Author: John Hanno

Rolling Stone

New Emails Suggest Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Was Communicating With Ron DeSantis — For Some Strange Reason

William Vaillancourt – February 4, 2022

Emails obtained by government watchdog group American Oversight suggest that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been in regular contact with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The June 2021 emails, reported by Politico on Friday, were sent by conservative activist Ginni Thomas to someone in the DeSantis administration requesting that the governor join a meeting organized in part by Judicial Watch, a right-wing group that frequently sues public officials.

Thomas, the wife of Clarence Thomas, writes that the governor should be familiar with her because, in addition to seeing him at a state dinner at the White House and having interviewed him for the Daily Caller, her “husband has been in contact with him too on various things of late.”

Ginni Thomas has long been intimately involved with several conservative groups that make no secret about where they stand on Supreme Court decisions. The New Republic noted recently, for example, that in 2000, Thomas, then a staffer at the conservative Heritage Foundation, screened resumes for Bush administration employees while the court had yet to rule on the legality of the Florida recount. (In a 5-4 decision, in which Clarence Thomas participated despite calls to recuse himself, the court put a stop to the recount.)

A more recent example, as noted by The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer, pertains to Ginni Thomas’ role on the advisory board of the conservative group Turning Point USA, which transported busloads of insurrectionists to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6. Last month, the court ruled 8-1 that ex-president Donald Trump must hand over documents to the House Jan. 6 committee. The lone dissenter? Clarence Thomas

These are just two of several instances of Ginni Thomas, who worries that America is danger of falling into the hands of “transsexual fascists,” presenting a conflict of interest to the court. As Stephen Gillers, an NYU law professor and a judicial ethicist, told Mayer, “I think Ginni Thomas is behaving horribly, and she’s hurt the Supreme Court and the administration of justice. It’s reprehensible. If you could take a secret poll of the other eight justices, I have no doubt that they are appalled by Virginia Thomas’ behavior. But what can they do?”

Friday’s report is sure to raise questions about whether DeSantis communicated with Clarence Thomas about, say, vaccine mandate cases that came before the court last month. The Biden administration’s mandate for health care workers was upheld in a 5-4 ruling, with Thomas dissenting, while the mandate for large businesses was overturned 6-3, with Thomas in the majority. DeSantis opposed both mandates.

Helen Aguirre Ferré, the executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, told Politico, “I can’t speak about any private conversations Governor DeSantis may or may not have had with anyone but both he and Justice Thomas believe in the separation of powers and defend individual liberty, the law and the Constitution as written.”

DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.

The New York Times

Water Supplies From Glaciers May Peak Sooner Than Anticipated

Raymond Zhong – February 7, 2022

The world’s glaciers may contain less water than previously believed, a new study has found, suggesting that freshwater supplies could peak sooner than anticipated for millions of people worldwide who depend on glacial melt for drinking water, crop irrigation and everyday use.

The latest findings are based on satellite images taken during 2017 and 2018. They are a snapshot in time; scientists will need to do more work to connect them with long-term trends. But they imply that further global warming could cause today’s ice to vanish in many places at a pace faster than previously thought.

In the tropical Andes, for instance, the study estimated glacier volume to be 27% less than the scientific consensus as of a few years ago. In parts of Russia and northern Asia, glacier volume was 35% smaller, the study found.-

Worldwide, the study found 11% less ice in the glaciers than had been estimated earlier. In the high mountains of Asia, however, it found 37% more ice, and in Patagonia and the central Andes, 10% more.

The new estimates come from a more detailed and realistic digital reconstruction of Earth’s 215,000 glaciers than had been possible before, said Romain Millan, a geophysicist at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, France, and lead author of the study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Even so, “we still have lots of uncertainty in some regions,” Millan said, mostly because of the scarcity of on-the-ground measurements, which help to inform any digital reconstruction. Those regions, including the Andes and the Himalayas, “are the ones where people rely on fresh water coming from glaciers,” he said.

The melting of glaciers is threatening livelihoods and reshaping landscapes in North America, Europe, New Zealand and many places in between.

In the upper Indus basin of the Himalayas, which straddles Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan, glacial melt accounts for nearly half of river flow. Yet logistical and political challenges mean scientists can monitor only a small share of the Himalayan glaciers, said Anjal Prakash, a water expert at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad who did not work on the new study.

“It’s a data-deficient region,” Prakash said. “Countries do not cooperate. They don’t share information with each other.”

With 1.5 billion people benefiting from the water and other resources of the Himalayas, while also facing growing risks of severe floods, the region “is just waiting for a disaster to happen,” Prakash said.

As glaciers have melted, they have contributed to rising global sea levels. The new study suggests that, all together, they could add 10 inches to the oceans instead of the foot or so that was estimated earlier. Either way, it is small compared with what the melting of Greenland and Antarctica could add to sea levels in the far future if the planet heats to catastrophic levels.

