Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
August 9, 2019
From fatbergs to microplastics, here’s why what you flush down the toilet matters — and why you should NEVER flush wet wipes 🚽(via NowThis Future)
What You Should & Should Not Flush Down the Toilet
From fatbergs to microplastics, here’s why what you flush down the toilet matters — and why you should NEVER flush wet wipes 🚽(via NowThis Future)
Posted by NowThis Politics on Thursday, August 8, 2019
By Darren Samuelsohn, Politico August 8, 2019
The former secretary of state’s advice came in a little-noticed interview conducted last July as part of an oral history project tied to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and quietly published earlier this summer. The interview amounts to some of her most extensive public comments on impeachment, and a fascinating window into her current thinking on the subject as House Democrats contemplate ousting yet another Republican president.
While President Donald Trump’s name didn’t come up during the hour-long sit-down, the man who bested Clinton in the 2016 general election looms over her answers as she opined from a perspective no one else in American history can claim: First as a young law-school graduate working for the Democrat-led committee that voted to remove Nixon and then more than two decades later as first lady when Republicans tried without success in the late 1990’s to oust her husband, President Bill Clinton.
“I think that it’s such a serious undertaking. Do not pursue it for trivial partisan political purposes. If it does fall to you while you’re in the House to examine abuses of power by the president, be as circumspect and careful as John Doar was,” Clinton said of the Judiciary Committee’s lead impeachment staffer, a Republican who served as a civil rights chief during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
“Restrain yourself from grandstanding and holding news conferences and playing to your base,” Clinton added. “This goes way beyond whose side…you’re on or who’s on your side. And try to be faithful purveyors of the history and the solemnity of the process.”
Hillary Rodham, as she was known when she started as a 26-year old staffer on the House Judiciary Committee — she had not yet passed the bar exam in Washington, D.C. — described in the interview working 16 or 18-hour days without weekends conducting research on the basic tenets of impeachment.
It was January 1974, and one of her first assignments involved learning about the basic procedures for removing a president in both the House and Senate, as well as the history involved in the unsuccessful 1868 attempt to remove President Andrew Johnson over his handling of reconstruction after the Civil War, as well as earlier English common law precedents that inspired the removal section in the Constitution.
Rodham and her colleague on the committee staff, future Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, were assigned the task on a Friday and asked to have the memo on Doar’s desk by the following Tuesday. With so little to go on, she said, the process assumed an ad hoc quality.
“We were trying to impose an understanding of the law and the history combined with a process that would be viewed as fair, providing due process to the president if articles of impeachment were decided,” she said. “So we were trying to rely on precedents as much as we could, but we were kind of making it up based on our best understanding of the law as we researched it.”
Clinton also played a role in helping the committee identify the facts for an impeachment investigation of Nixon surrounding Watergate, the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the Nixon administration’s attempts to cover up its involvement in that effort.
One of the jobs she talked about involved transcribing a White House audio tape of Nixon listening to other tapes — committee aides called it the “tape of tapes” — that he’d been secretly recording of his conversations and phone calls with aides and advisers.
“So, we would sit there with the headphones on, just exhaustingly listening, trying to make out words,” she said. “Some of the transcription already occurred, but some of it was garbled, it was not at all clear. But the tape of tapes was a big revelation to me. I had no idea that he would be taping himself listening to tapes and then coming up with rationalizations. So, he would call somebody into the room, and he would say, ‘I want to play this for you. Now when I said that, here’s what I meant.’ So, it was really a shocking experience.”
That specific experience, Clinton said, helped convince her that Nixon had obstructed justice.
“I think for me it was listening to the tapes, and particularly the so called tape of tapes because it was almost a textbook example of someone trying to get stories straight and getting other people to get their stories straight,” she said.
Doar tried to enforce strict rules that included requiring all aides to maintain their poker faces in hearings and meetings with lawmakers, Clinton said.
“He said, ‘Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t make facial expressions. Don’t portray any opinion. We were there just to make a presentation to the members of the committee.’ So, it was a matter of honor that we would maintain the secrecy that was so critical for this, for this whole investigation,” she said.
Doar’s mandate, Clinton said, also meant ignoring reporters who were staked out in the House office building where the Judiciary Committee worked – and who would pepper aides with questions when they went out for lunch.
“I particularly remember Sam Donaldson who had a really loud yell and he got to know the names of the lawyers, so he would yell, ‘Hillary, Hillary, come over here and talk to me.’ We would just walk by,” she recalled.
