GOP senator asks whether Trump is ‘recanting’ his oath of office

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show / The Maddow Blog

epa06169232 US President Donald J. Trump attends a joint news conference with President Sauli Niinisto of Finland in the East Room of the White House in…MICHAEL REYNOLDS

GOP senator asks whether Trump is ‘recanting’ his oath of office

By Steve Benen October 12, 2017

In 2009, after President Obama had been in office for about eight months, he and some of his top aides had some unkind things to say about Fox News. As regular readers may recall, the Beltway establishment did not take it well.

The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus, for example, was outraged – not because the Democratic president had said something untrue, but because Obama had the audacity to criticize a major news organization directly. Marcus called the White House’s Fox criticisms “dumb,” “childish,” “petty,” “self-defeating,” and having “a distinct Nixonian … aroma.”

Soon after, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) took the Senate floor to complain that the White House’s criticism of a news organization was evidence of the president’s team creating an “enemies list.”

Eight years later, I wonder what the reaction would’ve been if Obama had threatened the broadcast licenses of news organizations that ran reports that the White House disapproved of.

Yesterday morning, Donald Trump, apparently irked by NBC News, asked rhetorically at what point it might be “appropriate to challenge” the broadcast licenses of networks he apparently doesn’t like. He went on to suggest major American news organizations are “bad for country!” Ten hours later, the president turned the question into a statement.

“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!”

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), an occasional Trump critic who nevertheless votes with the White House’s position in nearly every instance, responded by asking whether the president is “recanting” his oath of office – since it was nine months ago when Trump swore to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment.

And while that’s a compelling point, all of this got me thinking: if Trump’s authoritarian instincts got the best of him, and he actually tried to follow through on these threats, what would (or could) he do?

TPM’s Tierney Sneed had a helpful piece on this:

First off, NBC itself as a broadcast network isn’t licensed by the FCC. NBC’s potential vulnerability would come as the owner and operator of 28 individual local stations, including its Telemundo station (There are also dozens of NBC affiliates that NBC does not own and thus does not hold the licenses to.)

Second, the FCC license renewal process Trump suggested could be used to retaliate against NBC occurs every eight years. According to experts, it’s basically a rubber stamp and stations’ licenses are almost always renewed, though citizens in the localities of a station can technically challenge a license, as can a station’s competitors, if the station is doing competitive harm. To challenge NBC’s licenses, someone would have to do so in each of the individual local communities and they would face an uphill battle, legally speaking, especially after the deregulation that occurred starting with the Reagan administration.

I rather doubt Trump is aware of these details. Call it a hunch.

Postscript: Richard Nixon actually did use his office to go after media outlets’ licenses during the Watergate scandal in 1973. Those who compared Obama to Nixon in 2009 were apparently off by eight years (and one president).

Second Postscript: Because there’s a contradictory tweet from the president’s recent past, let’s note that in May 2013, Trump denounced the Obama administration’s efforts to “intimidate” reporters. The irony is rich.

Trump to end key ACA subsidies, a move that could threaten the law’s marketplaces

Washington Post

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Trump to end key ACA subsidies, a move that could threaten the law’s marketplaces

How Trump’s executive order could weaken Obamacare

President Trump’s executive order on health care could have ripple effects throughout the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces. Here’s what you need to know. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Amy Goldstein October 12, 2017

BREAKING: President Trump will end cost-sharing payments in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces that have helped lower-income consumers afford their health plans. The move, confirmed late Thursday by two people briefed on the decision, is likely to immediately threaten the marketplaces and could prompt insurers to withdraw. This story is developing.

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday intended to circumvent the Affordable Care Act by making it easier for individuals and small businesses to buy alternative types of health insurance with lower prices, fewer benefits and weaker government protections.

The White House and allies portrayed the president’s move as wielding administrative powers to accomplish what congressional Republicans have failed to achieve: fostering more coverage choices while tearing down the law’s insurance marketplaces. The order represents Trump’s biggest step to date to reverse the health-care policies of the Obama administration, a central promise since last year’s presidential campaign.

Critics, who include state insurance commissioners, most of the health-insurance industry and mainstream policy specialists, predict that a proliferation of these other kinds of coverage will have damaging ripple effects, driving up costs for consumers with serious medical conditions and prompting more insurers to flee the law’s marketplaces. Part of Trump’s action, they say, will spark court challenges over its legality.

The most far-reaching element of the order instructs a trio of Cabinet departments to rewrite federal rules for “association health plans” — a form of insurance in which small businesses of a similar type band together through an association to negotiate health benefits. These plans have had to meet coverage requirements and consumer protections under the 2010 health-care law, but the administration is likely to exempt them from those rules and let such plans be sold from state to state without insurance licenses in each one.

How the Trump administration is undermining the ACA View Graphic

In addition, the order is designed to expand the availability of short-term insurance policies, which offer limited benefits as a bridge for people between jobs or young adults no longer eligible for their parents’ health plans. The Obama administration ruled that short-term insurance may not last for more than three months; Trump wants to extend that to nearly a year.

Trump’s action also is intended to widen employers’ ability to use pretax dollars in “health reimbursement arrangements” to help workers pay for any medical expenses, not just for health policies that meet ACA rules — another reversal of Obama policy.

In a late-morning signing ceremony in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, surrounded by supportive small-business owners, Cabinet members and a few Republicans from Capitol Hill, the president spoke in his characteristic superlatives about the effects of his action and what he called “the Obamacare nightmare.”

Trump said that Thursday’s move, which will trigger months of regulatory work by federal agencies, “is only the beginning.” He promised “even more relief and more freedom” from ACA rules. And although leading GOP lawmakers are eager to move on from their unsuccessful attempts this year to abolish central facets of the 2010 law, Trump said that “we are going to pressure Congress very strongly to finish the repeal and replace of Obamacare.”

The executive order will fulfill a quest by conservative Republican lawmakers, especially in the House, who have tried for more than two decades to expand the availability of association health plans by allowing them to be sold, unregulated, across state lines. On the other hand, Trump’s approach conflicts with what he and GOP leaders in Congress have held out as a main health-policy goal — giving each state more discretion over matters of insurance.

