 million settlement can change your outlook.
But something else happened yesterday too, with a price tag that may eventually dwarf that settlement, and with even larger potential implications for the future of the planet. The Supreme Court, also tersely, declined to grant cert in a case brought by oil companies desperately trying to hold off state court trials for their climate crimes.
To make a long story short: Eight years ago, journalists—led by Inside Climate News and the LA Times—began publishing stories proving that the big oil companies knew all there was to know about the dangers of global warming back in the 1980s. Among other consequences, this helped convince the legal departments of a number of cities and states to launch lawsuits against the oil giants, on the grounds that they’d done great and knowing damage to the taxpayers of these jurisdictions, who were having to clean up after the endless storms, fires, and floods.
This freaked out the industry, because it could see one possible future: a series of judgments large enough to bring it, like the tobacco industry, to its knees, forced to make some kind of general settlement just to stay in business. (This would be karmic payback of a high order, since Big Oil had hired pr veterans from the cigarette companies to help build out their climate denial campaigns).
And so they they’ve hit back on every possible front, from apparently launching a massive hacking campaign to surveil their opponents to employing their high-end legal talent in an effort to thwart those lawsuits or, barring that, to move them to federal court, figuring that (thanks in part to their longtime support of the GOP politicians who have filled the judiciary with their partisans) they’d never face real justice there.
But the Supreme Court yesterday refused to let them do that—the longstanding precedents giving state and local courts rights to hear cases like this about companies that do business in their jurisdictions were too high to overcome, even for this Court. And so the cases—in Baltimore, in Colorado, in a dozen other jurisdictions around the country—may now proceed.
“This was the right decision, and it is time to prepare for trial,” Sara Gross, who heads the Affirmative Litigation Division in Baltimore’s Law Department, told the Maryland Daily Record. “Since we filed this case nearly five years ago, the climate crisis has worsened, the costs to Baltimore taxpayers are skyrocketing, and the defendants have pocketed trillions of dollars in profits while trying to dodge accountability for their deception,” Gross said.
And here’s Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde, the city manager of Boulder, Colorado, which has seen catastrophic forest fires in recent years: “There’s no doubt that climate change is very costly for local government. Taxpayer dollars are stretched to support key services, and the costs to prepare for and recover from climate disasters are too much for communities alone to bear. Today’s decision is a step toward justice. Colorado communities will have the chance to hold oil companies responsible for the hundreds in millions in damages their actions cause.”
Meanwhile, tee hee, the counsel for Chevron expressed sorrow that the ruling would complicate his client’s efforts to, um, solve global warming: “These wasteful lawsuits in state courts will do nothing to advance global climate solutions, nothing to reduce emissions, and nothing to address climate-related impacts.”
The more pertinent sorrow, of course, is that they now have to try cases in jurisdictions across the nation (and perhaps around the world). The oil companies have made huge profits off Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but even that kind of money isn’t enough to begin to compensate for the damage that climate change has already caused, much less what it will cost in decades to come. (Check out a new Atlas of Climate Disasters that reads like a handbook for plaintiff’s lawyers seeking cases). Say you’re on a jury, and someone reads you a newly discovered memo from Shell dated 1989 and explaining that "‘climate-fuelled migration could swamp borders in the United States, Soviet Union, Europe, and Australia.’ “Conflict would abound,” the document said. “Civilisation could prove a fragile thing.” Perhaps you would vote for a large award.
If juries begin delivering massive damage awards in one place after another, at a certain point even the mighty oil industry may have to settle. The terms of that settlement could someday be the lever for the changes the world needs—above all, the agreement to wean the world off their products instead of trying to extend their business model indefinitely.
Cigarette smoke is no longer a ubiquitous feature of American life, in large part because of the power of the legal system. Maybe someday the smoke from fossil fuel will disappear as well, and for some of the same reasons. If so, yesterday will have turned out to be a bad day not just for gasbags, but for gas.
In other energy and climate news:
+A new report from researchers at Brown University finds that opponents of offshore wind are using “Deceit, Delay, Denial and Chicanery to Sabotage Crucial Renewable Energy.” If that sounds a bit like the fossil fuel industry at work, well:
The report emphasizes the need “to understand the … networks of mis/disinformation that are seeking to obstruct … renewable energy, as a strategy to maintain fossil fuels as a dominant energy (and profit) resource.”