The no-leaking rule also went a long way, Clinton said, toward giving credibility to the House proceedings, which resulted in the Judiciary Committee’s passage of three articles of impeachment and Nixon’s resignation before the Senate could hold a trial.
“We did not know where this was going to end up. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t come into it with any preconceived notion that, OK, this is going to be easy. We’re going to lay out all this stuff then the House will impeach and then he’ll be convicted in the Senate. I certainly didn’t do that. I don’t know anybody who did. And because it was such a historic experience, we all felt the weight of that responsibility,” Clinton said. “And John made very clear that we would be betraying our duty as lawyers and our historic obligation if we talked.”
It’s a very different story in 2019, where both Democratic and GOP committee aides coming from their respective partisan silos provide reporters with background updates about the status of the Trump impeachment debate. At the same time, panel leaders including Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler and Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, as well as rank-and-file lawmakers, frequently talk about the process on cable TV and social media.
During Watergate, Clinton said she made up her own mind while working on the House panel that there were some rough guidelines that lawmakers could follow as to what constitutes an impeachable offense.
“Once I had done the research it seemed clear to me that the president was not above the law,” she said. “The president did have certain authorities, certain standing. So it didn’t require that there be a crime charged in order for there to be an impeachable offense. But what that impeachable offense was often keyed to what we think of as criminal behavior.”
“So obstruction of justice is a crime,” she added. “And whether a president is ever charged with obstruction of justice or not, the obstruction of an investigation can represent abuse of power that rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors and therefore be the basis of an article of impeachment.”
“Well, I think that that’s one way of looking at it and it certainly is defensible,” Clinton said. “But I think another way of looking at it is that if you are persuaded that the president has abused power, committed a high crime or misdemeanor then it’s up to the proof that has to be presented in a trial to determine whether two-thirds of the Senate agrees with that. And remember the senators could bring whatever assessment they wanted to this determination. And you couldn’t second guess that, you couldn’t preempt that. It had to be left to them.”
Clinton said she wasn’t surprised by the House votes to impeach Nixon, noting the Judiciary panel chairman and staff “had a pretty fair idea of who was going to vote for it by then.” But she said she didn’t celebrate how the Nixon presidency came to its end.
“I was not at all happy or jubilant about him resigning,” Clinton said. “I thought it was a very sad chapter in our history. I thought the actual departure was a really poignant, painful moment for him and his family as well as for the country. So, I watched it on TV, like I guess everybody else did. And it was a really very unfortunate, sad outcome.”
All of that history, Clinton argued, got lost on House Republicans in 1998 when they advanced two counts of impeachment against her husband – for obstructing justice and lying under oath to a grand jury about his affair with the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky — but then the Senate acquitted him.
“That lesson was not learned,” Clinton said. “And that’s why I think it’s important to keep talking about how serious this is. It should not be done for political partisan purposes. So, those who did it in the late 90’s, those who talk about it now, should go back and study the painstaking approach that the [Watergate] impeachment inquiry staff took. And it was bipartisan. You had a bipartisan staff and you had both Democratic and Republican members of the committee reaching the same conclusions that there were grounds for impeachment.”
Clinton’s relatively minor role on the House Judiciary Committee has been the subject of fierce speculation for years — including the debunked internet rumor that she was fired — but she denied playing a role in the panel’s debate that Nixon was not entitled to his lawyer, James St. Clair, during the impeachment proceedings.
“I was not involved in that,” Clinton replied. “I knew about it. That was really among the senior lawyers led by Doar and the House members. And my memory is that they were very expansive in permitting St. Clair to be privy to information to be part of the process. But I don’t know any more details.”
August 8, 2019
More than 100 intense wildfires have ravaged the Arctic since June and scientists believe that climate change is one of the factors fueling the flames. We head into Siberia, one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, where temperatures are significantly warmer than usual. While the surface of eastern Russia is on fire, its foundation is literally melting away.
One of the coldest places on Earth is melting away
More than 100 intense wildfires have ravaged the Arctic since June and scientists believe that climate change is one of the factors fueling the flames. We head into Siberia, one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, where temperatures are significantly warmer than usual. While the surface of eastern Russia is on fire, its foundation is literally melting away.
Posted by CNN on Thursday, August 8, 2019
The human relationship with the land we live on has evolved over the hundreds of thousands of years humans have roamed the planet, but no period has seen as dramatic change as the last century when humans used land in new ways to extract wealth and build a modern economy.
Now, a landmark new U.N. report warns, humans face a moment of reckoning on how we use the planet’s land: human practices like deforestation threaten to undermine the role nature has played soaking up carbon dioxide emissions for more than a century. At the same time, climate change could threaten our ability to use the land, risking food security and vulnerable communities at risk of extreme weather.