Health policy experts in think tanks, academia and the health-care industry pointed out that the order’s language is fairly broad, so the ensuing fine print in agencies’ rules will determine whether the impact will be as sweeping or quick as Trump boasted — his directive will provide “millions of people with Obamacare relief,” he said.

Significant questions that remain include whether individuals will be able to join associations, an issue that could raise legal issues; whether the administration will start to let association health plans count toward the ACA’s requirement that most Americans carry insurance; and whether such plans can charge higher prices to small businesses with sicker workers — or refuse to insure them.

Trump signs executive order on health care

President Trump signed an executive order on the Affordable Care Act on Oct. 12. With the order, he directed federal agencies to rewrite regulations on selling a certain type of health insurance across state lines. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The president issued the directive less than three weeks before the Nov. 1 start of the fifth open-enrollment season in ACA marketplaces for people who do not have access to affordable health benefits through a job. Trump noted that about half of the nation’s counties will have just one insurer in their exchange, and he claimed that “many will have none.” However, the most recent canvass shows that there will be no “bare” counties in 2018.

A senior administration official, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity shortly before Trump signed the order, said that the policy changes it sets in motion will require agencies to follow customary procedures to write new rules and solicit public comment. That means new insurance options will not be available in time for coverage beginning in January, he said.

Even so, with a shortened sign-up period and large cuts in federal funds for advertising and enrollment help already hobbling the marketplaces, “if there’s a lot of hoopla around new options that may be available soon, it could be one more thing that discourages enrollment,” said Larry Levitt, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s senior vice president.

Other aspects of the executive order include commissioning a six-month study, to be led by federal health officials, of ways to limit consolidation within the insurance and hospital industries. Trump also directed agencies to find additional means to increase competition and choice in health care to improve its quality and lower its cost.

The order produced predictable reactions in Congress, with Republican leaders praising the move and Democrats accusing the White House of sabotaging the law.

Among policy experts, critics warned that young and healthy people who use relatively little insurance will gravitate to association health plans because of their lower price tags. That would concentrate older and sicker customers in ACA marketplaces with spiking rates.

Mike Consedine, chief executive of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) said Thursday that the group has long opposed such plans and is concerned that the administration will allow ones that can bypass state licenses and have such weak financial underpinnings that some will collapse, leaving customers stranded and state insurance regulators “picking up the pieces.”

[As ACA enrollment nears, administration keeps cutting federal support of the law]

Short-term health insurance makes up a tiny fraction of the policies sold, with fewer than 30 companies covering only about 160,000 people nationwide at the end of last year, according to NAIC data.

Experts could not point to figures for how many association health plans exist or how many people they insure. Such arrangements have existed for decades, and scandals have on occasion exposed “multi-employer welfare arrangements” started by unscrupulous operators who took members’ money and either did not have enough reserves to cover hospital bills or absconded with premiums.

The National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business lobby, has pressed Congress to allow use of association plans, arguing that they can be less expensive and give workers more insurance choices. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has promoted the idea, and he stood just behind Trump at the morning ceremony. After nearly walking out of the room without signing the order, the president returned to affix his bold signature to the document and then hand Paul the pen.

Selling health plans from state to state without separate licenses — the idea underlying much of the president’s order — has long been a Republican mantra. It has gained little traction in practice, however.

Half a dozen states — before the ACA was passed in 2010 as well as since then — have passed laws permitting insurers to sell health policies approved by other states. And since last year, the ACA has allowed “compacts” in which groups of states can agree that health plans licensed in any of them could be sold in the others. Under such compacts, federal health officials must make sure the plans offer at least the same benefits and are as affordable as those sold in the ACA marketplaces.

As of this summer, “no state was known to actually offer or sell such policies,” according to a report by the National Conference of State Legislatures. A main reason, experts say, is insurers’ difficulty in arranging networks of doctors and other providers of care far from their home states.

Amy Goldstein is The Washington Post’s national health-care policy writer. During her 30 years at The Post, her stories have taken her from homeless shelters to Air Force One, often focused on the intersection of politics and public policy. She is the author of the book, Janesville: An American Story.

Trump’s nonsensical comments to Hannity reveal he has no idea how the national debt works

ThinkProgress

Trump’s nonsensical comments to Hannity reveal he has no idea how the national debt works

Or he’s willfully trying to confuse the public.

Aaron Rupar October 12, 2017

CREDIT: SCREENGRAB

During his latest interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, President Trump went on a confused rant about the economy, at one point falsely suggesting that stock market gains are helping pay down the national debt.

“I’m so proud of the $5.2 trillion dollars of increase in the stock market,” Trump said, referring to the bull market that began as the economy pulled out of the Great Recession during the months after President Obama took office.

“Now, if you look at the stock market, that’s one element, but then we have many other elements. The country — we took it over, it owed $20 trillion, as you know, the last eight years they borrowed more than it did in the whole history of our country, so they borrowed more than $10 trillion — and yet, we picked up $5.2 trillion in the stock market, possibly picked up the whole things in terms of the first nine months in terms of value.”

“So, you could say in one sense we are really increasing values, and maybe in a sense we are reducing debt,” Trump added, before Hannity quickly moved on to another topic.

But it just doesn’t work like that. As CNBC details, to see why this doesn’t make sense, consider the relationship (or lack thereof) between the stock market and debt during the Obama administration.

“For evidence that the two metrics have little to no bearing on one another, look no further than the eight years of the Obama presidency: Between 2009 and 2017, the S&P 500 returned 235 percent while the national debt soared,” CNBC’s Christina Wilkie writes.

The national debt is a tough topic for Trump these days. Though candidate Trump repeatedly promised to pay down the national debt before the end of his term, it has actually expanded under his watch. And the tax cuts for corporations and the ultra wealthy he’s currently pushing would only make the debt bigger.

As Reuters explains:

The Republican tax plan unveiled last week calls for as much as $6 trillion in tax cuts that would sharply reduce federal revenues. No commensurate spending cuts have been proposed. So, on their own, the tax cuts being sought by Trump would hugely expand the deficit and add to the debt.

