April 18, 2018
There is no excuse for this in 2018
Once-A-Year Clinic Is Only Affordable Health Care Option For S…
There is no excuse for this in 2018
Posted by NowThis Politics on Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
Homebuilders paid for Pruitt’s Colorado hotel stay
Politico
Homebuilders paid for Pruitt’s Colorado hotel stay
By Lorraine Woellert April 17, 2018
During his visit to Colorado Springs, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt gave a speech to the builders and invited them to EPA headquarters in Washington, where he later told his staff to regard them as the agency’s “customers.” Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo
A group of Colorado home-builders paid for a luxury hotel stay last fall for EPA chief Scott Pruitt, eight months after the Trump administration began work on a major priority for their industry by unwinding an Obama-era wetlands regulation.
During his visit to Colorado Springs, Pruitt gave a speech to the builders and invited them to EPA headquarters in Washington, where he later told his staff to regard them as the agency’s “customers,” the head of the group told POLITICO.
The $409.12 hotel stay may have met federal legal requirements if EPA’s ethics officers had approved it ahead of time. But it’s likely to add to the storm of ethics controversies surrounding Pruitt, who faces scrutiny from EPA’s inspector general, the White House and members of Congress for his travel and security spending and a $50-a-night Capitol Hill rental he accepted from the wife of an energy lobbyist.
The $409 hotel room “might be the least of his problems, but it’s emblematic of all his problems,” said Virginia Canter, an ethics lawyer for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog group.
“It’s one thing when a head of an agency or senior official is engaged in legitimate outreach,” Canter added. “But to give a speech, accept a benefit of overnight lodging, then a few weeks later instruct your staff that these are your clients strikes me as inappropriate. At a minimum it raises an appearance issue.”
Pruitt is known to actively seek speaking slots at events with key groups with a stake in the agency’s actions. A former staffer, Kevin Chmielewski, has told lawmakers that Pruitt directed his staff to find places he could visit, congressional Democrats wrote in a letter last week. A former lobbyist also recalled Pruitt and his staff persistently asking for an invite to a conservative event that fundraisers frequently attend.
EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the travel arrangements.
Pruitt agreed to speak to the Housing and Building Association of Colorado Springs after it offered to cover his expenses, including his flights and $409.12 to put him up at The Broadmoor, a lakeside golf resort, on Oct. 4, according to the builder group’s chief executive officer, Renee Zentz. The hotel advertises itself as “a legendary Forbes Five-Star and AAA Five-Diamond resort with impeccable service and distinctive amenities.”
EPA never billed the trade group for his flights, Zentz said in an interview. And while Pruitt stayed at The Broadmoor as the group had agreed, his entourage spent the night at a different hotel, Zentz said.
“We didn’t pay for his team but we paid for him. That was the agreement when we talked to him,” Zentz said. “We just wanted to get him here, we were just so excited to have him.”
The trip’s headline event was a Pruitt speech to a lunch gathering of about 150 people on Oct. 5, Zentz said. In a stroke of good timing, board members from the National Association of Home Builders were meeting in nearby Santa Fe, N.M., and flew up for the event. NAHB President Jerry Howard hustled in from Washington to moderate Pruitt’s remarks.
The group’s invitation describes the event as “a rare opportunity to hear directly from the EPA administration” and “our chance to make sure the concerns of our industry are being listened to.”
“It just was an awesome opportunity,” Zentz said. “It was a pretty big feather in our cap locally.”
Builders rank among Pruitt’s biggest supporters, even amid his recent spate of negative headlines. They also have lauded the administration’s efforts to roll back regulations on clean water and storm runoff, including a sweeping Obama-era EPA regulation called Waters of the United States that several industries have denounced as a multibillion-dollar drag on the economy. Granger MacDonald, then-chairman of the National Association of Home Builders in Washington, was at the White House in February 2017 when President Donald Trump signed an executive order that took the first step toward undoing that rule, one of his first acts in office.
Pruitt, who attended the signing ceremony, has since set about crafting a much more limited regulation to protect waterways and wetlands. Environmental groups have said the move could leave 60 percent of U.S. stream miles and 20 million acres of wetlands unprotected and vulnerable to development or pollution.
Before the October lunch in Colorado Springs, Pruitt sat down to an invitation-only coffee with about 20 business owners and builders, who complained about EPA’s approach to stormwater controls and other regulations. At the end of that meeting, Pruitt instructed staff to arrange a meeting in Washington with industry representatives, Zentz said.
That meeting took place at EPA headquarters on Oct. 24, when Pruitt and his staff met with eight to 10 industry representatives, including a Colorado builder from Zentz’s group.