Meanwhile, a definitive new study takes down one of the fossil fuel industry’s new talking points, “certified gas.” A group of companies claim to be able to monitor emissions from drilling operations closely enough to certify that the gas produced from the wells won’t add to the methane accumulating in the atmosphere. However, a seven-month investigation from Oil Change International found:
that Continuous EmissionsMonitors (CEMs) b failed to capture every significant pollution event detected with Optical Gas Imaging (OGI) cameras. Our observations suggest that the company is misrepresenting the capabilities of its technology – a concern echoed in the testimony we gathered from several industry experts – and the underlying data behind certified gas.
And a fascinating investigation from Inside Climate News shows that lobbyists for the “clean energy” industry are not above dirty politics, allying themselves with the gas industry in search of “permitting reform” that would benefit them both. Environmentalists need to be aware that, say, the wind industry may not really care if the planet overheats as long as they get to build windmills.
“There are different ways to do clean energy policy, and [the American Clean Power Association], based on who it is—who its dues-paying members are—does just as you would expect,” says David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit watchdog organization. “ACP supports policies that are pro-clean energy in a way that is maximally financially beneficial toward large monopoly utility companies.”
+Lots of corporate annual general meetings underway these next few weeks, so here’s a nifty tool to let you easily vote your shares
+President Biden announced a new executive order prioritizing environmental justice efforts
The Executive Order directs agencies to consider measures to address and prevent disproportionate and adverse environmental and health impacts on communities, including the cumulative impacts of pollution and other burdens like climate change. Additionally, it requires agencies to notify nearby communities in the event of a release of toxic substances from a federal facility, and to hold a public meeting to share information on resulting health risks and necessary precautions.
Here’s Dr. Beverly Wright, director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, responding to the news:
“This executive order is a promise made and a promise kept by the Biden Administration. I was a part of the team that worked on the original executive order signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. Although it was an historic step in the right direction, it lacked accountability measures to ensure its efficacy. This new order strengthens the 1994 executive order by operationalizing and institutionalizing the recommendation within every level of the federal government. And to ensure accountability, each agency will report all progress made directly to the President. But, while today’s executive order is historic, much work must be done to achieve true environmental justice.”
+A fascinating account from the Wall St. Journal of industry efforts to build enough carbon sequestration equipment (much of it at public expense) to “give it license to keep operating as a driller decades into the future.” Instead of just building windmills, solar panels and batteries, it wants to
“build up to 135 such plants by 2035, depending on public incentives and demand for carbon credits. That would be more than seven times the number of CO2-removal facilities currently operating worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency. Occidental has leased more than 400 square miles from Texas to Louisiana to trap CO2 underground, and has presold carbon credits to Airbus SE, Shopify Inc. and BMO Financial Group.”
+Hemp, what is it good for? Mixing with lime to form a building material that “replaces plywood sheathing, synthetic house wrap, and spray foam insulation. In addition to providing thermal resistance (R-Value), hemplime wall and roof assemblies improve indoor air quality, buffer heat and moisture, are fire, mold, and pest resistant, inherently air-tight, and sequester carbon.” Check it out, and also this trailer for a new film on Reimagining Buildings.
+Elon Musk may never get to dusty Mars, but he’s covering large portions of Texas with dust from the launch of his super-heavy SpaceX rocket. According to the Times, a
a Port Isabel resident said that while Elon Musk’s venture had brought jobs to an economically distressed region, the brown muck covering her city was a reminder of the environmental downsides and a sign that things had gotten out of hand.
“The locals here are just being sacrificed,” she said.
“He just wanted to get this thing up in the air,” Ms. Almaguer said of Mr. Musk. “Everybody else sort of be damned.”
+Greenpeace won a major legal battle when a federal court dismissed a SLAPP suit from a Canadian logging giant—this is the one we talked about in last week’s newsletter. And it comes with the equally good news that Jamie Raskin’s cancer is in remission, which means he’ll be around to continue leading the fight against these lawsuits designed to put pesky environmentalists out of business.
+From historian of nonviolent movments Michael Nagler, a beautiful eulogy for Traute Lafrenz, the last surviving member of the White Rose resistance to Hitler.
+A truly scary early-season heatwave in Asia brought the humidity index in Thailand to 129 degrees Fahrenheit. As Rebecca Leber explained in a Vox essay, early season heatwaves are the worst because bodies are not yet acclimated:
Climate change is making a safe, slow adjustment to heat much harder by upending what we’d typically expect as seasons change. Summers are getting longer and more intense, encroaching on winter and extending long into the fall.
+In the Boston Review, David McDermott Hughes suggests that juries might “nullify” laws against climate-related vandalism in the years ahead
This oldest of democratic institutions wields the unchecked power to acquit, to set aside and unmake laws, and to ultimately render oil routes unprotectable. Juries have the power to sow anarchy far and wide. To be sure, the risks of this mode of activism are high and success is uncertain. The strategy known as jury nullification should be one of last resort. Unfortunately, the climate movement is running out of better options.
