Former Sen. Claire McCaskill Goes Scorched Earth On ‘Little, Lily-Livered’ Republicans
Lee Moran – July 21, 2023
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on Thursday ripped the Republican Party for what it’s become in the Donald Trump era.
McCaskill, now a political analyst for MSNBC, recalled on the “Morning Joe” show how GOP leaders in 2012 “rejected” her then-Republican challenger, the late Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), for his comments on “legitimate rape.”
But 11 years later, with the party in thrall to Trump, McCaskill explained how it’s a different story, as even top Republicans continue to defend the former president amid his mounting legal woes and reported imminent indictment in the special counsel probe into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“The main difference here is not the conduct of the candidate, it is the reaction of the leaders of his party,” McCaskill said, noting how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) all condemned Trump in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection.
“But then they got scared,” she said. “They just became little, lily-livered cowards and were too afraid that, somehow, they couldn’t hold on to their precious office or their precious power if they stated the obvious.”
“So, it is not so much what Donald Trump has done,” McCaskill added. “It’s the rest of the Republican Party who has elevated him and kept him elevated that has brought this upon America.
Farmers Insurance this month announced it would depart the Florida market with all its proprietary products – no new housing contracts, and no renewals for things like auto insurance. Pulling up stakes. Getting out.
While the Florida governing apparatus grappled with inapt hogwash, an actual crisis of critical impact was creeping from the shadows — despite the Legislature’s two-year policy of aggressively whistling past this particular graveyard.
The housing insurance rate in Florida is four times the national average, and the national average is higher than ever.
The problem has its roots in several ugly places – several likely out of the direct control of lawmakers. The reinsurance folks, who indemnify the insurers, have jacked up their rates in Florida by as much as 30%. They lost money here over the past 4-5 years and are looking to repair their profit margins. So, as costs to insurers rise, they are passed on to customers. Additionally, the hurricane seasons of the past few years have been brutal. The loss of life and property has risen and climate change, altered coastlines, beach erosion and failing breakwaters have contributed, as well.
All this damage comes with a gargantuan price tag. The cost of simply fixing things has risen – whether it be lines of roof tiles or an entire apartment block falling into the sea. That damage is covered by insurance – we hope – and the insurance folks pay out. And pay out. Squeezed between reinsurers and the insured, they raise premiums to preposterous levels until finally the roof caves in. They are, after all, in business and business demands a profit, and the profits the insurance folks are used to making are pretty astronomical.
There is an interconnectedness to all this, too. No housing insurance, no loans; no loans, no new moderate income or middle-class homeowners. No homeowners, no loans, and banking profits spin for the floor. It begins to look like a negative reversal of the housing “bubble” of 2007, which was driven by banks loaning too much on housing, whatever the risks.
Now, home loans are drying up because they cannot insure them. There’s a ripple effect spreading out into truly damaging areas. Middle management in businesses is often peopled by folks recruited out of college, and they have to have a place to live. When a potential employee is offered a job here, the appeal is high but unless the employer wants to take on the additional housing costs, the potential employee is likely to look elsewhere.
The cost of simply employing people in Florida could theoretically go through the uninsured roof. And the folks that are already here? Wages cannot keep pace with the rising costs. Moving from Florida is not popular, but it could become so, if the cost of living continues to soar.
Another oddity is the backwash from one thing the Legislature did do, although not with the intent of affecting the insurance world. The new immigration bill is causing what appears to be an ever-growing flood of immigrant workers out of the state or an increasing hesitancy to come at all. This has immediate implications on the construction labor market, much of which comes from immigrant labor. As it dries up, and as wages rise to attract scarce labor, the price of rebuilding goes higher each day.
I’d love to have a fistful of answers to this but I don’t. What we do know is, as long as the governing and policymaking end of government here in Florida is laser-focused on banning books and drag queens, we’re not going to find them.
Florida Schools Will Teach How Slavery Brought ‘Personal Benefit’ to Black People
Allison Quinn – July 20, 2023
Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty
Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”
After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
Dozens of Black residents were killed in the massacre, which was perpetrated to stop them from voting.
According to members of the board, that distorted portrayal of the racist massacre is factually accurate. MaryLynn Magar, a member of the board appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, said at the board’s meeting in Orlando on Wednesday that “everything is there” in the new history standards and “the darkest parts of our history are addressed,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
The majority of the speakers who provided public testimony on the planned curriculum were vehemently opposed to it, warning that crucial context is omitted, atrocities are glossed over, and in some cases students will be taught to “blame the victim.”
“I am very concerned by these standards, especially some of the notion that enslaved people benefited from being enslaved,” state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-Orlando) said, per Action News Jax.
“When I see the standards, I’m very concerned,” state Sen. Geraldine Thompson said at the board meeting. “If I were still a professor, I would do what I did very infrequently; I’d have to give this a grade of ‘I’ for incomplete. It recognizes that we have made an effort, we’ve taken a step. However, this history needs to be comprehensive. It needs to be authentic, and it needs additional work.”
