Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
The Mayor of Tallahassee (who’s running for governor of Florida) Took on the NRA, and Won
The Mayor of Tallahassee Took on the NRA, and Won
This candidate for Florida governor took on the NRA — and won
Posted by NowThis Election on Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Colin Kaepernick was one of eight recipients of the W.E.B. Dubois Medal from Harvard on Thursday for his work in social justice.
Comedian Dave Chapelle and artist Kehinde Wiley were among the others awarded “Harvard’s highest honor in the field of African and African-American studies.”
After receiving a rousing ovation, Kaepernick appeared to scrap his prepared remarks for an off-the-cuff speech shared by WHDH Boston’s Eric Kane that addressed his recent Nike deal and the first time he took a knee in protest.
“I had a short speech written, but it just didn’t seem true to what it should’ve been with the authenticity and the passion and the inspiration that’s been in this room,” Kaepernick said to start a speech that he requested not be broadcast.
He went on to talk about the first time he took a knee and the response from Oakland’s Castlemont High football team, whose players took a knee the next week to support him. He visited the team on game day.
“One of the young brothers says ‘We don’t get to eat at home, so we’re going to eat on this field,’” Kaepernick said. “That moment has never left me.
“And I’ve carried that everywhere I went. And I think that’s the reality of what I’ve fought for, what so many of us have fought for. People live with this every single day.”
Kaepernick also addressed his Nike campaign and what sacrifice means to him.
“I go to what recently happened with the Nike campaign where, to believe in something even it it means sacrificing everything quote became huge,” Kaepernick said. “As I reflected on that, it made me think of if we all believe something, we won’t have to sacrifice everything.”
Kaepernick made a call to action for people in the room and people of privilege to stand up for those in need.
“I feel like it’s not only my responsibility, but all our responsibilities as people that are in positions of privilege, in positions of power, to continue to fight for them and uplift them, empower them,” Kapernick said. “Because if we don’t, we become complicit in the problem. It is our duty to fight for them, and we are going to continue to fight for them.”
He concluded by focusing on love, not divide being the driving force behind his protests.
“I go back to something I said in a speech previously, that love is at the root of our resistance, and it will continue to be, and it will fortify everything we do.”
From Men’s Health
Who doesn’t love eggs? They’re inexpensive, and they’re a great source of protein, which is important whether you’re trying to lose weight or build muscle. Plus, eggs are versatile, so you can eat them scrambled at breakfast, hard boiled as a snack, or fried on top of a big pile of vegetables at dinner.
But can something so small really contain that much protein?
The amount of protein varies depending on size, but here’s how much you can expect from one egg, according to the United States Department of Agriculture:
There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s best to eat the whole egg – the egg white and the yolk – and recent studies have shown that whole eggs are a great food for weight loss and don’t increase your risk of cardiovascular disease. Although egg yolks contain many important nutrients like iron and vitamins A, D, E, and K, the whites pack the most punch of protein. The whites from one egg contain about four grams of protein, while the yolk includes 2.7 grams of protein.
Need ideas for how to get creative with your egg eating? Check out this list of 21 deviled egg recipes that make a great post-workout snack.
(‘You Might Also Like’,)
The world is completely off track and heading towards 3°C warming.
Read more: https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-ipcc-report-2610866…
Climate scientists say we may only have 12 years to save the planet
The world is completely off track and heading towards 3°C warming. Read more: https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-ipcc-report-2610866229.html
Posted by EcoWatch on Monday, October 8, 2018
In her Senate floor speech on Friday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) resolutely defended Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh both on his judicial philosophies and against sexual assault allegations, sounding no different than ring-wing GOP senators like Orrin Hatch of Utah or John Cornyn of Texas.
She validated and rewarded the Trumpian tactics of Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who stacked the deck against Christine Blasey Ford and the others who alleged sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh. Despite his clear and repeated lies, Collins lauded Kavanaugh’s “forceful” testimony to the committee denying all of the accusations,
Even after that, some in the Beltway media over the weekend were still locked in time, describing Collins, as they always have, as a “moderate.” One New York Times reporter actually characterized her speech as “reasoned [and] carefully researched.”
But these descriptions were fewer and far between compared to the past. And in Maine, where it matters, a Portland Press Herald editorial called the speech anything but reasoned and careful, clearly identifying what was either naivete or political spin:
Even in areas where experts in the field raised warnings, Collins put her judgment ahead of theirs… Only Collins appears to believe that Kavanaugh considered Roe v. Wade “settled law” or that he was deeply committed to preserving precedent, something legal scholars say is inconsistent with the way the Supreme Court works. It makes precedent when it wants to, and it takes only five votes to do it.