Pruitt “wanted to hear from our districts. He called a representative from every single district,” Zentz said. “He put his staff in the room and said, ‘This is our customer, this is who we’re going to listen to.’
“He told his staff, ‘These are our customers,’” Zentz said. “He listened.”
Federal law allows government officials to accept travel reimbursement, including hotel stays, with prior approval from agency officers. But even if the agency had approved the room, it was inappropriate, CREW’s Canter said.
“It appears to be abuse of the travel approval,” she said. “It’s not intended to be used to provide luxury accommodations to the head of the agency so he can turn around two weeks later and say we give these guys favorable treatment.”
Emily Holden and Annie Snider contributed to this report.
NLRB Becomes Anti-worker
ucommblog
NLRB Becomes Anti-worker
The confirmation of John Ring changes balance of the NLRB to favor management
by Guest Post April 16, 2018
Management lawyer John Ring was appointed chairman of the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday, one day after the U.S. Senate narrowly confirmed him as an NLRB member.
Ring’s appointment returns control of the five-seat board to a GOP majority that has already shown its determination to destroy Obama-era rules protecting workers’ rights.
The board had been split 2-2 since the previous chairman’s term ended in mid-December. Until then, with the Republican chair and two of President Trump’s nominees in place, the board worked at near-record pace in the fall of 2017 to reverse eight years of progress.
“There is an agenda: fewer workers will have fewer rights,” Wilma Liebman, a former Democratic chair of the board told The Huffington Post in December.
The flurry of rulings “hobble the ability of millions of working people to organize, which goes right against the mission of the agency,” International President Lonnie R. Stephenson said in an IBEW report on the board’s assault on unions.
The board’s Republican majority comprises Ring, employer-side attorney William Emanuel and Marvin Kaplan, a former Capitol Hill staffer who worked on policies to strip workers of union right. Another management lawyer, Peter Robb, was appointed by Trump as NLRB general counsel.
Until his appointment, Ring was a partner at the law firm Morgan Lewis, where he represented “management interests in collective bargaining, employee benefits, litigation, counseling, and litigation avoidance strategies. He has an extensive background negotiating and administering collective bargaining agreements, most notably in the context of workforce restructuring and multiemployer bargaining,” according to the firm’s website.
In a February letter, the AFL-CIO implored senators on the Health, Education Labor and Pensions committee to scrutinize Ring’s record, saying Trump’s earlier NLRB nominees weren’t living up to their confirmation hearing promises.
“Despite their commitments to your committee that they brought no agenda or prejudgments to the agency, these appointees have carried out the agenda of the Chamber of Commerce and Republicans in Congress, ignoring established agency practice and, in one case ignoring a clear conflict of interest to reverse precedent and take other actions to undermine workers’ rights,” the letter stated.
One such ruling overturned the joint employer rule that gave workers employed by contractors or franchises more power to bargain with and hold parent companies accountable. The board was forced to reinstate the rule in February, however, in response to revelations that Emanuel had a conflict of interest and should have recused himself from the case.
Ring and the earlier nominees were approved on party-line votes in both the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee and in full Senate, with all Democrats opposed.
In a December column at Slate.com, legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern said that in their zeal to “incinerate every Obama-era rule as quickly as possible,” Republicans are turning the NLRB’s mission on its head.
“The NLRB was not designed to veer wildly when the presidency changes hands,” Stern wrote. “Congress directed the agency to protect ‘the exercise by workers of full freedom of association’ and ‘self- organization.’ Although conservatives often accused Obama’s NLRB appointees of stretching the law, each of their decisions explicitly advanced this founding mission.
“Trump’s appointees, by contrast, are contracting the law in a manner that’s utterly incongruous with the policy of the board as prescribed by Congress. All indications are that they’ll succeed in this partisan mission, and American workers will pay the price.”
This article was written for the IBEW.
Trump Enraged After Finding Out He Stood Up to Putin
Vanity Fair
Trump Enraged After Finding Out He Stood Up to Putin
Isobel Thompson, Vanity Fair April 16, 2018
Nothing distinguishes Donald Trump from the Trump administration like Vladimir Putin, toward whom Trump remains inexplicably solicitous despite his advisers’ insistence that Russia is a grave national-security threat.
The most generous interpretation of this discrepancy is that the president is pursuing a good-cop, bad-cop strategy to bring Russia back into the international community. This is a worthy goal, of course, if somewhat naive. As my colleague Peter Savodnik wrote last month, in the wake of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, the friendship Trump long sought with Putin has been forestalled by circumstances outside his control. “That breakup is happening now, whether the American president wants to be broken up with or not.”
