James.galbraith

A federal appeals court on Thursday said Arkansas can’t enforce its ban on transgender children receiving gender affirming medical care.

A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a judge’s ruling temporarily blocking the state from enforcing the 2021 law. A trial is scheduled for October before the same judge on whether to permanently block the law.

Arkansas was the first state to enact such a ban, which prohibits doctors from providing gender confirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18 years old, or from referring them to other providers for the treatment. There are no doctors who perform gender affirming surgery on minors in the state.

“Because the minor’s sex at birth determines whether or not the minor can receive certain types of medical care under the law, Act 626 discriminates on the basis of sex,” the court’s ruling Thursday said.

The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law on behalf of four transgender youth and their families, as well as two doctors who provide gender confirming treatments.

Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed the ban last year, but GOP lawmakers overrode him to enact the law.

Multiple medical groups, including the American Medical Association, oppose the ban and have said the care is safe if properly administered. The Justice Department has also opposed the ban as unconstitutional.

Arkansas argued that the restriction is within the state’s authority to regulate medical practices. An attorney for the ACLU told the appeals panel in June that reinstating the restriction would create uncertainty for families around the state.

Hutchinson vetoed the ban following pleas from pediatricians, social workers and the parents of transgender youth who said the measure would harm a community already at risk for depression and suicide. Hutchinson said the law went too far, especially since it wouldn’t exempt youth already receiving the care.

By Travis Gettys A data hack reveals the right-wing Liberty Counsel may have violated IRS rules against political activity. The hacktivist site Enlace Hacktivista released a 25-gigabyte Liberty Counsel database containing nearly seven years of donor records, which show that 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations controlled by the evangelical organization encouraged supporters to vote for Donald Trump — an apparent violation of IRS rules prohibiting those entities from endorsing political candidates, reported The Intercept. “Noticing a worrying trend of far-right and anti-abortion activists alignin…

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The way Google calculates the climate impact of your flights has changed, the BBC has discovered. From the report: Flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than before. That's because the world's biggest search engine has taken a key driver of global warming out of its online carbon flight calculator. "Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry's climate impacts from its pages" says Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace. With Google hosting nine out of every 10 online searches, this could have wide repercussions for people's travel decisions. The company said it made the change following consultations with its "industry partners." It affects the carbon calculator embedded in the company's "Google Flights" search tool. If you have ever tried to find a flight on Google, you will have come across Google Flights. It appears towards the top of search results and allows you to scour the web for flights and fares. It also offers to calculate the emissions generated by your journey. Google says this feature is designed "to help you make more sustainable travel choices." Yet in July, Google decided to exclude all the global warming impacts of flying except CO2. Some experts say Google's calculations now represent just over half of the real impact on the climate of flights.

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The move has drawn criticism from some economists who argue that loan forgiveness could worsen already high inflation.

After months of uncertainty, the Biden administration officially announced Wednesday that it will cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for many borrowers. Supporters took the move as a win that would help lift the burden of student loans for millions of people, including many of the neediest borrowers. But it’s also drawn criticism, including from economists who argue that loan forgiveness could worsen inflation during a time when prices are already climbing rapidly.

Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, said on Twitter that student loan debt relief “raises demand and increases inflation.” Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and a top Obama administration economic adviser, tweeted: “Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.”

Conservatives have also attacked the policy and said it would fuel inflation. Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said the policy would “give away even more government money to elites with higher salaries” rather than help working families who are struggling to keep up with rising prices.

Many economists say it’s plausible for the policy to increase inflation. If people have less student loan debt to pay off, that frees up a portion of their budgets that they would otherwise spend on their loans. That might make people more likely to purchase things like new couches or cars. And as demand increases and consumers spend more, that tends to drive prices up.

For now, that’s still hypothetical. Whether student loan forgiveness ends up driving inflation higher — and if it does, by how much — will depend on how people change their spending after their loan balances are reduced or wiped out entirely.

Will this make inflation worse? It depends on how consumers change their spending.

Much of this rests on how much loan forgiveness actually leads to an increase in consumer spending. The administration said it would cancel $10,000 in student loans per borrower and $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants (borrowers are eligible if their individual income is less than $125,000 or under $250,000 for married couples). It also extended the repayment pause through the end of the year for the last time.

Nobody has been required to pay their student loans since the start of the pandemic, meaning that payments have been suspended and interest hasn’t accumulated, so people aren’t going to see the same immediate budget impact they would if they had been obligated to make payments.

Michael Pugliese, an economist at Wells Fargo, said he expected the policy to likely only have a marginal effect on inflation since borrowers aren’t actually gaining cash, but rather seeing an increase in their wealth. People might be inclined to spend more if they received a check in the mail or if their annual salary increased, he said, but it’s unclear how dramatically people would increase their spending if they had less student loan debt to pay off.

Economists at Goldman Sachs and Moody’s Analytics have also predicted that the policy will likely have a minor impact on inflation in the near term. “We would expect the effects on inflation to be similarly small,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a note on Thursday. “However, the end of the payment pause and the resumption of monthly payments looks likely to more than fully offset the small boost to consumption from the debt relief program.”

Pugliese also said it was unclear how big of an impact this would have on the total US economy, since the majority of Americans don’t owe student loans (roughly 43 million Americans have some federal loan debt).