“When you look at the history currently, it suggests that the [Ocoee] massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans. That’s blaming the victim,” the Democrat warned.
“Please table this rule and revise it to make sure that my history, our history, is being told factually and completely, and please do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial because I guarantee you it most certainly was not,” community member Kevin Parker said.
Approval of the new standards is a win for the DeSantis administration, which has effectively sought to create a new educational agenda that shields white students from feeling any sense of guilt for wrongs perpetrated against people of color. The Florida governor signed the “Stop WOKE Act” last year to do just that, restricting how issues of race are taught in public schools and workplaces.
In keeping with the administration’s crusade against “wokeness,” Education Commissioner Manny Diaz defended the new standards against criticism, saying, “This is an in-depth, deep dive into African American history, which is clearly American history as Governor DeSantis has said, and what Florida has done is expand it,” Action News Jax reported.
Paul Burns, the Florida Department of Education’s chancellor of K-12 public schools, also insisted the new standards provide an exhaustive representation of African American history.
“Our standards are factual, objective standards that really teach the good, the bad and the ugly,” he was quoted as saying Wednesday by Florida Phoenix. He denied the new standards portray slavery as beneficial.
Although education officials say teachers are meant to expand upon the new curriculum in the classroom, critics say teachers are unlikely to do that for fear of being singled out and possibly punished for being too “woke.”
The Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, called the new standards “a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994” in a statement after Wednesday’s vote.
Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, also condemned the new curriculum, saying in a statement: “Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for.”
“Today’s actions by the Florida state government are an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected. It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history. We refuse to go back,” he said.
Texas’ Harsh New Border Tactics Are Injuring Migrants
Edgar Sandoval, Jay Root and J. David Goodman – July 20, 2023
Texas law enforcement officers stand near concertina wire on the bank of the Rio Grande river in Eagle Pass, Texas on July 19, 2023. (Go Nakamura/The New York Times)
For more than two years, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has pursued an increasingly aggressive approach to the border, sending thousands of National Guard troops and police officers to patrol the Rio Grande and testing the legal limits of state action on immigration.
But in recent weeks, Texas law enforcement officials have taken those tactics much further, embarking on what the state has called a “hold-the-line” operation, according to interviews with state officials and documents reviewed by The New York Times. They have fortified the riverbanks with additional concertina wire, denied water to some migrants, shouted at others to return to Mexico and, in some cases, deliberately failed to alert federal Border Patrol agents who might assist arriving groups in coming ashore and making asylum claims, the review found.
The increasingly brutal, go-it-alone approach has alarmed people inside the U.S. Border Patrol and the Texas Department of Public Safety, the agency chiefly responsible for pursuing the governor’s border policies. Several Texas officers have lodged internal complaints and voiced opposition.
The reality of those tactics in one area of the border, around the small city of Eagle Pass, was detailed in an email by one state police medic, who described exhausted migrants being cut up by razor wire, a teenager breaking his leg to escape the barriers and officers being directed to withhold water from migrants struggling in the perilous heat. The actions described in the email drew broad condemnation from Texas Democrats in Congress and from the White House after the email was reported by the Houston Chronicle.
“If they are true, it is abhorrent. It is despicable. It is dangerous,” said White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, referring to the reports. “We’re talking about the bedrock values of who we are as a country.” The Justice Department said Wednesday that it was assessing the situation.
But the objections within the Texas Department of Public Safety extended far beyond a single medic: At least three other officers working around Eagle Pass, a main arrival point for migrants who are crossing illegally, have expressed their outrage and misgivings to higher-ups about the actions they have seen, according to internal correspondence and interviews with state officials briefed on the border response.
And it was not only officers describing the harshness of the new tactics. In several interviews with the Times in Eagle Pass, about two hours southwest of San Antonio, migrants nursing wounds said they had encountered phalanxes of law enforcement officers along banks of the United States that were newly bristling with barbed wire, some of it underwater.
“They kept yelling at us, ‘Go back, go back!’” said Reyna Gloria Dominguez, 42, who arrived in Eagle Pass from Honduras in a wheelchair. “We said, ‘We can’t.’ My son told them, ‘She needs help. She’s hurt.’”
Similar scenes have been playing out elsewhere along the border, including in the Texas city of Brownsville, near the mouth of the Rio Grande, where state police officers have been standing guard at crossing points behind two layers of concertina wire.
The increasing aggressiveness has created international tension with Mexico because, in addition to placing concertina wire, Texas also deployed a 1,000-foot floating barrier of buoys into the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass this month. Mexican officials have said the barrier may have violated international treaties and could encroach on Mexican territory.
Texas officials have blamed the Biden administration for allowing a chaotic situation on the border. They said the buoy barrier and concertina wire were designed to deter people from risking a dangerous swim across the Rio Grande and direct them to safe, official border-crossing stations.