Trump, naturally, has accepted this geopolitical reality with all the dignity of a lovesick teen whose parents have taken away his phone. As The Washington Post reports, the president had been adamant with his handlers in the White House that the U.S. response to the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain be limited.
Indeed, the president was initially hesitant to believe intelligence that Russia was responsible for the attack at all, and resisted pressure that he should respond in accordance with European allies. “Why are you asking me to do this?” Trump asked in a call with British Prime Minister Theresa May, according to a senior White House official. “What’s Germany going to do? What about France?”
At his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump was assured by aides that both nations would expel the same number of Russians diplomats. “We’ll match their numbers,” Trump finally agreed. “We’re not taking the lead. We’re matching.” Trump was furious, then, when it was announced that France and Germany didn’t even come close to matching the U.S., and were expelling only four Russians each:
His briefers tried to reassure him that the sum total of European expulsions was roughly the same as the U.S. number.
“I don’t care about the total!” the administration official recalled Trump screaming. The official, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the expulsions. “There were curse words,” the official said, “a lot of curse words.”
Despite Trump’s private anger, his government has taken a number of increasingly aggressive steps to counter Putin. Last year, the Trump administration approved the sale of lethal arms to Ukraine. Earlier this month, his administration sanctioned a clutch of Russian officials and oligarchs, prompting Russia’s Foreign Ministry to threaten a “harsh response.” And yet Trump himself is torn. “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!” he raged on Twitter last week, after an alleged attack that killed dozens of Syrians in the rebel-held town of Douma.
Just a bit later, however, he seemed to think better of poking the hornet’s nest. “There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together,” he pleaded. “Stop the arms race?” Later that morning, he made a point of blaming “Democrat loyalists” and the “Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation” for any “bad blood” with Russia. “No Collusion,” he added, instinctually.
Over and over, however, the president’s befuddling personal admiration for Putin seems to get in the way of domestic politics. Last summer, Trump was forced to sign a sanctions bill he had opposed when Congress presented him with a veto-proof majority. (Privately, the Post reports, Trump lamented that the Mueller probe had thwarted his efforts to befriend Putin. “I can’t put on the charm,” he complained.) When Trump grudgingly approved the arms sale to Kiev, the Post reports, he was infuriated that news of the deal became public. (“For some reason, when it comes to Russia, he doesn’t hear the praise,” a senior administration official said.)
More recently, he disregarded clear instructions from advisers to “NOT CONGRATULATE” Putin for his fraudulent re-election win, but did so anyways, even inviting him to visit the White House.
The tension between Trump and his government has resulted in what are, effectively, two separate Russia strategies: one pursued by the president, and one by his administration. On Monday, the president and his Cabinet butted heads again, with Trump throwing cold water on preliminary plans to impose additional economic sanctions on Russia, announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump, according to the Post, told his national-security advisers that he was not comfortable with how punitive they were. The least generous interpretation of that decision seems to speak for itself.
Why would an EPA chief need a car with ‘Kevlar-like seat covers’?
MSNBC – The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog
Why would an EPA chief need a car with ‘Kevlar-like seat covers’?
By Steve Benen April 17, 2018
In this March 10, 2016 photo, Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma Attorney General, gestures as he speaks during an interview in Oklahoma City, Okla. Photo by Sue Ogrocki/AP
Pruitt waste of taxpayer money on soundproof booth broke law: GAO
Yesterday was not a good day for embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. We’ve known for a while that the Oklahoma Republican spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a soundproof phone booth for reasons that have never made any sense, but we learned yesterday that as far as the Government Accountability Office is concerned, the purchase violated federal spending laws.
But that doesn’t mean things can’t get worse for the far-right EPA chief. Take this new Washington Post report, for example:
“Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt upgraded his official car last year to a costlier, larger vehicle with bullet-resistant covers over bucket seats, according to federal records and interviews with current and former agency officials.
Recent EPA administrators have traveled in a Chevrolet Tahoe, and agency officials had arranged for Pruitt to use the same vehicle when he joined the administration in February. But he switched to a larger, newer and more high-end Chevy Suburban last June.”
The article added that the head of Pruitt’s security detail “subsequently approved the addition of Kevlar-like seat covers to the vehicle at a cost of hundreds of dollars.”
That’s the same security official, Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta, who’s reportedly “clashed – at least once physically – with top E.P.A. officials who challenged Mr. Pruitt’s spending, and has steered at least one E.P.A. security contract to a business associate.”
