The newspaper’s editorial board broke down exactly why it believes Johnson is “the worst Wisconsin political representative since the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy.”
It ripped the Donald Trump loyalist, who is facing a reported tight race against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, as “an election falsifier who recklessly promoted” Trump’s 2020 lies and a “science fabulist” who baselessly questioned COVID-19 vaccines and spread pandemic misinformation. Johnson was also slammed for trying to rewrite “the sordid history” of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot.
“You’ll notice Johnson is not touting a long record of accomplishments in his ads for re-election,” the board wrote. “Instead, he and his supporters have attacked his opponent — a Black man — as ‘different’ and ‘dangerous.’”
Johnson was first elected to the Senate in 2010.
“Johnson in the past promised to serve no more than two terms,” the board concluded. “Voters should hold him to that pledge in November.”
Former Trump employee tells FBI Trump ordered Mar-a-Lago boxes to be moved -report
Sarah N. Lynch and Kanishka Singh – October 12, 2022
Trump holds rally in Nevada
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A former employee of Donald Trump has told federal agents the former president asked for boxes of records to be moved within his Florida residence after receiving a government subpoena demanding their return, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The testimony of the key witness, coupled with surveillance footage the Justice Department also obtained, represent some of the strongest known evidence to date of possible obstruction of justice by the former Republican president.
The FBI conducted a court-approved search on Aug. 8 at Trump’s home at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, seizing more than 11,000 documents including about 100 marked as classified.
The employee who was working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida was cooperating with the Justice Department and has been interviewed multiple times by federal agents, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the situation. The witness initially denied handling sensitive documents and in subsequent conversations with agents admitted to moving boxes at Trump’s request, the newspaper reported.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
A Trump spokesperson said the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden had “weaponized law enforcement.”
“Every other President has been given time and deference regarding the administration of documents, as the President has the ultimate authority to categorize records, and what materials should be classified,” Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich told the newspaper.
Budowich accused the Justice Department of leaking “misleading and false information” to the media.
The document investigation is one of several legal woes Trump is facing as he considers whether to run again for president in 2024.
New York state’s attorney general recently filed a civil lawsuit accusing Trump and three of his adult children of fraud and misrepresentation in preparing financial statements from the family real estate company.
The Trump Organization also is set to go on trial on Oct. 24 on New York state criminal tax fraud charges.
Separately in Georgia, a grand jury in the Fulton County is probing efforts by Trump to overturn the former president’s 2020 election defeat.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
Climate change is causing more billion-dollar weather disasters
David Knowles, Senior Editor – October 12, 2022
When Hurricane Ian barreled into Florida’s Gulf Coast last month, it became the 15th extreme weather event in the U.S. this year to rack up damages totaling more than $1 billion. Climate change, data shows, is helping to make expensive disasters much more frequent in recent years.
“In the last five years [2017-2021], there were just 18 days on average between billion-dollar disasters—compared to 82 days in the 1980s,” Climate Central, a consortium of scientists and journalists, found in a new analysis posted to its website.
This year’s extreme weather disasters in the U.S. have resulted in over 340 deaths, the NOAA said, and the financial toll is still being tallied. The insurance losses alone from Hurricane Ian are projected to cost between $53 billion and $74 billion, according to an estimate by RMS, a risk modeling company. In addition to that staggering sum, the National Flood Insurance Program could face an extra $10 billion in losses, Insurance Business America reported.
“The number and cost of weather and climate disasters are increasing in the United States due to a combination of increased exposure (i.e., more assets at risk), vulnerability (i.e., how much damage a hazard of given intensity — wind speed or flood depth, for example — causes at a location), and climate change is also supercharging the increasing frequency and intensity of certain types of extreme weather that lead to billion-dollar disasters — most notably the rise in vulnerability to drought, lengthening wildfire seasons in the western states, and the potential for extremely heavy rainfall becoming more common in the eastern states,” Adam Smith, a climatologist at the National Centers for Environmental Information and a lead analyst on the NOAA’s findings on $1 billion disasters, told Yahoo news in an email. “Sea level rise is worsening hurricane storm surge flooding.”
While climate change is not the sole cause of events like hurricanes, drought, rainfall or wildfires, ample scientific research has shown that rising global temperatures are amplifying all of them, making each potentially more destructive.
Workers clearing debris in Fort Myers, Fla., in the wake of Hurricane Ian, Oct. 1. (Giorgio Viera/AFP)
“The year-to-date average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 56.8 degrees F — 1.7 degrees above average — ranking in the warmest third of the YTD record. California and Florida saw their third- and fourth-warmest January-through-September periods on record, respectively,” the NOAA stated on its website.