Trump’s comments to Hannity were not the first time he’s revealed deep confusion about how the economy works. While he was pushing Obamacare repeal over the summer, Trump did an interview where he indicated he thinks it’s possible to purchase health insurance for $12 annually. During an interview last week, Trump unexpectedly claimed he wants to eliminate Puerto Rico’s $72 billion debt, saying “we’re going to work something out.” But in an indication that the president may not have understood what he was saying, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney quickly walked back Trump’s comments, telling CNN the next morning that “I wouldn’t take it word for word with that.”

White House budget director says Trump promise to eliminate debt was just ‘hyperbole’

Don’t take Trump seriously or literally.

Mulvaney has also walked back Trump’s campaign promises about eliminating the national debt. Asked during a TV interview in April about Trump’s promise to eliminate it by the end of his second term, Mulvaney replied, “It’s fairly safe to assume that was hyperbole.”

A Rising Constitutional Crisis No One Is Talking About

Esquire

A Rising Constitutional Crisis No One Is Talking About

This week in the laboratories of democracy.

Getty

By Charles P. Pierce October 12, 2017

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

We are going to do something unusual this week. Instead of skipping around the country in search of a state legislator with a duck on his head, or a state law making the date of Pat Robertson’s first orgasm a statewide holiday, we’re going to stay in this one spot and take stock of a truly dangerous bit of business that’s happening in a number of different states, and of a really long game that at the moment is perilously close to completion.

Last Sunday, Joy Reid hosted a discussion between former Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican and Teresa Tomlinson, the mayor of Columbus, Georgia. (While in the Senate, you may recall, Coburn was reckoned to be relatively normal because he served with Jim Inhofe, who is a failed replicant prototype that howls at the moon.) At issue was the proposed constitutional convention that would be called under Article V of the Constitution, a longtime conservative dreamshot that at the moment is as close to fulfillment as it ever has been. Under Article V, which deals with amending the Constitution, a constitutional convention must be called if two-thirds of the state legislatures called for it. At the moment, 27 state legislatures have done so. That leaves the plan a mere seven states short of the 34 that would meet the Article V threshold. As it happens, there are seven state legislatures with Republican majorities out there that have yet to take up the question. You can see why I’m just a little nervous.

Colbert’s Question About Trump’s “Unraveling”

The movement has its roots in the drive for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, a.k.a. The Worst Idea In American Politics. In his first term, President Ronald Reagan broached the idea in a televised address, causing constitutional scholars to duck and cover under their desks. By now, this is hardly an extreme position in the Republican Party; John Kasich, everyone’s favorite moderate manqué, has been a fan for years. There was no way that TWIIAP ever was going to be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then by two-thirds of the states. So this was the route its devotees took.

Many of the sharpies pushing the idea reassure the public that a convention thus called would be limited to a specific agenda. (Some even propose that the convention would pass TWIIAP and then everyone would drink up and go home.) There is no way to guarantee that; there’s certainly nothing in Article V that would support that argument, and very little in the history of the last constitutional convention that would do so, either.

The idea of a convention of Article V was one that came up very late in the proceedings. George Mason, the influential delegate from Virginia, rose to argue that the amending power as written left too much of that power to the national government. So he proposed that the several states be allowed to call a convention themselves. Mason’s colleague, James Madison, who hated revisionist constitutional conventions because he then nearly was finished hijacking one, perked right up. He immediately sussed out the difficulties:

“Mr Madison remarked on the vagueness of the terms, “call a Convention for the purpose.” as sufficient reason for reconsidering the article. How was a Convention to be formed? by what rule decide? what the force of its acts?”

All good questions, none of them ever has been answered.

A convention so called could pass TWIIAP lickety-split. That, of course, would be terrible in and of itself. But then the convention really could get down to business. There’s no apparent constitutional bar to a convention’s passing amendments allowing, say, congressional term limits, or requiring congressional supermajorities to pass any tax cut, or making raising the national debt limit dependent on the approval of a certain number of state legislatures. All of these are actual proposals floating around the various campaigns to bring this beast to life. Basically, this is the final masterwork of the conservative long game. These ideas have been around long enough to have become Republican dogma.

The party enlisted national sugar daddies like the Kochs, and regional ones like Art Pope in North Carolina. The radio and TV auxiliaries are led by Mark Levin, who wrote a whole book about the changes he wanted made, all of which would return the country to half-past the Articles of Confederation. They’ve suppressed the vote and gamed the maps. They have spent decades fashioning the state legislatures they need and now is the moment to strike. Looked at it from a distance, and ignoring the fact that the policy proposals are unworkable where they are not actually insane, it really is quite a political act of artistic creation.

teresatomlinson.com

(Here in the Commonwealth, God save it, the conservatives pushing the notion of a convention have “reached out” to their left by suggesting that some alterations in the Second Amendment might be possible. Yes, and the Sacred Cod is going to drop down into the well of the Massachusetts House and dance The Hustle.)

Last weekend, chased up a tree by Mayor Tomlinson, Coburn gave the whole game away. He began by saying that he was calling for “an amendments convention as long as you specifically state what areas you want to talk about.” This is, of course, nonsense. Here’s Article V in its entirety:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

You see anything in there that would require that a convention “specifically state what areas you want to talk about?” Neither do I. Coburn went on, though, blustering and fuming at the two women who kept pressing him for what he’s really up to here:

“We have three areas. We think there ought to be fiscal responsibility on the federal government’s part….We believe there ought to be term limits on our elected officials. (Ed. Note: Bingo!) The advantage of incumbency is unbelievable…And finally, we believe the scope and jurisdiction of the federal government ought to be what the Founders intended, which is a limited role, but very specific and very powerful, and what is not specifically set out for the federal government, left to the states.”

In other words, Coburn wants to enshrine in the Constitution itself every Republican national platform for the past 40 years. You will note that two of the three “areas” are pretty damn vague. How many amendments to the Constitution do you think it would take to roll back the federal government to a size that would satisfy Tom Coburn? Twelve? Twenty-seven? Eleventy-infinity? The mind boggles.