This is what’s become of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Donald Trump era.
For what it’s worth, it would be easier to justify “bullet-resistant covers” for Scott Pruitt’s seats if there were evidence of expansive security threats against the EPA chief, but there aren’t. The latest documents from the agency show those security threats don’t really exist. (The career EPA staffer who approved this evidence was removed from his post.)
And, of course, Pruitt’s “Kevlar-like seat covers” are also emblematic of Pruitt’s paranoia. As we discussed just yesterday, for example, the EPA chief also explored the possibility of getting a bullet-proof desk.
This fit into an amazing pattern. Pruitt, for example, has a massive, around-the-clock security detail. He’s spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on a professional sweep of his office searching for possible surveillance devices. And thousand more on a sound-proof phone booth. And thousands more on first-class air travel, apparently afraid of the riff raff who fly coach.
CNN reported that the EPA’s custodial staff is not allowed to enter Pruitt’s office on their own, and in the hallway around Pruitt’s office, “security employees check government IDs against a list of employees who are approved for access.”
And before you think Trump keeps this guy around because he’s ruthlessly effective at gutting environmental safeguards, let’s also not forget that reports on Pruitt’s competence have been greatly exaggerated.
Explore: The MaddowBlog and EPA
Republicans Are Scrambling To Save An Arizona House Seat In GOP Territory
HuffPost
Republicans Are Scrambling To Save An Arizona House Seat In GOP Territory
Daniel Marans, HuffPost April 17, 2018
Democrats have launched a serious bid to win an April 24 special election for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, scaring national GOP groups into spending major money on a seat that was once considered safely Republican.
Democrat Hiral Tipirneni, 50, a physician and an advocate for cancer research, is taking on Republican Debbie Lesko, 59, a conservative state senator, to fill a suburban Phoenix seat vacated by Rep. Trent Franks (R). Franks resigned in December after it emerged that he had offered a female aide $5 million to serve as a surrogate mother for his children.
Although the odds of Tipirneni flipping the seat are not in her favor, her candidacy has excited the Democratic base, enabling the party to improve its chances in other races. In November, Arizona Democrats hope to take control of the state Senate and plan to mount serious bids for the governorship and an open U.S. Senate seat.
“The party is confident that 2018 could be a big year for Arizona,” said Drew Anderson, spokesman for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Arizona’s 8th Congressional District is composed of suburbs north and west of Phoenix. The district is home to a large number of retirees: More than one-fifth of residents are 65 or older.
In 2016, President Donald Trump defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the district by 21 percentage points. That same year, the district re-elected Franks by an even wider margin, but his main opponent was from the Green Party, not the Democratic Party.
Other parts of Arizona, including adjacent areas of the Phoenix metropolitan area, have been trending more Democratic. Clinton lost the state by just 3.5 percentage points, and in Maricopa County, which encompasses greater Phoenix, voters ousted Joe Arpaio, the notoriously anti-immigrant sheriff.
Now, in a reflection of this year’s higher-than-usual Democratic enthusiasm, public polling indicates that the race for Arizona’s 8th is competitive. Tipirneni even leads Lesko by 1 percentage point in an Emerson College poll released Monday, although political strategists still see her as an underdog.
National Republican groups have responded in force, hoping to avoid another embarrassing defeat in solid-red territory. Three groups ― the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC ― have together spent nearly $1 million boosting Lesko’s bid.
The outside airpower aims to narrow the damage of Tipirneni’s fundraising lead over Lesko. Tipirneni has raised $740,000 compared with Lesko’s $564,000 haul. (Former Rep. Franks is among Lesko’s high-dollar donors, contributing the maximum of $2,700 allowed from an individual.)
And while the Arizona Democratic Party has pitched in for Tipirneni with a field office, staff and get-out-the-vote resources, national Democratic groups, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee, have not given her any cash directly.
The DNC has, however, used its email list to fundraise for Tipirneni. It also contributed a five-figure grant to the Arizona Democratic Party for voter outreach and registration through its State Party Innovation Fund, though the grant is not earmarked for use in the special election for Arizona’s 8th District.
Tipirneni’s biggest individual national booster may be Ady Barkan, an ALS-stricken activist who leads the progressive Center for Popular Democracy Action. Barkan, who played a lead role in Capitol Hill protests against the GOP tax cuts, traveled to the district to campaign for Tipirneni ― and press Lesko about her stances on cutting major social insurance programs.
Asked whether she was disappointed that the national party had not provided more support for her bid, Tipirneni responded indirectly.