To produce their new estimates of glacier dimensions, Millan and his colleagues combined more than 811,000 satellite images to clock the speeds at which the glaciers’ surfaces are moving. Glaciers may look like solid, unchanging masses, but in fact, they are constantly in motion: sliding across the terrain; deforming under their own weight; flowing, syrup-like, down valleys. This movement is a clue to the amount of ice that is locked inside.

“The thickness of the glacier controls how fast it moves,” said Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who did not work on the new study. “And so, vice versa, if you know how fast it moves, you can say something about the thickness.”

The high resolution of the satellite images allowed Millan and his colleagues to capture fine variations in the glaciers’ thickness, such as narrow troughs in the ground underneath. They could map small ice caps in South America, Europe and New Zealand that had never been mapped before.

In certain ways, scientists understand less about some of the glaciers draped over the world’s mountains than they do about the much larger ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, said Mathieu Morlighem, an earth scientist at Dartmouth College who worked on the new study.

Only a few thousand glaciers worldwide have been measured on-site. In places like North America, the balmier climate means more pockets of water in the glaciers, which can thwart radar measurements. Compared with the giant ice sheets, where fast-moving ice has smoothed the underlying bedrock over time, the terrain beneath mountain glaciers can be “just so complex,” Morlighem said, making it harder to gauge their dimensions.

“Just 10, 15 years ago, we barely knew the area of the glaciers,” said Regine Hock, a geoscientist at the University of Oslo in Norway who was not involved in the new research. Estimates of glacier volume were “very, very rough,” she said.

Today’s “data revolution” is helping scientists make better predictions about local and regional water resources, even if the big picture globally — that the glaciers will thin substantially during this century — is unlikely to change much, Hock said. “There is only so much ice,” she said, “and then it’s gone.”

CNN

The Canadian trucker protest is in its second week. This is how we got here

By Paula Newton – February 7, 2022

Ottawa (CNN)A massive protest by Canadian truckers and others against Covid-19 mandates has entered a second week, crippling downtown Ottawa with no end in sight. The city’s mayor has declared a state of emergency, and the capital’s police chief is calling for outside help to deal with the protesters.So what exactly are the demonstrations about, and what’s being done to address them? Why are the protests taking place now?

Here are some key questions and answers about Canada’s Covid-19 protests.

What are truckers protesting in Canada?

Thousands of Canadian truckers are participating in the so-called Freedom Convoy, fighting a vaccine mandate that is forcing all Canadian truckers crossing the US-Canada border to be fully vaccinated or face quarantine in their homes for two weeks when they return.

The new rule went into effect in mid-January in Canada and January 22 in the United States. The US Department of Homeland Security now requires non-citizens entering the United States via border crossings or ferry terminals along the US northern and southern borders be fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

A man takes part in the Freedom Convoy protest over Canadian Covid-19 restrictions in Ottawa on February 2.Before this mandate, truckers were exempted from the vaccine requirement and permitted to cross the border, at times testing for Covid-19, even during the 18-month period that the border was closed to non-essential traffic. Truckers were considered vital to keeping supply chains functioning normally.

According to the Canadian government, nearly 90% of Canada’s truckers are fully vaccinated and eligible to cross the border. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the protesting truckers represent a “small, fringe minority” and his government did not expect the vaccine mandate to significantly affect supply chains.

How did the protests start?

The “Freedom Convoy” of truckers began its protest in January in Canada’s western provinces with the goal of reaching the nation’s capital, Ottawa, and continuing the protest until the vaccine mandate was lifted.People protest Covid-19 vaccine mandates in Ottawa on February 5.On its cross-country journey and now in Ottawa, the protest has attracted support from thousands of Canadians, even some who are fully vaccinated, who say they want all vaccine and mask mandates lifted and all Covid-19 health restrictions dropped.

How have the protests evolved?

A large, noisy convoy, including hundreds of trucks and vehicles, descended on Ottawa on January 29. Dozens of trucks remain in Ottawa’s downtown core in what local officials have described as an “occupation.” This past weekend, several cities and towns joined in the protest with hundreds of trucks and thousands of protesters in some of Canada’s largest cities.

While most of the demonstrations outside Ottawa have ended, some protesters in those cities promise to return every weekend until health restrictions are lifted.The protest in Ottawa continues despite Ottawa’s police chief saying the demonstration is now “unlawful.”

What do the protesters want?

In a statement released last week, organizers of the Freedom Convoy said they will remain in Ottawa “for as long as it takes for governments across Canada to end all mandates” associated with Covid-19.Protesters CNN has spoken with also say they would like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to speak with them and hear their opposition to the mandates and restrictions.Trudeau has said he has no intention of meeting with them, and that they hold views “unacceptable” to most Canadians.Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau listens to a question at a media availability on Monday, January 31.

What has the impact been on Canadians?

