John Hanno – Page 206 – The Tarbabys Blog

Biden’s Cabinet is sticking around, bucking the turnover trend of his predecessors

NBC News

Biden’s Cabinet is sticking around, bucking the turnover trend of his predecessors

Peter Nicholas and Carol E. Lee – January 23, 2023

WASHINGTON — Ron Klain’s imminent departure as the White House chief of staff is the first step in a broader reshuffling among President Joe Biden’s advisers as he prepares for a 2024 re-election bid.

Jeff Zients, who led the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response, is set to replace Klain, and other White House aides are expected to leave in the coming months and shift over to the campaign, sources said.

But one part of Biden’s administration has been unusually stable, and it looks to stay that way for the foreseeable future: the Cabinet secretaries who run the sprawling federal government. Not one of the 15 department heads in the presidential line of succession quit in the first half of Biden’s term, nor have any given notice that they plan to leave any time soon, White House officials said.

The absence of turnover among the Biden appointees — whose jobs include stopping crime, keeping food safe and guarding against attack — is a rarity. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, only Barack Obama had no one from the Cabinet step down by the midpoint of his first term, said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Miller Center, a think tank on the presidency at the University of Virginia.

By contrast, Donald Trump churned through Cabinet secretaries as president — and senior staff members — at a head-spinning clip; nearly half his Cabinet had turned over as he entered his third year in office. By early 2019, Trump had cycled through seven of 15 Cabinet secretaries and was on his third chief of staff.

“Not one single member of the Cabinet has left in disgrace, is writing a tell-all book or has bad-mouthed the president,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who is close to the Biden White House. “There are no leaks, no backbiting, nothing.”

The new Republican-controlled House may try to yank at least one from his job. Some GOP House members hope to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in reprisal for what they see as lax immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border. A White House official said Mayorkas would fight any such attempt and has no wish to step down.

The durability of Biden’s Cabinet is something of a surprise. Before the midterm elections in November, some administration officials believed Cabinet departures hinged on whether Democrats kept control of the Senate. The thinking was that Cabinet officials would feel freer to leave because Biden would have an easier time getting a successor confirmed by the Senate than if Republican leader Mitch McConnell ran the chamber.

Democrats, indeed, kept the Senate, but the exodus from the Cabinet didn’t happen. In an interview after the midterms, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she wasn’t planning to leave before the term was over, despite the more favorable climate for confirmation.

“We have a lot of work to do,” she said in November. (There had been continual speculation that Yellen would leave and be replaced by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who in turn would be succeeded by Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia. When the Yellen domino didn’t fall, the others stayed in place.)

Why Cabinet members stay put rather than take better-paying jobs in the private sector or embark on independent political careers may have something to do with how they’re treated. Biden has made it a point to show them they’re valued, aides argue.

Before he gives a speech to a union group, he’ll call Labor Secretary Marty Walsh to make sure he is comfortable with the text, said Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser. When a businessperson raises a concern with him, he’ll pick up the phone and call Raimondo.

Few members of Biden’s Cabinet are strangers. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm played the part of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin during Biden’s debate preparation in the 2008 campaign. Biden thoroughly vetted Raimondo as a potential vice presidential pick in 2020.

“This is a president who really uses his Cabinet and values his Cabinet,” Dunn said. “Often, Cabinet members feel as though they are disconnected from the White House. In this case, the president has really depended on his Cabinet for advice.”

“They are a group of people that he has deep relationships with and who he listens to and seeks wisdom from that’s broader than their Cabinet agencies,” she added.

Going back decades, presidents have steadily concentrated power in the White House, at the Cabinet’s expense, historians say. Some Cabinet secretaries have felt marginalized as presidents stocked the West Wing with trusted advisers and usurped the prerogatives of Cabinet members who had thought they were brought in to run things.

The most glaring examples are in the foreign policy realm. Presidents have steadily padded the White House’s National Security Council with staff members who have, in some cases, left the secretary of state isolated. President Richard Nixon entrusted his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, with his most sensitive and consequential foreign policy goals, diminishing Secretary of State William Rogers.

Trump had no rapport with his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who once privately referred to him as a “moron” and was eventually fired by tweet.

But Biden is more of an institutionalist, having helped vet and confirm Cabinet secretaries throughout his 36 years as a senator. He also has an affinity with some members of his Cabinet forged through a long career in politics.

“Biden’s inner circle is so close-knit it’s almost familial,” said Chris Whipple, who recently published a book about Biden’s presidency. “It’s not so much a team of rivals but a bunch of team players. Those are just the people he chose. They’ve been pretty cohesive, and I don’t see a whole lot of movement.”

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked together for two decades, starting in the early 2000s, when Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Blinken was the Democratic staff director.

Asked about Blinken’s primacy in foreign policy matters, Dunn said Biden’s “relationship with Tony is so deep and goes back so far that it’s just a given.” She laughed.

Another enticement for the Cabinet to stay is that the next two years may be more fun. After grinding negotiations, Biden spent the first two years passing trillion-dollar infrastructure and climate change bills that it’s the Cabinet’s job to implement. That means ribbon-cuttings and visits to grateful states — all of which are helpful in cementing legacies in office.

“It’s just like any job,” said Tenpas of the Miller Center. “When there’s success, you want to keep doing it.”

GOP endorses full on crazy: How Kevin McCarthy Forged an Ironclad Bond With Marjorie Taylor Greene

The New York Times

How Kevin McCarthy Forged an Ironclad Bond With Marjorie Taylor Greene

Jonathan Swan and Catie Edmondson – January 23, 2023

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), fist bumps with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) as he arrives for a photo with freshman GOP members of the 117th Congress on the East Steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, on Jan. 4, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — Days after he won his gavel in a protracted fight with hard-right Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy gushed to a friend about the ironclad bond he had developed with an unlikely ally in his battle for political survival, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

“I will never leave that woman,” McCarthy, R-Calif., told the friend, who described the private conversation on the condition of anonymity. “I will always take care of her.”

Such a declaration from McCarthy would have been unthinkable in 2021, when Greene first arrived on Capitol Hill in a swirl of controversy and provocation. A former QAnon follower who had routinely trafficked in conspiratorial, violent and bigoted statements, Greene was then widely seen as a dangerous liability to the party and a threat to the man who aspired to lead Republicans back to the majority — a person to be controlled and kept in check, not embraced.

But in the time since, a powerful alliance developed between Greene, the far-right rabble-rouser and acolyte of former President Donald Trump, and McCarthy, the affable fixture of the Washington establishment, according to interviews with 20 people with firsthand knowledge of the relationship, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it.

Their political union — a closer and more complex one than has previously been known — helps explain how McCarthy rose to power atop a party increasingly defined by its extremes, the lengths to which he will go to accommodate those forces, and how much influence Greene and the faction she represents have in defining the agenda of the new House Republican majority.

“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy said. Both he and Greene agreed to brief interviews for this article. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”

It is a relationship born of political expediency but fueled by genuine camaraderie, and nurtured by one-on-one meetings as often as once a week, usually at a coffee table in McCarthy’s Capitol office, as well as a constant stream of text messages back and forth.

McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Greene, even dispatching his general counsel to spend hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy.