“As we’ve continued to pour more and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the Earth’s system has responded and it’s continued to absorb more and more,” says Louis Verchot, a lead study author and scientist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. But “this additional gift from nature is limited. It’s not going to continue forever.”
Today, emissions from land use — think of practices like agriculture and logging — cause nearly a quarter of human induced greenhouse emissions, according to the report, authored by scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. climate science body.
Still, land elsewhere on the planet has balanced the effects of those emissions. In recent years, forests, wetlands and other land systems have soaked up 11.2 gigatons more carbon dioxide than they have emitted on an annual basis. That’s a greater quantity of carbon dioxide than released by the world’s coal-fired power plants in a given year. But a slew of human practices including deforestation, soil degradation and the destruction of land-based ecosystems threaten to halt that trend, potentially driving land to release more carbon dioxide than it absorbs.
Climate advocates billed the report as a wake-up call. Much of the attention around addressing climate change has focused on shifting the global energy system, but to keep warming at bay will require nature-based solutions that consider how humans use land, climate scientists say.
The report — at more than 1,300 pages in length — lays out a number of opportunties to use land to reverse the trend. And many of the solutions are already at hand, if governments have the wherewithal to implement them. “We don’t have to wait for some sort of new technological innovation,” says study author Pamela McElwee, an associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”
Significantly reducing deforestation while increasing the rates of restoring forests ranks among the most urgent solutions in order to retain any hope of keeping temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels by the end of the century. Reducing deforestation alone can stop annual emissions equivalent to twice those of India’s, scientists found.
The report also highlights how emissions from agriculture contribute significantly to climate change, and the opportunity to address it by rethinking diets. As global demand for food has grown, food producers have converted forests into agricultural land, leading to a release of carbon dioxide stored in trees. At the same time, more than a quarter of food goes to waste, according to the report.
With those trends in mind, scientists say a shift away from eating meat toward plant-based diets could yield big dividends in the fight against climate change. Reduced meat consumption means lower emissions from livestock and the fertilizer needed to sustain them but also provides an opportunity to reforest land that farmers would have otherwise used for grazing. Rethinking the human diet across the globe could drive emissions reductions of up to 8 gigatons annually, according to the report, greater than an entire year of emissions in the U.S.
But, while these changes are technically feasible, there are a number of barriers to adoption. To achieve the greatest emissions reductions by shifting diets would require most of the world to go vegan, for instance, requiring a fight against entrenched agricultural interests and cultural preferences.
And despite year’s of research underscoring the threat of deforestation the practice has worsened in some of the most critical areas. In recent years, deforestation has accelerated in the Amazon rain forest in both Brazil and Colombia, with a recent report from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research showing that the practice had increased 40% in the previous two months compared with the same period the year prior.
And, while that finding alone is alarming, so is the response of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who disputed the figures and fired the head of the government agency charged with collecting deforestation data. “We cannot accept sensationalism,” said Bolsonaro, who has denied the science of climate change, according to a report from the AFP news agency, “or the disclosure of inaccurate numbers that cause great damage to Brazil’s image.”
The new IPCC report comes less than a year after the body’s 2018 report on the dire effects of 1.5°C of warming, which warned that climate change will bring catastrophic levels at even that level of warming. In its wake, students walked out of school across the globe, some governments committed to reducing their emissions and activists in the U.S rallied for a Green New Deal, all citing the report’s impact.
Much like last year’s, the new IPCC report highlights a number of shocking risks. The surface temperature on land has already warmed more than 1.5°C since the beginning of the industrial era, and continued warming threatens to cause a slew of extreme weather events while threatening food security and other essentials required for human life. Whether this report can inspire a similar wave of action remains to be seen.
August 7, 2019
“Help us,” begs a doctor in a hospital that’s been bombed multiple times, “We’re human beings.”
In Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in Syria, hospitals, markets and schools have been systematically targeted. CNN’s Arwa Damon takes us inside the besieged city to meet children, mothers, farmers and others who are struggling to stay alive.
Trying to stay alive in Syria’s last rebel-held city
“Help us,” begs a doctor in a hospital that’s been bombed multiple times, “We’re human beings.”In Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in Syria, hospitals, markets and schools have been systematically targeted. CNN’s Arwa Damon takes us inside the besieged city to meet children, mothers, farmers and others who are struggling to stay alive.