Similar to the characterizations of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) despite facts to the contrary, Collins has consistently been described as a “moderate” or a “maverick” by many establishment Washington political reporters, treating her with kid gloves in discussing possible political motivations.
Often in a Washington bubble themselves, they’ve allowed Collins to perpetuate a myth that she’s a principled bridge-builder who rises above partisanship, so much so that she believes it herself and thinks she’s invincible. Collins appears to have no idea what she’s about to face if she’s seeking re-election in 2020 (and she implied she will in a CNN appearance on Sunday defending her support for Kavanaugh), drunk on the standing ovation she received from Republicans on the Senate floor and the accolades that no doubt came in from President Donald Trump’s base all across the country.
Yes, she voted to protect funding for Planned Parenthood, voted to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military and has defended the environment. These high-profile votes, in a GOP caucus that is so extreme, allowed her to distinguish herself ― and allowed some in the Washington press to distinguish her ― as someone who was anything but right-wing.
But this was always simplistic. Collins voted with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the White House almost 90 percent of the time in the first year of the Trump administration. Her much-heralded vote against Obamacare repeal was negated by her vote for the GOP tax bill. She insisted that in backing that latter bill she got a promise from McConnell that the Senate would consider several fixes to Obamacare ― pledges that never materialized.
Collins refused to support marriage equality as that debate heated up in Maine over the years and as LGBTQ activists came under vicious verbal assault by extremists in the GOP. She finally came out for marriage equality in 2014, two years after the state became one of the few in which marriage equality was achieved via a ballot measure. Thus, she never actually lifted a finger to help Mainers get equality.
She announced her evolution just in time for her re-election bid in 2014, having garnered the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national LGBTQ group. That backing, along with endorsements of her from abortion rights groups, helped her thwart her Democratic challenger.
Collins has since voted to confirm a constant stream of stridently anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ judges nominated to the federal courts by Trump.
That includes Kyle Duncan, confirmed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, who wrote the amicus brief for Louisiana and 14 other states to uphold same-sex marriage bans and fought to uphold transgender bathroom restrictions. It includes backing Steve Grasz for the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, who received a unanimous “unqualified” rating from the American Bar Association. He’d called Roe v. Wade “moral bankruptcy” and sat on the board of a group that promotes “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ minors.
Collins voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, who, like Kavanaugh, promised her and the world that he respected precedent, even calling the Obergefell marriage equality ruling “absolutely settled law.” Four months after joining the court Gorsuch wrote a vigorous dissent inviting states to challenge Obergefell.
Kavanaugh ― who was staff secretary in George W. Bush’s White House while it promoted a federal amendment banning same-sex marriage ― didn’t even go as far as Gorsuch in his hearings, simply saying that Obergefell is law and he “applies the law.”
Whether she is trying to avert a 2020 primary from the right that Trump could lead against her ― he has already threatened Sen. Murkowski (R-Alaska) with political retribution for voting against Kavanaugh ― or she truly believed what she was saying, Collins this time couldn’t keep her political machinations under the radar. The allegations against Kavanaugh ― and the outrage over him they sparked ― placed a glaring spotlight on her vote.
Nor could Collins even get cover from her good friends in the Senate ― Murkowski was joined by conservative Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota in opposing Kavanaugh, even though the latter lawmaker conceded the vote could harm her re-election bid this year. So Collins stood as the sole so-called “moderate” woman in the Senate to have abandoned millions of women across the country and many others who will be hurt by the court’s likely lurch to the extreme right.
In this moment, the mask of moderation has been ripped off Collins. There will be those who say that she’s untouchable ― as they have said in the past ― and that Mainers who re-elected her before will do so again. They’ll tell you that she’ll have plenty of money from the Koch brothers and others, and she surely will.
But we’re in a different time, both nationally, with regard to the political energy of women and the Me Too movement, and in Maine. Already, people in Maine running a grassroots campaign have raised $3.5 million via crowdfunding to funnel to the Democratic opponent who takes on Collins in 2020. Several potential candidates have emerged in the past few days, as Democratic officials look to a deep pool of possible contenders in the state.
Polls in recent weeks found voters in Maine would be less likely to vote to re-elect Collins if she voted to confirm Kavanaugh. And in a Suffolk University poll in early August, she had only a 49 percent favorable rating, down from an impressive 67 percent in a Portland Press Herald 2016 poll.