“We have learned very clearly that every state is worth contesting and every race is worth investing in,” Tipirneni told HuffPost in an interview. “We’ve learned that repeatedly, so I don’t know why we’re even addressing it.”
An aide to Lesko said he would respond later this week to detailed questions about her policy stances and campaign. HuffPost will update this article accordingly.
It is hard not to see in the race for Arizona’s 8th some of the same elements that propelled Democrats to an upset victory in the March 14 special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District.
Tipirneni is benefiting from the enthusiasm and mobilization of the district’s Democratic voters, particularly suburban women, in the wake of Trump’s election.
Recent policy battles in Arizona, one of several GOP-controlled states experiencing a backlash, including threatened teacher strikes, after years of fiscal austerity, have created a ready-made corps of activists primed to canvass for Tipirneni. Many of the same women knocking on doors for Tipirneni now had already mobilized against a bill in the state Legislature expanding private school vouchers. Lesko was a sponsor of the school voucher bill, which has since become a law that’s being challenged on the November ballot.
At the same time, Tipernini is keenly aware that she needs the support of independents and Republicans to win. To this end, she has not made Trump a focus of her run ― or really spoken much about him at all.
“When people ask, I speak about him,” Tipirneni told HuffPost. Even then, Tipirneni does not dwell much on Trump as a person. She criticizes the president in the context of his work with congressional Republicans to pass policies Tipirneni opposes, such as the tax cut legislation, which she calls “atrocious.”
It’s just unconscionable that on the backs of seniors they would pay for this huge corporate tax cut. Hiral Tipirneni, Democratic candidate for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District seat
Indeed, Tipirneni has focused on the kitchen-table issues of health care, education and retirement security.
She supports creating a Medicare-like public option to compete with private plans that would be accessible to all Americans.
The proposal has prompted charges from Lesko that Tipirneni is too liberal for the district. “She’s for this socialized, Bernie Sanders, Medicare for all. And that’s not what our constituents want,” Lesko said in a televised debate with Tipirneni in late March.
In fact, while Sen. Sanders proposes replacing private insurance with Medicare, Tipirneni would simply permit people to buy into the program.
And she laments the pressure to cut Social Security and Medicare as the GOP tax cuts add $1.5 trillion to the national debt. (In an interview discussing his decision not to seek re-election, House Speaker Paul Ryan expressed regret that he had not accomplished “entitlement reform,” a euphemism for scaling back major social insurance programs.)
“A lot of my community are elderly folks, retirees. For them, Medicare and Social Security are their lifelines,” Tipirneni said. “These are earned benefits that they have paid into through decades of hard work.”
“It’s just unconscionable that on the backs of seniors they would pay for this huge corporate tax cut that puts billions of dollars into the pockets of companies like Exxon and Walmart, as opposed to folks who could really use that help,” she added.
In lieu of the current tax revision, Tipirneni proposes making the middle-class tax cuts in the law permanent and expanding them so they reach more people.
Although Tipirneni’s progressive policy stances put her comfortably in the Democratic mainstream, she identifies as a “moderate Democrat” and emphasizes her “data-driven approach” to policy.
“Show me the facts, show me the research. That’s what my science background brings to the table,” Tipirneni said.
For her part, Lesko has touted her conservative bona fides and devotion to Trump’s agenda, not least on the hot-button issue of immigration.
In a 30-second TV ad, “Built the Wall” Lesko declares her support for Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern U.S. border but also says it’s “not enough.”
“We need more Border Patrol agents and the best technology to stop this invasion,” she says.
Republicans have also accused Tipirneni of financially benefiting from the ACA. Her firm, CSRA, received a contract to assist with Obamacare enrollment. But Tipirneni said her research work is completely separate and that she has not profited from the landmark health care law in any way.
Tipirneni remains optimistic about her bid, but she also acknowledged the importance of her bid in increasing the Democratic Party’s reach in the state ahead of the November elections. The party’s biggest pickup opportunity is likely in the state Senate, where Republicans currently have a four-seat majority.
“Whatever happens on April 24, we have definitely laid the groundwork to continue the momentum forward,” Tipirneni said.
More News in Arizona: Teachers to Get a 20 Percent Pay Raise
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Arid West Invading Fertile Eastern U.S.
EcoWatch
Arid West Invading Fertile Eastern U.S.
Climate News Network April 16, 2018
The 100th meridian (solid line) dividing the moister eastern U.S. from the dryer west. Climate change may already be moving the divide eastward (dotted line). Image modified from Seager et al, Earth Interactions 2018
There’s an invasion going on down the middle of the U.S., as America’s arid West advances eastwards. Imperceptibly, decades of climate change have shifted the natural boundary between the dry west and the fertile farmlands of the eastern states by more than 225 kilometers (approximately 140 miles), according to a new study by U.S. scientists.