(Watch him as Mayor Tomlinson tells us about all the hidden jokers in this deck. Coburn looks like he’s going to float out of the studio in a burst of pure rage.)

But we’re talking about this today because all those state legislators with ducks on their heads who pass the laws making Pat Robertson’s first orgasm a statewide holiday, the people whom we’ve been mocking out the windows of the shebeen’s luxurious tour bus every Thursday for going on seven years now, these are the people who will be the delegates to this convention. Maybe you want to trade George Mason for the guy with the duck on his head, or James Madison and Alexander Hamilton for Mark Levin and Tom Coburn, but I don’t.

And we conclude right where we began, and as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Boot Scooter Friedman of the Plains was represented in the Senate for many years by both Coburn and Jim Inhofe and therefore has had enough trouble so we’ll leave him be this week.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it…while you still can.

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Dear North Korea, it’s President Trump

Yahoo News

Dear North Korea, it’s President Trump

Matt Bai’s Political World October 12, 2017

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos AP [3], Getty Images.

FROM THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington, D.C.

To the Honorable Kim Jong Un

Dear Leader:

I hope you’ll treat this letter as personal and confidential, from one large-handed leader to another. I got the idea to write it from my generals, who were telling me all about this big showdown over Cuban missiles back in the 1960s, which apparently really happened.

I figured, hey, if John Kennedy can negotiate over missiles directly with a dictator — and he was a very low-quality person, let me tell you — then so can Trump.

You can’t leave diplomacy to a loser like Tillerson, believe me. But I’m trying not to think about him right now.

It’s very important that you and I talk, very important. Because like I said during one of those debates we had during the campaign, which were a total waste of time, although people said I won them all and frankly that I was the greatest debater ever, and that’s a direct quote from somebody somewhere, but anyway, what I said during a debate was, “I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.”

I can’t say it any clearer than that.

First off, let me just point out that our great peoples have a long history together, and all of Korea is frankly very special to us — very, very special. I mean, you gave us the TV show “M*A*S*H,” which had a tremendous run.

Also, without the Korean people, we wouldn’t have all those unbelievable grocery stores in Manhattan. Seriously, I have so much love for the people, so much love. I told my guys at ICE, leave the Koreans alone, because a lot of actual Americans depend on them for kimchi. Great respect, believe me.

You and I have plenty in common, we really do. I know they said that calling you “Little Rocket Man” was a terrible insult, but you can’t believe anything you read in the failing New York Times or lying CNN or the rest of the fake news media. These are the same people who said that I could never win the primaries, and that Hillary was going to be the president, and that Puerto Rico was part of the United States.

The truth is that “Rocket Man” is a very popular song here in America — very much loved, believe me. It’s about a guy who goes into space and finds out that Mars isn’t a very good place to raise a kid, because it’s cold as hell, and there’s no one there to raise them if you did. Which frankly makes no sense, even in English, but it was the ’70s.

The point is, we’re a lot alike. For one thing, we both value family, am I right? I saw you just promoted your sister to a powerful job in the Politburo — very touching, very beautiful. I’m getting ready to turn the White House over to Ivanka in 2020, even though my poll numbers are just unbelievable, better than any president in history, let me tell you.

I’d point out that Ivanka is smarter than Pence, but frankly I think Donald Jr. is smarter than Pence, and I’m pretty sure he still eats crayons when he’s nervous, so that’s not saying very much.

And while we’re on the subject of family, let me say I admired the way you took out your brother, having strangers run up and poison him in the airport, which was genius. I made a comment about it, and ever since then, every time I go to hug Jared, he jumps back and shields his face. Hysterical.

Let’s see, what else. Both of us have great hair, right? I see that everyone in your country wants to do their hair just like you, which I applaud. I mean, I look at a guy like Tillerson, who’s 65 years old and still parts his hair in the middle, and I think it’s just sad, frankly. But I’m not bothered by him, I’m really not.

We’re both deeply committed to the mining industry. I’m getting rid of these Obama rules, which are very, very harmful to our economy, and you’re giving people jobs for the rest of their lives in labor camps, which is basically the same thing.

We both know how to handle critics. Although I have to rely on tweets for that, because I don’t have the same kind of latitude you enjoy over there, which is something we need to change, let me tell you.

I can’t tell you how many mornings I wake up and think: Wouldn’t it be nice to throw Bob Corker into a pit of starving dogs, or pin him to an antiaircraft battery?

And don’t even get me started on Tillerson. Everyone told me, “Get Tillerson, you’ve got to get Tillerson for State.” And then he calls me a moron. You know who’s a moron? A guy who gives up 25 million bucks a year so he can come running whenever I ring a bell, that’s who.

Let’s just say that if I were to send Tillerson on a diplomatic mission to Pyongyang, and he were to, say, disappear into one of your work camps, I could see how we might end up in a very long standoff before negotiating his freedom. It could take years, a deal like that. But that’s a hypothetical.

Anyway, we’ve got a great thing going here. This business with me tweeting about blowing up your country, and you coming back with “final doom” and all of that. The ratings are off the charts, right? It’s a hell of a show, it really is.

We’ve got the whole world waiting to hear every twist and turn. It’s playing on all the networks at once, which is really something, let me tell you.

But you do know it’s a show, right? Because words are one thing. Words have no consequences, near as I can tell. You can say anything, incite any kind of rage or reaction, and your people just love you more for it. This is what I’ve learned in politics, believe me.

Nuclear war, though — my generals tell me that would be very, very horrible. Millions and millions of people would disappear, and not like on “The Apprentice.” Our ratings would tank. The show would be terrible.

I’m sure we’re on the same page here, but it can’t hurt to double check. So good luck with the public executions, and please pass along my fire and fury to the entire family!

Sincerely,

Donald J. Trump

P.S. If you really need to sink Guam, as kind of a season finale, I get it. Just maybe give me a heads-up, so I can see about Tillerson’s travel schedule. But I’m not thinking about him right now. I’m really not.