Still, Pugliese said there were many unknowns and it was possible for the policy to have a more sizable impact on inflation if it significantly boosts spending among those experiencing debt relief. And he said that even a small bump in inflation isn’t so great, since prices are already up 8.5 percent from a year ago, according to some estimates. (The Federal Reserve usually targets a slower and more stable 2 percent annual inflation rate.)

“Additional inflation when you’re already so, so high is a lot different than say, marginal inflation when it’s 1.5 or 2 percent,” he said.

Marc Goldwein, the senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the administration’s student loan forgiveness would only put upward pressure on prices since it would lead to increased consumer spending. He noted, though, that it was unclear to what degree that will happen.

“With an already overheated economy, more spending is actually going to raise prices,” Goldwein said. “It’s going to raise prices on everything from clothing to gasoline to furniture to housing because there’s more money being spent versus being saved in the form of paying down your debt.”

An analysis from the organization, which advocates for policies that reduce the deficit, found that the administration’s debt cancellation and repayment pause extension would cost the United States between $440 billion and $600 billion over the next decade. The policy would likely cost more than double the amount saved through the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, the analysis found.

Some proponents of student debt cancellation argue that the policy would have no impact on inflation. Alí R. Bustamante, the deputy director of the Worker Power and Economic Security program at the progressive Roosevelt Institute, said that an increase in wealth might not lead to much higher spending since consumers are likely to use that money to pay off other debts. They could also use that money to build up their savings, as many households have done during the pandemic, he said.

“So many of these folks actually lack any considerable economic buffer,” Bustamante said. “When you just take into consideration the demographics of it, you can see that any kind of increase in spending is actually very small.”

Bustamante said the debt cancellation would provide some relief to Americans struggling to deal with inflation since it puts more money in their pockets and helps reduce the racial wealth gap, since Black students are much more likely to take out student loans and tend to borrow larger amounts. He also said it would help Americans who didn’t complete college, but still took on student loan debt.

But it remains to be seen how the Biden administration’s actions could influence people’s expectations for future debt cancellation.

Beth Akers, a senior fellow focusing on the economics of higher education at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that based on recent analyses, the policy would probably have a small impact on overall inflation. But she said she worried that students could expect more debt relief in the future, which could boost demand for college and the amount they’re willing to pay. That could then lead to higher education institutions driving up costs as a result of that increased demand, she said.

“Nobody really knows how strongly students will respond to the idea that there might be another cancellation in the future,” Akers said. “So whether or not this is inflationary for higher education specifically will depend on their perceptions of whether or not this is going to happen again.”

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According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, researchers at MIT describe new aluminum-sulfur batteries that are made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials and can be charged in less than a minute. "The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee," reports MIT News. The caveat with this new kind of battery is that it requires a variety of molten salts that need to be "close to the boiling point of water." From the report: In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25 C (77 F). Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction. The chloro-aluminate salt they chose "essentially retired these runaway dendrites, while also allowing for very rapid charging," Sadoway says. "We did experiments at very high charging rates, charging in less than a minute, and we never lost cells due to dendrite shorting." What's more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. "As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat," Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, "you'd store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you'd draw electricity after dark, and you'd do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature." This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity. For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year's European Inventor Award. The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway says. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, "if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don't have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility." So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve these chargers. "The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale," Sadoway says, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles. If you're looking for a detailed breakdown of how this new battery works, we recommend you check out Ars Technica's article here.

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After years of revelations about strange lights in the sky, first hand reports from Navy pilots about UFOs, and governmental investigations, Congress seems to have admitted something startling in print: it doesn't believe all UFOs are "man-made." Motherboard reports: Buried deep in a report that's an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, a budget that governs America's clandestine services, Congress made two startling claims. The first is that "cross-domain transmedium threats to the United States national security are expanding exponentially." The second is that it wants to distinguish between UFOs that are human in origin and those that are not: "Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena," the document states. The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government's study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin. The standard line is typically that, if UFOs exist, then they're likely advanced -- although human-made -- vehicles. Obama refused to confirm the existence of aliens but did say that people have seen a lot of strange stuff in the sky lately when asked directly on The Late Show with James Corden, for example. But now Congress seems to want to specifically distinguish between objects that are "man-made" and those that are not. The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government's study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin. A large question, of course, is why Congress is seemingly admitting this now, in public. After all, lawmakers are privy to classified information that the general public isn't. "It strains credulity to believe that lawmakers would include such extraordinary language in public legislation without compelling evidence," Marik von Rennenkampff, an Obama-era DoD official, said in an op-ed in The Hill about the budget. According to the op-ed, the comments were first noticed by UFO researcher Douglas Johnson. "This implies that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee believe (on a unanimous, bipartisan basis) that some UFOs have non-human origins," von Rennenkampff continued. "After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-'man-made' UFOs if such objects did not exist?" "Make no mistake: One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development."

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The Interior Department’s internal watchdog said former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke lied to investigators who were probing whether he wrongly blocked two native tribes from opening a casino in Connecticut in 2017 — and that he pressed the office to postpone Wednesday's report until after the November election that he is hoping will return him to Congress.

The results of the inspector general’s investigation, which began after POLITICO reported lobbyists and Nevada lawmakers pressured Zinke to reject the casino despite an approval recommendation from agency analysts, comes as Zinke is running for a Montana congressional seat. And it follows an IG report in February that found Zinke had also not been honest in explaining his actions relating to a personal real estate deal he was negotiating while head of Interior with the then-chairman of oilfield services company Halliburton.