In effect, what was once marked by the 100th meridian is now at 98 degrees of longitude.
The 100th meridian is one of those astronomically-determined lines that emerge from what the researchers call “psychogeography.” Just as the historic 38th parallel separates the hostile states of North and South Korea, the Mason-Dixon line marks a notional but blood-stained boundary between the northern states and the American South, and the Greenwich meridian formally replaced the Paris meridian as the notional ground zero for the measure of universal time, so the 100th meridian has entered U.S. consciousness.
It was first cited 140 years ago when a pioneer geologist and surveyor identified a divide running from north to south between land that received ample rainfall, and soils in the so-called rain-shadow of the Rockies that could be classed as arid.
And, conveniently, it could be measured as 100 degrees west of Greenwich in the UK, the starting point for lines of longitude. In two papers in the journal Earth Interactions, researchers have taken a closer look at the reality of this historic divide and the changing nature of the U.S. landscape as a consequence of climate change driven by ever-greater ratios of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, in response to ever-more profligate human use of fossil fuels.
They confirm that in the 140 years since the first observation of that divide, the line through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas has shifted eastwards by 140 miles, or 225 km: in the state of Texas, this is a shift from Abilene to Fort Worth.
In 1878, the geologist John Wesley Powell noted the transformation observed as he crossed a north-south band of terrain in the U.S. “On the east, luxuriant growth of grass is seen, and the gaudy flowers of the order Compositae make the prairie landscape beautiful.
“Passing westward, species after species of luxuriant grass and brilliant flowering plants disappear; the ground gradually becomes naked, with ‘bunch’ grasses here and there; now and then a thorny cactus is seen, and the yucca plant thrusts out its sharp bayonets,” he later wrote.
Big Change Ahead
Today, west of the line, population drops away sharply and farms are fewer but bigger. To the east, most of the crop is maize, a plant greedy for water. To the west, the dominant harvest is wheat, which is more resistant to aridity.
The researchers predict that dry-lands will continue to move eastward with the century, as global temperatures continue to rise, and eventually trigger large-scale changes.
Such research is simply another way of identifying the impacts of climate change. None of it should be a surprise. Researchers have repeatedly warned that the U.S. climate is changing with ever-greater risks of climate extremes, including ever-more devastating droughts, and with increasing risks of forest fire.
So the 100th meridian study is another way of telling the story again. “Powell talked eloquently about the 100th meridian, and this concept of a boundary line has stayed with us down to the current day,” said Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who led the study “We wanted to ask whether there really is such a divide, and whether it’s influenced human settlement.”
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Franklin County studying ways to solve ‘alarming’ poverty.
The Columbus Dispatch
Franklin County studying ways to solve ‘alarming’ poverty.
By Kimball Perry, The Columbus Dispatch April 16, 2018
Christine Bennett discusses homework with her granddaughters, from left Linh Hustead 12, Geneva Hustead 9, and Asia Hustead 11, in their two-bedroom apartment in Columbus. Bennett is caring for the girls, whose mother is in prison. Eric Albrecht/Dispatch
Concerned because so many in Franklin County live in poverty — one in four children, and one in six residents — despite a strong regional economy, the county’s commissioners are investing in a yearlong study to find solutions for the most vulnerable.
“There’s a lot of people out here (who) need help,” said Christine Bennett, 52, of the West Side.
Bennett is among them.
With a daughter in prison, she cares for three grandchildren who are 12 or younger. They have to move because officials discovered there is too much lead in their home. The family gets public medical benefits and cash assistance but doesn’t qualify for food assistance because Bennett’s income is just over the limit.
“It’s very difficult. I lost my husband five years ago,” she said.
For some time, county leaders have considered what can be done to improve what Commissioner John O’Grady calls “alarming” poverty statistics in a generally economically successful population. He and fellow commissioners Marilyn Brown and Kevin Boyce decided to make it their top priority.
The commissioners now have asked companies to submit proposals on how to identify and recommend solutions for Franklin County’s poverty issues.
“We’re not just providing checks and a subsidy. We’re providing a pathway to prosperity,” Boyce said. “The best social service agency is a good-paying job.”
He knows.
His father was killed when Boyce was 7. His family lived in poverty, moving 11 times before he graduated from high school. Their big break came when his mother got a job at the Postal Service. “You’d have thought we hit the lottery,” Boyce said.