Greene, in turn, has taken on an outsize role as a policy adviser to McCarthy, who has little in the way of a fixed ideology of his own and has come to regard the Georgia congresswoman as a vital proxy for the desires and demands of the right-wing base that increasingly drives his party. He has adopted her stances on opposing vaccine mandates and questioning funding for the war in Ukraine, and even her call to reinvestigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to show what she has called “the other side of the story.”

McCarthy’s agenda, Greene said, “if he sticks to it, will easily vindicate me and prove I moved the conference to the right during my first two years when I served in the minority with no committees.”

‘Kevin Did This to You’

It was a right-wing conspiracy theory that first came between McCarthy and Greene, but not in the way that many people think.

When Greene entered Congress in January 2021, Republican leaders viewed her as a headache, and McCarthy regarded her as potentially beyond redemption. During her primary, social media posts had emerged in which she embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory and warned of “an Islamic invasion of our government.”

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, had intervened to oppose Greene — an affront she would not forget — but McCarthy, who eschews confrontation and conflict, would not go that far. He issued a statement through a spokesperson condemning the statements, but did not endorse her opponent.

Weeks after Greene was sworn in, more conspiracy-laden posts surfaced, including diatribes in which she had questioned whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and endorsed the executions of Democratic politicians including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama.

Outraged Democrats demanded that McCarthy oust her from congressional committees, and when he made no move to do so, they scheduled a vote to do it themselves. As the pressure built, some of Greene’s far-right allies told her yet another conspiratorial story that she believed: McCarthy, they said, was secretly working with Pelosi to strip her of power.

Enraged, Greene stormed into McCarthy’s office in the Capitol late one night in February 2021 and handed him a letter signed by Republican leaders in her district, urging him to keep her on her committees. They had received “countless” messages, they said, from their voters who were intent on supporting her.

It served as a not-so-subtle warning to McCarthy that the Republican base would be outraged if he did not ensure she kept her committee seats. McCarthy tried to explain to Greene that he agreed that what Democrats were doing was outrageous, but that as minority leader, he had neither the power nor the votes to stop it.

But Greene did not believe McCarthy, a person familiar with her thinking said. After she was booted off the Education and Budget Committees, members of her inner circle told her, “Don’t forget: Kevin did this to you.”

‘The Principal’s Office’

The relationship remained fraught throughout Greene’s first year in Congress, as the same pattern played out again and again in their interactions. A controversy would erupt over an outrageous comment Greene had made, then McCarthy would summon her to deal with the matter privately.

Greene would joke to friends, “Uh-oh, I’ve been called to the principal’s office.”

But even as she continued to traffic in offensive conspiracy theories and spoke at a white nationalist rally, McCarthy refused to punish her and often refrained from even criticizing her comments until pressed by reporters. It was a calculated choice by McCarthy, who leads more by flattery and backslapping than through discipline.

And by early 2022, Greene had begun to believe that McCarthy was willing to go to bat for her. When her personal Twitter account was shut down for violating coronavirus misinformation policies, Greene raced to McCarthy’s office in the Capitol and demanded that he get the social media platform to reinstate her account, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Instead of telling Greene that he had no power to order a private company to change its content moderation policies, McCarthy directed his general counsel, Machalagh Carr, to appeal to Twitter executives. Over the next two months, Carr would spend hours on the phone with them arguing Greene’s case, and even helped draft a formal appeal on her behalf.

The efforts were unsuccessful at the time, but they impressed Greene and revealed how far McCarthy was prepared to go to defend her. It was part of a broader and methodical courtship of the hard right by McCarthy that included outreach to conservative media figures and Trump’s hard-line immigration adviser Stephen Miller.

He had studied the two previous Republican speakers of the House, former Reps. John Boehner of Ohio and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a person familiar with his thinking said, and concluded that one of their fatal errors had been unnecessarily isolating far-right members, who in turn made their lives miserable. So McCarthy set out to do the opposite.

Approaching Symbiosis

Still, the alliance between McCarthy and Greene did not truly begin to flourish for several more months. At a party in the Dallas suburbs at the home of Arthur Schwartz, a GOP consultant and outside adviser to McCarthy, Greene found herself in the corner of a great room chatting with Devin Nunes, a former top Republican on the Intelligence Committee and a committed Trump ally.

Nunes told Greene about the time he had witnessed McCarthy yelling at Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who was then the majority leader, for his party’s decision to remove Greene from her committees, and threatening that he would do the same to Democrats when Republicans came to power.

Greene recalled it as the first time she had heard from somebody she trusted that McCarthy had defended her, rather than conspired with Democrats to blackball her.

“That conversation had a big impact on me,” she said.

From then on, the two settled into a kind of symbiotic relationship, both feeding off what the other could provide. Greene began regularly visiting McCarthy, frequently dropping by his office, and he began inviting her to high-level policy discussions attended by senior Republicans and praising her contributions.

He was impressed not only by Greene’s seemingly innate understanding of the impulses of the party’s hard-right voters, but also by her prowess at building her own brand. He once remarked to allies with wonder at how Greene, as a freshman, was already known by a three-letter monogram: MTG. “She knows what she’s doing,” McCarthy marveled privately. “You’ve got AOC and MTG.”

After Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, winning only a narrow majority and guaranteeing that McCarthy would have a tough fight to become speaker, Greene was quick to begin barnstorming the right-wing media circuit as one of his top surrogates, using her conservative credentials to vouch for his.

As her peers on the far-right flank of the party refused to support McCarthy, subjecting the Republican leader to a four-day stretch of defeats, Greene was unflinching in her support, personally whipping votes on the House floor and strategizing on calls with Trump.

Greene’s support for McCarthy created a permission structure for other GOP lawmakers to do the same.

Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., said in an interview that when conservatives back home sought an explanation for his support for McCarthy, he would comfort them by replying: “Well, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene are standing with Kevin McCarthy. And so am I.”

The relationship has also paid off for Greene, no longer the fringe backbencher stripped of her power. Republican leaders announced last week that she would serve on two high-profile committees: Oversight and Homeland Security. She is also likely to be appointed to a new Oversight select subcommittee to investigate the coronavirus, according to a source familiar with McCarthy’s thinking who was not authorized to preview decisions that have yet to be finalized.

It is already clear that she is influencing McCarthy’s policy agenda.

After Greene had told McCarthy that vaccine mandates were morally wrong and that he needed to stop them, he fought vociferously — and successfully — to include the repeal of the military coronavirus vaccine mandate in last year’s defense bill.

After she told him that the party faithful could not understand why Congress continued to send money to help Ukraine secure its borders, when the United States’ southern border was not secure, McCarthy helped pave the way for Republicans on the Foreign Affairs Committee to put forward and support a bill sponsored by Greene, who does not sit on the panel, demanding that Congress audit U.S. aid sent to Ukraine.

And after she told McCarthy that many people imprisoned for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were being victimized, he signaled that Republicans would start an inquiry of their own digging into the work of the panel that was investigating the assault.

“People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit,” Greene said. “It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”

In the early hours of Jan. 7, after McCarthy had finally clinched the speakership on the 15th ballot and pallets of Champagne were being wheeled into his new office, Greene opted not to join the celebration. But she sent him a text message the next day telling McCarthy how happy and proud she was — and how she could not wait to get started.

Scrub Hub: Passing a wind farm, I see some turbines spinning and others motionless. Why?

IndyStar – The Indianapolis Star

Scrub Hub: Passing a wind farm, I see some turbines spinning and others motionless. Why?