“No orders or directions have been given under Operation Lone Star that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally,” Abbott said in a joint statement with top officials from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department, using the name of the state operation.
The new Texas tactics have frayed relations between state and federal law enforcement agencies that have long worked together to monitor the border.
In a memo to the Texas DPS last month, Border Patrol officials in the Eagle Pass area raised concern that the concertina wire placed along the water by Texas officials was creating new hazards for migrants as well as for federal border agents.
At the same time, state police supervisors have been directed by their own superiors not to alert Border Patrol when encountering groups of migrants, but rather to handle the situation themselves, according to a departmental text message addressed to sergeants, obtained by the Times.
“Can you please push out a message to your troopers,” the text read, referring to those stationed in a city-owned park by the international bridge in Eagle Pass. “They are NOT to call BP when they see a group approaching or already on the bank.” Officers were instead directed to make arrests for criminal trespassing, an element of Operation Lone Star.
The text message, which was sent last week and has not been previously reported, also directed officers to tell migrants to “go back to Mexico” and to cross the border at one of the international bridges.
Many of the migrants who arrived in Eagle Pass after passing through the treacherous new gantlet were left shaken, and some were injured.
Gleyders Durant, 27, a migrant from Venezuela, peeled off bandages on his right foot to reveal several wounds. He said that as he crossed the river on Friday and stepped onto U.S. soil — his 3-year-old son on his shoulders and his wife following them — he felt a sharp pain. Blood gushed through one of his tennis shoes.
“That’s when I realized that I had stepped on a stretch of wire hidden under dark waters,” he said. Panicked, he extended his arms and carried his wife over it. “It was hidden, under the water.”
Nearby, in a respite center in Eagle Pass, another migrant from Venezuela, Marjorie Escobar, 32, described a harrowing encounter Saturday between her group of about 20 people, including children as young as 4, and several law enforcement agents in Texas.
As some in her group threw inflatables and blankets over the concertina wire to avoid injury, she said, the agents began yelling, “Go back to Mexico!” and “If you cross, we are going to arrest and charge you.”
Then, she said, an agent wearing a brown uniform and a cowboy hat who appeared to be a Texas state trooper roughly pulled a blanket off the barrier as people were climbing over it. The abrupt maneuver caused a young woman to hit her face on a spike, leaving a gash on her forehead, Escobar recalled. She said several of the agents stood still for several minutes, until an officer wearing what looked like a soldier’s uniform offered help to the wounded woman.
State officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident.
“I was still in the river, about to jump over, when I saw what that agent did and was horrified,” she said of the officer in the cowboy hat. “She was crying, saying, ‘Help me, help me.’”
Because of the increased number of migrants being taken to the lone hospital in Eagle Pass, residents have often been waiting up to eight hours to receive medical care, said Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr. “I support legal migration and orderly law enforcement,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “What I am against is the use of tactics that hurt people.”
The tactics by Texas appear to have intensified in the lead-up to the lifting in late May of Title 42, a public health policy imposed during the coronavirus pandemic that allowed federal agents to rapidly expel most arriving migrants.
The Department of Public Safety has defended its approach and said officers were providing assistance to migrants in medical distress. “There is not a directive or policy that instructs troopers to withhold water from migrants or push them back into the river,” an agency spokesperson, Travis Considine, said.
At the same time, Considine said, officers, who have been directed to keep migrants from entering and to instruct them to return to Mexico, are given some discretion in how they carry out those orders.
“If there are women and children who are asking for water, they’re getting water,” he said. “A group of 30 adult males comes, and they’re begging for water. I’m not going to say there are not troopers saying, ‘We’re not going to give you water.’” He said that if the migrants did not seem to be in distress, troopers might tell them to go get water in Mexico.
The four officers who raised concerns said there were explicit orders to deny water to migrants and to tell them to go back to Mexico. Three said they had been told by supervisors that troopers were not to inform the Border Patrol when migrants were in the water or at the Texas riverbank.
One of the officers, Trooper Nicholas Wingate, was a medic. In an email to supervisors July 3, he said numerous migrants, including a pregnant woman, had gotten tangled in the razor wire. He said the woman, 19, was “doubled over” and “in obvious pain, stuck in the casualty wire.” A 4-year-old girl who attempted to cross was “pressed back by Texas Guard soldiers due to orders given to them,” he wrote in the email.
With temperatures soaring past 100 degrees that day, the girl passed out and became “unresponsive,” Wingate wrote. She was taken away by emergency medical workers.
Wingate also described seeing a father with lacerations on his leg after extricating his child from what he called a “barrel trap,” a plastic barrel floating in the water with concertina wire surrounding it. “I believe we have stepped over the line into the inhumane,” he wrote.
Considine said the agency did not deploy “barrel traps.” But he said it was possible that a barrel that had been wrapped in concertina wire in one part of the river to hold it in place had floated away in rising waters, though he said that the agency had not confirmed that was the case.