Across the West, nearly 1,000 heat records were broken in early September, the NOAA said, a month that will go down as the fifth-warmest on record. In all, the last seven years have been the warmest on record, according to data from NASA, the NOAA and Berkeley Earth.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has for years been sounding the alarm about the risks related to global temperature rise and tried to convince world governments to agree to limit greenhouse gas emissions so as to keep average temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
In its most recent report, which was issued in February, the IPCC reiterated that the planet could expect an increase in the kinds of severe weather consequences seen in recent years that have been liked to climate change.
“This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction,” Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC, said in a statement that accompanied the release of the report. “It shows that climate change is a grave and mounting threat to our well-being and a healthy planet. Our actions today will shape how people adapt and nature responds to increasing climate risks.”
Another Challenge to New York’s Gun Law: Sheriffs Who Won’t Enforce It
Jesse McKinley and Cole Louison – October 9, 2022
Sheriff Robert Milby in his office in Lyons, N.Y., Sept. 15, 2022. (Lauren Petracca/The New York Times)
LYONS, N.Y. — Robert Milby, Wayne County’s new sheriff, has been in law enforcement most of his adult life, earning praise and promotions for conscientious service. But recently, Milby has attracted attention for a different approach to the law: ignoring it.
Milby is among at least a half-dozen sheriffs in upstate New York who have said they have no intention of aggressively enforcing gun regulations that state lawmakers passed last summer, forbidding concealed weapons in so-called sensitive areas — a long list of public spaces including, but not limited to, government buildings and religious centers, health facilities and homeless shelters, schools and subways, stadiums and state parks, and, of course, Times Square.
“It’s basically everywhere,” said Milby, in a recent interview in his office in Wayne County, east of Rochester. “If anyone thinks we’re going to go out and take a proactive stance against this, that’s not going to happen.”
On Thursday, a U.S. District Court judge blocked large portions of the law, dealing a major blow to lawmakers in Albany who had sought to blaze a trail for other states after the Supreme Court in June struck down a century-old New York law that had strictly limited the carrying of weapons in public. Between the court challenge and the hostility of many law enforcement officers, New York’s ambitious effort could be teetering.
The judge, Glenn T. Suddaby, agreed to a three-day delay of his order to allow an emergency appeal to a higher federal court. But even before Suddaby ruled, a collection of sheriffs from upstate New York were already saying they would make no special effort to enforce the law, citing lack of personnel, an overbroad scope and possible infringements on the Second Amendment.
Nationwide, conservative sheriffs have been at the front line of an aggressive pushback on liberal policies — often framing themselves as “constitutional sheriffs,” or as self-declared arbiters of any law’s constitutionality. Sheriffs in other states have also been part of efforts to prove a fallacious conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
In New York, dissent has walked a fine line between loud complaints and winking resistance, including pledges of selective — and infrequent — enforcement.
“I have to enforce it because I swore to uphold the laws, but I can use as much discretion as I want,” said Richard C. Giardino, the Republican sheriff in Fulton County, northwest of Albany. “If someone intentionally flouts the law, then they’re going to be handled one way. But if someone was unaware that the rules have changed, then we’re not going to charge someone with a felony because they went into their barbershop with their carry concealed.”
Such criticism has been heard from Greene County, in the Hudson Valley, to Erie County, home to Buffalo, the state’s second-largest city, as well as from groups like the New York State Sheriffs’ Association, which called the new law a “thoughtless, reactionary action” that aims to “restrain and punish law-abiding citizens.”
“We will take the complaint, but it will go to the bottom of my stack,” said Mike Filicetti, the Niagara County sheriff, who appends a Ronald Reagan quote to his emails. “There will be no arrests made without my authorization and it’s a very, very low priority for me.”
The law took effect Sept. 1, and, at least anecdotally, has been used only sparingly since. Jeff Smith, the sheriff in mostly rural Montgomery County, west of Albany, said his office has had no calls for enforcement of the new law, noting that “almost every household” in his jurisdiction had some sort of gun.
Smith, a Republican, said he understands the motives of lawmakers to quell violence and mass shootings, but that the gun law inadvertently targeted lawful gun owners.
“The pendulum swung way too far,” he said.
An element of the New York law makes it a crime to carry a firearm onto any private property, including homes, unless there is “clear and conspicuous signage” indicating that the owner allows such weapons. Some sheriffs have printed their own signs and distributed them to gun-friendly businesses and residents.
“I don’t think you could find one case in this country, in United States history, where a sign said ‘SCHOOL ZONE NO GUNS PERMITTED,’ and it stopped an active shooter,” said Giardino.