Karl Schneider, Indianapolis Star – January 23, 2023

Wind farms are becoming more common in Indiana. The state already boasts the fourth largest “farm” in the U.S. and produces nearly 3,500 megawatts of wind energy, with more on the horizon.

The towering windmills reaching up to the sky produce slightly more than 9% of all the electricity used in the state. That’s enough to power more than 1 million homes, according to the American Clean Power Association.

With more projects in the works that will produce another 302 megawatts, and a handful of bills proposed in this session of the General Assembly, wind power is likely to continue to grow across the state. And with the increasing presence of the conspicuous energy generators comes some curiosity.

So, for this edition of Scrub Hub, we took to our trusty submission form and chose a question from Teresa, who asked: Why are the wind turbines not turning right now?

Wind turbines operate in a rural area north of Lafayette, Indiana, on Wednesday, August 4, 2021.

It’s possible for the blades on wind turbines to reach up to speeds of 200 mph, so it may seem odd when some are spinning very quickly while the blades on others nearby are not moving.

We dug around in some state, federal and industry reports and reached out to academic experts in energy technology to determine why some turbines in a wind farm spin while others remain still.

Short Answer: The turbine is down for maintenance

Wind turbines, like all machines, need both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. In some instances that explains why some are operating but not others.

The basic components of a wind turbine are the visible tower and rotor blades, as well as the gearbox and generator located at the top of the tower.

Scheduled maintenance helps prevent wear and tear from breaking parts and unscheduled maintenance occurs when the turbine experiences any of a number of failures.

Regular preventative maintenance can include periodic equipment inspection, oil and filter changes, calibration and adjustment of various parts, as well as replacing brake pads and seals. General housekeeping and blade cleaning can also temporarily keep a turbine from spinning.

In larger wind farms, several turbines on a circuit can be inoperable and not spinning because they are all down for maintenance, said John Roudebush, program chair of Ivy Tech College’s Energy Technology program.

More Scrub Hub:Hoosiers may not be able to plant the same trees they used to

Long answer: Curtailment, congestion and wind speed

Energy transmission in Indiana is run through the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, commonly known as MISO. The group manages the flow of electricity by balancing demand versus what’s being generated, which means there are times where excess electricity is being produced.

“(Sometimes) we don’t need the power as demand is down or another power plant is selling power to the customers instead,” Roudebush wrote in an email. “Power plants compete on the grid. A coal plant, a natural gas plant, or a wind farm will all bid to sell power during some part of the day and MISO will pick the cheapest bid for the day. Generally, wind is the cheapest but not always.”

John Hall, assistant professor at the University of Buffalo’s Engineering and Applied Sciences, focuses his research on the technical aspects of wind energy. While some wind turbines will operate normally, he said others may be stopped to match production with grid demand.

“Basically, you have the utility company distributing power and buying and selling in real time,” Hall said. “Based on how much they need, wind farms would turn turbines off accordingly.”

The industry calls a wind turbine that is not spinning “parked,” Hall said, and this is done with a braking system that holds the rotor in place. Once energy demand rises, the brake is released and almost immediately the turbine starts delivering electricity to the grid again.

Another obvious answer to why the turbines may not be spinning is that the wind speed is not high enough.

Generally, turbines can generate power with wind speeds as low as 5 mph. If speeds fall below that, there just isn’t enough to turn the sometimes massive blades.

On the other hand, wind that is too fast can cause damages to the turbines, so operators of wind farms will park the rotors until the wind calms down. Turbines generally shut down when wind speeds hit about 55 mph.

“The system is not designed for that, so they shut it down,” Hall said. “That’s OK because we rarely get winds over that speed, and it would not be worthwhile to design for that for the few instances.”

To help improve the efficiency of wind farms, Hall said banking excess power is a huge research area right now.

“There are studies on new battery technology and super capacitors and different ways to get around that issue,” Hall said.

More:Toxic pollution, fossil fuels, floodplains: Top environmental bills to watch this session

Another solution for storing excess electricity is by making hydrogen, Hall said. Wind farm operators would be able to create hydrogen and store it for use later when the grid demand increases.

While fossil fuel plants may be more responsive to the constantly moving supply and demand for electricity, Hall said the future depends on renewables.

“If folks are concerned about climate and want a better future for the next generation and everything, renewable energy like wind and hydro-electric and tidal power are all really not just sources of energy but vital to perhaps our existence,” Hall said.

Karl Schneider is an IndyStar environment reporter.

IndyStar’s environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

How to solve Arizona’s housing shortage, which has reached crisis levels

AZ Central – The Arizona Republic

How to solve Arizona’s housing shortage, which has reached crisis levels

Jenn Daniels and Sean Bowie – January 23, 2023

Arizona is short at least 100,000 housing units to keep pace with demand.

As you read this, 300 Americans have just decided to move to our beautiful state. And it keeps happening every day.

Quality of life, low cost of living, climate, low regulatory environment and a simplified tax structure continues to draw people and businesses to Arizona.

Yet keeping up housing supply with this population growth has been challenging. While numbers vary, the Common Sense Institute Arizona estimates a shortage of about 100,000 housing units.

Barriers to development at the local level, bureaucracy within state agencies and preemptive state laws have limited the building of more housing units at a pace that keeps up with our growing population. Often unnecessary, burdensome rules and regulations have delayed project start times and increased costs for developers and homebuilders.

These costs ultimately get passed on to the buyer.

It’ll take steady, deliberate policy to solve this

Simply put, Arizona has a housing crisis – we need more housing, and we need it now. To be clear, there is no fast and easy button that will make the housing shortage go away. The solution is steady, intentional, deliberate policy and collaboration between all levels of government and the private sector.

We are of different political parties, but we have come together to find solutions to the challenges before us. After careful study of the data, dozens of stakeholder interviews and analysis of policy from other states, we have developed a menu of bipartisan solutions as part of a report for the nonpartisan Common Sense Institute Arizona (CSI).

We believe this can be a roadmap for state and local policymakers.

1. Expedite zoning and approval processes

Current processes for obtaining municipal approval to develop a piece of property vary from city to city. The process is burdensome, costly and takes far longer than is practical for builders.

The consistency achieved by establishing a universal, streamlined process for all Arizona cities will enable for a more objective approach. The development of a uniform process at the state level should be collaborative in nature among cities and consider cities of all sizes. Builders and developers would go through the same process regardless of the jurisdiction and get more houses to market more quickly.

Phoenix market stabilizing:One area is already back to favoring sellers

In essence, the ideal process to go from empty lot to home for sale would be the same in every municipality. By creating a uniform process, a homebuilder in Surprise would follow the same steps, checklist and timeline as a homebuilder in Chandler or Yuma.

2. Let state Housing department grade cities

Once the state has designed and implemented statutory guidelines around streamlined entitlement, review and permitting processes for residential development, the Department of Housing would review and monitor local processes and grade municipalities using objective standards like how long, expensive and onerous an entitlement and permitting process was.

In reviewing the onerousness of this process, the department would compare the cities performance relative both to other cities and towns in Arizona, and national benchmarks and standards.

Top-performing jurisdictions would have greater opportunity to use the novel tools, and receive some of the new state funding, recommended elsewhere in our report – we believe that when a city knows better, they also want to do better. Having true benchmarks and measurable data that can be tracked and shared openly is the best indicator.