The most profound impact has been in Ottawa’s downtown core, where the convoy of trucks has blockaded several downtown streets, honking their horns in some cases day and night.Residents and service providers in the downtown core told CNN they feel like hostages in a city under siege. The majority of businesses in the area have been forced to close; they include a large mall adjacent to the protest site.People hold signs and wave flags along Wellington Street in front of Parliament Hill on February 5 as part of the Freedom Convoy protest.Ottawa police say they opened a hate-incident hotline that has received more than 200 calls in a matter of days, with residents reporting incidents of harassment and intimidation.To date, Ottawa police say, they have initiated more than 60 criminal investigations related to the demonstration. They are primarily for mischief, thefts, hate crimes and property damage, they say.Hundreds of traffic and parking tickets have also been issued, as well as dozens of fines for bylaw infractions.

What has PM Justin Trudeau said about all this?

Trudeau says the protesters do not represent the vast majority of Canadians who have opted to be fully vaccinated and believe that public health restrictions save lives.At a news conference last week, he indicated that while there are no formal requests for military help — despite Ottawa’s police chief saying it may take the military’s help to end the protest — the military option was not “in the cards right now.””One has to be very, very cautious before deploying military forces in situations engaging Canadians. It is not something that anyone should enter in lightly,” Trudeau said.A spokesman for Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand also told CNN last week that “the Canadian Armed Forces are not involved in law enforcement in this situation,” adding that the military is not a police force.

81% of Canadians are vaccinated. Why so much angst now?

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, more than four of every five Canadians are vaccinated. However, provincial governments and the federal government have enforced various vaccine mandates.

At the federal and provincial level, Canada has enforced some of the strictest Covid-19 measures in the world with widespread mask mandates and restrictions on the size of gatherings, not only at large events and restaurants, but in private homes.

A vocal minority of Canadians says they agree with the truckers’ protest, saying is it time to drop most Covid-19 restrictions. With so many Canadians complying for so long with vaccine and mask mandates and other Covid-19 measures, some say public health officials and government leaders are now going too far.As one couple who said they were fully vaccinated told CNN, they feel they did their part and now they want to move on.

Had Canadians staged serious protests over Covid-19 rules before this?

Various smaller protests took place across the country against health measures and mandates in 2020 and 2021. However, this is the largest and most widespread protest of its kind to date during the pandemic.

What Covid-19 restrictions are in place now for Canadians who are not truckers?

Several provinces are beginning to drop some health measures and allow the reopening of restaurant dining rooms, theaters, cinemas and gyms, albeit with capacity restrictions.

Decisions about most of these health restrictions and how and when to ease them are determined not by the Trudeau government, but by individual provinces.

There is still a federal vaccine mandate for passengers traveling by air domestically or internationally. In addition, all federal public servants are required to be fully vaccinated as a condition of employment.

Crowds of demonstrators join rallies across Canada as Covid-19 trucker protests spread

Traveling to Canada during Covid-19: What you need to know before you go

HuffPost

WSJ Gives Republicans A Blunt Reality Check Over ‘3-Time Loser’ Trump

Ed Mazza – February 7, 2022

The Wall Street Journal ripped into Donald Trump and Republicans after the party doubled down in its support of the former president.

The newspaper also praised former Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to cave to Trump’s pressure to overturn the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Mr. Pence was presiding over the vote counting as President of the Senate, but he refused Mr. Trump’s pressure to disqualify electors from some closely contested states,” the editorial stated. “It was Mr. Pence’s finest hour.”

But that, the newspaper said, wasn’t common in today’s Republican Party.

“Mr. Pence stands out as a rare Republican these days willing to stand up to Mr. Trump’s disgraceful behavior after the election,” the newspaper’s editorial said. “Too many in the GOP seem to have lost their constitutional moorings in thrall to one man.”

The Journal warned the GOP about the cost of sticking to Trump no matter what, given his less-than-stellar track record at the ballot box:

The conventional wisdom now is that Mr. Trump controls the Republican Party and can have the 2024 nomination if he wants it. But someone should remind voters that Mr. Trump ended as a three-time election loser. He mobilized Democrats against him in historic numbers to cost the GOP the House in 2018, then the White House in 2020 and finally the two Georgia Senate seats in 2021.

Read the full editorial here.

The Atlantic – Ideas

The Economy Is Good, Actually

Americans are living through the best labor market in half a century. Pay for low-wage workers is up. Why can’t the left take credit?

By Zachary D. Carter – February 7, 2022 

We are living through the best labor market in 50 years. The U.S. economy created 467,000 jobs in January, more than triple the 125,000 that economists had anticipated. According to the most recent data, the economy created 700,000 more jobs at the end of last year than previously believed. Workers are leaving their jobs for greener pastures at record levels, organized labor is enjoying a resurgence of worker power unseen in a generation, and pay for low-wage workers is up even after adjusting for inflation.