Wine Country fires hit organic farms hard in Glen Ellen, Santa Rosa

SF GATE

Wine Country fires hit organic farms hard in Glen Ellen, Santa Rosa

By Tara Duggan October 11, 2017

Photo: JOSH EDELSON, AFP/Getty Images

Burned property smolders in Glen Ellen, where several farms have been destroyed. Multiple wind-driven fires continue to ravage the area burning structures and causing widespread evacuations.

Several small vegetable farms in Sonoma County have fallen victim to the North Bay fires, including several that were founded in the past six years by young farmers taking part in the local organic farm movement. While properties are still partly intact, many farmers have lost homes and essential infrastructure, and they said that getting back to the business of providing vegetables to customers will be an uphill battle.

In Glen Ellen, Oak Hill Farm, Flatbed Farm and Bee-Well Farms either burned completely or suffered severe damage, as did Let’s Go Farm and Leisen’s Bridgeway Farms in Santa Rosa.

“Those farms alone each had a huge impact,” said Evan Wiig of the Farmers Guild in Sebastopol, a network of local farms including several of the ones lost in the fire. He said the fire’s influence on local agriculture will be “massive.”

“We lost pretty much everything, but our animals have been able to survive,” said Melissa Lely, 27, of Bee-Well Farms, which she founded in 2015 with her husband, Austin, on 40 acres of leased land. The couple lost their home and at least $50,000 in farm equipment, plants and crops.

They’re amazed that none of their 12 cows, 500 chickens and two goats was lost, even though the low grass all around — and under the chicken coops — burned.

Since Monday, the Lelys have spent every day, from dawn until late at night, taking care of their animals and their neighbors’ farm animals. Since the power is out and water pumps aren’t operating, they are lugging 50-gallon drums of water around the area. The two plan to continue farming after the disaster.

“This is just a bump in the road,” said Melissa Lely.

Other farmers aren’t feeling so optimistic. Janet and Corrie Leisen of Leisen’s Bridgeway Farms in Santa Rosa were on a cruise to Florida when they heard about the fire. The farm had been in the family since 1870, though the couple had only been selling to Bay Area farmers’ markets for the past five years, said Janet Leisen.

They lost hoop houses, olive trees, fig trees, a greenhouse, all of their farmers’ stand supplies, vintage cars and farm vehicles. Leisen estimates that half of their 200 chickens perished. On another 3-acre site where they grow produce, there is no power to water the crops, so they likely will die.

“It looks like we probably are going to shut down,” said Janet Leisen, who added that because she is 62 and her husband is 65, they weren’t making enough from the farm to justify restarting. Both are retired from careers in the dental industry.

Farm manager David Cooper lost his home at Oak Hill Farm, a produce and flower farm, along with several farm buildings and equipment. On Tuesday, the fire reignited in the hills about 500 yards from farm buildings, he said.

By Wednesday, Cooper hadn’t yet been able to go back to the farm and wasn’t sure about the fate of the fields and a 100-year-old barn. Oak Hill Farm owner Anne Teller and her late husband, the conservationist Otto Teller, began farming there more than 50 years ago.

Joey Smith, 34, discovered Tuesday that the family home where he lived for most of his life had burned to the ground, along with a lot of equipment on Let’s Go Farm in Santa Rosa, which he began running in 2011. Among the losses were a tractor and new solar panels, which were supposed to be a 30-year investment.

“The garden so far survived,” he said, based on photos someone took for him, since he cannot get to the property. The fences have blown down, so his sheep are eating up the produce in his fields.

In addition to the immediate losses, those involved in local agriculture are concerned about jobs for farm and vineyard workers in the area, as well as the long-lasting impact the fire damage will have on farms and vineyards that depend on outside visitors.

“Here in the North Bay, there’s a strong connection between agriculture and tourism,” Wiig said. Farmers and vintners rely on the North Bay being a destination, he said. “If our hills are blackened, how many people are going to want to come spend weekends here, visiting our farmers’ markets and farm stands? It’s going to hurt our economy.”

The Farmers Guild and others are planning fundraising benefits for farmers, and a separate group of volunteers is gleaning produce from local farms and bringing it to restaurants and other professional kitchens to cook meals for those displaced by the fire.

“We’re preparing to help farmers for what will be a very long recovery,” Wiig said.

Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.

Mike Ditka Just Showed Why the NFL’s National Anthem Protests Are Necessary

“There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.”

Getty

By Jack Holmes October 10, 2017

Mike Ditka is a Hall of Fame football player and coach who made a damn good cameo in Will Ferrell’s Kicking and Screaming. He is also the latest standard-bearer for the growing number of Americans completely allergic to historical reality. You need only look to his latest comments on the so-called national anthem protests in the NFL, in which a group of primarily black players have demonstrated during pregame festivities in various ways to bring attention to racial inequality in the criminal justice system and a lack of accountability for police who kill unarmed black citizens.

Like many people—including the president—Ditka has conflated the vehicle for their protest with the subject of the protest. (Again, the players are not protesting the anthem or the flag, and their stated intention has nothing to do with disrespecting the armed forces. No player has criticized the troops.) But Ditka also took things to a new level of unreality.

It’s one thing to contend there’s no racial injustice in this country right now. Although that flies in the face of reality—the statistics on criminal justice are quite clear—it is not yet a settled matter of historical record. But the idea that there has been “no oppression in the last 100 years”—since 1917—is a statement beyond comprehension.

Mike Ditka is 77 years old. He was alive during the Civil Rights Movement, when African-American citizens were dragged off to jail for sitting at the wrong lunch counter or in the wrong part of the bus. He was alive when black Americans were sprayed with firehoses and had police dogs sicced on them because they dared march for equal rights in Birmingham, Alabama. He played in the NFL, with black teammates, throughout the 1960s as the movement hit its prime. Did he never speak to them about their experience in America, as Martin Luther King, Jr. marched on his TV screen? Did he ever wonder why John Lewis, now a United States congressman, was willing to nearly die marching alongside King in Selma?

A 1963 civil rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama.