3. Develop statewide zoning definitions

Zoning definitions vary from city to city. Identifying logical and predictable zoning definitions at the state level allows for comparison of zoning between municipalities, transparency in the process, and clarity for developers. Additionally, defining new or innovative types of housing, diversifying the types of housing within a municipality, and providing a cohesive way to update municipal codes will benefit cities, regions and developers.

Housing opportunity zones – which use a percentage of existing tax revenue within a municipality to help fund development – can improve the supply of housing where the market alone is unable to meet demand.

4. Form local ‘Housing Opportunity Zones’

For instance, in Arizona, we utilize a manufacturing Transaction Privilege Tax incentive, wherein we divert state sales-tax dollars to cities to support manufacturing project infrastructure costs, so developers don’t have to front those costs. This played a large role in TSMC’s development of their new $12 billion fabrication plant expanded here in our state.

Likewise, housing opportunity zones would likely be most popular in areas that are ripe for development where there are already significant resources being invested in bringing more housing supply onto the market. Like all policies of this nature, it should have a sunset date and be reviewed by the Legislature.

Developers who construct housing and meet accountability benchmarks could retain a proportion of local sales or property taxes otherwise owed on the project, as a way to compensate for costs associated with building and selling the affordable units. A city or town could also use the monies to reimburse itself for capital costs associated with providing public infrastructure that supports these projects.

5. Help cities fund more affordable housing

The state should encourage cities to create their own affordable housing funding. One way to do this is to create a statewide grant program that incentivizes cities to create dedicated funds that would go towards more affordable housing development.

The city of Tempe has been a leader in this regard, creating its Hometown for All program in 2021. Fifty percent of several development permitting fees paid to the city go into the fund and help finance land acquisition and redevelopment within city borders.

Our full report outlines a total of 19 solutions. These aren’t Republican ideas or Democratic ideas. These are Arizona ideas.

It’s important for everyone address this critical issue together. The success of our state depends on remaining an attractive and affordable place for new businesses and new residents. Together, we can ensure Arizona stays that way.

Jenn Daniels, a Republican, is former mayor of Gilbert and Sean Bowie, a Democrat, is a former Arizona state lawmaker. They served as housing fellows at Common Sense Institute Arizona.

There is no US debt crisis

Quartz

There is no US debt crisis

Tim Fernholz – January 23, 2023

Some of our posts include links to retailers. If you buy something from clicking on one, G/O Media may earn a commission. Because editorial staff is independent of commerce, affiliate linking does not influence our editorial content.

Republicans in Congress are threatening once again to force the US to default because they lack the votes to enact their preferred fiscal vision.

Yes, it’s debt ceiling season once again. For those not following along at home, US law imposes an arbitrary limit on the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow. Historically, this was intended to make borrowing easier. Today, it is a tool for brinksmanship, with Republicans threatening to block paying the bills they already voted to incur unless GOP demands for unspecific spending cuts are met.

Right now, the US is at the limit, and the Treasury Department is moving money around to delay a conflict until later in the year. But if the limit is not raised, the US faces a constitutional crisis: How can the president execute the laws set by Congress if those laws are contradictory? (Here’s a flow chart for your consideration.)

The last time a real debt ceiling face-off happened in 2011, the US had its sovereign debt rating downgraded and incurred more than a billion dollars in economic losses. So let’s set aside the hypocrisy and political posturing and ask a simpler question: Is there a debt crisis that would justify holding the economy hostage?

And the answer is no. Markets are not worried about the US paying its debts, and there are no bond vigilantes appearing out of the woodwork.

That’s because the US is an enormously wealthy nation with a growing economy. The US has a lot of debt, about $22 trillion, equal to about an entire year’s economic production. But the US also has a lot of wealth—about $137 trillion (pdf). It’s true that interest rates are rising, but only because the Federal Reserve is pushing them up. Investors are still betting that rates will fall soon, with the interest paid on ten-year Treasury bonds lower than on government debt due in two years. That yield curve inversion reflects expectations that the Fed will cut rates during a potential recession. But even absent a downturn, the Fed isn’t likely to hike more than expected next year thanks to slowing inflation.

Public debt is stabilizing. How do you shrink it?

And what’s the trend for federal public debt? After a huge surge driven by pandemic-driven public spending, borrowing is set to shrink as a share of the economy in the years ahead. These Congressional Budget Office forecasts are from May 2022, and don’t include changes from legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act or updated economic data, but the figures do offer a best guess at what we can expect:

datawrapper-chart-nnWgR

Many policymakers and economists fret that publicly-held debt approaching 100% of annual GDP is too high. The “correct” level of debt is difficult to assess; researchers think too much debt can be a drag on growth, but only if it crowds out private spending or leads to higher interest rates. The global economy, however, is in many ways dependent on a steady supply of US debt. Perhaps the biggest reason to push down current borrowing is to make sure the US has the fiscal capacity to weather the next emergency. One thing that won’t help reduce the debt, however, is a financial crisis caused by debt ceiling brinksmanship.

Despite the Fed’s tightening, growth remains strong and unemployment is low. That’s arguably a good environment to reduce government spending after the enormous surge in pandemic aid. Spending is already falling faster, as a share of the economy, than it did after the 2008 recession.

There are ways to keep driving spending down (pdf), but they require delivering pain to somebody: Eliminating subsidies to everyone, from agribusiness to defense contractors, leads to lobbyists for affected industries pounding down lawmakers’ doors, while cutting benefits to children, the sick or the poor remains broadly unpopular. Tax hikes can be more palatable but can generate political repercussions among influential upper class voters.

The last time anyone tried to hash out a compromise on all of this—the 2011 glory days of the Bowles-Simpson commission—Republicans backed out because of proposed tax increases, and Congress wound up cutting spending 10% across the board. (Republicans reversed many of the cuts when President Donald Trump took office in 2017.)

Debt politics are different in 2023

Absent the specter of the European debt crisis or a Republican party united on fiscal issues, the politics of debt reduction sit differently. Some Republican politicians, like Trump and Senate leader Mitch McConnell, are already warning that the cuts for popular but expensive programs such as Social Security and Medicare implied by a debt default aren’t going to help the party gain power in the next election. Republican member of Congress Nancy Mace told NBC over the weekend spending must be cut but couldn’t name a single target for reductions. Instead of cuts, conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is pushing to lift the limit on taxable Social Security wages.

It’s easy—it’s always easy—to imagine the Biden White House coming together with Republicans in Congress to find a moderate deficit reduction package that raises taxes and cuts some spending. The White House certainly imagines it, since administration spokespeople such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have made clear it won’t engage with novel plans to avoid a debt ceiling crisis like minting a platinum coin or various other finance shenanigans. Still, the patience—or complacency—about the debt ceiling might leave Washington in an uncomfortable place come this summer: It remains to be seen if the hardliners among Republicans have the patience for bipartisan legislating. If global investors won’t give them the debt crisis they want, they seem eager to create it.

Ukraine’s battlefields look like World War I but with a new and terrifying addition that leaves troops with almost nowhere to hide

Insider

Ukraine’s battlefields look like World War I but with a new and terrifying addition that leaves troops with almost nowhere to hide

John Haltiwanger – January 22, 2023

The conflict in Ukraine has emerged as the first major war involving drone use on both sides.

Experts say that drones have made artillery even more lethal, and are changing the face of warfare.

The debate over whether drones would matter in a conventional war is now over, one expert said.