On the question of coordinating with Border Patrol, Considine said officers did not alert Border Patrol when arresting migrants for criminal trespassing. He said the number of such arrests had increased recently in and around Eagle Pass.
But federal law entitles people who enter the United States, even unlawfully, to claim asylum by stating that they faced persecution in their home country.
It is not clear how many migrants have died while crossing the border in recent weeks.
The river is always treacherous, and four people, including an infant, drowned this month in the span of a few days. According to the sheriff’s office in Maverick County, which includes Eagle Pass, 26 migrants have drowned so far in 2023. There were 77 migrant drownings in the county in all of last year.
For some local officials, the hardened border was sending the wrong message.
“Seeing barbed wire on the bank of the river, it doesn’t look good for the USA,” said Sheriff Tom Schmerber of Maverick County. “We’re used to seeing all that in communist countries. Now we have them here in Texas.”
“It’s kind of like a black eye. And it’s not working anyway,” he added. “It’s not stopping the immigrants.”
Florida’s CFO blames wokeness for insurers leaving the state: ‘I do call them the Bud Light of the insurance industry’
Chris Morris – July 20, 2023
As yet another insurance company is pulling back from issuing policies in Florida following a string of natural disasters, the state’s chief financial officer has accused the industry of pulling out not because of losses, but due to wokeness.
Jimmy Patronis, CFO of the state, lit into Farmers Insurance for its plans to leave the state on CNBC recently, saying “if they would just leave ESG [environmental, social, and corporate governance ] and put it away, and focus on the bottom line, they may not have made this decision to leave the state of Florida with the tail between their legs.”
“I do say they’re too woke,” he added. “I do call them the Bud Light of the insurance industry. I do feel like they have chaos in their C-suite.”
The accusations aren’t helping the state hang onto insurers, though. This week, AAA announced it would not renew the auto or homeowners policies of some customers in Florida, making it the fourth insurer in the past year to back away from the state. (Bankers Insurance and Lexington Insurance, a subsidiary of AIG, left Florida last year.)
All of the companies that have reduced or eliminated their presence in the state have said the string of local hurricanes, including last year’s catastrophic Hurricane Ian, have made it too expensive to cover residents of the state.
The shrinking number of insurance options and the growing number of disasters is hitting Floridians in the wallet. The average homeowner’s premium in the state costs over $4,000, compared to the U.S. average of $1,544, according to E&E News, a division of Politico that focuses on environmental and energy news.
The companies are leaving the state despite legislation meant to encourage them to stay. Last year, Florida created a $1 billion reinsurance fund and set up laws meant to prevent frivolous lawsuits.
Insurance companies have also stepped back from California, with AIG, Allstate and State Farm no longer taking new customers, as wildfires in that state have driven up costs.
Is America on the brink of tyranny? Trump’s plan if elected in 2024 should frighten us all.
Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut – July 20, 2023
The New York Times published an article Monday that’s bone-chilling for anyone who cherishes our freedom, democracy and constitutional governance. The story recounted, with full cooperation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, his plans to eliminate executive branch constraints on his power if he is elected president in 2024.
The obstacles to be eliminated include an independent Justice Department, independent leadership in administrative agencies and an independent civil service. Richard Neustadt, one of the country’s best known students of the American presidency, has said that in a constitutional democracy the chief executive “does not obtain results by giving orders – or not. … He does not get action without argument. Presidential power is the power to persuade.”
Trump now may face federal charges for his role in fomenting the riot.
And while he was president, in addition to appointing subservient heads of executive departments, he took steps to increase his control over the regulatory authority of administrative agencies. To cite one example, in 2019, Trump forced climate change researchers in the Department of Agriculture to move from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Missouri, producing a huge exodus from federal employment.
In 2020, he attempted to undermine the independence of the civil service by issuing an executive order adopting “Schedule F.” It purported to vastly augment a president’s power to hire and fire federal officials by expanding the number of “political appointees” throughout government employment who were outside civil service protections.
Trump’s plan is to centralize power in Oval Office
The Times story outlined his 2025 road map to implement this command-and-control model of executive authority and centralization of power if he’s returned to the Oval Office. In effect, the article described how his team would replace our constitutional republic with an authoritarian state.
Such a state seeks to eliminate the independence of civil servants. Saying good things about bureaucracy may be unpopular, but federal employees’ competence, expert judgment and commitment to governance by law is essential to democratic government.
One definition of an authoritarian state is that it is characterized by the consolidation of power in a single leader, “a controlling regime that justifies itself as a ‘necessary evil.'” That kind of control necessarily features “strict government-imposed constraints on social freedoms such as suppression of political opponents and anti-regime activity.”
Those characteristics describe the contours of the 2025 blueprint that the Trump campaign wanted the public to see via the Times’ report. As the story notes, they are setting the stage, if Trump is elected, “to claim a mandate” for the goal of centralizing power in him.