For supporters of the law, the opposition is insincere, considering that sheriffs’ demands for law and order are often coupled with complaints that the state is in disarray, that crime is rampant and that the Legislature has empowered lawbreakers.
“To turn around and say, ‘For the laws that we don’t like, or we may disagree with politically, we will refuse to enforce,’ to me is the height of hypocrisy,” said state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat who voted for the bill.
John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said sheriffs weren’t just endangering the public, they were also “endangering their colleagues in law enforcement.”
Myrie added that if sheriffs are angry, they should direct their ire at the Supreme Court, noting that the majority decision in the case, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, an avowed conservative — and specifically noted a historical basis for restrictions in “sensitive places.”
Kelly Roskam, the director of law and policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said that the Supreme Court left many unsettled questions that lower courts must address. One particular challenge is a lack of clarity in the court’s test for constitutionality: whether a sensitive place is identical to or sufficiently similar to one that existed at the time of the Second Amendment’s adoption in the late 18th century.
“We face different problems with firearms than those who ratified the Constitution did,” she said. “You’re likely to see challenges to these laws, and different judges will come to different conclusions.”
The nation has a long history of banning guns in certain places, said David Pucino, the deputy chief counsel at Giffords Law Center, which seeks to stem gun violence, with dozens of states restricting concealed weapons in places like airports, courthouses and locations that serve alcohol.
“The statements that we’ve been seeing here are ideological statements,” Pucino said of the sheriffs. “And that’s not an appropriate basis for a sheriff to enforce or not enforce laws.”
The dispute evinces a larger rift between Democratic lawmakers in Albany — heavily represented by downstate liberals — and more conservative law enforcement and elected officials upstate. The schism was intensified by the pandemic, with some sheriffs defying COVID-19 occupancy rules for Thanksgiving dinners in 2020, while other Republican county officials refused to abide by mask mandates in schools.
“The people who are doing this, a lot of them are New York City legislators and they don’t have a clue,” said Todd Hood, the sheriff of Madison County, east of Syracuse, who says that “firearms are what made our country great.”
“There are different people up here,” said Hood, a Republican. “It’s run totally different.”
Jeffrey A. Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University, said that Albany lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, performed a critical test of the Bruen decision’s limits, even if the law is overturned.
“What New York did in response to Bruen was just about as strong or any other state in the country,” he said. “The governor and the Legislature were sticking their chins out in service of making a very important point.”
For her part, Hochul says she and her staff consulted with a raft of state and county law enforcement officials before the gun bill’s passage. “It was an intense process, but it was necessary,” Hochul said in late August, on the eve of the law taking effect.
The rollout was not without hiccups, including concerns from some military re-enactors who have canceled events out of fear of running afoul of the new law. Officials in Adirondack Park, the 6-million-acre swath of greenery and small towns in the state’s North Country, also pressed Hochul on whether guns would be allowed there.
For his part, Milby, a Republican elected in November, reiterated that his officers, fewer than 100 in a county of nearly 100,000 people, would not be actively pursuing offenders of the new law, although they would respond to calls about concealed weapons if they came in.
More than anything, he said his office is getting “an awful lot of calls” from residents confused by the law, many of whom are “very pro-Second Amendment.”
“It’s basically been clear as mud since Sept. 1,” he said.
And as for who was to blame, Milby said the opinions in Wayne County were crystal clear long before Thursday’s decision.
“There’s a very strong sentiment in this county that the governor has just thumbed her nose at the Supreme Court, in what’s being touted as an unconstitutional conniption fit,” he said. “She’s absolutely overstepped.”
I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid for an abortion or if he blew up the planet Alderaan
Rex Huppke, USA TODAY – October 6, 2022
There’s a report that Herschel Walker, the staunchly anti-abortion Republican running in Georgia’s Senate race, got a woman pregnant then paid for her abortion back in 2009.
Dana Loesch, a conservative radio host and former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, put it best this week when she said: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”
Abortions are unacceptable – except for this one
Amen, sister. Abort those eagle babies! Like Loesch, I believe deeply in the sanctity of life and oppose all abortions – except for this one, which I will accept to prevent it from costing my party control of the Senate.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker speaks at a rally in Athens, Ga., in May 2022.
The report came from The Daily Beast, and all they had to back it up was: a receipt from the abortion provider; a canceled check Walker sent to the woman five days after the procedure; and the get-well card Walker sent the check in. Walker denies the whole thing and claims he doesn’t know the woman, who, as The Daily Beast reported Wednesday, is also the mother of one of his children.
I’m going to have to side with Walker on this one, because I want my party in power and believe it’s a sin to use the word “hypocrisy.”