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This is all within the last 60 or so years. The 1920s—still within Ditka’s gobsmacking historical window of racial harmony in America—was the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the Klan’s methods of enforcing white supremacy and the oppressive regime of Jim Crow—also a fixture of the real Ditka-era America—was lynching. According to the The NAACP, there were 4,743 recorded lynchings between 1882 and 1968. This is the reality. This is what happened in parts of the United States of America as recently as 50 years ago.

And this is also why the national anthem protests Ditka finds so unacceptable are so necessary. While Ditka’s apparent ignorance is certainly extraordinary, his basic unfamiliarity with the experience of being black in America is not. Put simply, many white people are often unaware that injustice exists because it does not affect them personally, as the rest of The Washington Post‘s writeup of Ditka’s conversation shows:

Later on Monday, Gray asked Ditka, “For those who want social justice, and for those who look back at the lives of Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens, and John Carlos and Tommy Smith, your response would be?”

“I don’t know what social injustices have been,” the Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee replied. “Muhammad Ali rose to the top. Jesse Owens is one of the classiest individuals that ever lived. I mean, you can say, are you talking that everything is based on color? I don’t see it that way.

“I think that you have to be colorblind in this country. You’ve got to look at a person for what he is, and what he stands for and how he produces, not by the color of his skin. That has never had anything to do with anything.

“But all of a sudden, it’s become a big deal now, about oppression. There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.

“Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people. I think the opportunity is there for everybody. Race, religion, creed, color, nationality—if you want to work, if you want to try, if you want to put effort into yourself, I think you can accomplish anything.”

In the United States, only white people have the luxury of pretending that people can be colorblind. (In fact, this was a running joke on The Colbert Report.) People of color know this is not the case, and the national anthem protests—like Muhammad Ali’s or Jon Carlos’ and Tommie Smith’s before it—are an attempt to make the wider population (that is, white people) aware that inequalities and discrimination exist. If you have never been discriminated against personally, it is much easier to believe there is no discrimination and the system is just. That was the power in Martin Luther King’s decision to march peacefully, knowing the reaction from southern whites would be violent. It demonstrated to the wider world how the system actually worked.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic Games.

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Ditka’s belief that “if you want to work, if you want to try…you can accomplish anything” is also simply not true across the board. Racial discrimination in hiring processes is real and pervasive. In one study, résumés with “white-sounding names” got 50 percent more callbacks than résumés with “black-sounding names.” If you’re black in America, wanting to work is not always enough.

“There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.” – Mike Ditka

In another demonstration of historical illiteracy, what Ditka and other opponents of today’s protests don’t seem to understand, is that MLK and Muhammad Ali were deeply unpopular in their time. Like Colin Kaepernick and those who have followed him, they were reviled by many as ungrateful upstarts who were always choosing the wrong place and time to protest. Except that is the very point of protest: It is supposed to be at the wrong place and time. It is supposed to make people uncomfortable and frustrated, because that is the baseline experience of the oppressed classes in society. If the status quo works for you, you’re unlikely to change the status quo—unless others can show you that it is morally indefensible.

The reactions from others around the National Football League have begun rolling in. That includes one from Martellus Bennett, a tight end for the Green Bay Packers whose brother, Michael, had a telling experience of his own this year when Las Vegas police reportedly told him they would “blow his fucking head off” when they mistook him for a criminal suspect after the Mayweather-McGregor prize fight in August.

Michael Bennett’s teammate on the Seahawks, Richard Sherman, weighed in as well:

Martellus Bennett @MartysaurusRex Hasn’t seen oppression in 100 years bruh?….

Richard Sherman @RSherman_25 Some only see what they want to see

Sherman may indeed have made the essential point. It seems Ditka, likes millions around the country, has developed an entire world-historical view tailored to the idea of unequivocal American greatness. There can’t be racial discrimination, because there hasn’t been for a century. When you mold your own reality, even basic history isn’t safe. That can have dangerous consequences for the present.

Editor’s Note: It was Michael Bennett, not Martellus, who was involved in an incident with Las Vegas police in August. We regret the error.

Northern California firestorm ‘literally exploded,’ killing 15 and destroying hundreds of homes

ThinkProgress

Northern California firestorm ‘literally exploded,’ killing 15 and destroying hundreds of homes

More than 200 have been reported missing after fast-moving fires devastate communities north of San Francisco.

Natasha Geiling October 10, 2017

Flames from a massive wildfire burn in Napa, CA. (CREDIT: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

High temperatures and fast winds are fueling more than a dozen wildfires across California, forcing more than 20,000 northern California residents to evacuate their homes and communities. At least 15 people have died, and more than 200 have been reported missing, after several fires spread rapidly throughout Monday.

The fires ignited late Sunday night and into Monday morning and have since spread over 50,000 acres across Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying at least 2,000 structures and sending at least 100 to the hospital with injuries ranging from burns to smoke inhalation. The Tubbs Fire — which is currently burning at 27,000 acres — has prompted the evacuation of at least 10 neighborhoods in the city of Santa Rosa, which has a population of 125,000. Two hospitals have also been evacuated after the fire jumped across Highway 101 between Sunday night and Monday morning.

Aerial photographs show entire neighborhoods of the city completely destroyed by the fire, which as of Tuesday morning was zero percent contained. Smoke from the wildfires caused the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to issue an air quality warning for the region on Monday; as of Tuesday, much of the area north of San Francisco was still experiencing unhealthy air quality.

The cause of the fires is still under investigation, but officials are confident windy conditions combined with an excess of dry grass and underbrush helped the fuel the fires’ rapid growth. According to the National Weather Service, “fire literally exploded and raced along the landscape” aided by fuel at “all time record dry levels.”

September and October tend to be the worst months for California’s fire season, as strong winds can combine with low humidity and dry vegetation to turn a single spark into a major incident. At the beginning of September, fast-moving winds and record-heat sparked the largest wildfire in Los Angeles’ history, burning more than 5,000 acres north of the city. The worst wildfire in California history — the Cedar Fire of 2003 — started in October and burned more than 273,246 acres, destroying 2,820 structures and killing 15. Already, the scope of this weekends’ fires rivals the destruction of the Cedar Fire.