The Times quoted John McEntee, Trump’s 2020 White House director of personnel, defending the rejection of checks and balances on a president: “Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. … What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
Founders warned about danger of too much presidential power
In fact, the executive branch, like the two other branches, was devised by the framers of our Constitution, to limit power by dividing it. Even Alexander Hamilton, who defended energy in the executive branch, suggested that the path to tyranny was marked when government officials are “obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man.”
James Madison joined Hamilton in warning in The Federalist 48 that “power is of an encroaching nature.” For that reason, The Federalist 51 states, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
It described the paradox facing the framers as this: One must “enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
Trump’s 2025 blueprint would end governmental control on a president so he can dominate and control the governed.
Along with divided power, the central constraint that our founding documents create is the overarching legal institution known as the rule of law. That is why Trump’s plan for a radical reorganization of the executive branch starts with ending “the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.”
Controlling the prosecutorial power allows a president to use it to favor friends, destroy enemies and intimidate ordinary citizens tempted to speak out.
That would sound the death knell of American freedom. As John Locke, the 17th century political philosopher who inspired the authors of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” Or as Blake Smith put it in an article in Foreign Policy last year, “The bureaucratic ethos is essential to the functioning of the state and the preservation of private life as a separate, unpolitical domain of tolerated freedom.”
At the close of America’s first decade as a constitutional republic, George Washington voluntarily chose not to seek a third term as president to avoid setting the country on the road to the tyranny of lifetime rule by a president. He understood from the revolution against a king that retaining the personal power of one person is the central goal of authoritarianism.
If voters elect Trump president in 2024, he will implement the plan his campaign has purposefully leaked. The outcome is easy to foretell. A bureaucracy purged of those loyal to the Constitution rather than to Trump will send free and fair elections to history’s landfill, along with the Bill of Rights and the freedoms they were designed to protect.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts.Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, is counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
Authoritarianism Expert Warns Why It’s Critical To Listen To Trump’s Words Right Now
Lee Moran – July 20, 2023
Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned on Wednesday that when Donald Trump talks about obliterating and then politicizing the civil service, and seizing control of every aspect of government if he wins the White House in 2024, he really means it.
“Nobody is ever prepared” for an authoritarian takeover of their country, Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
“They think they are going to be the exception. They don’t listen to the warning signs until it’s too late,” she continued.
But Trump is actually “being very clear” with what he is saying, said Ben-Ghiat.
Last week, a New York Times article said Trump would seek to expand presidential authority “over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
Ben-Ghiat cautioned: “Authoritarians always tell you what they are going to do as a kind of challenge and as a warning, and people don’t listen until it’s too late.”
If Trump wins election again, he will “be finishing the job that he started, and by the way that’s not just destroying democracy internally,” she added. His other main aim was “to take America out of the realm of democratic internationalism and align it with autocracies. That will happen as well.”
Homes become ‘air fryers’ in Phoenix heat, people ration AC due to cost
Isabella O’Malley – July 20, 2023
Manuel Luna, left, a volunteer at the Salvation Army, gives out items to a patron at a cooling station on July 19, 2023, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)JP Lantin, right, owner of Total Refrigeration, and service tech Michael Villa, work on replacing a fan motor on an air conditioning unit July 19, 2023, in Laveen, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File) After finishing up an air conditioning repair call, Michael Villa, a service tech with Total Refrigeration, finds shade as he wipes sweat from his face July 19, 2023, in Laveen, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)
Temperatures have peaked at or above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius) the entire month of July in Phoenix. Air conditioning, which made modern Phoenix even possible, is a lifeline.
When a cloudless sky combines with outdoor temperatures over 100 F, your house turns into an “air fryer” or “broiler,” as the roof absorbs powerful heat and radiates it downward, said Jonathan Bean, co-director of the Institute for Energy Solutions at the University of Arizona. Bean knows this not only from his research, he also experienced it firsthand this weekend when his air conditioner broke.
“This level of heat that we are having in Phoenix right now is enormously dangerous, particularly for people who either don’t have air conditioning or cannot afford to operate their air conditioner,” said Evan Mallen, a senior analyst for Georgia Institute of Technology’s Urban Climate Lab.
Yet some are cutting back on AC, trying to bear the heat, afraid of the high electricity bills that will soon arrive.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-11-1/html/r-sf-flx.html
Camille Rabany, 29, has developed her own system to keep herself and her 10-month-old Saint Bernard Rigley cool during the Arizona heat wave. Through trial and error, Rabany found that 83 F is a temperature she is willing to tolerate to keep her utility bill down.
By tracking the on-peak and off-peak schedule of her utility, Arizona Public Service, with the help of her NEST smart thermostat, Rabany keeps her home that hot from 4 to 7 p.m., the most expensive hours. She keeps fans running and has a cooling bed for Rigley, and they both try to get by until the utility’s official peak hours pass.
“Those are the hours that I have it at the hottest I’m willing to have it because I have a dog,” she said. Last month, Rabany said her utility bill was around $150.