Control of the Senate is what matters here, and he played football!
As a matter of fact, I don’t think Loesch went far enough in defending Walker with her hypothetical eagle abortion clinic.
Like the many Republicans who’ve rushed in to stick up for Walker in the wake of the abortion news, I don’t care if the former football star is an ancient, trans-dimensional, shape-shifting entity of pure evil that takes the form of a clown named Pennywise and terrorizes a small town in Maine. I want control of the Senate, and I’m sure Walker regrets any past desire to feed on humans.
Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker signs memorabilia for supporters in Columbus, Ga.
The destruction of a planet or two is fine if it leads to power
Heck, I don’t care if Walker oversaw the construction of a moon-size space station that blew up the 2-billion-person planet of Alderaan, then later got in an argument with his son and chopped his right hand off. We have to secure that Georgia Senate seat so we can stop President Joe Biden’s immoral agenda!
I’m not the least bit bothered if Walker, in the year 1219, let loose the Mongol hordes on the Khwarazmian Empire in Persia after the shah, Ala ad-Din Muhammad II, broke a treaty. Control of the Senate is of tantamount importance to the moral fabric of our nation.
Ruling Mordor isn’t so bad when you think about it
The possibility Walker may have been described in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem “Beowulf” as the monster Grendel, “accursed of God, the destroyer and devourer of our human kind,” doesn’t bother me a whip if it leads to a Republican becoming Senate majority leader. And the additional claims that he slaughtered the inhabits of the mead hall of Heorot, built by King Hrothgar? A minor detail if the power to cut corporate taxes is in play.
No, I see no logical or moral inconsistency between my firmly held religious beliefs and the lack of concern I would feel if I learned Walker had remained a noncorporeal evil for centuries before rising again in the land of Mordor and building the dark fortress Barad-dûr not far from Mount Doom. And if he gathered massive armies of orcs and trolls then tricked the elven-smith Celebrimbor into forging the Rings of Power? Well that’s a small price to pay to defeat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who is a pastor and has probably never paid to abort endangered baby eagles.
Basically, nothing matters as long as we win
The discovery that Walker is, in fact, the Dark Lord Voldemort, “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and is plotting, with the help of Death Eaters, to rid the world of Muggles, would in no way impact my support for a candidate whose qualifications include being somewhat famous.
The dark wizard Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) lords over the wizarding world in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I.”
I want control of the Senate. Getting Herschel Walker elected is key to that end. And if that means being OK finding out he once snapped his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet and instantly wiped out half of all life in the universe, well … so be it. I’m not about to let the morality I use to disguise my craven thirst for power get in the way of my craven thirst for power.
Court Screwup Reveals Mar-a-Lago Judge’s Latest Legal Absurdity in Trump Case
Jose Pagliery – October 6, 2022
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast
First, she stopped FBI special agents from even glancing at the classified documents they recovered from Mar-a-Lago. Then she appointed a special court referee that former President Donald Trump wanted to slow down the investigation over his mishandling of classified documents.
But now, it’s clear District Court Judge Aileen Cannon already knew the Department of Justice was ready to hand Trump back a ton of personal records six days before she claimed the former president was suffering “a real harm” by being “deprived of potentially significant personal documents.”
The “medical records” she worried the feds might leak to the press—what she called a “risk of irreparable injury” to the former president—were actually a doctor’s note Trump himself made public when running for the White House in 2016 as part of a publicity stunt.
A description in court records indicates the feds were trying to return an addendum to the infamous, eye-rolling letter that a Manhattan doctor quickly typed up emphatically declaring, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
Those details were made public when the court screwed up Tuesday night and posted a sealed DOJ filing on the public docket, which was quickly caught by Bloomberg reporter Zoe Tillmann.
The Aug. 30 letter to the judge, which is marked “sealed,” lays out the abundantly cautious way the DOJ treated its raid on Mar-a-Lago earlier that month. The FBI had a “privilege review team” of agents and lawyers conduct an initial sweep and sort through evidence to put aside anything that could taint an eventual prosecution of the former president—such as confidential letters between him and any of his 35 different lawyers.
In the letter, a DOJ lawyer representing that “taint team” explained that three weeks after the seizure of goods at the oceanside Florida estate, the team was ready to return 43 items that had nothing to do with the investigation: legal documents ranging from his confidential settlement with the Professional Golfers’ Association to invoices from his attorney Alina Habba.
The revelation makes even more obvious how far Cannon went to appease the president who gave her a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. And it’s only adding to what’s become a resounding consensus from legal scholars that Cannon is squarely on Trump’s side.