+Bats are great, and bats are in trouble. A new State of the Bats report find that
Experts now estimate that 52% of bat species in North America are at risk of populations declining severely in the next 15 years. As the scope and severity of threats increase, so does the need for collaborative research, monitoring, and public support for bat conservation. We must act now to reduce or eliminate threats.
+The creative geniuses at Britain’s Make Your Money Matter campaign have released a new ad with a couple of stars from Game of Thrones explaining the relationship between banks and the fossil fuel industry.
Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden campaigns at a town hall event in Exeter, New Hampshire in 2019. | Scott Eisen/Getty Images
‘CLEANUP IN AISLE NEW HAMPSHIRE’ — Does the name Keith Judd ring a bell? Probably not.
He’s the convicted felon who, while incarcerated at a federal prison in Texas, managed to win 10 counties and 41 percent of the 2012 West Virginia Democratic primary vote against the incumbent president of the United States.
For a fleeting moment, his out-of-nowhere performance against Barack Obama stunned the political world. Several news cycles were occupied with stories trying to understand who he was, and why voters from the president’s own party were so mad. Republicans reveled in the election results, using the opportunity to highlight party messaging against Obama’s so-called War on Coal.
Obama was never in danger of losing anywhere during the entire primary season. And Judd’s performance was just an aberration, nothing more than a minor pothole on his road to reelection. Still, it represented an embarrassing episode, a reminder that even within a president’s own party, one aggrieved state can still wreak havoc.
That’s what makes New Hampshire worth watching now that President Joe Biden has announced his candidacy for a second term. Biden angered the state’s top Democrats by pushing changes to the 2024 nominating calendar that eliminated New Hampshire’s prized first-in-the-nation primary status and put South Carolina in the lead-off spot.
But New Hampshire is still likely to go first, thanks to a state law that requires the primary to take place one week before any others. The Democratic National Committee gave New Hampshire until June to change the date, but that’s a no-go with the Republicans who control the governor’s office and state legislature.
And so Biden faces a quandary of his own design. If he participates in the primary of a state that’s poised to go rogue, he risks violating party rules — which would likely impose sanctions on candidates or states in violation. (A Biden campaign aide said the president and his team would abide by any sanctions imposed by the DNC, if that were to happen.)
But if Biden doesn’t appear on the ballot, he could cede the unofficial first contest to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and self-help guru Marianne Williamson.
Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.) has privately urged Biden twice now to compete in New Hampshire. “He should be on the ballot in New Hampshire. He’ll win handily,” she said in an interview this week. And if Biden is not on the ballot, there’s an alternative option: a write-in campaign, which is what Kuster and other top Democrats expect will happen if the president chooses to formally skip New Hampshire.
Either way, losing a primary that doesn’t actually count for anything isn’t a problem. Nor are Kennedy and Williamson a threat to the president’s renomination — not by any stretch.
But the optics surrounding the potential train wreck would be a messy distraction, at precisely the wrong time — the official outset of the presidential primary season. Comparisons would be drawn to two of the most famous and consequential New Hampshire primary challenges of yesteryear — Democrat Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and Republican Pat Buchanan in 1992 — even if the circumstances next year aren’t remotely similar.
“In terms of materially impacting his reelection, it’s probably a minimal effect. But New Hampshire is still an important swing state in the general election that you can’t take for granted and you want positive movement,” said Chris Moyer, a veteran of Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) 2020 presidential campaign in New Hampshire. “You don’t want any negatives along the way as he looks ahead to 2024.”
The president’s history in New Hampshire is already checkered. In his unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid, Biden was polling at a mere 3% in the state before he dropped out of the race one week before the primary. In 2020, he finished an anemic 5th there, nearly 50,000 votes behind his Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who finished in 2nd place behind Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The most recent polling out of the state suggests Biden still has much work to do. According to an April University of New Hampshire Granite State Poll , 50 percent of likely Democratic primary voters say Biden definitely or probably should not run for president in 2024. Just 43% think he definitely or probably should run.
The New Hampshire primary situation, veteran Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh told Nightly, is “an unnecessary disadvantage.”
“It won’t be a death knell,” she said. “But it does make it tougher in New Hampshire — it’ll be like ‘cleanup in aisle New Hampshire’ for the general election.”