"We found that Secretary Zinke and the [Chief of Staff] made statements to [Inspector General] investigators with the overall intent to mislead them,” the office said in the new report. “We found that both Secretary Zinke and COS made statements that presented an inaccurate version of the circumstances in which the [Department of Interior] made key decisions. As a result, we concluded that Secretary Zinke and COS did not comply with their duty of candor when questioned about their respective involvement in the DOI’s decision."

The agency noted that Zinke, who served in Congress before joining the Trump administration and narrowly won the Republican primary in June, asked the IG to keep its findings under wraps until after the November election, a request the agency said was not in keeping with its practices.

“In his comments, Secretary Zinke cited DOJ guidelines and contended that we should postpone release of this report until after the conclusion of the November 2022 election in which he is seeking public office,” the report states.

A lawyer for Zinke blasted the report and its timing.

“On the eve of an election, the IG has released a misleading and inaccurate report that suggested Secretary Zinke lacked candor in his interview with IG agents,” Zinke's attorney, Danny C. Onorato, said in an emailed statement. “That is wrong. The content of the IG report and the timing of its release will be seen for what it is, another political smear.”

Scott Hommel, Zinke’s chief of staff while at Interior, could not be reached for comment.

The inspector general’s office said it had forwarded its findings to the Justice Department in 2018, but that the department in 2021 declined to pursue its own investigation. Today’s report doesn’t address whether Interior mishandled the casino permits, saying the matter was still being fought over in federal court at the time of its investigation.

A federal judge in 2018 dismissed the original lawsuit that one of the tribes and the state of Connecticut filed against Interior over the rejection, but allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaint to add allegations of political tampering in the process. The tribes then dropped the suit in March 2019.

The investigation stemmed from tribes’ accusations that Zinke overrode Interior staff recommendations to approve the casinos, and that he instead acted inappropriately to block the project as a favor to lobbyists from MGM Resorts International, which owned a competing casino, and lawmakers from Nevada.

The report lays out a series of multiple phone calls, text messages and emails going back and forth between Zinke and MGM representatives, including a political consultant the report describes as having “a close personal relationship” with Zinke. The consultant told the IG’s office he brought up the casino issue with Zinke during a skiing trip the two took together in March 2017, according to the report.

“The Political Consultant told us that he regularly ate dinner with Secretary Zinke, primarily at the Secretary’s residence in Washington, DC, and that he discussed Casino’s argument against the Tribes’ amendments with Secretary Zinke during one or more of those dinners,” the report states.

Despite these multiple meetings and communications, Zinke told investigators that he had not discussed the issue with anyone outside the Interior Department.

“OIG investigators also asked Secretary Zinke about any discussions he may have had with individuals outside the DOI about the Tribes’ ... requests” the report states. “They specifically asked the Secretary, ‘Did ... you discuss, uh, outside of — outside of, say the DOI personnel, did you have these same discussions with — with representatives from the Tribes, the states? Others?’ Secretary Zinke responded, ‘I didn’t — no.’”

Zinke also denied discussing the casino issue with a U.S. senator, despite the senator telling investigators that he spoke to Zinke at length on that very issue. Previous reporting showed the person to be former Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, who called Zinke to urge him to decline the tribes’ applications.

“The U.S. Senator said he and Secretary Zinke discussed the amendments in detail ... in fact, the Senator reiterated to us that discussing the amendments was the purpose of the call,” the report states. “The U.S. Senator also stated that he was sure he asked the Secretary not to approve the Tribes’ amendments and that his communications to the Secretary were clear.”

Overall, the agency found that Zinke’s was the only testimony that didn’t fit in with that from multiple other people involved, the report concludes.

“We drew this conclusion in large part based on the content and extent of the documentary evidence that we reviewed, as well as the interviews we conducted with the U.S. Senator, the Casino lobbyists, the Associate Deputy Secretary, the [Interior] attorneys, and other witnesses,” the report states. “We note that the witnesses’ statements to OIG investigators and their emails and text messages were consistent with each other and generally conflicted with Secretary Zinke’s statements to us.”

While Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker takes full advantage of his “minority business” red seal, he also spends a lot of time on the campaign trail condemning the very federal programs that offer Black business owners a fair chance at success, as first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). 

Walker’s company, Renaissance Man Food Services, has taken full advantage of being “a certified minority-owned food company” and winner of “Marriott’s 2016 Diversity Supplier of the year” and the “Marriott International Diversity & Inclusion Award” in 2014, per their website. But during a Hall County, Georgia, Republican event in July, Walker launched into the usual GOP rhetoric of dragging the designation of “minority-owned” as “affirmative action.”  

“They have regulations for everything … I found out that I was Black, so my company was a minority-owned business. Like wow, a minority-owned business, what does that mean? It means you’ve got to fill out all of these forms,” Walker said. “I was like, ‘I got to fill out forms to be Black?’”

RELATED STORY: Herschel Walker is not an ethical person and he shouldn’t be running for Senate

The AJC reports that upon winning their awards, the company said:

“Renaissance Man Food Services is one of our longstanding and extremely successful diverse supplier partnerships … Owned and operated by Mr. Herschel Walker, Renaissance Man has served as an integral food partner to our Courtyard Brand, supplying chicken products to the majority of these properties throughout the United States.”

But during a Republican roundtable in an Atlanta neighborhood, Walker took a very different tone about minority-owned businesses.

“I didn’t want to be a Black-owned business … I wanted to be a business,” Walker said.