Trump lawyers, who’ve gone judge-shopping for her in the past, seemed to do it again when they filed this lawsuit to freeze the FBI investigation. Avoiding the South Florida magistrate judge who initially approved the search warrant and was already overseeing the matter, Trump’s lawyers marked the case as unrelated to other pending litigation—diverting this over to another judge and ending up with Cannon.
At the very first court hearing, Cannon signaled deep distrust of the DOJ and journalists. She expressed a belief that the FBI’s investigation of Trump for mishandling “top secret” records was somehow distinct from the federal government’s damage assessment over whether the nation’s secrets were put at risk. Legal analysts Teri Kanefield, Harry Litman, and others agonized over Cannon’s bizarre legal reasoning.
At every turn since, she has granted Trump’s lawyers exactly what their client wants most: time to burn.
“She’s just giving him the delay that he’s asked for,” said Peter M. Shane, a legal scholar at New York University’s law school. “She has obvious sympathy for Trump’s contention that, as a former president, he deserves super-consideration.”
Trump’s lawyers wanted to hit the brakes on the FBI investigation. Cannon forbade the agents from reviewing the classified documents.
They wanted to appoint a “special master” to micromanage the DOJ and review whether any seized document could be considered a privileged presidential record or attorney-client communication. Cannon didn’t just appoint one—she picked the semi-retired judge they wanted.
“This is how a judge would behave… if her motivation was simply to be helpful to Trump,” Shane told The Daily Beast.
The DOJ has already been moderately successful at appealing her decisions. The Eleventh Circuit, despite its conservative leaning, restored the FBI’s ability to keep reviewing the classified government records taken from Mar-a-Lago. And on Wednesday, the federal appellate court in Atlanta granted the DOJ’s pleas and agreed to expedite the appeal that could scrap the entire “special master” ordeal.
But while the case makes its way through that process, legal scholars worry Cannon will continue to micromanage her chosen micromanager.
“She seems to be cooperating quite well with the former president,” said Carl Tobias, a law school professor at the University of Richmond.
Dearie was once the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn and went on to become a federal judge, including a seven-year stint on the coveted and hyper-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is where the feds ask for judicial approval to conduct some kinds of spying on foreigners. His role in this case could keep it moving forward fairly, although some legal scholars are starting to worry whether he’ll stick around.
“This is a person who spent 38 years building his enormous reputation. If I were a judge for 38 years… I wouldn’t want to be ordered around by someone who’s a lackey to Trump,” Tobias said.
But her potential to harm the FBI’s investigation is far from over. Dearie’s role is merely to be a temporary referee to shepherd the potentially privileged document review process. His decision’s aren’t even final. Any conclusion he makes will still be submitted for approval to Cannon, who’s 37 years his junior and was a newborn in Colombia when he was already leading the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York while the crime rate was soaring.
Tobias stressed that every day the case remains with Cannon is a step in the wrong direction, noting that she should have done the right thing: recognized that this case was already an extension of the Mar-a-Lago search and transferred it back to Bruce Reinhart, the magistrate judge who approved the search warrant.
“I just don’t think she ever had jurisdiction,” Tobias said. “She could have kicked this back to the magistrate. To the extent this case had any validity, it belonged there—rather than have this. They forum-shopped to get her. It raises all kinds of issues.”
Hurricane risk might seem like the obvious problem, but there is a more insidious driver in this financial train wreck.
Finance professor Shahid Hamid, who directs the Laboratory for Insurance at Florida International University, explained how Florida’s insurance market got this bad – and how the state’s insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance, now carrying more than 1 million policies, can weather the storm.
What’s making it so hard for Florida insurers to survive?
One is the rising hurricane risk. Hurricanes Matthew (2016), Irma (2017) and Michael (2018) were all destructive. But a lot of Florida’s hurricane damage is from water, which is covered by the National Flood Insurance Program, rather than by private property insurance.
Another reason is that reinsurance pricing is going up – that’s insurance for insurance companies to help when claims spike.
But the biggest single reason is the “assignment of benefits” problem, involving contractors after a storm. It’s partly fraud and partly taking advantage of loose regulation and court decisions that have affected insurance companies.
It generally looks like this: Contractors will knock on doors and say they can get the homeowner a new roof. The cost of a new roof is maybe $20,000-$30,000. So, the contractor inspects the roof. Often, there isn’t really that much damage. The contractor promises to take care of everything if the homeowner assigns over their insurance benefit. The contractors can then claim whatever they want from the insurance company without needing the homeowner’s consent.
If the insurance company determines the damage wasn’t actually covered, the contractor sues.
