“You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas
I am strong when I am on your shoulders
You raise me up to more than I can be” ❤
"You raise me up, so I can stand on mountainsYou raise me up to walk on stormy seasI am strong when I am on your shouldersYou raise me up to more than I can be" ❤
Watch Jon Stewart’s powerful, emotional speech slamming Congress for its inaction supporting 9/11 victims and first responders.
“What an incredible metaphor this room is for the entire process that getting health care and benefits for 9/11 first responders has come to. Behind me, a filled room of 9/11 first responders, and in front of me, a nearly empty Congress.” https://cnn.it/2I8ZYTJ
Watch Jon Stewart's powerful, emotional speech slamming Congress for its inaction supporting 9/11 victims and first responders. "What an incredible metaphor this room is for the entire process that getting health care and benefits for 9/11 first responders has come to. Behind me, a filled room of 9/11 first responders, and in front of me, a nearly empty Congress." https://cnn.it/2I8ZYTJ
‘Punched in the Face’: U.S. Floods Snarl Trucks, Trains, Barges
Brian K. Sullivan, Shruti Date Singh and Mario Parker, Bloomberg
June 8, 2019
‘Punched in the Face’: U.S. Floods Snarl Trucks, Trains, Barges
(Bloomberg) — Hundreds of barges are stalled on the Mississippi River, clogging the main circulatory system for a farm-belt economy battered by a relentless, record-setting string of snow, rainstorms and flooding.
Railways and highways have been closed as well, keeping needed supplies from farmers and others, and limiting the crops sent to market. For Chris Boerm, who manages transportation for Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., one of the nation’s largest agricultural commodities dealers, the weather is an unyielding, ever-changing challenge.
He and his co-workers spend time carefully planning out the quickest way to get supplies to the people that need them, he said. But it’s tough staying ahead of the drenching rain.
“It’s sort of like Mike Tyson’s quote, everybody’s got a plan until you get punched in the face, right?” Boerm said by telephone. “Every day we come in and we’ve got a plan. But then it rains three inches somewhere overnight where it wasn’t expected, and the plan changes.”
That means supplies they plan to move on one river may need to be rerouted to a different waterway, or offloaded onto a rail car or a truck, with the hope they won’t be delayed by the weather as well. For instance, when water reaches the wheel bearings on a freight car in a siding, it can’t be hauled long distances without an inspection, yet another potential delay.
At just two locks along the upper Mississippi, almost 300 barges are being held in place as a result of high water and fast currents, according to Waterways Council Inc., which tracks barge movements. And hundreds more are waiting in St. Louis, Cairo, Illinois and Memphis, Tennessee, said Deb Calhoun, the council’s senior vice president.
“It’s a big bottleneck,” Calhoun said.
The contiguous U.S. had its wettest January to May on records dating back to 1895, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri had their rainiest May on record, the center’s data shows, while Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Illinois were all in the top 10.
Since last year, heavy snow fell on the Midwest and Great Plains, melting into saturated ground early in the spring. In March, a so-called bomb cyclone drenched Nebraska and Iowa with record rain and snow, sending the Missouri River out of its banks and creating a multi-state disaster area.
While high waters stop barge traffic, they also carry other dangers. Flood waters have closed off Interstate highways on a number of occasions and water itself. That overwhelms farm fields, sewer and septic systems and industrial plants along its banks, which can become quite toxic as it flows away from the river beds.
“We dealt with a wet fall, and then record snowfall in many places,” said Tim Eagleton, senior engineering specialist for FM Global, an industrial insurer. “Of course, all that melts and comes down the Mississippi. Not only that, but we have had 200%-plus rainfall over a large part of that basin for months, and then a record-wet May in a lot of places.’
The bottom line, according to Eagleton: “Very long duration flooding on the Mississippi River that can really start to wear on people.’’ Almost 200 miles of the Mississippi has been shut down, he said.
Farmers are definitely feeling the crunch.
Iowa corn farmer Bob Hemesath, whose farm is about 35 miles west of the Mississippi River in Decorah, had planned to deliver about 20,000 bushels of corn to a Bunge Ltd. facility in McGregor in March and April. Instead, he ended up sending the grain to a local ethanol plant because the facility was closed due to high water levels and still remains shuttered.
He knows neighboring soybean farmers who are waiting to send their crops down the river as well. U.S. farmers still hold a lot of crops in their silos from their 2018 harvest because selling hasn’t made financial sense during the U.S.-China trade war, slow demand and slumping prices. Now, with northbound and southbound river traffic stalled, Hemesath is worried about what the barge backlog is going to look like this fall.
“We are going to be missing almost three months of river traffic, I don’t even know how we will get caught up,” he said. “If the river facilities don’t have barges that are caught up on old crop they won’t be able to ship new crop. It’s another stress for farmers.”
Among Boerm’s worries is that with the water levels so high — and for so long — there isn’t a lot of visibility yet on what the long-term impact to the waterways may be.