Posted by CNN on Wednesday, August 7, 2019
LOS ANGELES (AP) — What if alternative energy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? That’s the provocative question explored in the documentary “Planet of the Humans,” which is backed and promoted by filmmaker Michael Moore and directed by one of his longtime collaborators. It premiered last week at his Traverse City Film Festival.
The film, which does not yet have distribution, is a low-budget but piercing examination of what the filmmakers say are the false promises of the environmental movement and why we’re still “addicted” to fossil fuels. Director Jeff Gibbs takes on electric cars, solar panels, windmills, biomass, biofuel, leading environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club, and even figures from Al Gore and Van Jones, who served as Barack Obama’s special adviser for green jobs, to 350.org leader Bill McKibben, a leading environmentalist and advocate for grassroots climate change movements.
Gibbs, who produced Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” didn’t set out to take on the environmental movement. He said he wanted to know why things weren’t getting better. But when he started pulling on the thread, he and Moore said they were shocked to find how inextricably entangled alternative energy is with coal and natural gas, since they say everything from wind turbines to electric car charging stations are tethered to the grid, and even how the Koch brothers are tied to solar panel production through their glass production business.
“It turned out the wakeup call was about our own side,” Gibbs said in a phone interview. “It was kind of crushing to discover that the things I believed in weren’t real, first of all, and then to discover not only are the solar panels and wind turbines not going to save us … but (also) that there is this whole dark side of the corporate money … It dawned on me that these technologies were just another profit center.”
Both know the film is going to be a “tough pill to swallow.” It was a difficult eye-opener for them as well.
“We all want to feel good about something like the electric car, but in the back of your head somewhere you’ve thought, ‘Yeah, but where is the electricity coming from? And it’s like, ‘I don’t want to think about that, I’m glad we have electric cars,'” Moore said. “I’ve passed by the windmill farms, and oh it’s so beautiful to see them going, and don’t tell me that we’ve gone too far now and it isn’t going to save us … Well, my feeling is just hit me with everything. I’m like let’s just deal with it now, all at once.”
It’s part of the reason why they had to make it independently. Gibbs said he tried for years to get an environmental group on board to help offset the costs, only to be turned down at every door. He was further disheartened when, in the film, he approaches people like Jones, McKibben and a local Sierra Club leader, and asks them about their stance on biofuel and biomass. Biomass, like wood and garbage, can be used to produce heat and is considered a renewable source of energy. It can also be converted to gas or liquid biofuels that can be burned for energy.
He finds every one ill-prepared to comment on their stance about the biomass process, which the documentary says requires cutting down enormous numbers of trees to produce the woodchips that are converted into energy. Neither Jones nor McKibben responded to request for comment from The Associated Press.
“I like so many people in the film and I’m one of those people who wanted to believe all of these years that that was the right path,” Moore said. “(But) I refuse to let us die out. I refuse to let this planet die.”
They were even nervous to show it to the festival crowd, where they expected maybe a “50-50 response.” Instead, they got a standing ovation. And there were even members of The Sierra Club there.
“It’s up to people who actually share the same values to sometimes call each other out and bring out the uncomfortable truths,” Gibbs said. “This is not a film by climate change deniers, this is a film by people who really care about the environment.”
Although the findings will be disheartening, both Gibbs and Moore say they hope that it inspires people to reset and start thinking differently.
“Now we can begin to come up with the right solutions that might make a difference … The film doesn’t have the answers but it will get us asking a better set of questions,” Gibbs said. “I really do trust that when millions of people are discussing an issue, answers will emerge … This is what we do as humans, we solve problems, but we’ve got to have the right questions.”
Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter:
A pair of mass shootings rocked the nation over the weekend, leaving more than 30 dead and dozens more injured in two cities across the country.
A suspect opened fire inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday morning, leaving 22 people dead and injuring dozens more in the Mexican border city. Just hours later across the country, another shooter opened fire at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Nine people died, including the alleged shooter’s sister, and 27 were injured.
The El Paso shooting marked the deadliest of the year, and the Dayton shooting marked the 251st mass shooting this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Sunday was just the 216th day in the calendar year.
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, one of the most outspoken coaches in the NBA, spoke about the mass shootings on Monday at USA Basketball training camp in Las Vegas. Kerr, one of coach Gregg Popovich’s assistants for the upcoming FIBA World Cup, is a longtime advocate for gun control in the United States and is constantly using his platform to raise awareness on the issue.
Gun control, he said, is always in the front of his mind.