Trench warfare, relentless artillery, gains measured in mere meters, and heavy casualties on both sides. The battlefields of Ukraine resemble those of World War I, but with a new and terrifying reality — the incessant buzzing of drones, harbingers of death and destruction that are constantly watching from above.

The Ukraine war has essentially become “World War I with 21st century ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance],” Mark Cancian, a retired US Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Insider.

Artillery firing in Ukraine — Ukrainian soldiers work in their artillery unit in the direction of Marinka, 15 January 2023.Diego Herrera Carcedo/Getty Images

Ukrainian soldiers in a trench on the Vuhledar frontline in Donetsk oblast, 5 January 2023.Diego Herrera Carcedo/Getty Images

Both Ukraine and Russia have used drones of all shapes and sizes to spy on each other and to strike targets on a scale that’s never been seen before, and it’s changing the face of warfare. Drones are being used to locate enemy positions and direct fire, crash into and destroy buildings in “kamikaze” attacks, and drop bombs on tanks.

With much of the fighting occurring in rural areas with large open fields that are often dangerous to cross — a modern equivalent of WWI’s horror-filled “No Man’s Land” — drones have proven to be an extremely useful and deadly tool. Both sides are using drones equipped with cameras or other sensors that offer a livestream that can be watched on a laptop or digital tablet to scout out the enemy and coordinate attacks from afar.

Drones have played an important role in adjusting artillery fire and confirming that targets were hit or destroyed. They’re an eye in the sky on the battlefield in Ukraine that’s making artillery even deadlier.

As fighting rages in Ukraine's Donetsk region, Russian forces near the city of Bakhmut are said to be exhausted. Ukrainian troops rely on their air reconnaissance. A drone unit known as The Wings of Madyar provides real-time information to Ukrainian artillery batteries. pic.twitter.com/xJhysmsxIb
— Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (@RFERL) December 30, 2022

“Unmanned systems have been used in greater and greater numbers in conflicts over the last decade, but the Ukraine war took it to a new level. But it is not just about the numbers, but the type of war. Up to last year, there was an active debate as to whether drones could play a role in conventional war, instead of just missions like Afghanistan,” P.W. Singer, a leading expert on modern warfare and senior fellow at the New America think tank in Washington, told Insider.

“That debate is now over,” Singer added.

‘The future of warfare’

A Ukrainian soldier launching a drone — Ukrainian servicemen fly a drone on the outskirts of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine on December 30, 2022.Sameer Al-Doumy/Getty Images

Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, have been used in various capacities in warfare for generations. Some researchers point to Austria’s use of pilotless hot-air balloons to bomb Venice in 1849 as the first example.

The US began developing unmanned aircraft as far back as World War I. Remotely piloted aircraft were used for surveillance during the Cold War, and unmanned technology gradually advanced over the 20th century. By the late 1990s, Predator drones were being used by the US and NATO for reconnaissance missions in the Kosovo War.

But it was the onset of the war on terror that saw the use of drones rise exponentially and move away from primarily being employed for reconnaissance. In the years since the 9/11 terror attacks, the US military and CIA have used drones for the surveillance and targeted killings of suspected terrorists in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

Armed drones have also been used in other conflicts, including in fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Drones have become increasingly attractive to militaries worldwide as the technology has advanced and gotten cheaper. These systems can gather intelligence and execute missions that might otherwise risk the life of a pilot and cost less than building a traditional air force.

The war in Ukraine, however, marks the first time that we’ve seen drones employed in a conflict involving major powers and modern armies on both sides and used so “extensively and over an extended period of time,” Cancian said.

Ukraine has in many ways emerged as a guinea pig for drone warfare. A wide array of unmanned aerial vehicles produced everywhere from the US to China and from Turkey to Iran have been used in battle.

In the early days of the fighting, Ukraine saw success using the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drone to rain hell from above on key Russian assets like armored vehicles. A Bayraktar — which has a range of 186 miles, is the size of a small plane, and is capable of carrying laser-guided bombs — was involved in the attack that sank the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

Later in the war, Russia began launching swarms of Iranian-made Shahed-136 “kamikaze” drones, striking targets across Ukraine. The Shahed-136 is a loitering munition — designed to linger or loiter before locating a target and crashing into it. It’s less than 12 feet long, can fly at 115 mph, contains an explosive warhead in its nose, and explodes on impact. These single-use drones are relatively cheap ($20,000 each) and have been used by Russia to destroy vital civilian infrastructure and make life even harder for Ukrainians.

The US has also provided Ukraine with hundreds of Switchblade drones, a type of loitering munition or kamikaze drone, which can be carried in backpacks. Switchblades can be used to strike infantry, armor, and artillery.

“We’re seeing the first use of swarm drones with what have been called ‘kamikaze’ drones, these Iranian Shahed-136s and all of their various relatives — that’s new,” Cancian said, adding, “A lot of people have pointed to that as the future of warfare.”

Ukraine’s Air Force says it shot down six of Russia’s Iranian Shahed-136 kamikaze drones and one Su-25 in the south. But two Shahed-136 drones did strike a building in Odesa, destroying it and killing one person. Video below shows the drones over the city. pic.twitter.com/mLR4d2H0kd
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) September 23, 2022

Singer said the Russian military’s use of drones to strike civilian targets sets a dangerous precedent for the future of war.

“It is a parallel to the German use of V-1 missiles towards the end of World War II,” he said. “A nation hoping a new technology will make up for its losses on the battlefield, by terrorizing the home-front.”

Destruction from a drone attack in Kyiv — Firefighters work after a drone attack on buildings in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Oct. 17, 2022.Roman Hrytsyna/Associated Press

‘They’re always being watched’

The most prevalent drone on the battlefield in Ukraine can fit in your hand. Indeed, military analysts have been particularly surprised by the heavy reliance on small civilian or commercial drones such as the Chinese-made DJI Mavic 3, which cost less than $3,000 online.

These drones are being used for reconnaissance but have also been weaponized, with soldiers rigging them with improvised explosive devices or grenades.

“Both Ukraine and Russia are now using them in literally hundreds. Every small infantry unit now has one or more flying for them. It was not something that militaries had been training for,” Singer said of the use of cheap commercial drones in Ukraine.

Drones are not necessarily the most important or impactful tool being used in Ukraine, but they’re making other weapons more accurate.

“If you wanted to seek out enemy positions in the past, you would have had to send out special forces units… and you might have lost some troops,” Marina Miron, a defense researcher at Kings College London, told BBC News in early January. “Now, all you’re risking is a drone,” Miron added.

The surveillance element has been significant, with troops on the front line in Ukraine reporting that drones are “always around,” Cancian said, adding, “They’re always being watched.”

A Ukrainian soldier holding a drone — A Ukrainian serviceman poses with a drone on the outskirts of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine on December 30, 2022.Sameer Al-Doumy/Getty Images

A Ukrainian soldier pointing his weapon toward the sky — A Ukrainian serviceman shoots at a Russian drone with an assault rifle from a trench at the front line east of Kharkiv on March 31, 2022.Fadel Senna/Getty Images

“We’ve had overhead reconnaissance for a long time, but the scale of it is new and also the ability to connect that with fire support,” Cancian said. “It’s one thing to get a picture of a target and be able to do something about it 24 or 48 hours later, as opposed to being able to do something in 10 minutes.”