Boerm was an ADM manager in 1993, when more than 17 million acres were flooded across nine states in June through August. He recalls working with the Red Cross in Hardin, Illinois, sandbagging the bloated waterways and helping evacuate homes. The recent flooding is just as formidable a beast, he said.
“In ’93, the flood was really kind of concentrated in Iowa and the Upper Midwest,” Boerm said. “This has been much more expansive, getting all the inland rivers,” affecting the entire Mississippi, the Arkansas River, the Illinois River and the Ohio River.
It’s impossible to know the full fallout until the waters recede, Boerm added.
That could take some time, according to Jeff Graschel, service coordination hydrologist with the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center in Slidell, Louisiana. “A lot of locations since December to January have been above flood levels, and they probably will be in June to July,’’ he said. “We have another month or two before we can get some of these areas to go below flood.’’
Waterways near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Natchez, Mississippi and Cairo, Illinois, have all set records for the length of the flood by weeks, Graschel said.
The repercussions will ripple through the economy for the rest of the year, said Jon Davis, chief meteorologist with RiskPulse, a weather analytics firm in Chicago. When crops that have been sowed late in the season to start moving to market, barge, truck and train traffic will soon be stretched thin, he said.
“There are a couple of things that make this situation incredibly unique, the first of which is the longevity of the flooding, ’’ according to Davis. “The other factor is how widespread everything is.’’
Corn and soybean planting lags the five-year average, and grain shipments on the Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio Rivers have already dropped well below last year and the three-year averages, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
With assistance from Michael Hirtzer and Kevin Varley.
To contact the reporters on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net; Shruti Date Singh in Chicago at ssingh28@bloomberg.net; Mario Parker in Chicago at mparker22@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net, Reg Gale, Pratish Narayanan.
Mitch McConnell refuses to vote on gun safety bill after 10,000 deaths in 100 days
By Dan Desai Martin June 7, 2019
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The House passed historic gun safety legislation 100 days ago, but McConnell is blocking the Senate from taking any action.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell still refuses to allow a vote on a pair of gun safety bills 100 days after the landmark legislation passed the House of Representatives.
On February 27, the House passed a bipartisan universal background checks bill, the first piece of significant gun safety legislation in a generation. The next day, the House overcame Republican opposition to pass another bill to close the “Charleston loophole,” which would make it harder for those with a criminal record to bypass a background check and obtain a gun.
“Our constituents sent us here to do something — and we did,” Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) told Shareblue Media. “100 days ago, leaders who ran on a promise to take action delivered a historic victory for gun safety,” former Rep. Gabby Giffords said in a Thursday statement. “Every day since, the House majority continued fighting for stronger gun laws — fighting to make our country a safer place to live, work, study, worship, and play.”
Giffords, who was shot eight years ago during an event with constituents, now runs a gun safety advocacy group bearing her name.
Despite overwhelming public support (64% of gun owners agree that the government needs to address gun violence), McConnell continues to engage in an obstructionist agenda.
McConnell’s inaction “presents another hurdle,” to making America a safer country, Wexton noted. “It’s been 100 days with zero action by the Senate Leader. This bill would save lives, yet he allows it to languish on his desk — it’s shameless.”
McConnell refuses to do anything with the gun safety legislation, even after a dozen people in Virginia Beach were killed in a mass shooting at the end of May. In fact, 10,000 people in America died from gun violence during the 100 days McConnell allowed these bills to languish on his desk.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a leading gun safety advocate, said McConnell’s “inaction is complicity.”
Gun safety advocates refuse to stop fighting for a safer, less violent America.
“The Senate has yet another opportunity to do the right thing — something their constituents overwhelmingly support — and pass a law requiring a background check on every gun sale,” Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action told Shareblue Media. “Polls show more than 90 percent of Americans support closing this loophole in federal law. Every Senator who refuses to act to keep our families and communities safe the should expect to be held accountable.”
In her statement, Giffords added that “Americans are watching Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump and waiting for them to take the next step. How many more lives will be lost before they sign the background checks bill into law?”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took aim at McConnell’s do-nothing attitude during her weekly press conference. “We’re very proud of the work that we have done to send over to the Senate where Mr. McConnell has said he’s the Grim Reaper,” she said. “It’s a Senate graveyard.”
Pelosi was referencing a speech McConnell gave to supporters about blocking legislation moving through the House, where McConnell dubbed himself the “Grim Reaper.”
With approximately 100 people dying every day from gun violence, McConnell’s description of himself is far too accurate.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
Should summer Fridays be all year round?Fareed Zakaria looks at the studies making an argument that shorter workweeks are better for health, equality and the environment.
CNN’s Dana Bash: Is there a role for private insurance in your Medicare for All plan?