And when asked about the difficulties of being a minority business owner and how the grants and support they can receive can often help making opportunities equal, the AJC reports the Heisman Trophy winner replied: “There’s always room for affirmative action, but you have to put the right person at the table.”

But Walker’s double standard attitude really is the least of his problems.

As we’ve reported at Daily Kos, Walker’s lies are ubiquitous.

The GOP and Trump-endorsed Walker has lied about everything from graduating from the University of Georgia, the AJC reported, to hiding the fact that he had any children other than his one 22-year-old son Christian, to the mammoth exaggerations about his business acumen, to the tall tale about the time he founded (or co-founded) the veteran's organization Patriot Support—which he did not. He even recently tried to deny that former President Donald Trump ever said that the 2020 election was stolen.  

It’s no wonder Walker has continued to waffle on debates against Georgia’s Democratic incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock.

As reported by Georgia Public Radio (GPB) in early August, Walker agreed to a debate against Warnock in Savannah on Oct. 14. The debate is sponsored by the mammoth conglomerate Nexstar Media Group, “which owns several television stations in Georgia, including WSAV in Savannah,” according to GPB.

In an email to GPB, Walker’s campaign team said it had accepted the Nexstar debate because the "format and the moderators are fair and would allow each candidate equal opportunity to share their message.”

But it’s also extremely likely that the Walker camp really wanted this particular debate because, according to the terms as published on GPB, the “topic[s] will be provided to the campaigns prior to the broadcast,” although “specific questions will not.”

One of the big messages from people big angry about President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan is that it’s just wrong to borrow money and not pay it back, even if you were 17 when the decision was made to borrow the money and it cannot be discharged through bankruptcy like most other debts and the interest means your debt is growing despite your monthly payments. Gosh, lucky for those people there are no other recent cases of government loans being forgiven! 

Oh. Wait. Hang on. What’s that you’re saying about the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) forgiving $10.2 million in loans, with an average amount of $72,500 forgiven? (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) Huh. Well, I’m sure none of the people angry about student loan forgiveness benefited from that program. 

Uh … whoops.

RELATED STORY: Biden exceeds expectations with student debt relief announcement

That’s more than $16 million to congressional Republicans alone. Right-wing media organizations also took a lot of money:

And that’s not even getting into the random well-to-do Republicans venting about student loan forgiveness at the country club after their businesses got PPP money forgiven.

It’s not just PPP, either. Under certain other circumstances, Republicans are happy to embrace people who get out of debts:

Then there’s the crowd that’s yelling about how unfair it is for some people to benefit while others don’t, be they people who already paid off their student loans or people who never had any to begin with. About that:

Tens of millions of people’s lives are changing for the better, and all some people can think to do is be mad about it. That says a lot … about the angry people and the political ideology encouraging their rage.

RELATED STORY: Republicans screech about student debt cancellation, while borrowers cry in relief

Republicans didn’t even wait for President Joe Biden to announce up to $20,000 in student debt relief before they started screeching about how terrible it would be for people who don’t have student debt and people who already paid off their student debt. The screeching has been going on for as long as debt cancellation has been discussed, but it reached a fever pitch as Biden’s announcement approached. Hours before, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called debt cancellation, “a slap in the face to working Americans who sacrificed to pay their debt or made different career choices to avoid debt.”

That was the polite version. There’s been a lot of performative Republican weeping over this, some of it extremely hypocritical (of course), and sprinkled lavishly with insults toward the 45 million people in this country with student debt, and the 60% of white college students and 86% of Black college students in school right now who have had to take out loans. There were also plenty of insults and accusations of vote-buying toward Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

But what about the people who just learned that they will be benefiting from the move? What are they saying, and what kind of difference can it make in their lives? Anne Helen Petersen collected some testimonials about the impact student debt relief will have, and I defy you to read it without finding that the room has suddenly gotten very dusty.

RELATED STORY: Biden exceeds expectations with student debt relief announcement

“This forgiveness will save my family $500 a month,” one person wrote. “That’s moving into a larger apartment, so that our future (much wanted!) baby could have a room. I don’t know if people who graduated pre-2008 crash truly understand what it means to not have the family you crave because you got an education.” 

“A 19 year old albatross on my neck, gone in an instant,” wrote another. “I’m so happy, you have no idea! I had Pell grants but my outstanding balance is (was?) $9,293.53. Oldest loan dated 09/30/2003. No politician has ever done so much for me in my entire life! No loan payment means more fresh fruit and veg in our fridge, more books for our boys and now I can afford to get new clothes too. I’m in total disbelief!”

Petersen has many more amazing stories, and expect to see more like this in the days and weeks to come:

There are also plenty of people coming forward to say they actually don’t feel angry that this comes after they paid off their own loans:

Everyone is not terrible. Being terrible is a choice that supporters of one of the major political parties are making, but it’s not universal. Student debt cancellation is a great thing in a lot of people’s lives—as they’re telling us, and we can be happy for them. We can understand how it’s a good thing that millions of lives are getting easier and choices are opening up for people. Even if we’re not personally benefitting from this right now. 

Back in June, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the West Virginia v. EPA case that absolutely gutted the federal government’s ability to do anything about the major cause of the climate crisis. As April Siese reported at the time, the 6-3 ruling from the conservatives on the court made it impossible for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to place limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, in spite of the clear intention of the Clean Air Act.