Fast-moving winds and low humidity aren’t rare in California, and neither are October wildfires, but it’s likely climate change made these fires even more destructive. After years of historic, prolonged drought, which studies have linked to climate change, California experienced record-setting rains that fueled the growth of grasses and underbrush — young vegetation that dries easily during the summer and is especially susceptible to ignition. Because warmer atmospheric temperatures can hold more water, experts have suggested that the cycle of drought followed by intense precipitation could be linked to climate change.

Even the state’s characteristic winds — known in the northern part of the state as Diablo Winds and in the southern part of the state as Santa Ana winds — could be getting worse because of climate change. The Santa Ana and Diablo winds occur when high inland pressure pushes air down the sides of mountains (Mt. Diablo in northern California and Mt. Ana in southern California), whipping wind through the canyons and hillsides outside major population centers like Los Angeles and San Francisco. According to a 2015 study lead by researchers at University of California, Los Angles, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and the U.S. Forest Service, a warming climate will likely make these winds both more frequent and stronger, fueling potentially destructive fires.

Across the country, warm, dry conditions have fueled a record-breaking fire season. The National Wildfire Coordinating Group currently lists 179 active wildfire situations throughout much of the Western United States, from Colorado to Washington. The largest active fire in the United States is the Chetco Bar Fire in southern Oregon, which has burned over 191,121 acres and is 97 percent contained. As of October 6, wildfires have burned 8,469,590 acres across the United States — the third largest total acreage burned in the last 10 fire seasons.

According to an analysis by Climate Central, climate change has increased the length of the annual fire season, a reference to the time of year when conditions are ripe for wildfires, by 105 days since 1970. Over the same period of time, the average number of wildfires over 1,000 acres has doubled across the western U.S. Since 2000, at least 13 states have experienced their largest fires on record.

As climate change is fueling longer fire seasons, human activity — both through an intense focus on fire suppression, rather than forest management, and an decreasingly populated rural-urban boundary, are making fires more destructive and deadly. A longer and more active fire season is also stretching the bounds of the Forest Service’s budget, with 2017 fire suppression costs already exceeding $2 billion, making this the most expensive year on record.

Unlike disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes, wildfires don’t qualify for federal disaster funding under the Disaster Relief Act; instead, the Forest Service is forced to pay for fire suppression costs in excess of the budgeted amount by borrowing from other Forest Service programs. That means in especially active fire years, the Forest Service is taking money from programs meant to prevent fires and using those funds to fight existing fires — a cycle that critics of the current set-up argue puts the Forest Service at a perpetual disadvantage when it comes to anticipating and preventing forest fires.

“Land managers can’t plan for restoration projects, even if they have huge fire benefits, if they don’t know whether the money is going to be there by the time they get around to doing the project,” Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, told ThinkProgress. “An account for a forest in Tennessee could be slashed to fight fires in Wyoming, and then all of the sudden you could have a terrible fire in Tennessee the next year, and you didn’t get the project done, so it ends up burning bigger, brighter, and longer than it would have if you had the projects completed.”

Driven by heat and high winds, wildfires are 10 times worse this year than average.

Climate change means that there is no such thing as a typical “fire season” anymore.

Since 2015, the Forest Service has spent more than 50 percent of its budget on fighting wildfires — more than a thirty percent increase from 1995, when fire suppression was just 16 percent of the agency’s budget. According to a 2015 report, future fires could consume even more of the Forest Service’s budget, to the point where by 2025, two-thirds of the agency’s budget could be spent on fire programs.

One legislative solution for the Forest Service’s budget woes currently being considered in Congress would allow the agency to draw from a separate pool of federal disaster funds, similar to what other agencies can do through FEMA after a disaster like a tornado or hurricane. That bill, known as the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of 2017, is sponsored by a bipartisan coalition of nine Western senators — five Democrats and four Republicans. In the House, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), has introduced a similar bill for the past three years. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) has urged Republicans in Congress to oppose the bill in the past, arguing that it would “result in increased federal spending.”

Fiscal conservatives in Congress have instead proposed a different way to address the rising costs of forest fires: loosen environmental regulations to allow timber companies more leeway to thin forests, thereby lessening the amount of fuel available for wildfires. One bill, introduced this year by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR), would do away with the public input and full environmental review process for thinning or logging projects of 10,000 acres or less (currently, only projects 3,000 acres or less are subject to less stringent environmental regulations). It would also allow the Forest Service to forgo required consultations with the Fish and Wildlife Service if the agency determined the project was unlikely to harm a federally protected species.

Westerman, who has received more than $142,000 from the timber industry since being elected to Congress in 2014, has argued that the bill would “provide protection to America’s forests by reducing the risks of wildfires through proper management techniques.” Westerman received a master’s degree in forestry from Yale Forestry School in 2001, and is the only licensed forester in Congress.

But environmentalists, conservationists, and Democratic lawmakers argue that the real problem with the growing cost of forest fires isn’t a lack of management techniques, but a lack of funds with which to implement them. Even Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has criticized the current funding structure of the Forest Service, saying in September that without a consistent stream of funding, “we’re asking for disasters.”

“You can have all the tools in the universe, but if you don’t have the resources to implement that, it doesn’t matter,” the National Wildlife Federation’s O’Mara said. “And that’s where we are right now.”

Update, 10/10/17, 4:29 p.m. EST: This story has been updated to reflect new estimates of the number of missing persons, fatalities, and destroyed structures.

Newt Gingrich compares Trump to former president who engineered genocide of native tribes

ThinkProgress

Newt Gingrich compares Trump to former president who engineered genocide of native tribes

“I think he’s… probably the biggest change agent since Andrew Jackson,” Gingrich said.

Melanie Schmitz October 10, 2017

Credit: CBS This Morning

In an interview with CBS This Morning on Tuesday, former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called President Trump a “remarkable” and “historic” figure, comparing him to the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson.

“I think Trump is a remarkable figure,” Gingrich said, responding to questions about the president veering off course and antagonizing his own party ahead of a major budget and tax reform battle. “I think he’s a historic figure, he’s certainly probably the biggest change agent since Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s.”