Compared with the federal government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, the recovery from the COVID-19 crash has been an extraordinary success. It took more than a decade after the onset of the previous recession for the unemployment rate to fall back to 4 percent, the level where it stands today. Even this figure understates the gap between the Great Recession and the pandemic-era economy. Most of the jobs created after the 2008 crisis paid poverty wages, and the country never recovered all of the manufacturing jobs it lost. Today, manufacturing jobs have nearly returned to their pre-pandemic levels amid a burst of onshoring activity across different industries. The stunning jobs numbers over the past two months were secured as the Omicron variant damaged commercial activity across the country.

David Frum: Biden won big with a bad hand

It remains difficult to find intellectuals or policy makers eager to take credit for these triumphs. This silence is especially noticeable on the left, which can reasonably claim much of the change in approach as its own. The federal government spent far more money over the course of the pandemic than it did in response to the 2008 crash, and spent more of that money on ordinary families. The child-tax-credit expansion unveiled by President Joe Biden in early 2021 cut child poverty in half all by itself, never mind the hardships averted by expanded unemployment benefits and stimulus checks.

The primary rationale for this reluctance to declare victory is not a secret: Many Americans are pretty miserable at the moment. The pandemic itself is a grief machine, and most of the efforts that households and governments can take to mitigate the coronavirus’s spread are extremely frustrating. Biden’s approval rating has been in the toilet since the summer, and reached new lows last month. The collapse of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which was sabotaged by two senators in the president’s own party, has not helped his cause, and neither has his administration’s clunky and at times bizarre response to the pandemic itself. (White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki mocking the very idea of sending out free COVID-19 tests to households was probably the low point.)

But most of the conversation about the economy today is not about manufacturing jobs, strike activity, or quit rates. It’s about inflation. And wage growth across the pandemic is much less impressive when you focus on the past six months or so of consumer-price data. Inflation-adjusted wages are actually up since the first quarter of 2020, but they were down 2.4 percent over the course of 2021. (Even this data point carries a silver lining, though: Workers in the bottom third of the income distribution still enjoyed modest wage gains last year, a break with recent trends in which wage growth has been concentrated at the top.) Polling consistently indicates that voters loathe inflation. In 2013, when inflation was nonexistent, a majority of Americans cited inflation as “a very big problem.” It is less popular today.

Read: Transforming America with a one-vote majority

Just why inflation remains a problem is a matter of intense debate among economists, but virtually everyone accepts two premises. First, the pandemic is a major cause of rising prices. Shutting down whole sectors and then starting them up again creates all sorts of disruptions and bottlenecks that lead to shortages, which in turn lead to price increases. Second, the higher prices created by those shortages are exacerbated by robust consumer purchasing power. How much of either factor—high household demand or bad bottlenecks—is responsible for the problem remains under dispute, but it seems likely that inflation will not dissipate until the supply-chain issues are resolved. In the meantime, any good economic news—more jobs, better pay—will put at least some upward pressure on prices. People are reluctant to claim credit for the recovery because they are reluctant to accept blame for inflation.

They shouldn’t be. Highlighting the strength of the job market may or may not be a winning message for politicians, but it’s essential for understanding both the calamity we avoided and how to respond to inflation going forward. The conventional response to rising prices—higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve, withdrawing fiscal stimulus—may well bring prices down, but it will do so by attacking the incomes of ordinary Americans, particularly those at the edges of the labor market. Given Senate gridlock, this may well be the best that policy makers can do with the tools available to them. But it is not the only way to deal with rising prices. An excess-profits tax on businesses is one; rent control for families is another. Both have the advantage of avoiding a direct hit to consumer pocketbooks.

The Great Recession was a generational cataclysm for the American middle class. The COVID-19 recession has not been, because policy makers have prioritized the benefits of a high-demand economy over the risk of moderately rising prices. They should not be ashamed of their success.

About the author: Zachary D. Carter is a writer in residence at Omidyar Network. He is the author of The Price Of Peace: Money, Democracy, And The Life Of John Maynard Keynes.

The Atlantic – Ideas

Trump Is Obsessed With Being a Loser

His electoral defeat has pulled him into a deep, dark place. He wants to pull the rest of us into it as well.

By Peter Wehner  – February 7, 2022

Donald trump has made clear time and time again that, in his view, the worst thing that can happen to a person is to be judged a “loser.” In the 2020 presidential election he was, in fact, a loser, but his narcissism and the incredibly fragile self-esteem that undergirds it won’t allow him to accept that reality. He has spent the past 15 months attempting to overthrow the election in an effort to make himself the winner and, after that effort failed, rewriting the narrative, portraying himself as a victim of “THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY.”