In that opinion, the conservative majority climbed onto a high horse to make an extended claim about the importance of specific legislative language to address this issue, saying the issue was too important to be handled merely through regulation and that the “broad consensus to pass legislation” as required in the Constitution means that “any new laws would enjoy wide social acceptance.” Most importantly, the ruling insists that there must be “clear congressional authorization” for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gasses. 

Well … now there is. Because down in the text of the just-signed Inflation Reduction Act is clear language that amends the Clean Air Act to address “any greenhouse gas” as well as listing a set of gases already fitting that category. The court demanded specific language. Now they have it. 

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As The New York Times reports, the purpose and result of the legislation is crystal clear—clear enough that Republicans are fuming that this is another thing they missed.

Don't listen to Republicans trying to fuel their Resentment Industrial Complex.

The Republican rising star rallied for the lightning-rod candidate the day before the election.

When it comes to the state of our political parties, a new NBC News poll has more bits to chew on, and as usual a good bit of it can be summarized into "a good chunk of the Republican base is unhinged." Most voters agree that "investigations into alleged wrongdoing" by part-time Mar-a-Lago resident Donald Trump should continue—but only 1 in 5 Republicans can agree to that.

This is either because 4 in 5 Republicans seriously believe that Dear Golfing Leader is being politically persecuted for being too glorious for his political rivals to tolerate, God help us, or because 4 in 5 Republicans believe that Captain Golfboy should be allowed to get away with federal crimes if he wants to—in which case God help us and then some.

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NBC might have buried the lede, though. Another question asks Republicans whether they support Donald Trump more than they support the Republican Party, or support the party over Donald Trump, and again it shows that a good chunk of the Republican base isn't in it for the Republicanism. They're in it for the preening, racist fascism.

Just 50% of Republican voters say they are more loyal to the Republican Party than to Donald Trump himself, down from 58% a few months ago. And 41% now say they support Trump over the party, up from 34%.

In that little number, we see why House and Senate Republicans continue to defend Trump even in the comical case of "he was discovered to have stolen classified nuclear weapons documents after losing office, taking them to his spy-riddled private Florida club." The Republican Party would be a rump party if it wasn't for Trump. He was the one who collected the Dear Leader-driven fascists, the violent, the racist, the Americans willing to believe any hoax and invent a few of their own, and turn them into his own private voting army.

Forty-one percent of Republican voters don't give a damn about fiscal austerity or tax policies or any of the rest of what the party's top officials try to sell them. They're in it for the shouting. They're here for the fake promises to build invisible border walls and for the guy willing to do crimes to make their imagined enemies pay.

Eighty percent of Republicans agree that it's outrageous to investigate Donald Trump for doing crimes, and of that number, half think Donald Trump being able to get away with things is more important than the party itself.

This is the schism that just cost Rep. Liz Cheney her political career. She was unwilling to abide an actual coup attempt by the Trumpist wing of the party—and the rest of the Republican Party's leadership, cowards to a person, savaged her for it. Her voters savaged her for it. If 40% believe Trump is more important than the party itself, then that's 40% of Republican voters who will absolutely support a coup over holding elections. If 80% of Republican voters don't think Trump should even be investigated for criminal acts such as violent coup or what could very well turn into a case of for-profit espionage, then there's your whole answer to the current moment:

Any Republican who doesn't back crimes or coups immediately loses 80% of the base. Without the crimes and the coups, there ... is no longer a party. It doesn't exist.

If there is good news here, it is that Donald Trump has assembled the rubes of Republicanism, and what the rubes giveth the rubes can taketh away. If Fox News turns on Trump, it's likely that a majority of his current support simply vanishes into thin air. These are people who are responding to the rhetoric on their television sets, and neither know nor give a damn about the actual events they are basing their current political personalities around.

Giving them a new personality would be as easy as replacing the Tucker Carlson show with the Liz Cheney show. Fox wouldn't do it, of course, but giving a nonfascist Republican who is still willing to give the base the xenophobia they want while simultaneously bashing Trump on a nightly basis would cause a good chunk of them, over the course of a year or so, to dislike Trump, because disliking Trump is now the hip new position to take.

A much, much more plausible concern for the party is what might happen if Donald Trump died. The man is never more than one cheeseburger away from dropping dead on his own golf course, which would leave the fascist flock without a guiding figure. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is preparing for that day as if he knows something we don't.

No, I mean he is really preparing for the day that Donald Trump drops dead and the party's fascist wing needs to find someone who exactly fills his suit.

Yikes and a half. Ron is already coming perilously close to doing the full Trump centaur stance. If he disappears for a few weeks and comes back with gold-dyed hair and skin the color of a highway detour sign, Trump had better have someone else start turning the ignition key on his golf carts for a while.

That's the thing about nearly half the Republican Party wanting a Trump-like figure more than they want actual Republicanism: It doesn't necessarily have to be Trump. Anyone will do, so long as they parrot Trump's cruelty, penchant for crimes, utter disregard for laws and norms he doesn't like, willingness to lie about anything for any reason, willingness to lie in order to invent new enemies for his base to become consumed with, and the rest. And, as it turns out, there are hundreds if not thousands of Republican politicians who can parrot all of that the moment they know there’s a base for it.

The bragging golf cheat is not a political genius. He simply stumbled into a moment where being an uncontrollable malignant narcissist, obsessed with self-gain and contemptuous of the notion that anyone but him even has the right to exist, much less prosper, was exactly the platform the Republican Party's carefully honed Fox News-watching voting base was waiting for.