So insurance companies are stuck either fighting the lawsuit or settling. Either way, it’s costly.
Other lawsuits may involve homeowners who don’t have flood insurance. Only about 14% of Florida homeowners pay for flood insurance, which is mostly available through the federal National Flood Insurance Program. Some without flood insurance will file damage claims with their property insurance company, arguing that wind caused the problem.
How widespread of a problem are these lawsuits?
Overall, the numbers are pretty striking.
About 9% of homeowner property claims nationwide are filed in Florida, yet 79% of lawsuits related to property claims are filed there.
The legal cost in 2019 was over $3 billion for insurance companies just fighting these lawsuits, and that’s all going to be passed on to homeowners in higher costs.
Insurance companies had a more than $1 billion underwriting loss in 2020 and again in 2021. Even with premiums going up so much, they’re still losing money in Florida because of this. And that’s part of the reason so many companies are deciding to leave.
Assignment of benefits is likely more prevalent in Florida than most other states because there is more opportunity from all the roof damage from hurricanes. The state’s regulation is also relatively weak. This may eventually be fixed by the legislature, but that takes time and groups are lobbying against change. It took a long time to pass a law saying the attorney fee has to be capped.
Thirty more are on the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation’s watch list. About 17 of those are likely to be or have been downgraded from A rating, meaning they’re no longer considered to be in good financial health.
Florida’s Leaders Opposed Climate Aid. Now They’re Depending on It.
Christopher Flavelle and Jonathan Weisman – October 4, 2022
A helicopter carries evacuees from Pine Island, Fla., on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. (Hilary Swift/The New York Times)
Hurricane Ian’s wrath made clear that Florida faces some of the most severe consequences of climate change anywhere in the country. But the state’s top elected leaders have opposed federal spending to help fortify states against and recover from climate disasters, as well as efforts to confront their underlying cause: the burning of fossil fuels.
Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott opposed last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law, which devotes some $50 billion to help states better prepare for events like Ian, because they said it was wasteful. And in August, they joined their fellow Republicans in the Senate to vote against a new climate law, which invests $369 billion in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the largest such effort in the country’s history.
At the same time, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has blocked the state’s pension fund from taking climate change into account when making investment decisions, saying that politics should be absent from financial calculations.
In the aftermath of Ian, those leaders want federal help to rebuild their state — but don’t want to discuss the underlying problem that is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive.
As Hurricane Ian approached Florida’s coast, the storm grew in intensity because it passed over ocean water that was 2 to 3 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year, NASA data show. Its destructive power was made worse by rising seas; the water off the southwest coast of Florida has risen more than 7 inches since 1965, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Finally, warmer air resulting from climate change increased the amount of rain that Ian dropped on Florida by at least 10%, or about 2 extra inches in some places, according to a study released last week.
Rubio has secured millions of dollars to restore the Everglades as a way to store floodwaters and repair coral reefs to buffer storm surges. One of his House colleagues, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a South Florida Republican, has secured billions for climate resiliency.
But none of the top Republicans in the state have supported legislation to curb the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.
With its sun and offshore wind, Florida could be a leader in renewable energy, said Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat who represents Tampa. Instead, it imports natural gas that it burns to produce electricity.
“To not admit that climate change is real and we need to address it bodes nothing but a harm for the future for Florida and the nation,” said Charlie Crist, a former Republican Florida governor who won a House seat as a Democrat and is now challenging DeSantis’ reelection.
Hurricane Ian is far from the first time Florida has felt the impacts of climate change. In Miami, the rising ocean means streets and sidewalks regularly flood during high tide, even on sunny days. In the Florida Keys, officials are looking at raising roadbeds that will otherwise become impassable.
Yet the state’s leaders have long resisted what scientists say is needed to stave off a catastrophic future: an aggressive pivot away from gas, oil and coal and toward solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.
“Attempting to reverse-engineer the U.S. economy to absolve our past climate sins — either through a carbon tax or some ‘Green New Deal’ scheme — will fail,” Rubio wrote in 2019. “None of those advocates can point to how even the most aggressive (and draconian) plan would improve the lives of Floridians.”
Scott, the former governor of Florida who is now the state’s junior senator, has argued the cost of attacking climate change is just too great.
“We clearly want to and need to address the impacts of climate change,” Scott told NPR last summer. “But we’ve got to do it in a fiscally responsible manner. We can’t put jobs at risk.”
Hurricane Ian could be among the costliest storms to hit Florida, with losses estimated in the tens of billions.
The two senators also voted against last year’s infrastructure bill, which provided about $50 billion toward climate resilience — the country’s largest single investment in measures designed to better protect people against the effects of climate change.