“Somebody could walk in the door in the gym right now and start spraying us with an AR-15,” Kerr said, “They could. It might happen because we’re all vulnerable, whether we go to a concert, a church, the mall or go to the movie theater or a school.
“It’s up to us as Americans to demand change from the gutless leadership that continues to allow this to happen and continues to somehow claim the second amendment is doing its job. The Second Amendment is about the right to defend yourself. The only thing that Second Amendment is doing is leading to mass murder right now. This is all just insanity.”
Kerr’s Twitter feed has been full of posts and reposts calling for stricter gun control, criticizing Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) since the shootings.
Though he’s clearly frustrated with the lack of action in Congress, Kerr does think change is just around the corner.
“It’s going to happen. The momentum is building,” Kerr said, “People are more and more frustrated in our country. I think at this point, the vast majority of people in this country have had it. Now it’s a matter of taking action.”
Kerr did make it clear that he doesn’t have an issue with guns as a whole. It’s the assault-style weapons that he feels, like so many others in the United States, don’t belong in the hands of the public.
“A lot of my friends have had guns. They’ve had them in gun lockers. It was kept safely away. They weren’t carrying around AR-15’s,” Kerr said, “They had hunting rifles. This is not what it’s about. This is not about someone’s ability to own a gun.
“It’s about someone’s ability to have a military style assault rifle with huge magazines. The cops got there in Dayton in one minute after the shooting started. In one minute, the shooter was killed from what I gather. But he killed nine people in one minute because of the gun and the weapon he had. We’re really going to say as Americans we should allow him to carry an AR-15? It’s ridiculous.”
Kerr will be by Popovich’s side when USA Basketball heads to China for the FIBA World Cup later this month. Popovich, who is just as outspoken as Kerr, was asked Tuesday if he thought the team could be a welcome distraction for the country in the wake of the latest shootings.
While he didn’t discredit that idea, he had a much more blunt request of lawmakers instead.
“I think that, you know, the situation we’re all living in now, everybody looks for a little bit of distraction in some way, shape or form,” Popovich said, via Eric Woodyard of the Desert News.
“It’d be a lot better if people in power got off their asses and got something done.”
Though he knows USA Basketball can’t realistically solve any problems in the United States with its performance in the FIBA World Cup — regardless of how they do in the tournament, which kicks off on August 31 and runs through September 15 — Popovich at least hopes they can be a model for the country to build off of.
“We can’t fix the divisiveness in our country,” Popovich said Monday, “But what we can do is be a great example of how people can come together for a common goal and achieve it.
“It’s our responsibility to not only become the best team we can be, but it’s the way we conduct ourselves with USA on our shirts. We’re representing a lot of people.”
August 3, 2019
Moscow has 12 million people, and no system to recycle.
That’s created a garbage crisis not just for the city, but the entire country.
Moscow has No System to Recycle and it's Starting to Poison People
Moscow has 12 million people, and no system to recycle.That’s created a garbage crisis not just for the city, but the entire country.
Posted by VICE News on Friday, August 2, 2019
Show this handy video to all of your conservative friends who claim that President Obama didn’t accomplish anything in his two terms. He makes President Trump look like a lazy amateur.
What did President Obama do for America?
Show this handy video to all of your conservative friends who claim that President Obama didn't accomplish anything in his two terms. He makes President Trump look like a lazy amateur.
Posted by Occupy Democrats on Saturday, July 22, 2017
Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) announced Wednesday that he will not seek reelection in 2020, becoming the fifth congressional Republican in just two weeks to announce an imminent retirement.
“This will be my final term,” he said at a press conference in Texas.
Citing frustrations with gridlock in Congress and the three-term limit on committee chairman positions, the eight-term congressman said he wanted to “leave on my own terms.”
Conaway was first elected to represent Texas’ 11th Congressional District in 2004. He’s the ranking Republican on the House Agriculture Committee and is also a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee and the House Armed Services Committee. Conaway previously gained national attention for his role helming the Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russian election interference.
Conaway’s retirement decision comes on the heels of similar announcements made by GOP Reps. Pete Olson of Texas, Paul Mitchell of Michigan, Martha Roby of Alabama and Rob Bishop of Utah ― all of whom have said they won’t be running for reelection next year.
As The Hill’s Reid Wilson noted on Tuesday, House Republicans ― now in the minority for the first time in eight years ― are concerned that a “massive wave of retirements” could undermine their chances of winning back their majority in Congress in 2020.
“We are in the minority. That is never much fun in the House,” a senior Republican member of Congress told Wilson, speaking anonymously. “The odds are against us retaking the majority.”
Marina Fang contributed reporting.