"Screw everyone except me" is practically the party motto now. Put that on a cheap red hat and you'd sell 100,000,000 of them. "Donald Trump is allowed to get away with any crimes he wants" is probably too long to put on a hat, but I imagine we’ll be seeing them at Republican rallies anytime now.

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sciencehabit writes: From the start of the pandemic, the Chinese government -- like many foreign researchers -- has vigorously rejected the idea that SARS-CoV-2 somehow originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and escaped. But over the past 2 years, it has also started to push back against what many regard as the only plausible alternative scenario: The pandemic started in China with a virus that naturally jumped from bats to an "intermediate" species and then to humans -- most likely at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. Beijing was open to the idea at first. But today it points to myriad ways SARS-CoV-2 could have arrived in Wuhan from abroad, borne by contaminated frozen food or infected foreigners -- perhaps at the Military World Games in Wuhan, in October 2019 -- or released accidentally by a U.S. military lab located more than 12,000 kilometers from Wuhan. Its goal is to avoid being blamed for the pandemic in any way, says Filippa Lentzos, a sociologist at King's College London who studies biological threats and health security. "China just doesn't want to look bad," she says. "They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do." The idea of a pandemic origin outside China is preposterous to many scientists, regardless of their position on whether the virus started with a lab leak or a natural jump from animals. There's simply no way SARS-CoV-2 could have come from some foreign place to Wuhan and triggered an explosive outbreak there without first racing through humans at the site of its origin. "The idea that the pandemic didn't originate in China is inconsistent with so many other things," says Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has argued for more intensive studies of the WIV lab accident scenario. "When you eliminate the absurd, it's Wuhan," says virologist Gregory Towers of University College London, who leans toward a natural origin. Yet Chinese researchers have published a flurry of papers supporting their government's "anywhere-but-here" position. Multiple studies report finding no signs of SARS-CoV-2 related viruses or antibodies in bats and other wild and captive animals in China. Others offer clues that the virus hitched a ride to China on imported food or its packaging. On the flip side, Chinese researchers are not pursuing -- or at least not publishing -- obvious efforts to trace the sources of the mammals sold at the Huanan market, which could yield clues to the virus' origins.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared at a rally together in Youngstown, Ohio, Friday. While hundreds of supporters attended the event, the press was largely kept out amid an outrageous list of rules for coverage.  

According to the Statehouse News Bureau, several reporters chose not to cover the event after learning that the requirements for receiving a press credential included prior approval from event sponsor Turning Point Action in order to interview attendees.

In an online application form, journalists were asked to agree to 12 bullet points in order to get a press pass.

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Editors from The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote in an op-ed that one of the rules gave event sponsors the right to review video and/or use it for promotional purposes.

“That’s never okay. News agencies are independent of the political process. We do not provide our work product to anyone for promotional use. To do so would put us in league with people we cover, destroying our credibility,” the op-ed reads.

“Yet another of the rules reserved the right to know in what manner any footage of the event would be used. We are news people. We use footage on news platforms. But this rule set up a situation in which reporters could be grilled on their intentions,” the op-ed added.

The Washington Post reported that journalists were also banned from recording any speaker who refused to be recorded.

Monica Nieporte, the president and executive director of the Ohio News Media Association, told the Post, “These are highly unusual conditions,” and added, “We do not agree that the Unite & Win Rally has any standing to be asking for blanket access to the content that is created by journalists in exchange for permission to cover their event … The journalists work for their media outlet and not for the Vance campaign. Their content is owned by their employer.”

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point Action, argued that requirements for press credentials “protect the organization from being taken advantage of by organizations or companies — usually non-traditional press — that don’t intend to report on the event at all, but rather want to monetize raw footage/pics. These policies also maintain guest and speaker privacy in green rooms, backstage, etc., and protect our underage attendees.”

According to Spectrum News 1, the rally drew a packed house.

One supporter, Karen Carbone of Toledo, reportedly waited for hours to get into the rally.

About DeSantis, Carbone said, “He listens to what people are asking for, and he tries to implement the things that will make their lives easier,” adding, “He’s a fighter like Trump is … Better at the game and more polished.”

Ohio Statehouse reporter Morgan Trau tweeted a copy of the press application; you can read it below.

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Microsoft could be preparing to name its next big OS update the "Windows 11 2022 Update." A report adds: References to this naming have appeared in near-final versions of the next big Windows 11 release, currently named 22H2. Twitter user XenoPanther spotted the Windows 11 2022 Update naming in the Get Started app that appears when you set up a new PC. The naming could simply be a placeholder, or it could indicate Microsoft is finally simplifying its often confusing update names for Windows. We've seen a variety of names over the years, including the Creators Update naming for a big Windows 10 update, more mundane naming like the Windows 10 May 2021 Update, and more recently, the Windows 10 21H2 moniker. Microsoft had considered naming its updates after animals or people but transitioned to the more safe monthly naming instead of point releases like Apple does with iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and many other software updates. A move to just the yearly naming for Windows 11 updates would make sense if Microsoft is planning fewer big drops of features.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Normally, once a president leaves office, donations from private funders are gleefully given to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to pay for the commission of an official portrait of the president and former first lady. In former President Donald Trump’s case, he opted to use the money he’d received from his supporters to pay for his portrait and that of Melania Trump.