As a state representative, Boyce saw the flip side of the prosperity and economic success driving central Ohio. His district included pockets — often several generations — of families affected by poverty.
“Some neighborhoods and communities have upwards of 50 percent poverty,” Boyce said.
A 2015 Redfin study deemed Columbus the nation’s least economically diverse large city. A 2015 University of Toronto study found that Columbus was the second-most economically segregated American city, behind Austin, Texas.
“Your destiny should not be determined by your ZIP code,” county Administrator Kenneth Wilson said.
The economic disparity exists despite the Franklin County Department of Job and Family Services’ $86 million budget this year and the tens of millions more spent by other government entities and nonprofit, faith-based and other agencies that provide food, health and other social services to the needy. The federal poverty level in the 48 lower states is set at an annual income of $25,100 for a family of four.
“It’s never been just about handouts,” O’Grady said. “We want to give people an opportunity to help themselves. We can’t just go throwing money at it.”
Already, Franklin County provides job training, has developed an internship program for construction trades to fill jobs in a field desperate for workers, and provides subsidies for companies such as Fortuity, a call center seeking to hire and train workers living in poverty. The county also upped its employees’ minimum hourly wage to $13.69.
The area’s unemployment rate is low, fluctuating around 4 percent, but large pockets of poverty remain.
Brown said that’s because so many of the needy work two or more low-paying jobs and sometimes still need food or medical assistance to survive.
“This is the issue of the community, and it’s the community’s responsibility — employers, employees, everybody,” Brown said. “The real goal is not to keep them on public assistance, but to help them” become employed and paying taxes.
The contract for the report, which probably will cost more than $100,000, is expected to be awarded in June, with the report presented to commissioners a year after that.
Boyce acknowledges that the process to obtain social services is complicated and bureaucratic and doesn’t provide the best services.
“We are addressing the symptoms instead of the causes,” Boyce said.
All three commissioners expect that the report will show overlaps and gaps in social service systems. They want to know where and how that can be fixed.
The commissioners suspect that the finished report will suggest a temporary steering committee to help collaboration of all social services. It will look at what is working or not working in other governments and whether their best practices can be applied here.
“There’s many facets to poverty. That’s why we need experts to look at it,” Wilson said.
Now is the time, officials insist, to make a hard push to address local poverty because the region is predicted to have up to 1 million more residents by 2050.
“As we continue to grow,” Wilson said, “we’re going to suffer if we don’t solve this.”
Billionaire Republican Donor Will Fund Democrats ‘For the Good of the Country’
Newsweek
Billionaire Republican Donor Will Fund Democrats ‘For the Good of the Country’
Joseph Difazio, Newsweek April 16, 2018
Boston-area billionaire hedge fund manager Seth Klarman will now start funding mostly Democrats after a history of giving large donations to Republicans.
“The Republicans in Congress have failed to hold the president accountable and have abandoned their historic beliefs and values,” Klarman said in a statement to The Boston Globe. “For the good of the country, the Democrats must take back one or both houses of Congress.”
Klarman told the paper that he wanted to use the money he was saving from the Republican tax overhaul to “invest” in Democrats.
Klarman is the CEO and President of Baupost Group, a hedge fund in control of $32 billion, according to Forbes. The business magazine pegs his net worth at around $1.5 billion.
While not a registered Republican, Klarman has a long history of donating to the GOP, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Klarman has donated to candidates, political action committees and the Republican National Committee. Klarman has given to Democrats in the past, but the recent shift is a marked change in his donations.
According to an analysis by the Globe, Klarman has given over $200,000 to Democrats since the election of President Donald Trump, after spending more than $7 million on Republicans and their organizations while Barack Obama was president.
Klarman has always had a distaste for Trump, even backing Hillary Clinton in the past presidential election, after Tump won the Republican nomination.
“His words and actions over the last several days are so shockingly unacceptable in our diverse and democratic society that it is simply unthinkable that Donald Trump could become our president,” Klarman told Reuters in 2016.
Besides Trump’s personality, Klarman has taken issue with his policies, particularly the tax cut. Klarman could not immediately be reached for comment.
More from Newsweek
Trump’s Tax Cuts Didn’t Benefit American Workers, Just Made Rich Companies Richer
Trump Should Be Worried by Cohen Probe. Really Worried.
Bloomberg – White House
Trump Should Be Worried by Cohen Probe. Really Worried.
Federal prosecutors can dog him for the rest of his presidency, and he has no power to fire them.