Drones have significantly shortened the so-called kill chain, Cancian explained, helping troops swiftly locate targets and provide coordinates for artillery. “Kill chain” is a military phrase or concept referring to the stages of an attack, from identifying a target to engaging it and assessing the damages.

The war in Ukraine has shown that drones are “as essential” in battle as artillery or tanks, Singer said, adding that “drones have arguably been most valuable not in launching their own missiles, but in making Ukrainian artillery so lethal, in pinpointing their fires.”

Native Hawaiians flock to Las Vegas for affordable living

Associated Press

Native Hawaiians flock to Las Vegas for affordable living

Jennifer Sinco Kelleher – January 22, 2023

Doreen Hall Vann walks with son Zaiden after tryouts for a club baseball team Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023, in Las Vegas. In 2019 Vann moved from Hawaii to Las Vegas to be closer to her daughter in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Doreen Hall Vann wathes her son Zaiden during tryouts for a club baseball team Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023, in Las Vegas. In 2019 Vann moved from Hawaii to Las Vegas to be closer to her daughter in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Locher)

KAPOLEI, Hawaii (AP) — Kona Purdy never wanted to live anywhere but Hawaii. As a Native Hawaiian, he wanted his children to grow up like he did: rooted in their culture, and nourished by the mountains and ocean.

But raising a family in Hawaii meant squeezing nine people into a four-bedroom house — rented with extended family — in Waipahu, a Honolulu suburb. It felt cramped, but the Purdys accepted that this was the price to survive in their homeland.

“We stuffed ourselves into one room,” Purdy said of his four-member family’s living arrangements.

Their share of the monthly rent was $2,300. When rent increased, the Purdys realized that they could no longer afford to live in Hawaii.

“I was so busy working, trying to make ends meet,” he said. “We never took our kids out to the beach. We didn’t go hiking.”

It’s increasingly common for Hawaii residents to be priced out of the Aloha State, where the median price for a single-family home topped $900,000 during the pandemic. On Oahu, the most populous island and where Honolulu is, the median price is more than $1 million.

Many residents work in low-wage service jobs, and the financial strain is especially significant for Hawaii’s Indigenous people. A state analysis published last year showed that a single person working 40 hours a week would need to earn $18 an hour to pay for housing and other necessities in Hawaii, but the state minimum wage is currently $12 an hour.

Many, like the Purdys, have headed to Las Vegas.

According to 2021 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the biggest growth of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander populations was in Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, and Sacramento County, California. The biggest decline of Native Hawaiian residents was in Honolulu.

Hawaii residents are spending on average 42.06% of their income on rent, which is the highest of any state, according to a Forbes Home analysis. California ranks second, but at a much smaller proportion of income going toward rent: 28.47%.

Estimates from the American Community Survey showed that in 2011, there were about 296,400 Native Hawaiians in Hawaii and about 221,600 on the continental U.S. Just a decade later, those numbers flipped. In 2021, there were about 309,800 Native Hawaiians in Hawaii and about 370,000 in other states.

“There’s no Hawaii without Hawaiians,” said Honolulu City Council Chair Tommy Waters, who is Native Hawaiian. His five siblings have all moved to the continental U.S. “That’s just incredibly sad to me, that Hawaiians cannot afford to live in Hawaii.”

Las Vegas was desirable to the Purdys because it’s a popular vacation destination for Hawaii residents, which meant family would likely visit often. Also, the cost of living is significantly lower.

So in 2017, they uprooted their family and moved to Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb in Clark County, where they could afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment for $1,000 a month.

Far from Hawaii’s shores, they felt like “fish out of water,” Purdy said.

“So it’s real ‘eha,’” Purdy said, using the Hawaiian word for painful, “because you do get disconnected from the land, which we’re so connected to, being born and raised here.”

But even though they were nearly 3,000 miles from home, Hawaiian culture was all around them. Thanks to many other transplants, the Las Vegas area is full of restaurants catering to Hawaiian taste and cultural events expressing Hawaiian pride.

There’s even a real estate brokerage that helps families relocate from the islands — run by mostly former Hawaii residents.

“You go into any store in any part of the valley and you’ll find someone from Hawaii working there or shopping there,” Purdy said.

A three-bedroom home priced at $300,000 in a Las Vegas suburb would be $1.2 million in Honolulu, said Terry Nacion, a Native Hawaiian realtor. She left Hawaii for Las Vegas in 2003 because home ownership felt unattainable. “Back home, you either had to have your home passed down to you or you have to work four jobs,” she said.

A few months after they moved, about 20 other relatives, including Purdy’s mother, uncle and sister Lindsay Villarimo, followed them.

“Over time, it just became exhausting trying to make ends meet,” said Villarimo. “It’s heartbreaking that’s the choice we make. The majority of us, I think we just got priced out of home.” When Villarimo and her family decided to move to Nevada, her husband Henry had never even left Hawaii.

Las Vegas’ affordability was “liberating,” she said. With cheaper rent and groceries, and no state income tax, she could stretch her paycheck further.

“We were just living it up in the dollar store,” she said. In Hawaii, that type of store doesn’t exist.

For Hawaii residents, the draw to Las Vegas can all be traced back to a downtown hotel that opened in 1975, author Dennis M. Ogawa said.

The hotel originally catered to Californians, but he struggled to get business. Reminded of gambling’s popularity in Hawaii, it shifted focus to visitors from the islands. “Aloha Spoken Here” became the hotel’s slogan.

In 2019, Doreen Hall Vann decided to move to Las Vegas to be closer to her daughter, who had moved to Seattle for more job opportunities.

On Facebook, she gushed about how much cheaper everything was, from bread to rent. But she started to worry about staying connected to her culture while living far from home, especially because she uprooted her son, who was then 6 years old, from his Hawaiian language immersion school.

“It’s just like when you give birth and you cut your umbilical cord. For us Native Hawaiians, our ‘piko’ is the source of life,” Hall Vann said, using the Hawaiian word for navel or umbilical cord. “When we move off island … we are disconnected because we’re not on our land anymore.”

But in her new home, she found she had more time and less stress.

“I was so busy back home trying to make a living,” she said. “When I moved to Vegas, it really put a pause in my life and I could see things a lot clearer.”

That allowed her to get involved in the Las Vegas Hawaiian Civic Club, where she now teaches Hawaiian.

“We have our people, our home, our community is thriving,” she said.

In Las Vegas, Purdy’s children began to learn hula and the family enjoyed “hoolaulea,” cultural festivals that were bigger than celebrations back in Hawaii.

But in August 2021, exactly four years after leaving Hawaii, the Purdys moved back home.

Purdy said that his wife wanted to take care of her mother, who began showing signs of dementia. Their daughter also got accepted to Kamehameha Schools, a highly selective and relatively affordable private school system that gives admissions preference to students with Hawaiian ancestry.

The family moved to Kapolei, a Honolulu suburb not far from where they once lived, to share a five-bedroom house with their extended family. Now that the Purdys have three children, they rent two of the bedrooms.

Purdy is trying to find time to take his kids to hula lessons. Since moving back, the family has only been to the beach once.

“It’s a grind, it’s hard, it’s really expensive,” he said. “But I also feel like we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be right now.”