Sen. Bernie Sanders: “No. The function of this system is to make money for the insurance companies… we need a cost-effective health care system guaranteeing health care to all people.” https://cnn.it/2XzKBcd
CNN’s Dana Bash: Is there a role for private insurance in your Medicare for All plan?Sen. Bernie Sanders: "No. The function of this system is to make money for the insurance companies… we need a cost-effective health care system guaranteeing health care to all people." https://cnn.it/2XzKBcd
This 97-year-old World War II veteran jumped out of a plane to recreate his D-Day parachute drop: https://cnn.it/2Kub7QM"Beautiful jump. Beautiful flight. Everything was perfect."
To have Trump commemorate the Normandy landings is to understand the word impostor.
By Roger Cohen, Opinion Columnist June 5, 2019
President Trump and other world leaders looking on as Queen Elizabeth II arrived for a D-Day commemorative event in Portsmouth, England, on Wednesday. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
PARIS — How small he is! Small in spirit, in valor, in dignity, in statecraft, this American president who knows nothing of history and cares still less and now bestrides Europe with his family in tow like some tin-pot dictator with a terrified entourage.
To have Donald Trump — the bone-spur evader of the Vietnam draft, the coddler of autocrats, the would-be destroyer of the European Union, the pay-up-now denigrator of NATO, the apologist for the white supremacists of Charlottesville — commemorate the boys from Kansas City and St. Paul who gave their lives for freedom is to understand the word impostor. You can’t make a sculpture from rotten wood.
It’s worth saying again. If Europe is whole and free and at peace, it’s because of NATO and the European Union; it’s because the United States became a European power after World War II; it’s because America’s word was a solemn pledge; it’s because that word cemented alliances that were not zero-sum games but the foundation for stability and prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.
Of this, Trump understands nothing. Therefore he cannot comprehend the sacrifice at Omaha Beach 75 years ago. He cannot see that the postwar trans-Atlantic achievement — undergirded by the institutions and alliances he tramples upon with such crass truculence — was in fact the vindication of those young men who gave everything.
As Eisenhower, speaking at the Normandy American Cemetery, last resting place of 9,387 Americans, told Walter Cronkite for the 20th anniversary of the D-Day landings: “These people gave us a chance, and they bought time for us, so that we can do better than we have before.”
That was a solemn responsibility. For decades it was met, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Doing better, however, is not rising nativism, xenophobia, nationalism and authoritarianism given a nod and a wink by the president of the United States. It’s not Brexit, Britain turning its back on the Europe it helped free.
The American moral collapse personified by Trump is not “beautiful” or “phenomenal” or “incredible” or any of the president’s other clunky two-a-penny superlatives. It’s sickening and dangerous.
My impression here is that Europe has gotten used to Trump to the point that it is no longer strange that the American president is a stranger. In less than two and a half years Trump has stripped his office of dignity, authority and values.
His foreign policy increasingly consists of a single word, “tariffs.” His contempt for allies undermines American diplomacy, or whatever is left of it, from Iran to North Korea, from Venezuela to China. His trampling of truth is so consistent that when he says in London that Britain is the largest trading partner of the United States — it’s nowhere near that — the impulse is to shrug.
Before arriving in London, Trump set the tone. He mocked the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, as short. It was a tweet in keeping with the president’s signature stunt as schoolyard bully. Khan, who had criticized “rolling out the red carpet” for Trump, responded by comparing the president to an 11-year-old.
This was generous. Most 8-year-olds know better.
Of course Khan — the brown Muslim son of a bus driver, self-made guy — would get under the skin of a man like Trump, who was born on third base and imbibed his reflexive racism in the family real estate business.
Khan called Trump’s policies — on the reproductive rights of women, on immigrant children at the Mexican border, on “amplifying messages from racists” — the antithesis of Londoners’ values and “abhorrent.” In response, Trump tweeted that Khan was as bad as the “very dumb” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, “only half his height.”
There is something so disturbing about a very small man like Trump impugning the height of the mayor of the great international city he is visiting that even 28 months of progressive inurement to his outrages feels inadequate.
America is much better than this, much better than an American president who, as the cartoonist Dave Granlund suggested, probably thinks the D in D-Day stands for Donald and spends the night of the commemoration trashing Bette Midler on Twitter.
As for the Republican Party, don’t get me started. To recover its bearings the G.O.P. would do well to recall one of its own, Eisenhower, who in that same 20th-anniversary interview said that America and its allies stormed the Normandy beaches “for one purpose only.”
It was not to “fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest.” No, it was “just to preserve freedom, systems of self-government in the world.” It was an act, in other words, consistent with the highest ideals of the American idea that Trump and his Republican enablers seem so intent on eviscerating.
Roger Cohen has been a columnist for The Times since 2009. His columns appear Wednesday and Saturday. He joined The Times in 1990, and has served as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor.
Today, we remember D-Day. 75 years ago, the largest amphibious assault ever was launched, paving the way for Germany's defeat in World War II. https://cnn.it/2Mwhtlg