By Noah Feldman April 16, 2018
Under pressure. Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Make no mistake: The presidency of Donald Trump has hit a major inflection point with the investigation of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
Until now, Trump personally was in jeopardy only if special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in Washington finds evidence that he knew about collusion between his campaign and Russia in the 2016 election. Even if that happens, there might not be enough to justify impeachment or a subsequent criminal charge of Trump. The president also has the power to fire Mueller to try to shut down the investigation, especially if he thinks Mueller is going beyond the terms of his appointment to investigate Russia.
Comey Says Trump Is ‘Morally Unfit’ to Serve
Now, however, the Southern District can investigate potential Trump crimes in any area connected to Cohen, a fixer who is known to have arranged payoffs to an adult film star who says she had an affair with Trump. These prosecutors can go back as far as they want before the election, not to mention during and after it.
And there’s essentially nothing Trump can do about it. He can’t fire the career civil servant prosecutors who are now on the job. And practically, he can’t order the Southern District to stop investigating him, because such an order would likely be construed by the prosecutors there as a criminal obstruction of justice.
The upshot is that if it’s accurate, as it has been reported, that Trump is more worried about the Cohen investigation than the Mueller one, he’s not wrong.
The Southern District team can’t bring Trump to trial while he is president. But if it finds evidence of felonies involving Trump, the team could name him as an unindicted co-conspirator in charges against Cohen. That would tell the world that the president is a crook. It would put substantial pressure on Congress to impeach Trump. And, after Trump’s presidency ends, whether at the end of his term or before, a criminal prosecution could await. The prospect of a trial would loom over whatever time in the presidency he has left.
The first key to seeing this as a moment of transition is to recall that Mueller’s investigation is limited by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s letter of appointment. It authorizes Mueller to investigate Russian involvement in the 2016 election and potential crimes arising from the investigation. It isn’t carte blanche for Mueller to go after any other area of Trump’s career or life.
That matters, and not only because Mueller is likely to take the terms of his appointment seriously. The letter also points to the one way Trump could credibly try to fire Mueller without revoking the Department of Justice regulations that the letter says apply to his appointment. The regulations say Mueller can be fired for good cause. Exceeding the terms of his investigative mandate could plausibly be described as good cause for removing him.
That’s why it was a master stroke for Rosenstein — presumably with Mueller’s agreement and probably prompting — to assign the Cohen investigation to the regular career prosecutors in New York. The letter doesn’t apply to them. Their job is to investigate any crime of any kind that occurred within their jurisdiction, which the office traditionally interprets extraordinarily broadly to include, in essence, the whole world.
That means the Cohen investigation can’t be blocked by firing Mueller. It now very literally has a life of its own. And this investigation can go after any aspect of Trump’s life that might be relevant to potential crimes by Cohen. That includes crimes that Cohen may have committed on behalf of Trump.
Imagine, for example, that Cohen structured financial transactions to hide payoffs — keeping withdrawals just small enough to fly under a bank’s radar. That would be a felony. If Cohen did so with Trump’s knowledge and on behalf of Trump, that could easily be charged as a federal conspiracy that would make Trump criminally liable for Cohen’s conduct. That’s how easy it would be for the Southern District prosecutors to connect Trump to federal crimes.
If Trump is implicated in Cohen’s actions, the Southern District probably wouldn’t charge the president while he’s in office. Current Justice Department guidelines say that the president shouldn’t be criminally charged while in office. (Whether that’s a constitutional requirement is under dispute, and the team that investigated Bill Clinton argued that a sitting president could be criminally charged.)
But the Southern District prosecutors wouldn’t have to charge Trump. They could simply name him as an unindicted co-conspirator while charging Cohen, as a grand jury named Richard Nixon in the cover-up of the Watergate burglary.
Naming the president as subject to potential felony prosecution would be a game-changer in Congress. It’s one thing for congressional Republicans to dispute potential Mueller findings that might connect Trump to Russian collusion — on the assumption that such evidence even exists, which it might well not.
It would be another thing altogether for Republicans to ignore independent career prosecutors’ naming of Trump as an unindicted felon. They would come under huge pressure to impeach, and pay a huge political price if they did not.
Meanwhile, Trump would not be able to do anything about it. A potential felony charge would hang over his presidency. On leaving office, he could face charges and even prison.
That would create a huge incentive for Trump to resign and wait for Mike Pence to pardon him.
So there are plenty of good reasons for Trump to be much more worried now than he may have been before Cohen’s office and homes were raided last week. If Trump knows he hasn’t knowingly colluded with Russia, he knows he isn’t all that vulnerable to Mueller’s investigation. But when the person who makes your problems go away is under the microscope, that’s bad news — historically bad.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story: Noah Feldman at nfeldman7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net