Almost every public comment Trump makes these days is focused on the election. America’s 45th president said in a statement last week that his vice president, Mike Pence, should have “overturned” the election. In a speech, he indicated that if he were to become president again, he’d likely pardon the people who on January 6, 2021, violently stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the election, part of his ongoing effort to turn insurrectionists and those charged with seditious conspiracy into martyrs. He also warned that he would incite unrest if prosecutors who are investigating him and his businesses took action against him.

Trump’s mind has no room to entertain any other thoughts, at least not for long. His defeat is his obsession; it has pulled him into a deep, dark place. He wants to pull the rest of us into it as well.

Idiscuss trump in psychological terms because I have said for a half-dozen years—and previously in these pages—that the most important thing to understand about Trump is his disordered personality; it’s the only way to even begin to think about how to deal with him. (I’m not the only person to think that.)

Trump seems unable to incorporate anything critical about himself, hence his need to create an imaginary world in which he really won the 2020 election but was the victim of a conspiracy that borders on intergalactic. He’s performed a moral inversion in which the supporters who stormed the Capitol are the true patriots; they, like he, are being unfairly persecuted. They are the defenders of democracy; the people who are holding them accountable are the enemies of America.

Another reason Trump’s mindset matters is that millions of his followers—passionate, committed, incensed, aggrieved, and absolutely sure they are right and righteous—have entered his hall of mirrors. To understand the GOP, one must understand Trump. It’s true that his hold on the party has weakened some since he left office; that was inevitable. But he is still far and away the dominant figure in the GOP and, at this juncture at least, its mostly likely presidential nominee in 2024. As Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times put it, “the Republican Party is very much still Mr. Trump’s, transforming his lies about a stolen 2020 election into an article of faith, and even a litmus test that he is seeking to impose on the 2022 primaries with the candidates he backs. He is the party’s most coveted endorser, its top fund-raiser and the polling front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination.”

Read: Trump fans have found their safe space

The Trump era has conditioned many in the Republican Party to think like he does—and those who don’t are too afraid to speak out against his malicious transgressions. Even Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine—who voted to impeach Trump, who represents a blue state, who isn’t up for reelection for four years, and who clearly views Trump as a threat to American democracy—bobbed and weaved when she was asked if she would support Trump in 2024. The proper response would have been: of course not!

As if to prove that the GOP is now an instrument of Trump’s obsession, late last week Republican leaders meeting in Salt Lake City censured Representative Adam Kinzinger and Representative Liz Cheney because of their work on the January 6 committee. The Republican National Committee also announced that it would fund Cheney’s primary opponent.

Cheney and Kinzinger engaged in a “Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse,” the Republican National Committee’s chair, Ronna McDaniel, said. McDaniel’s words were echoed in the censure, which accused Cheney and Kinzinger of “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

Even in a Trump-led party, it is stunning that Republican leaders would seek to whitewash a violent attack on the Capitol to overturn a presidential election. This is not just moral degradation; it is moral nihilism.

McDaniel’s insistence, after a great deal of blowback, that “legitimate political discourse” referred only to nonviolent protesters isn’t convincing. For one thing, there is no “persecution”—to use the language from the RNC resolution—by the January 6 congressional committee aimed at people who gathered peacefully before the assault on the Capitol. For another, Trump’s dangling of a pardon could apply only to those who were arrested for attacking the Capitol. And in a resolution in which the events of January 6 were central, the RNC did not see fit to say a single critical word about the violent mob that stormed the Capitol. That is itself quite telling.

Amanda Carpenter, who once worked for Senator Ted Cruz, put it well: “The fact the RNC is censuring Cheney and Kinzinger for investigating January 6 and not condemning Trump for causing January 6 is absolutely demented.”

Even The Wall Street Journal editorial page felt compelled to issue this warning: “Republicans should not get within 10 miles of defending the Capitol riot. What is to be gained by the RNC’s indulgence of President Trump’s vendettas?” The answer, of course, is that they may be true believers—and even if they aren’t, they understand, perhaps better than The Journal’s editorial writers, what MAGA world is demanding.

To put this “indulgence” in perspective, contrast the behavior of the Republican Party in the United States with the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. As Mark Landler, the Times’ London-bureau chief, has noted, Tory members of Parliament have been far more critical of Prime Minister Boris Johnson—who didn’t incite an attack on the House of Commons but did host drinking parties during lockdown—than Republicans have been critical of Trump. The Tory party understands the distinction between partisan loyalty and craven, unpatriotic fealty; the Republican Party does not.

I’ve sensed lately that some people on the right—individuals who defended Trump at virtually every turn in his presidency but knew privately, deep in their heart, that they had made moral accommodations they weren’t proud of—wish the rest of us would just move on from Trump. Media coverage of the former president brings to the foreground the cost of their Faustian bargain.

Shortly after the election, some of us tried to move on. But unfortunately, Trump and MAGA world had something different in mind—undermining trust in our elections, storming the Capitol, propagating malicious and destructive lies. There is now an entire media industry—Right Wing Inc.—built around the distorted and disturbed mind of Donald J. Trump.