Emily Schmidt’s home cooling strategy in Tempe, Ariz. also centers around her dog. Air conditioning is “constantly a topic of conversation,” with her partner, too, she said.
“Sometimes I wish I could have it cooler, but we have to balance saving money and making sure the house isn’t too hot for our pets.”
With the unrelenting heat of the recent weeks, “I’m honestly afraid what the electric bill will be, which makes it really hard to budget with rent and other utilities.”
Katie Martin, administrator of home improvements and community services at the Foundation for Senior Living, said she sees the pet issue, too. Older people on limited incomes are making dangerous tradeoffs and often won’t come to cooling centers when they don’t allow pets.
“In recent years we are finding that most of the seniors we serve are keeping their thermostat at 80 F to save money,” she said.
Many also lack a support network of family or friends they can turn to in case of air conditioner breakdowns.
Breakdowns can be dangerous. Models from Georgia Tech show that indoors can be even hotter than outdoors, something people in poorly-insulated homes around the world are well acquainted with. “A single family, one-story detached home with a large, flat roof heats up by over 40 degrees in a matter of hours if they don’t have air conditioning,” Mallen said.
The Salvation Army has some 11 cooling stations across the Phoenix area. Lt. Colonel Ivan Wild, commander of the organization’s southwest division, said some of the people visiting now can’t afford their electricity bills or don’t have adequate air conditioning.
“I spoke to one elderly lady and she that her air conditioning is just so expensive to run. So she comes to the Salvation Army and stays for a few hours, socializes with other people, and then goes home when it’s not as hot,” he said.
While extreme heat happens every summer in Phoenix, Wild said that a couple of Salvation Army cooling centers have reported seeing more people than last year. The Salvation Army estimates that since May 1, they have provided nearly 24,000 people with heat relief and distributed nearly 150,000 water bottles in Arizona and Southern Nevada.
Marilyn Brown, regents professor of sustainable systems at Georgia Tech, said that high air conditioning bills also force people to cut spending in other areas. “People give up a lot, often, in order to run their air conditioner… they might have to give up on some medicine, the cost of the gasoline for their car to go to work or school,” she said.
“That’s why we have such an alarming cycle of poverty. It’s hard to get out of it, especially once you get caught up in the energy burden and poverty,” Brown added.
Beatrice Dupuy contributed to this story from New York and Melina Walling contributed from Chicago.
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations.
How Paramount buried a Vice documentary on Ron DeSantis at Guantanamo Bay
Max Tani – July 20, 2023
The Scoop
Showtime slated “The Guantanamo Candidate,” a 30 minute-long episode of its Vice documentary series, for May 28.
The episode opens with a shot of the outside the US prison complex at the southern tip of Cuba, where Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis served as a lawyer from March 2006 to January 2007.
Vice reporters had secured on camera interviews with a former detainee, Mansoor Adayfi, and a guard at the prison, staff sergeant Joe Hickman. Both said they remembered seeing DeSantis at the prison during a controversial detainee hunger strike. The Vice crew traveled to Guantanamo Bay to attempt to try to speak to military staff, and made several attempts to ask DeSantis about the allegations directly, eventually confronting him at a press conference in Israel, according to a detailed description provided to Semafor.
But Showtime viewers who turned on their televisions May 28 never saw the episode. (They were treated to a re-run of the scripted drama Yellowjackets.)
Showtime and Vice cited “scheduling” in a statement after The Hollywood Reporter noticed the missing episode.
But in fact, two people familiar with the incident said, the Paramount-owned cable channel ditched the DeSantis episode over fears of the political consequences. One person briefed on the decision told Semafor that the company’s Washington lobbyist, DeDe Lea, raised concerns about the piece.
Showtime declined to comment on the decision to pull the episode.
“We not only stand behind our rigorous reporting but are proud of the incredible journalism showcased in this story,” a spokesperson for Vice, Elise Flick, told Semafor.
Know More
The politicized decision to kill the DeSantis episode came as Showtime’s parent company, Paramount, cut costs to reflect a gloomy streaming business. The company folded a diminished Showtime under the streaming umbrella Paramount+, and laid off a wave of staffers, including the executive who greenlit prestige unscripted shows and documentaries.
The new president Chris McCarthy, has a background in less expensive reality TV.
But the first sign of trouble for the DeSantis episode came on only Thursday, May 25 days before it was set to air.
The episode had already been vetted by Vice’s internal legal team, and returned by Showtime executives without any requests for changes. Both Showtime and Vice had already sent around promotional materials and screeners for the episode to reporters.
On Showtime’s site, the network said the episode contained allegations from “former detainees that he was present at force-feedings that were condemned as torture by the UN” raised the “role of Navy JAGs in the investigation of the detainee deaths.”
But just four days before the show was set to air, Vice received a note from Showtime’s post-production staff, which normally focuses on issues like color and sound. The production team told Vice “the broader network group teams are taking a deeper internal look at this Sunday’s episode, which will delay its premiere.”