According to a Federal Election Commission filing, on July 14, Trump’s Save America leadership PAC reported a $650,000 “charitable contribution” to the Smithsonian. The Daily Beast reports confirmation from the museum that the money was used “specifically” to cover the cost of portraits of both Donald and Melania Trump.

A spokesperson for the Smithsonian explained to The Daily Beast that all of the museum’s presidential portraits are paid for from private donations. The $650,000 donation from the Save America PAC is “accompanied by one additional private donation” and that the amount is “considerably less than the amount from his supporters’ contribution from the PAC.”

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Trump raises money from supporters who are convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, that their leader is being targeted by a Democratic conspiracy, and most recently, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was a political move by President Joe Biden.

Save America has spent almost $1 million from MAGA donations on legal fees in July alone, Axios reports. But Trump’s PAC has also paid for such ridiculous items as stying the first lady’s wardrobe—to the tune of $60,000.

“It’s hard to see what commissioning of the portrait has to do with fundraising or advancement of fellow candidates in the Republican Party,” Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University who specializes in campaign finance, told USA Today.

The Daily Beast reports that donating to himself isn’t new for Trump. The ex-president once donated $10,000 from donations to his Trump Foundation to bid on a portrait of himself because no one else had. According to a press release from the New York Attorney General’s office, Donald Trump Jr. reimbursed the charity for the cost of the bid.

Last week, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to 15 counts of tax fraud. Per his plea deal, he agreed to testify at trial against the very company he’d staunchly refused to testify against.

According to a press release from the District Attorney of New York’s office, Weisselberg was sentenced to five months in jail, to be served on Rikers Island, and five years probation, “contingent on his [Weisselberg’s] testifying truthfully in the upcoming criminal trial of the Trump Organization by providing truthful testimony as to the facts underlying his allocution and plea.”

“Judge Juan Merchan said Weisselberg would be sentenced after the Trump Organization’s trial,” CNN reports. 

Trump’s Save America PAC currently has $99.1 million on hand—that’s a lot of lawyers' fees, designer outfits, and portraits to pay for.

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A “prominent” Texas judge who has been handling cases under Gov. Greg Abbott’s racist border scheme primarily targeting migrants of color has been accused by a defense attorney of using a vile anti-Latino slur. The Texas Tribune reports that Allen Amos, a judge who has been overseeing trespassing cases leveled under the Operation Lone Star scheme, said defendants weren’t “your regular wetbacks.” A complaint about the slur was filed to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct by Emily Miller, the defense attorney to whom Amos made the remark.

“Miller is asking the commission to consider whether Amos’ alleged comment violates the Texas Judicial Code of Conduct,” the report said. “On Monday, Amos told the Tribune he would not comment on the complaint but would ‘have to wait for the judicial ethics people.’” Not exactly a denial, is it?

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Amos allegedly used the slur when discussing his apparent belief that asylum-seekers swept up under the racist policy are more affluent. “They have phones and clothes and all kinds of other things,” he reportedly said. Ah yes, because we all know that cell phones and clothes these days are so expensive that they continue to be reserved for the privileged few. These migrants are not “your regular wetbacks,” he continued. The Texas Tribune said the complaint was first reported by The Daily Beast.

Of course, the worry now is the cases handled by the judge. “I have had several indigent clients of Guatemalan, Honduran, and Mexican descent whose bonds have recently been revoked by Judge Amos, and his presumed bias against my clients by calling them ‘wetbacks’ and mentioning their supposed affluence leads me to question whether he made an unbiased decision in their hearings,” Miller wrote in the complaint. Amos has also steadily refused to lower bond amounts, leaving men to languish in jail for as long as 100 days at at time, The Texas Tribune reported.

”A former Concho County judge, 80-year-old Amos was tapped by the Kinney County judge to oversee a large group of the migrant trespassing cases in the county that has most zealously prosecuted them,” the report said. A number of state and national civil rights organizations have previously noted the role that Kinney County has played in this border scheme in a Title VI discrimination complaint last winter.

Around that same time, the Kinney County judge dismissed three retired judges who had been overseeing cases under the policy. What did all three state-appointed judges have in common? They’ve “often agreed” to allow detained men to be released on bail, The Texas Tribune reported at the time. Tully Shahan, the Kinney County judge, then asked for five of his own picks to be installed. Amos was among them. “This is clearly retaliation against the judges who have been releasing hundreds of people and dismissing deficient cases under Operation Lone Star and is a threat to the rule of law,” Texas Fair Defense Project Executive Director Amanda Woog said in the report at the time.

Abbott’s racist Operation Lone Star scheme, which has reportedly been under investigation by the Justice Department since at least May, has also been deadly, a recent report shockingly revealed.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and Texas Civil Rights Project said that state Department of Public Safety officers have racially profiled drivers under the policy, with some of this harassment turning into unnecessary high-speed chases. They say at least 30 people have been killed as a result, including five bystanders who had nothing to do with the stops. “Federal civil rights investigation and intervention is urgently needed,” the two organizations said in a complaint.

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If there’s one thing we can count on conservatives to do, it’s … Ban books? Apparently yes, even in 2022. As we get closer to midterm elections this November, we’ve seen Republicans at all levels of government stir anti-queer hysteria by launching attacks on vulnerable trans people when it comes to sports, health care, and even the basic dignity of safe bathroom access. We’ve also seen anti-queer rhetoric more broadly come up in Don't Say Gay bills and efforts to get Pride flags and discussions of pronouns out of classrooms. 