University of New England political science professor Brian Duff told the Press Herald last week that voting against Kavanaugh “would be the more popular choice in Maine and easier for her to recover from, especially if she is able to vote for another conservative appointee later.” Two years, he said, is a long time in politics and “it’s hard to see a primary challenger emerging with any strength just because she voted ‘no’ on Brett Kavanaugh.”
Now that she’s voted yes, however, Collins can’t put her mask back on.
The Human Rights Campaign and several other national LGBTQ groups slammed her for backing Kavanaugh, as did Planned Parenthood and NARAL. It seems implausible that any of these groups would risk their members’ outrage by backing Collins in 2020.
And what does Collins do about Trump in her re-election year? In 2016, she announced in a scathing Op-Ed that she wasn’t voting for him that year, vocally distancing herself from his bigotry and recklessness as Hillary Clinton took Maine in the election. In 2020 Trump ― who tweeted accolades to Collins over the weekend ― presumably will be on the ballot with her. Will she dare endorse him ― or dare to not?
And as Kavanaugh rules with the far right of the court on issue after issue, as he undoubtedly will, Collins will sink even further, having taken full ownership of this Supreme Court nomination in the end.
Collins had a good gig, promoting herself as something she’s not. She’s now been fully exposed.
By Lawrence Hurley, Reuters October 9, 2018
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday turned aside appeals of a 2017 lower court ruling by its newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh, that struck down an environmental rule imposed under former President Barack Obama regulating a potent greenhouse gas linked to climate change.
The appeals had been brought by an environmental group and companies that supported the 2015 rule that had limited hydrofluorocarbons, which are used in a variety of products including spray cans and air conditioners.
The ruling authored by Kavanaugh, confirmed by the Senate on Saturday after a contentious political battle, was made by a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the court on which he formerly served. The 2-1 ruling threw out the rule issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during Obama’s presidency.
Tuesday marks Kavanaugh’s first day on the court.
The Senate backed President Donald Trump’s nominee 50-48 after a contentious confirmation process during which Kavanaugh denied allegations of sexual misconduct decades dating from the 1980s.
Kavanaugh has a long history of skepticism toward environmental regulations, especially those concerning air pollution. [L1N1U519A]
“However much we might sympathize or agree with EPA’s policy objectives, EPA may act only within the boundaries of its statutory authority,” Kavanaugh wrote in the ruling.
If the high court had agreed to hear the case, Kavanaugh would not have participated. The decision not to hear the case was made privately by the justices before Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate.
The court rejected two separate appeals, one by the Natural Resources Defense Council environmental group and another by companies that supported the regulation, including Honeywell International Inc . Manufacturers including Mexichem Fluor Inc, a unit of Mexichem SAB de CV , and Arkema Inc, part of Arkema SA , also were part of the coalition that challenged the regulation.
The Trump administration had urged the high court not to take the case because the EPA currently is reconsidering the regulation and agrees with Kavanaugh’s interpretation of the law.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
This city lets you ride a 
🚴 anywhere. Even a 
🛶. Just don’t drive a 
🚗 Read more: https://wef.ch/2OCI14g
Copenhagen is building a neighbourhood where cars will be obsolete
This city lets you ride a 🚴 anywhere. Even a 🛶. Just don't drive a 🚗 Read more: https://wef.ch/2OCI14g
Posted by EcoWatch on Friday, October 5, 2018
Bernie Sanders Progressive Virtues (From August 2018)
If you haven’t caught this week’s Real Time with Bill Maher, it’s one of the best, most substantive espisodes in a long time. Here Nancy MacLean discusses the Koch Brother’s hidden agenda, and it’s beyond distrubing.
Nancy MacLean: The GOP's Long Game | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)
If you haven't caught this week's Real Time with Bill Maher, it's one of the best, most substantive espisodes in a long time. Here Nancy MacLean discusses the Koch Brother's hidden agenda, and it's beyond distrubing.
Posted by Bernie Sanders's Progressive Virtues on Sunday, August 5, 2018
Jerry Adler October 8, 2018
“Don’t these people have children?” I asked incredulously.
“Well,” the lobbyist replied with a shrug, “the rule is you dance with who brung ya” — meaning officials who owed their positions to support from the fossil fuel industry were not about turn against their patrons merely out of concern for the future of life on earth.
The question came back to mind recently when the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration was acknowledging a mainstream scientific prediction for global warming: a catastrophic 7-degree (Fahrenheit) rise in average temperature, cumulative since pre-industrial levels, by the end of the century — swamping islands and coastlines, disrupting agriculture and making parts of the globe uninhabitably hot.
“I was shocked when I saw this,” said David Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I thought, wait, they’re putting this out? This is the administration, it’s not some aging hippie in Santa Monica.”