That bill, which passed the Senate with support from 19 Republicans, included measures designed to help protect against hurricanes. It provided billions for sea walls, storm pumps, elevating homes, flood control and other projects.
Many of those measures were co-written by another coastal Republican, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who called it “a major victory for Louisiana and our nation.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, also supported the bill. Both states face enormous threats from climate change.
But Rubio called it “wasteful,” while Scott said it was “reckless spending.” Both voted no.
Scott and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.
Dan Holler, a deputy chief of staff to Rubio, said the senator opposed the infrastructure bill because it included unnecessary measures, just as he opposed the final version of relief for Hurricane Sandy in 2013 because of what he called extraneous pork barrel spending.
But the larger issue, Holler said, is that those pushing broad measures to wean the nation from fossil fuels have yet to prove to Rubio that such efforts would actually slow sea level rise, calm storms or mitigate flooding.
Other Republicans offer similar explanations. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican candidate expected to win the House district around Tampa Bay, spoke of the devastation she said she saw in Fort Myers, Pine Island and Sanibel Island.
“The damage is so catastrophic, we are going to need help,” she said Monday.
But Luna pushed back hard on the need to address climate change by cutting fossil fuel emissions. She called it “completely bonkers” that the United States would harm its own economy “while we send manufacturing to a country that is one of the top polluters of the world,” referring to China.
Crist sounded almost sympathetic as he discussed the bind that Florida Republicans find themselves in — accepting donations from the oil and gas industry, unwilling to raise the issue of climate change with their most loyal voters, while surveying the damage it is doing to their state.
The oil and gas industry is not a major source of campaign cash for politicians in Florida, where offshore drilling is prohibited. Rubio has received $223,239 from the oil and gas industry since 2017, which puts the industry at 15th on his donor list, federal records show. Scott has received $236,483 from oil and gas, his 14th most generous industry.
But the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Scott leads, has received $3.2 million in oil and gas donations this campaign cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, eclipsed only by real estate, Wall Street and retirees. By contrast, the fossil fuel business isn’t among the top 20 industries that have given this cycle to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
“There’s an ‘ideological versus reality’ divide here that must be very excruciating to these Republican politicians,” Crist said.
Republicans in the state have taken steps to fund climate resilience and adaptation efforts but shy away from using the term “climate.” In 2017, Diaz-Balart, then the Republican chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds housing programs, secured $12 billion for “mitigation” measures in block grants to states and communities, $1.4 billion of that for Florida. The word “climate” did not appear in the definition of “mitigation.”
“If you’re from Florida, you should be leading on climate and environmental policy, and Republicans are still reticent to do that because they’re worried about primary politics,” Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from South Florida. “But on this, the consequences are so serious, it’s worth putting politics aside and addressing climate head on.”
While DeSantis announced a program last year to provide $1 billion over four years to local governments to address flooding, rising seas and other challenges, he has blocked his state’s pension plan from accounting for the environmental performance of companies in making investment decisions.
“We are prioritizing the financial security of the people of Florida over whimsical notions of a utopian tomorrow,” DeSantis said in a statement announcing the decision.
DeSantis’ record on other climate decisions may also come back to haunt him. As a congressman in 2013, he voted against a bill to provide extra disaster aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy — the same type of extra support that Florida is now seeking for Ian.
On Friday, Rubio and Scott wrote to their Senate colleagues asking them to support a package of disaster aid. Like DeSantis, Rubio opposed a similar measure after Sandy struck the Northeast in 2012. (Scott had not yet been elected to the Senate.)
Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director of the CLEO Institute, a nonprofit group in Florida that promotes climate change education, advocacy and resilience, said the state’s top elected officials need to do much more than react after disaster strikes.
“Florida will continue to be on the front lines of more destructive hurricanes fueled by a warming climate,” Arditi-Rocha said. “We need Republican leaders to step up.”
Nicolle Wallace Slams Wall Street Journal’s Condemnation Of Trump
Lee Moran – October 4, 2022
The conservative Wall Street Journal’s condemnation of Donald Trump over his latest violent rhetoric rang somewhat hollow for MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
On Monday’s broadcast of “Deadline: White House,” Wallace welcomed the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s denunciation of Trump’s suggestion on his Truth Social platform that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a “DEATH WISH” for supporting “Democrat sponsored Bills.”
But the Journal was “seven years too late to the parade,” Wallace said, pointing out its past support of Trump. The Journal has repeatedlyflip-flopped on Trump and last year even published a letter to the editor from him containing unchecked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
The Journal did “more laundering and legitimizing of Donald Trump’s presidency than perhaps any other outlet,” said Wallace, who was the White House communications director for former President George W. Bush.