Read: Trump is making the midterms a referendum on himself

A wise conservative friend of mine who is a critic of the left recently told me, “At the elite level, the Republican Party is much worse than the Democratic Party when it comes to the health of American democracy. It is led by, and defined by, Trump, who wants to attack our institutions at every level.”

So he does, and so he has. Trump was dangerous, his mind disordered, before; he’s more dangerous, his mind more disordered, now. He’s obsessed and enraged, consumed by vengeance, and moving us closer to political violence. His behavior needs attention not because of the past but because of the future. A second Trump term would make the first one look like a walk in the park.

About the author: Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

Insider

Trump White House staffers frequently put important documents into ‘burn bags’ and sent them to the Pentagon for incineration, report says

Joshua Zitser – February 6, 2022

• Trump-era White House staffers frequently put documents in “burn bags,” per The Washington Post.
• Regular “burn runs” would see these bags taken to the Pentagon for incineration, The Post said.
• It was up to the staffers to decide which documents to preserve and which to destroy, the media outlet reported.

It has been widely reported that former President Donald Trump had a penchant for tearing apart presidential documents, but new details have emerged about how his aides disposed of potentially important papers.

According to The Washington Post, staffers frequently put documents into “burn bags” to be incinerated at the Pentagon.

Burn bags resemble paper grocery bags and are widely available throughout the White House complex. Organizations dealing with top-secret information, like the CIA and NSA, often use them because destruction via burn bags is considered superior to shredding.

There are two types of “burn bags,” one for classified and the other for unclassified material, but both are ultimately destroyed, per The Post.

The media outlet reported that, in Trump’s White House, there were regular “burn runs” in which the classified bags were transported to the Pentagon for incineration.

A senior Trump White House official told The Post that he and other staffers regularly put documents into “burn bags” to be incinerated, and, he said, it was up to them which would be destroyed.

Meanwhile, records personnel would attempt to manage the volume of torn documents being consigned to burn bags. They would tip the contents onto a table to puzzle out which documents needed to be taped back together and preserved, a former official told The Washington Post.

Problems with record preservation in the Trump administration are well-documented. Insider reported that the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack received Trump-era White House documents that had been torn up and taped back together by staff assigned to jigsaw them back together.

Historians raised concerns during his tenure that his presidential records would be poorly preserved or destroyed entirely – potentially violating the Presidential Records Act.

“The biggest takeaway I have from that behavior is it reflects a conviction that he was above the law,” said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, told The Washington Post. “He did not see himself bound by those things.”

Yahoo! Life

Meet the young Black farmers fighting environmental food injustice: ‘Sustainability is about longevity’

Rachel Sarah – February 7, 2022

In Unearthed, Gen Z climate-change activists discuss some of the most pressing issues facing our planet — and reveal what you can do to help make a real difference.

Extreme heat, droughts and severe downpours fueled by the climate crisis are affecting crops around the world. And farmers, perhaps more than anyone, understand that climate change, with its decreasing crop yields, require action before it is too late — and that includes funding to enable farmers “to truly revolutionize current ways of farming globally,” implored researchers in the journal Nature Food recently.

In the United States, Black farmers point out how communities of color — often located in urban “food deserts,” with little access to fresh fruits and vegetables, thus increasing the reliance on unsustainable practices such as eating at fast-food chains and having to drive long distances to well-stocked stores — are most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

“If we are to create a society that values Black life, we cannot ignore the role of food and land,” wrote Leah Penniman, co-director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, of the 80-acre farm, which, like many other small Black farms across the country, is bringing “diverse communities together on this healing land to share skills on sustainable agriculture, natural building, spiritual activism, health, and environmental justice,” notes its website.

“People think that justice has to be super radical,” says Ivy Walls, founder of Ivy Leaf Farms in South Houston, Tex. “But it can be as simple as supporting the farmer who is growing food in your community. When you do that, you’re supporting so many other people. Because farmers who are making money will produce more food, right?”

Food justice means providing healthy, nourishing, affordable food to people right where they live. It also means educating people to grow their own food, as well as creating a welcoming space where people can gather, work together and support each other.

That’s the also the aim of Kamal Bell, founder of Sankofa Farms in North Carolina, on a mission to create a sustainable food source for families of color in rural and urban areas, and also provide new economic and educational opportunities.

Since 2016, Bell and his mostly Gen Z team — local youth between the ages of 11 and 17 — have worked year-round on this thriving 12-acre farm outside of Durham. (Sankofa is a West African term that signifies remembering your past as you move forward and progress in life.) They grow everything from lettuce and cucumbers to peppers and tomatoes. They also have prospering beehives and chickens.