Despite the fact that it was intended to be complimentary, the Trump-Jackson comparison is unfortunate. Jackson, a historic figure with a number of military achievements under his belt, admittedly shares certain similarities with the current president, including his anti-establishment legacy and, as one onlooker at the time put it, the “rabble mob” he brought with him to the White House after his inauguration in 1829.

But the seventh president is also notorious for a number of troubling, inhumane reasons: Jackson was a slave-owner who offered rewards to anyone who gave escaped slaves especially cruel beatings. At the time of his death he owned approximately 150 slaves, though it’s been estimated that, over the course of his lifetime, he owned over 300.

Jackson is perhaps most famous for engineering one of the worst genocides in American history. A longtime proponent of removing native tribes who were taking up what he considered to be valuable land meant for white settlers, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, eventually forcing nearly 50,000 indigenous people off their lands and into the West. In the winter of 1838 alone, some 4,000 Native Americans died along the Trail of Tears.

In certain ways, the Trump-Jackson comparison seems depressingly fitting: since his own inauguration in January, Trump has become laser-focused on the removal of certain populations of people from the United States, including undocumented immigrants and their children, as well as on banning travelers and immigrants from several Muslim-majority nations. His antagonistic views toward social justice movements meant to draw attention to the deaths of minority populations, such as Black Lives Matter, has also drawn criticism. And as ThinkProgress’ Josh Israel pointed out in March, “Jackson, like Trump, preferred to ignore federal courts rather than enforce constitutional protections for all people.”

But, given Gingrich’s praise on Tuesday morning, it’s clear that many don’t view these comparisons negatively — quite the opposite, in fact.

Trump himself has touted those similarities in the past, using them to prop up his own legacy and play himself off as a change-maker. During a speech this past March at Jackson’s Nashville estate and plantation, The Hermitage, Trump noted, “It was during the revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar?”

California’s Raging Wildfires as You’ve Never Seen Them Before

Time

California’s Raging Wildfires as You’ve Never Seen Them Before

TIME Staff, October 9, 2017

Lake Fire | Big Bear June 2015

On the Front Lines of California’s Increasingly Devastating Fires

Video by Jeff Frost | Text by Josh Raab

Forest fires have long been a part of life in California, but not always like this. In recent years, artist Jeff Frost, based near Joshua Tree National Park, has watched as fires raged across the West Coast with increasing frequency and intensity. “Fire is a natural part of nature,” he says, “but what you’ll hear veteran firefighters say over and over, ‘I’ve never seen fire behavior like this.” Fire seasons are also starting earlier and ending later, on average 78 days longer than they were in 1970. On Monday, late in the fire season, Frost was chasing blazes in Sonoma and Napa counties, which have scorched tens of thousands of acres and led to widespread evacuations, including in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Four years ago, Frost, now 39, decided to begin documenting the fires. He put himself through the most intense fire-safety training courses he could find, enrolling in courses sanctioned by the U.S. Forest Service, then equipped his camper with a bed and a generator and headed to the front lines of California’s biggest fires.

Bluecut Fire | Cahone Pass Aug. 2016

Frost’s project, “California on Fire”, will be a feature-length art film combining his wildfire time lapses. The non-narrative film will look at forest fires loosely through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The stages will follow the life of wildfires, looking at their causes and effects from their ignition to the twisted metal and charred forests they leave behind. Frost is especially interested in exploring the role human involvement plays in these fires, both intentional and unintentional. “Human beings are stewards of the planet,” he says. “It’s just a question of whether we’re good stewards or bad stewards.”

On scene, Frost shoots sequences of hundreds of still photos, which he then combines into time-lapse videos. He previously used this approach at Joshua Tree National Park and at CERN, the research center renowned for building particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.

For the “California on Fire” project, Frost has shot more than 300,000 images at over 40 forest fires, resulting in over 500 time lapses ranging from 1 to 30 seconds. The blazes he has documented include the Erskine wildfire outside of Bakersfield in June 2016 that destroyed 386 structures and led to two deaths, and the King wildfire near Lake Tahoe in September 2014, which destroyed 80 structures and scorched almost 100,000 acres of land. While he is fascinated by fire, Frost’s obsession is to create an art piece that speaks to a larger reality: The role climate change plays in the fires.

Erskine Fire | Lake Isabella June 2016

“The intent is to show the effect of climate change right now, not just in the future,” he says. “Burning people’s houses down is not abstract.” Over the past three decades, climate change has doubled the area burned by forest fires in the western United States and the fire season has grown significantly longer. A number of climate-related issues are intensifying fires. Drier climates and more available fuel cause fires to start easier, burn longer and move faster. In addition, forest fires lower the number of trees that can absorb the carbon dioxide that causes climate change in the first place.

The federal cost of fighting forest fires has risen substantially. Fires cost the U.S. Forest Service more than $2 billion in 2015, over half of its annual budget, up from $240 million in 1985 (not adjusted for inflation).

LaTuna Fire | Los Angeles September 2017

While shooting the Rocky fire in Lake County in July 2015, Frost followed a firefighting team into a valley only to find himself completely surrounded by flames until a backup team arrived. “The wind was whipping across the hillside and catching grass on fire. I was sitting in the truck freaking out,” he says. “There were droves of insects running into the truck trying to get away from the fire. We had to wait for two hours before somebody could come in and retrieve us. That fire was a total of 70,000 acres but that day it burned 50,000.” Frost’s point-of-view video below documents his close call.

Rocky Fire | Clear Lake July 2015

After almost four years, Frost has shifted away from the front lines and turned his focus to covering the aftermath. He is shooting scorched landscapes and the remains of cars left behind. Recently, he started picking up pieces of charred aluminum, polishing them and displaying them in art exhibits to bring awareness to the power of forest fires. He expects to complete his time-lapse film in early 2018. A pre-public release will go out to his Patreon followers before he submits the film to Cannes and Sundance.

Jeff Frost is an artist based outside of Los Angeles. Follow him on instagram @frostjeff.

josh raab IS a multimedia editor at time. follow him on instagram @instagraabit.