‘I had no choice’: For many homeless people, O’Hare has become a nighttime refuge

Chicago Tribune

‘I had no choice’: For many homeless people, O’Hare has become a nighttime refuge

Adriana Pérez, Chicago Tribune – January 22, 2023

Norbert Pikula, 77, had been sleeping on a friend’s sofa every night for the last six months. But when his friend was admitted to the hospital a few weeks ago, Pikula’s fragile world turned upside down and he had nowhere to sleep.

So now he uses his senior citizen CTA pass to ride to O’Hare International Airport and spend the night there. His situation mirrors that of countless other homeless people who sleep at the airport to stay warm and safe during the winter.

“I had no choice,” Pikula told the Tribune on Thursday. He was on his way to open a bank account after eating his usual weekday lunch at Providence Soup Kitchen in St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church.

According to a report from the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, an estimated 65,611 people experienced homelessness in Chicago in 2020, an estimate different from that offered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development because it takes into account people living doubled up or temporarily staying with others.

And while sheltering at the airport isn’t new, said Jessica Dubuar, director of health and specialty services of Haymarket Center, which has conducted outreach operations out of O’Hare to address homelessness in public transportation since 1990, the steadily increasing number of people doing it is.

“We saw over 600 unique individuals that we engaged with. We also had almost 14,000 encounters with them throughout the calendar year,” she said. Compared with previous years, that number illustrates an uptick: In 2021, there were 11,196 recorded encounters. In 2020 — the beginning of the pandemic — saw 12,270 encounters. In 2019, they recorded 9,975 encounters. In 2018, it was 8,132.

“This is not a new situation at the airport. It’s one that many organizations and city departments have been aware of and have been devoting resources to for 30 plus years,” Dubuar said. “As the years have gone on, we definitely see a pattern of the number of folks who are coming to the airport — I would even just call it a spike in the numbers of folks that we’re seeing at the airport when the weather turns cold.”

Advocates offer a couple of reasons for why more people are seeking shelter at O’Hare. Sarah Boone of the Chicago Housing Initiative who created a GoFundMe to help Pikula raise money, said there are three realities facing the homeless population right now: the number of beds in homeless shelters was decreased at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and never restored, migrants who have recently arrived in Chicago are increasingly using homeless shelters as well, and homeless shelters across the city are overwhelmed.

And on the ground at O’Hare, workers offer another possible explanation. Jessy Pearl, a Transportation Security Administration agent who works at the airport, said she has noticed an uptick in the homeless population sheltering there since Delta Air Lines moved out of Terminal 2 and into Terminal 5.

“There’s more homeless people — more activity is concentrated at Terminal 2, since there’s less passenger traffic,” especially in the early afternoon, Pearl told the Tribune. “I’ve worked at the airport long enough to know that more homeless people have been around the CTA and arrivals area ever since the pandemic started. More so lately, since Delta moved to Terminal 5.”

According to a statement by the Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA), which manages O’Hare, the department is “aware of the increasing population of unsheltered individuals at O’Hare International Airport. It’s a common occurrence at this airport and airports nationwide when temperatures drop in the winter months. Airport leadership and staff on the ground continue collaboration with the Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) and their delegate agencies to provide 24/7 outreach to unsheltered residents at O’Hare.

“Outreach professionals engage with individuals experiencing homelessness at O’Hare and conduct needs assessments. If the individual chooses to accept assistance, outreach professionals connect them with appropriate services and shelters, including necessary referrals and transportation. The CDA is committed to working with fellow city departments and community partners to support those in need and connect them with all available resources in Chicago.”

Pikula has been sleeping at the airport for the last two weeks or so, said Boone. And he’s been carrying around his belongings all day as he moves around the city. “I think it’s wearing on him,” she added.

Boone said she met Pikula at Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ukrainian Village where free food is offered on Saturdays. Her organization shows up to soup kitchens and places where there’s free food to connect homeless people with necessary services in the city and tend to their needs.

“I tried to get him to go to the hospital across the street, because you can go to the ER to call the shelters. And he didn’t want to do that because the wait is so long,” Boone said. “So we tried calling 311. And he kind of just said he’d prefer to be at the airport than at the shelters. So then I went home and I just thought about it. And I was like, we should do a GoFundMe. I’ve never done this before. But what if it works?”

With approximately 100 donations, the campaign had raised over $4,900 as of Friday afternoon out of a $9,800 goal.

Pikula said he is looking for a more permanent housing situation than couch surfing or spending nights at O’Hare. He’s hoping to find a studio or one-bedroom apartment in Wicker Park, Logan Square, Avondale or Garfield Park. That’s where his friends from the soup kitchens he visits live, so he wants to be close by.

A Polish American who grew up in Chicago, Pikula previously worked as a baker and security guard. He is on the waiting list for senior Chicago Housing Authority housing and subsidized Catholic Charities senior apartments. So far, he has had no luck finding a place to live.

During the pandemic, many homeless people turned to the CTA for shelter, and service providers set up at the Forest Park Blue Line station. But as the effects of the pandemic continue to limit housing, needs at the other end of the line also became evident.

Off the Blue Line O’Hare stop, to the left, a sign for the Haymarket Center O’Hare Outreach sticks out of the wall. A man was waiting to go in Thursday morning as he charged his cellphone.

The program assists homeless clients and passengers seeking shelter at the airport. It also approaches issues regarding alcohol and substance abuse, housing and income. Dubuar described what a client may find in the 24/7 office at O’Hare.

“We have a number of resources available on site from, food and coffee, water, hand sanitizer, masks … those things. We also have clothing available, hygiene products and a few other things,” she said. “What we’ll also do is invite people to come in and sit down and talk to us. And we do a small assessment with them, exploring all sorts of things from health care, mental health care, substance use, benefits and IDs and all of those things.”

The O’Hare Outreach program is funded by the Chicago Department of Aviation and carried out in cooperation with the Department of Family Support Services and a host of other community partners, such as shelter providers, substance use treatment providers and — importantly — housing programs.

“The complexity of the (needs of) folks we’re seeing has increased and, (in) the number of encounters, that’s really where you see that reflected,” Dubuar said. “This isn’t just a ‘somebody needs a sandwich today’ and that’s it, that’s all they needed. Because I think that we have folks, their needs are complex and navigating through these systems is hard and they need as much support as they can possibly get.”

While Dubuar couldn’t confirm whether there is a more concentrated homeless population in specific airport terminals, she said it’s possible that changes in the airport complex layout influence where homeless people spend their time.

“Individuals who come to the airport for shelter do learn the system and do see when there are construction projects or changes to how the space is being monitored with our partners from CPD and the Department of Aviation,” she said. “And so it is it is highly possible that there are going to be some folks who are visible because certain areas are under construction or maybe not being monitored as much as possible.”

On Friday morning, as the sun rose, a few scattered people in O’Hare’s Terminal 2 rustled in their sleep. They were slowly waking up. Some of them might have had canceled or delayed flights. Others, though, were homeless and had sought a warm place to spend the night.

A police officer approached a person who was lying by the windows in the arrivals area of Terminal 2. He asked if they were OK. “Just try not to fall sleep,” he said. “Stay awake.”

Pikula and other homeless people will likely keep searching for a more stable situation than sleeping at the airport every night. Even as they seek support services, though, continuing to sleep at the airport seems, in Pikula’s words, the only option in terms of surviving cold winter nights.

“I’ll be honest with you, my life has not been rosy,” Pikula said. “It’s been a fighting life.”

It’s hard to say how long it takes, on average, for a homeless person in Chicago to find stable housing, Dubuar said.