Feeding local communities through farming

Walls, after graduating from Prairie View A&M University in 2016 — with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and minor in Chemistry — first got a job as an infection preventionist, which had her working closely with COVID-19 patients during the current pandemic. That’s when she began making the connections between staying healthy and having access to fresh produce.

“They turned this community into a dump, with literally miles high worth of trash,” says Walls about the history of her Sunnyside, which she describes as a “historically Black neighborhood,” that eventually “kind of got forgotten,” adding that the city dump there once housed a toxin-spewing incinerator.

In 1912, a white councilman had segregated, or annexed, Sunnyside, along with other neighborhoods in Texas, and by the 1960s, the community had so many Black-owned businesses that residents called a stretch of Cullen Boulevard “Black Wall Street.” But in the 1980s, the oil bust shuttered many doors, leaving the neighborhood to become a desert economically.

Sunnyside also became a food desert, Walls says. Because while the incinerator in Sunnyside has since closed, today the community of roughly 20,000 people has yet another health-risking problem: only one grocery store — Fiesta Mart — which is reviewed on Yelp with one-and-half stars, and described as “old” and “dusty.”

It all compelled Walls to found Ivy Leaf Farms in 2020, when she was just 25, with an initial investment of $500. Today her dad, a computer engineer for NASA, is her lead farmhand.

Everything that Walls grows is free to her community; she even drops off produce free of charge to Sunnyside residents. “I raise money by selling seeds and merch,” she says. While the land she farms was already owned by her family, she’s also received grants aplenty — including from Kellogg’s, the NAACP and even Beyonce.

Walls has also joined forces with Jeremy Peaches, a fellow Prairie View A&M University alumnus, to found Black Farmer Box — a farmer-owned, community-operated affordable food system to provide fresh food to food desert communities, supporting local Black farmers through the purchase of wholesale produce, and creating jobs and opportunities; they also have plans to open a new fresh food grocery store. Walls hopes her business can become a “blueprint” for the nation, and others have similar goals.

“A lot of our work right now is in advocating for Black farmers, and as well as fighting on the legal front to make sure that Black farmers receive some form of debt relief,” says LeeAnn C. Morrissette, of the National Black Food & Justice Alliance, a member-based organization consisting of Black farmers and food justice organizations working towards Black food and land sovereignty.

The Justice for Black Farmers Act — landmark legislation aimed at addressing and correcting historic discrimination within the U.S. Department of Agriculture in federal farm assistance, introduced by Sen. Corey Booker — calls for “making up to 160 acres of land available to any Black person committed to stewarding land,” as well as providing resources, funds and legal support to Black-led organizations, training programs and more.

Morrissette explains, for example, that debt relief in the United States would help small and medium farmers stay in business, keep their land and continue to feed communities across the country as we recover from the pandemic.

“It’s important for people to educate themselves about what it takes to grow food,” says Yemi Amu, who founded Oko Farms in New York City in 2013. Most people don’t know where their food comes from, she says, or how farmers, many of whom are immigrants, make a living. “Folks need to expand their awareness to include rights for farmers.”

“We often don’t talk about how farmers in the United States are dealing with drought because of climate change,” adds Amu, who runs two urban farms in Brooklyn. Through the farms she cultivates a variety of freshwater fish and plants using a recirculating closed loop system known as “aquaponics,” which allows farmers to cultivate both freshwater fish and vegetables while saving water — not to mention that the waste from fish such as koi and goldfish acts to fertilize the plants. Like Sankofa and Ivy Leaf Farms, Oko Farms provides fresh produce to the community, and also offers workshops to teach others how to create a soilless farm.

“We talk a lot about water and the role of water in agriculture to raise awareness about water use and water scarcity,” says Amu about her workshops, which are open to kids, youth and adults.

Adds Bell, “Sustainability is about longevity. We should be able to pass our farms to the next generation.”

It’s why he and so many other farm owners are focused on youth. “Young people, for us, is how we address sustainability,” says Bell. “It means having human interactions. It means ensuring that youth look at farming as a potential career.”

How to be a part of the food-justice movement

“Get involved in your local food system,” says Morrissette. “Find out who your local farmers are, and if you can, buy from BIPOC farmers.”

Indexes of Black-owned farms can be found here and here. Shopping there will not only work toward turning food deserts around, but will cut down on food miles — the distance food travels to reach stores — and the related fossil-fuel emissions.

Bell from Sankofa Farms agrees that supporting farmers who are doing the work is crucial. He encourages businesses to collaborate with farmers in creative ways, like compensating them to hold workshops or team building events on a local farm.

“Farms could always use some extra help!” Bell says. “Farming is labor intensive and if you have some free time and are willing to learn, then offering your time can be helpful. Farming is also susceptible to Mother Nature… So if you have a giving heart, it’s not a bad idea to send your favorite farmer a contribution every now or then.”

Walls also encourages people to “try to grow something.”