— North Carolina Supreme Court clears way for partisan gerrymandering: The North Carolina Supreme Court has overturned its own past ruling that said partisan gerrymandering is illegal , clearing the way for Republicans there to redraw the state’s congressional lines in a way that heavily favors the GOP. The ruling allows North Carolina legislators to aggressively gerrymander the congressional map, which is currently represented by seven Democrats and seven Republicans. Now Republicans in Raleigh could re-create the map they initially passed last cycle which a Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court struck down, netting as many as four seats.
— Government report shows steep decline in FBI’s ‘backdoor searches’ on Americans: The Biden administration has a new argument in its uphill battle to sell Congress on renewing a controversial electronic surveillance statute : it can rein in abuses of the program itself. The number of times FBI personnel sought information on Americans within a repository of data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act fell more than 95 percent in 2022 from 2021, according to a much anticipated transparency report on U.S. spying released today.
— Brutal Democratic primary could pit ex-lawmaker against gov’s sister: Former New York Rep. Mondaire Jones is gearing up for a potential run for his old House seat , which could tee up a ugly primary with the sister of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in must-win territory for Democrats. While the ex-congressman is publicly saying he’s undecided, four people familiar with his plans say he’s prepping a run for his former New York seat. That’ll likely pit him against Liz Whitmer Gereghty, who has filed federal campaign paperwork and is slated to officially launch her bid soon.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Thursday in Manchester, New Hampshire. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
INSURRECTION-FRIENDLY — At a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Thursday, former President Donald Trump embraced a woman named Micki Larson-Olson who was convicted of defying police orders on the U.S. Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021. “Listen, you just hang in there,” Trump told Larson-Olson. “You guys are going to be okay.” He then signed the backpack that she brought with her to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
GETTING COZY — Biden plans to convene over 150 of his largest political donors in Washington over the weekend , according to CNN. At the reception, which will take place this evening, Biden will lay out the beginnings of his re-election strategy in the hopes that big donors who have backed him in the past are willing to do so yet again. Top Biden donors who will back him again told CNN that they’ve been encouraged by the response from fellow contributors in the days after his announcement.
PROPPING UP PENCE — A super PAC backing an expected Mike Pence presidential bid is planning to launch in mid-May , while his campaign is ramping up talks with consultants and activists in early nominating states, according to a senior adviser to the former vice president. A second person familiar with the Pence camp’s internal deliberations confirmed the PAC’s timeline to POLITICO, saying it would be “up and running shortly.” The formation of the PAC would serve as the prelude to an official campaign that is betting heavily on performing well in Iowa.
TRUMP'S PATH — While conventional political wisdom suggests that Biden has an advantage in a potential rematch with Trump, Ruy Teixeira lays out the opposite case in his political and social analysis blog The Liberal Patriot . Biden, he argues, could lose in 2024, for reasons including that his polling remains very weak, abortion might not be as impactful on the 2024 race as it was in 2022 and the president is having trouble with working class voters, while Trump projects significant strength there.
The opposition candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, is supported by a wide-ranging coalition from across the political spectrum, as the election is widely expected to be the most hotly contested in Erdoğan’s 20-year rule.
The vote of the Kurdish population, which makes up around a fifth of Turkey’s 85-million population, will be a decisive factor in the presidential race, as Kılıçdaroğlu and Erdoğan as the most recent polling compiled by POLITICO shows the two candidates in a statistical dead heat.
The left-leaning HDP party is the largest pro-Kurdish political force, representing around two-thirds of the Kurdish vote. The party’s leader Selahattin Demirtaş is currently serving a prison sentence on terrorism charges.
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NIGHTLY NUMBER
$110 million
The amount of money that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has on hand in various accounts, according to public filings and people who represent the entities. Without even launching an official campaign account, DeSantis’ financial advantage looms over the Republican field: Most contenders have cash balances on orders of magnitude lower than his. Even the super PAC backing Trump, MAGA Inc., reported $55 million on hand as of the end of 2022 — a hefty sum, but far short of what’s in the bank for DeSantis. The former president has also raised $18 million through his campaign since launching in November.
RADAR SWEEP
GAME OVER — Magnus Carlsen — by most measures chess’ greatest player of all time — is abdicating his throne . As the World Chess Championship takes place in Kazakhstan this week, Carlsen has decided not to participate, meaning that chess will crown a new champion. He’s doing so because, according to him, he’s “not motivated to play another match,” referring to the way he would defend his title, by playing a series of games against one challenger over the course of weeks. The even stranger this is, Carlsen expects to continue to play chess competitively. So, as the chess world crowns a new champion, Carlsen’s shadow will continue to loom large. David Hill reports for The Ringer.
PARTING IMAGE
On this date in 1945: A crowd in Chicago celebrates the report of Germany's surrender that spread through the nation. Germany officially signed surrender documents on May 7. | AP Photo
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