Vice, which had just declared bankruptcy and was desperate to save anything it could, proceeded delicately. Subrata De, Vice’s EVP and global head of programming and documentary, and Vice’s showrunner Beverly Chase, sent a note to the production team at Showtime asking for more details. They told employees they would return to the DeSantis piece later in the season.
The new Showtime team didn’t respond to their inquiries, people familiar with the situation said. And Showtime quickly scrubbed promotion of the episode from its website.
When the Hollywood Reporter broke the news a week later that the episode had been shelved, Vice asked that the two sides work together to draft joint statements to give to reporters, and a spokesperson told reporters that “we are very much still in discussion about the scheduling of this episode. We are proud of our reporting and of our continuing partnership with Showtime.”
But within days, it became clear that Showtime was not still in discussion about the scheduling of the episode. Executives at the network stopped communicating with editorial employees at Vice including De and Chase. And immediately after the seventh episode aired, the company filed a motion in bankruptcy court to opt out of its contract to pay Vice.
Max’s view
Showtime’s decision to kill the DeSantis story has gotten lost amid the two companies’ other woes — Vice’s bankruptcy, Paramount’s scramble to cut expensive original programming.
But the episode is in fact a rare, and serious, glimpse at how a big media company killed a potentially controversial story. Perhaps they had reason to be fearful: DeSantis showed that he was willing to take on a much bigger and more influential media company, Disney.
And that kind of decision is made far more likely by the fragile state of the television business, where “the challenges are greater than I had anticipated,” as Disney CEO Bob Iger said earlier this month.
Both Vice and Paramount have spent the last several months sharply reducing costs, laying off staff and gutting the operations that produced critically-acclaimed work. And Vice’s bankruptcy presented a good opportunity for Showtime to claw back at least several million dollars at a moment when it is on a much tighter budgetary leash within Paramount.
When Vice was at the top of the world, Showtime executives may have thought twice about canceling an episode it didn’t particularly care for. Of course, Showtime wasn’t the distributor of the Vice docuseries at its peak. That would be HBO, which unceremoniously parted ways with the Vice weekly years ago when its parent company gave a similar edict: Trim the fat. And with it, the risk.
The View From Tallahassee
DeSantis has declined to discuss his time at Guantanamo recently, but the Washington Post reported that he discussed it in previous interviews. He had advised guards they could force-feed prisoners, he said.
He said in 2018 that he learned from the hunger strikes that detainees “are using things like detainee abuse offensively against us. It was a tactic, technique and procedure.”
Notable
“DeSantis had little authority to address these crises as a 27-year-old lieutenant at a notorious facility micromanaged from Washington. But it was a formative period for a career-minded officer who had enlisted hoping for a deployment to Guantánamo Bay, where he would come face to face with the realities of America’s least conventional war,” McClatchy reported.
DeSantis was present for the investigation of three apparent detainee suicides whose circumstances remain in dispute, The Guardian wrote.
“DeSantis was stationed at Guantanamo during a year marked by riots, hunger strikes and death,” according to the Independent.
Vice is now looking for a new home for the series, according to THR.
Donald Trump; Hunter Biden Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images
Donald Trump continues to threaten death, murder, and other mayhem upon his “enemies” or any individual(s) or group(s) who dare to oppose him and the neofascist MAGA movement. Last week, in a post on his Truth Social disinformation platform, Trump wished death upon Hunter Biden because President Joe Biden’s son was able to enter a plea deal in response to minor federal tax crimes.
Weiss is a COWARD, a smaller version of Bill Barr, who never had the courage to do what everyone knows should have been done. He gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence. Because of the two Democrat Senators in Delaware, they got to choose and/or approve him. Maybe the judge presiding will have the courage and intellect to break up this cesspool of crime. The collusion and corruption is beyond description. TWO TIERS OF JUSTICE!
Trump’s death wish for Hunter Biden comes several weeks after Trump shared what he believed to be the address of former President Barack Obama’s home in Washington D.C. on his Truth Social platform. Trump’s intent was obvious: he wanted one of his cultists to assassinate or otherwise commit acts of serious violence against Barack Obama and likely his family. Trump would (almost) get his wish, when one of his followers, who was armed with several guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, apparently attempted to gain access to Obama. The man, named Taylor Taranto, bragged online about his plans to assassinate Obama. Taranto was also a participant in the Jan. 6 coup attempt and attack on the Capitol. Fortunately, the Secret Service stopped the would-be assassin before he could follow through on his nefarious plans.
As a practical matter, why would Donald Trump stop making violent threats?
As FBI agent Clarice Starling says of the serial killer known as Buffalo Bill in the film “The Silence of the Lambs”, “He’s got a real taste for it now, and he’s getting better at his work.”