“Don’t be scared to grow something in your own backyard, on your balcony, on your windowsill,” she says. “I would love to challenge everyone to grow one meal that comes from your backyard.”

Reuters

Judge orders U.S. to pay more than $230 million to Texas church shooting victims

Jonathan Stempel – February 7, 2022

(Reuters) – A federal judge ordered the U.S. government to pay slightly more than $230 million to survivors and family members of victims of a 2017 mass shooting at a Texas church that killed 26 people.

U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez ruled seven months after finding the government 60% responsible for the Nov. 5, 2017, massacre by former Air Force airman Devin Patrick Kelley at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

“The losses and pain these families have experienced is immeasurable,” wrote Rodriguez, who works in San Antonio, Texas.

Kelley, whom the judge found 40% responsible, used firearms he should not have been allowed to buy after admitting in a 2012 court martial to domestic assault. The Air Force had failed to enter that plea in a database used for background checks.

In addition to those killed, 22 people were injured when Kelley, 26, dressed in black and wearing a skull mask, opened fire at a Sunday service at the church, 31 miles (50 km) east of San Antonio.

He later died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head following a police chase.

In his 185-page decision, Rodriguez rejected what he called the government’s effort to “obfuscate its responsibility” by adopting a “no-fault” approach to damages similar to that used to compensate victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Monday’s decision covered about 80 claimants, most of whom were awarded money.

A spokeswoman for the Air Force said it was aware of the awards and reviewing the decision.

In December 2018, a government report said the Air Force had missed six chances to alert law enforcement about Kelley’s history of domestic abuse.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler)

The Charlotte Observer

Republican chief justice tarnishes the court with embarrassing dissent in NC maps ruling

the Editorial Board – February 5, 2022

The North Carolina Supreme Court’s Democratic majority handed down a win for democracy Friday when it struck down maps gerrymandered by Republicans.

But Chief Justice Paul Newby, joined by his fellow Republican justices, handed down what amounted to a judicial tantrum.

Newby “respectfully” dissented to the ruling by repeating an argument circulated widely by Republicans lately: that the court’s Democratic justices are guided by politics, not jurisprudence.

“A majority of this Court, however, tosses judicial restraint aside, seizing the opportunity to advance its agenda,” Newby wrote in his dissent. Newby also accused the court’s majority of “seeking to hide its partisan bias.”

The legal basis for Newby’s dissent is ludicrous in itself. Newby argues that since electoral maps are drawn by members of the General Assembly, who are chosen by voters, any judicial intervention in the redistricting process usurps the will of the people. That’s a head-scratching argument when the primary issue is that the maps drawn by Republicans all but guarantee that the legislature does not, in fact, represent the will of the people.

But Newby didn’t just dispute the merits of the majority ruling, as a judge appropriately does in a dissenting opinion. He went a step further by questioning the merits of his colleagues and the court itself. It was behavior unbecoming of a justice, let alone the chief justice of the state Supreme Court.

North Carolina Republicans, of course, will be North Carolina Republicans. As with previous rulings that didn’t go their way, they lambasted the court’s Democratic majority Friday, christening the justices “bought and paid for” partisan hacks and even suggesting they ought to be impeached.

That’s unfortunate, and it should be out of bounds for lawmakers of either party. But for that narrative to be repeated by a chief justice, in his written dissent, is an altogether different and troubling development. It’s hard to imagine U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts accusing his colleagues of bias or calling their ethics into question. Despite the many issues on which they vehemently disagree, justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have generally strived to maintain a minimum level of respect for one another, at least in the public eye.

It’s not the first time that Newby has publicly maligned his colleagues. In 2019, Newby, who at the time was the lone Republican on the court, criticized his fellow justices in a campaign speech, calling them “AOCs” and accusing them of “judicial activism.”

But perhaps that’s just what you get when you elect justices to the state’s highest court through partisan elections, and allow campaigns to be funded by private dollars rather than by public financing. It is, after all, nearly impossible to keep politics out of a court that isn’t designed to be apolitical. The result was apparent Friday: a state Supreme Court soiled by the same toxic partisanship that poisons other branches of government, eroding public trust in the court and every justice who sits on it.

It is, in many ways, emblematic of another political dispute that has paralleled North Carolina’s redistricting battle: a fight over the legitimacy of the state Supreme Court itself. In recent months, the high court has been weighed down by accusations of partisanship, threats of impeachment and demands for recusal — not just in the redistricting case, but in others as well. We fear that’s led North Carolinians to be skeptical of the courts and their ability to decide cases fairly. With public confidence in our institutions dwindling, a chief justice should focus on restoring that trust, not work to accelerate its decline.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case here. Newby sounded a lot more like a Trump-era politician than a Supreme Court justice. And in doing so, he revealed that it’s he who’s seeing things through a partisan, political lens. It is the very thing that Republicans have accused the court’s Democratic justices of all along.