“They’re as culpable as any news organization in this country for his presidency and his ongoing viability as a political figure,” she added.
In its editorial, the publication’s board warned of real-life consequences to Trump’s words.
It wrote:
Mr. Trump’s apologists claim he merely meant Mr. McConnell has a political death wish, but that isn’t what he wrote. It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr. Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr. McConnell. Many supporters took Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about former Vice President Mike Pence all too seriously on Jan. 6.
“If Republicans return to Washington’s business as usual, if we have no bigger plan than to be a speed bump on the road to America’s collapse, we don’t deserve to govern,” Scott wrote in the plan’s introduction. “We must resolve to aim higher than the Republican Congresses that came before us. Americans deserve to know what we will do.”
Scott’s decision to put his name to a series of specific proposals for what Republicans could and should do if they retake the Senate and House this fall stands in direct contrast to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has pointedly refused to offer an alternative policy agenda.
When asked last month what the GOP’s agenda would be if they took control of Congress, McConnell told reporters: “That is a very good question and I’ll let you know when we take it back.”
Scott seems to acknowledge the fact that he is rebelling against his party leadership, writing: “Like the ‘Contract with America’ before it, the Washington insiders will hate this plan.” (The Contract with America was the Republican agenda unveiled during the 1994 midterms, when the GOP won control of the House.)
Why did Scott do it then? Well, at least in part (a large part) because of politics. Scott, the former governor of Florida who was elected to the Senate in 2018, has his eye on bigger prizes. He’s currently serving as the chairman of the Senate Republican campaign arm and has done very little to knock down talk that he would be interested in a presidential bid down the line.
This plan feels like the sort of thing that could become the basis of a Scott presidential run, whether in 2024 or 2028.
So what’s actually in the plan? A fair amount of it is just red-meat rhetoric sure to make the base of the party happy. But amid the spin – and the attacks on Democrats, “wokeness” and the media – there are some actual policy proposals. Let’s go through them.
1. Kids in public schools would say the Pledge of Allegiance and be required to stand for the National Anthem. They also would have to “honor” the American flag.
2. The Department of Education would close. “Education is a state function,” wrote Scott.
3. The government would never be able to ask you to disclose your race, ethnicity or skin color “on any government form.” (On a related note, the US Census Bureau is on line one, Sen. Scott.)
4. The US military would engage in “ZERO diversity training” or “any woke ideological indoctrination that divides our troops.”
5. If a college or university uses affirmative action in admissions, it would be “ineligible for federal funding and will lose their tax-exempt status.”
6. “Strict” mandatory minimum sentences would be required in every case in which a police officer is seriously injured.
7. Any “attempt to deny our 2nd Amendment freedoms” would be strongly opposed.
8. The wall along the US southern border would be completed and named after former President Donald Trump.
9. Immigrants to the US would not be able to collect unemployment benefits or welfare until they have lived in the country for seven years.
10. So-called sanctuary cities would be stripped of all federal funding.
11. The federal budget would be balanced and, if not, members of Congress would not be paid.
12. All Americans would pay some income tax “to have skin in the game.” (At present, roughly half of Americans do not pay taxes because their taxable income doesn’t meet a minimum threshold.)
13. Federal debt ceiling increases would be prohibited unless accompanied by a declaration of war.
14. All federally elected officials, as well as all federal workers, would be subject to a 12-year term limit.
15 All federal legislation would have a sunset provision five years after it passes. (People currently on Social Security or Medicare might be particularly interested in that one.)
16. Funding for the IRS, as well as its workforce, would be cut by 50%.
17. Politicians would be banned from becoming lobbyists when they leave office.
18. Voter ID would become the law of the land. “All arguments against voter ID are in favor of fraud,” according to Scott.
19. Same-day voter registration would be banned.
20. “No federal program or tax laws will reward people for being unmarried or discriminate against marriage.”
21. No government form would offer options related to “gender identity” or “sexual preference”
22. Biological males would be banned from competing in women’s sports.
23. “All social media platforms that censor speech and cancel people will be treated like publishers and subject to legal action.”
24. No tax dollars could be used for “diversity training or other woke indoctrination that is hostile to faith.”
25. No dues would be paid to the United Nations or “any international organization that undermines the national interests of the USA.”
26. “The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.”
There’s more in there, but those are the main points.
It’s an attempt – both rhetorically and from a policy perspective – to make permanent many of the changes that Trump ushered in during his four years in office. It’s a promise of all the things you liked about Trump without some of the bombast and unpredictability. It’s a blueprint for Trumpism without Trump.