Until very recently, Trump has never been held seriously responsible for his decades-long public crime spree that includes sexual assault as confirmed in the E. Jean Carrol civil case and a panoply of other antisocial and antihuman behavior. Trump attempted a coup on Jan. 6 that involved a lethal assault by his followers on the Capitol. He has repeatedly bragged about being able to kill someone in broad daylight and get away with it because of his popularity. At his rallies and other events Trump repeatedly encouraged his followers to engage in acts of violence against journalists, the news media, Black Lives Matters protesters, “Antifa” and others deemed to be “the enemy” because they are “not real Americans” like his MAGA followers.
Trump has publicly threatened, both explicitly and implicitly, the lives and safety of President Biden, Hillary Clinton, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the prosecutors and law enforcement who are trying to hold him accountable for his crimes. Trump’s main 2024 presidential campaign message is a promise that if elected there will be a “final battle”, a reign of terror and revenge against the Democrats, liberals, progressives and any other Americans who oppose the neofascist MAGA movement.
Of course, Trump’s violent and other pathological behavior has not disqualified or otherwise seriously hurt his quest to be the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee. In fact, the party and its voters are ever more united behind Donald Trump where his criminality and other aberrant behavior has made him more popular and not less.
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on Trump and his cabal’s plans to eliminate any and all opposition to the regime through the normal process of institutional checks and balances by civil servants, the rule of law, and other democratic institutions if he takes back the White House in the 2024 Election. Trump would in essence become an American dictator. If such a nightmare scenario were to materialize, then a man who has a demonstrated and proven attraction to and capacity to engage in violence and destruction would have almost free rein to follow through on his most dark and evil impulses.
Trump cannot achieve his revolutionary goal of destroying America’s multiracial, pluralistic democracy – and the Constitutional order more broadly – by himself. He needs a political party, a movement and other allies and forces to achieve such an outcome. On this, historian Heather Cox Richardson warns in a recent issue of her newsletter how the Republican Party “appears to have fully embraced the antidemocratic ideology advanced by authoritarian leaders like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán”:
They claim that the tenets of democracy—equality before the law, free speech, academic freedom, a market-based economy, immigration, and so on—weaken a nation by destroying a “traditional” society based in patriarchy and Christianity.
Instead of democracy, they have called for “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy, which uses the government to enforce their beliefs in a Christian, patriarchal order.
Trump leads a fascist-authoritarian-fake right-wing populist cult of personality. As such, Trump exerts a powerful if not inexorable amount of influence and control over his followers which translates into his violent impulses and behavior spreading across American society like a plague.
New research by The Lincoln Democracy Institute on political polarization and violence in the Age of Trump and beyond reinforces how severe America’s democracy crisis really is:
The survey found that extremism is born out of increasing polarization and the normalizing of extremist rhetoric. The right and left deal with their competing worldviews by directing their anger at the “other side”. Long-standing generational divides further feed into this: the baby boomers are more likely to be extremist and have ideological divides than any other generation. Other divides include generational experiences such as the end of the Cold War, relationships with technology, and the propensity to embrace cultural change.
This is all being fed by a new right wing media ecosystem that plays off the fears of its viewers and pushes them towards radicalization. Particularly troublesome is the new right extremist media that promotes election denialism and frequently pushes false narratives designed to anger their audience and the MAGA base.
“As the electorate is becoming more politically extremist, and some are radicalizing the threat of violence is growing exponentially,” said Trygve Olson, Survey author and Lincoln Democracy Institute Senior Advisor. “The lack of belief that a fair election is possible in 2024 is setting the stage for wholesale rejection of the results that could lead to violence during and after the election. This is a critical moment for democracy and it is imperative that the nation respond to the moment by supporting our democratic institutions and calling out bad actors.”
Donald Trump is 77 years old. He is not going to change. The greater concern in terms of American society and what happens in the years and decades to come – independent of Trump – is how the American people as a whole, the mainstream news media, and too many political elites have become so quickly used to and habituated to a former president, one of the most powerful people in the country, who routinely if not a daily basis threatens violence, death, mayhem and other harm upon his “enemies” in the rival political party and across society.
After the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II, social psychologists spent much time and energy trying to determine how an entire democratic and cosmopolitan society like Germany can quite literally go mad, intoxicated by violence and hatred in what would become a project of self-destruction.
One does not have to look to the past or abroad for answers: The Age of Trump and the rise of American neofascism is providing a direct and personal lesson in real-time for the American people in how such horrors unfold and become normalized.
In an attempt to find some clarity during these horrible years, I have repeatedly returned to Milton Mayer’s important book “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.” The following two passages have proven to be remarkably helpful:
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D….”
“In the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.”
The Trumpocene and what it birthed has done great harm to us as individuals, collectively, and as a society.
We the Americans are very sick right now and most don’t even realize it. This includes the many tens of millions of Americans in the MAGA movement, the Republican fascists, and the larger white right who are very sick but believe that they are in fact healthy. The human mind’s capacity for denial and delusion is that extreme.