“As with most social services, benefits and resources, it’s about eligibility and availability,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a matter of the stars aligning.”

Chicago Tribune’s Rosemary Sobol contributed.

Military probing whether cancers linked to nuclear silo work

Associated Press

Military probing whether cancers linked to nuclear silo work

Tara Copp – January 22, 2023

FILE – An inert Minuteman III missile is seen in a training launch tube at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., June 25, 2014. Nine military officers who had worked decades ago at a nuclear missile base in Montana, home to a vast field of 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silos, have been diagnosed with blood cancer and there are “indications” the disease may be linked to their service, according to military briefing slides obtained by The Associated Press. One of the officers has died. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nine military officers who had worked decades ago at a nuclear missile base in Montana have been diagnosed with blood cancer and there are “indications” the disease may be linked to their service, according to military briefing slides obtained by The Associated Press. One of the officers has died.

All of the officers, known as missileers, were assigned as many as 25 years ago to Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to a vast field of 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silos. The nine officers were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, according to a January briefing by U.S. Space Force Lt. Col. Daniel Sebeck.

Missileers ride caged elevators deep underground into a small operations bunker encased in a thick wall of concrete and steel. They remain there sometimes for days, ready to turn the launch keys if ordered to by the president.

“There are indications of a possible association between cancer and missile combat crew service at Malmstrom AFB,” Sebeck said in slides presented to his Space Force unit this month. The “disproportionate number of missileers presenting with cancer, specifically lymphoma” was concerning, he said.

Sebeck declined to comment when contacted by email by the AP on Saturday, saying the slides were “predecisional.” In the slides, he said the issue was important to the Space Force because as many as 455 former missileers are now serving as Space Force officers, including at least four of the nine identified in the slides.

In a statement to the AP, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said that “senior leaders are aware of the concerns raised about the possible association of cancer related to missile combat crew members at Malmstrom AFB.”

Stefanek added: “The information in this briefing has been shared with the Department of the Air Force surgeon general and our medical professionals are working to gather data and understand more.”

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which according to the American Cancer Society affects an estimated 19 out of every 100,000 people in the U.S. annually, is a blood cancer that uses the body’s infection-fighting lymph system to spread.

For comparison, only about 3,300 troops are based at Malmstrom at a time, and only about 400 of those are assigned either as missileers or as support for those operators. It is one of three bases in the U.S. that operate a total of 400 siloed Minutemen III ICBMs, including fields at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.

The median age for adult non-Hodgkin lymphoma is 67, according to the National Institutes of Health. The former missileers affected are far younger. Officers are often in their 20s when they are assigned duty watch; the officer who died, who was not identified, was a Space Force officer assigned to Schreiver Space Force Base in Colorado with the rank of major, a rank typically achieved in a service member’s 30s. Two of the others are in the same Space Force unit with the rank of lieutenant colonel, which is typically reached in a service member’s early 40s.

It’s not the first time the military has been alerted to multiple cancer cases at Malmstrom. In 2001 the Air Force Institute for Operational Health investigated the base after 14 cancers of various types were reported among missileers who had served there, including two cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

But the review found the base was environmentally safe and that “sometimes illnesses tend to occur by chance alone.” The report lamented that the list of those diagnosed had been collected because it “perpetuates the level of concern.”

The discovery of new cases comes as the U.S. government has shown more openness to acknowledging the environmental hazards, or toxic exposures, troops may face while serving.

In her statement to the AP, Air Force spokeswoman Stefanek said, “We are heartbroken for all who have lost loved ones or are currently facing cancer of any kind.”

It was not clear whether some of the nine officers identified in the January briefing slides, whose diagnoses occurred between 1997 and 2007, overlap some of the cases identified in the Air Force’s 2001 investigation. It’s also not known if there were similar reports of cancers at other nuclear silo bases or whether that is being investigated by the Air Force.

“Missileers have always been concerned about known hazards, such as exposure to chemicals, asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyls, lead and other hazardous material in the work environment,” Sebeck said in the January slides. “All missileers should be screened and tracked for the rest of their lives.”

Last year President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act, which greatly expanded the the types of illnesses and toxic exposures that would be considered presumptive — meaning a service member or veterans would not face an uphill battle to convince the government that the injury was tied to their military service in order to received covered care.

Doctors Say This One Habit Can Help You Sleep Better And Boost Your Energy

She Finds

Doctors Say This One Habit Can Help You Sleep Better And Boost Your Energy

Faith Geiger – January 22, 2023

woman waking up and stretching feeling energized

Proper rest is so important for your overall health. From brain performance to mood and even gut health, sleep plays a role in so many vital components of wellness—which is why it’s so essential to ensure you’re getting the best, most restful sleep possible each night. And as it turns out, there may be one missing piece you’re overlooking if you’re struggling to fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling energized. Believe it or not, it has to do with your morning routine.

That’s right: we spoke Dan Ford, sleep psychologist from The Better Sleep Clinic, to learn more about the best habits to improve sleep and energy throughout the day, and he told us that waking up at the same time each morning is crucial. Your wake-up time plays a key role in regulating your circadian rhythm and releasing important hormones for sleep. Learn more below!

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Wake up at the same time every day

When you think about good sleep habits, you may think primarily about what you do before you go to bed–i.e. shutting down electronics, unwinding, drinking a relaxing tea, etc. And while all of these things are definitely great habits to promote better sleep, Dr. Ford says that a good wakeup routine can also be a gamechanger. “While every second internet article recommends having a go to sleep routine, the irony is that the most important habit in all of sleep medicine is to get up at the same time every day and try not to vary this by more than 1 hour,” he says. Who knew?!

Dr. Ford tells us that waking up at the same time every day is beneficial for two reasons. “First, when you get up at the same time this helps to anchor your circadian rhythm or body clock,” he explains. This is the “master clock” in your brain that takes cues from the amount of light your body gets in order to regulate the clocks in your body. From there, your body uses these “clocks” to know when to release hormones, as well as when to carry out a number of other important processes. And it’s extremely important to your sleep cycle that you keep these clocks on track. “When you shift your wake-up time, you change the light dark cycle signals to your body clock, throw it out of sync, and the result is similar to jet lag–symptoms of fatigue, nausea, lack of energy etc,” Dr. Ford says. That means that, believe it or not, sleeping in and waking up at a later time than your body is used to could actually cause you to have less energy throughout the day.

But it isn’t just your energy levels that a consistent wake-up time can improve. It can also help you get a better sleep at night. “The reason for this is that the length of time you are awake determines the build-up of the chemical adenosine in your body,” Dr. Ford goes on. “Adenosine build up influences how sleepy you feel and how deep you sleep at night.” And the longer you’re awake, the more adenosine you’re able to build up–and the easier it will be to fall asleep and stay asleep. Alternatively, if you sleep in to try to “catch up on sleep,” your day will be shorter than usual, and you’ll likely have trouble falling asleep–which means you’ll also have less energy in the morning. “Most adults will need around 16-17 hours of wakeful activity before they have sufficient adenosine build up to sleep for a solid 7 hours (the healthiest amount of sleep for an adult),” Dr. Ford notes.

So, as it turns out, a restful, energizing sleep is about more than going to bed at a decent time and having a good relaxation routine. Your morning can make a big difference, too. So be sure to set that alarm clock–and don’t hit the snooze button too many times!