But the administration wasn’t bringing up this scenario to emphasize the need for more urgent action to fight climate change. Instead, it treated it as a reason to do nothing, on the grounds that the world is screwed no matter what, so why bother trying to save it?
This marks the endpoint of the process of rationalizing inaction whose beginning I witnessed 30-some years ago. It began by denying the fact of global warming, then in the face of evidence admitting it was happening but claiming human activity wasn’t responsible, then arguing that people were causing it but the effects would be tolerable, or preferable to incurring the costs of controlling it, and has now arrived at the position that it’s too late to do anything about it.
The 7-degree calculation, buried in an environmental impact statement from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, assumes that worldwide greenhouse gas emissions continue indefinitely at the same level after 2021. Thus it concedes in advance the failure of the 2015 Paris Agreement on global warming, which is meant to limit further increases in global temperature to roughly half that amount by transitioning away from burning fossil fuels for energy. Trump has already announced his intention to withdraw from the agreement. The NHTSA statement was in support of scrapping one part of the Obama administration’s plan to comply with the agreement, a mandated increase in fuel-efficiency standards for new cars and trucks through 2026 — because we’re all doomed anyway.
By NHTSA’s calculations, the net effect of the Obama plan would provide at best a marginal benefit for the climate, amounting to a small fraction of a degree, compared to the Trump administration’s preferred approach, which is to do nothing. Meeting the Obama standards “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible,” the statement says.
“They made some assumptions to make the number come out where they wanted,” Pettit told me. “They wanted to show their proposal won’t make any significant difference. They got to the number they attribute to the Obama rules by a crazy assumption that after 2021 nobody does anything else to fight global warming. That gets you to the 7 degrees.”
Needless to say, most environmentalists don’t agree that it is not feasible for “the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels,” because it is already starting to happen. The administration proposal seems motivated almost entirely by right-wing ideology and reflexive hostility to anything originating with its predecessor. Not even the auto industry is calling for freezing mileage requirements. Detroit would prefer some leeway in meeting the standards proposed by Obama, which in very general terms require a corporate-fleet average increase to 55 miles per gallon by the mid 2020’s. But carmakers have to design their products years in advance and don’t want the uncertainty of going through a whole new rule-making process, or the ensuing lawsuits from environmentalists and from individual states. Also, they want to be able to sell their cars in other countries, which are trying to limit carbon emissions. The Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association, representing over 1,000 suppliers of automobile parts, submitted a comment on the administration proposal that made these points. The group asserted that freezing mileage standards “would result in a loss of 67,000 direct auto industry jobs with a full impact of 500,000 direct, indirect, and induced jobs by 2025,” compared with letting the Obama rules take effect.
Also, some of those people probably have children too.
Which brings me to Trump, and what this little episode says about him. Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, aptly describes Trump’s philosophy as “nihilism,” the denial of meaning and purpose in human existence. I never thought of Trump possessing any kind of considered philosophy that extended beyond “I’ve got mine,” but maybe I was underestimating him. Someone with the “very good brain” he likes to boast about — his uncle was a professor at MIT, in case you didn’t know — undoubtedly is well versed in the philosophy of Nietzsche. Trump certainly fits the description of one kind of postmodern nihilist found here: “a dehumanized conformist, alienated, indifferent, and baffled, directing psychological energy into hedonistic narcissism or into a deep res-sentiment that often explodes in violence.” If life has no meaning, you might as well take advantage of its pleasures, which is what Trump has been doing all along. Trump, who was born in 1946, can afford not to worry about sea level rise in the year 2100. If worse comes to worst, he can always find a golf course above the flood zone, or put one behind a wall. Apres Trump, le deluge. Or even before then — just ask the residents of North Carolina.
And by the same token, why should he be concerned about adding almost $900 billion to the national debt? Trump won’t be around when the bill comes due, and even if he is, the New York Times just published a 14,000-word article explaining how successful he’s been at wriggling out of paying taxes. Why should he worry about the implications for American democracy of his reckless trampling of civic and political norms? Norms are meant to be broken by people like Trump, who are in the best position to profit from the wreckage.
Of course, nihilism is opposed to Christianity, but I suspect that even the evangelical hucksters who cluster around Trump realize that he is a pagan at heart.
But Trump, as we know, has children, and grandchildren who could well be alive into the next century. Does he think about them at all? To even ask the question is to answer it. I am of the same generation as Trump, and if I outlive him it probably won’t be for too many years. If I had to think of one thing he has done for me, it’s to give me a reason to be glad I’m old.