And, of course, the book bans. Conservatives are out to get books by and about queer writers (as well as writers of color, and especially queer writers of color) but most seem to know they can’t simply say they don’t want books by and about LGBTQ+ people in public schools and libraries. So they describe these books as “obscene” or “pornographic” or “inappropriate,” all of which are perfectly in tune with the “grooming” hysteria the party is pushing to further demonize queer people. It’s hateful, discriminatory, and scary. It’s also concerningly effective.

One recent example of book ban hysteria comes to us from a school district in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, where a book was temporarily removed from a public high school library by police after a parent complained, as covered by the Houston Chronicle. Yes, you read that correctly. By police.

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Katy Independent School District confirmed to the outlet that a copy of Flamer by Mike Curato was removed from the library after a parent of a high school student filed a police report saying the material was harmful to minors. Flamer is a graphic novel for teens about queer identity, self-discovery, and self-love and acceptance in the 1990s.

These books are always relevant and important for young readers, but especially in today’s world, where young queer people and allies are hearing so much anti-LGBTQ+ messaging from elected officials and candidates. But of course, conservatives ultimately want to erase queer people and think they can stomp queerness out of youth. 

If this all sounds more than a little familiar, it’s likely because the school district has become infamous for its book bans. During a school board meeting on Monday, for example, concerned community members spoke out against book ban efforts that have resulted in the district pulling 10 books deemed “pervasively vulgar” under vague qualifications.

Mind you, parents can already be notified about each book their youth checks out from the library, which is in itself a violation of privacy and clearly dangerous for questioning or queer youth who aren’t safe coming “out” to their families or guardians.

Mom and professional counselor Anne Russey accurately pointed out queer people and other minority communities are being targeted in these bans and that it’s ultimately harmful.

“They are not pornographic books,” Russey said at the meeting, per local outlet KHOU 11. Instead, she points out they’re written to “tell a story,” not with the intent of “arousing anybody.”

The big picture policy in the school district is that anyone who resides in the district can file a complaint about a library book; they don’t necessarily have to be a parent or have a child enrolled in the school district. From there, according to Texas Monthly, the district pulls the book from circulation for up to one month for a “formal review” while a committee considers the content of the book. The aforementioned “pervasively vulgar” category can result in a book being banned entirely or limited to specific grade levels.

Republicans aren’t trying to hide the queerphobia in their policies anymore, if they ever were to begin with. But young people are suffering—and they’re relying us on to vote and advocate on their behalf. 

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to be the next president of the United States. He has successfully replicated Donald Trump’s general obdurate dunderhead mannerisms—the ones so applauded by the MAGA base. He has also been able to hoodwink popular online libertarians into believing that his ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ approach to COVID-19 policy was successful, even though all evidence shows it was not.

In recent weeks, DeSantis has started to strike hard with national GOP talking points in order to both up his profile and prime the pump for the inevitable announcement that he’s going to run for president in 2024. One of the third-rail issues for Republicans that is difficult to play both sides of, especially in states that honestly can swing either way (like Florida), is abortion. Reproductive rights have been revoked for millions of Americans after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and while many conservatives are uneasy about abortion and women, specifically, having rights, they don’t actually believe the government should control everyone’s bodies.

Early in July, DeSantis and his fellow Florida Republicans cheered their victory at being able to thwart reproductive rights by reinstating the 15-week abortion ban law they hastily pushed through. However, this was the comprise version of what the GOP really wants, which is an all-out ban on reproductive rights for pregnant individuals.

On Tuesday, the ever-cowardly DeSantis answered a single “policy” question from reporters, and we all got to see why Gov. DeSantis spends most of his press appearances not taking serious questions. Asked about the 15-week abortion law, DeSantis started out with the general talking point: “15 was very difficult to be able to achieve. We were happy we were able to achieve it. Ahhhhummm,” and it is at this point that DeSantis says the quiet part out loud: “And so we look forward and we welcome future endeavors. Ahh, but we ah, we realize there’s still going to be fights on the legal end on that.”

The obvious follow-up question, which DeSantis just realized he had opened himself up to, was, “What would you like to see as an ultimate end to abortion?” At which point DeSantis ran away.

They are coming for control over your bodies. This is Conservative Christian Theocracy for white folks.

Would a GOP-run Congress dominated by fools be any different from a smarter one?

How many classified documents is too many? When Hillary Clinton used a private email address during her role as secretary of state, there were three emails that had marks that may have made them classified that were stored on the still-secure server. That was enough to generate media coverage that was literally wall to wall, including every single column of the front page of The New York Times, as well as congressional investigations, a prolonged investigation from the FBI, and endless chants of “lock her up!”

But when it comes to the boxes of material removed from Mar-a-Lago, the number of classified documents seems to be somewhat higher. Like, orders of magnitude higher. Because on Monday evening, the same New York Times reported that Trump was hoarding more than 300 classified documents. That includes at least one set of materials containing an unknown number of documents that were marked with the highest level of ”top secret/sensitive compartmented information.”

More than 150 classified documents were in the first tranche of material that Trump finally handed over in January after long efforts to secure their return by the National Archives. It was looking through that information that made it absolutely clear that Trump was holding hostage secrets that are vital to the nation. What the FBI found when they went back into the material Trump had not returned was as least as many more examples of classified material as it had found on the first pass.

On Tuesday morning, the story of Trump’s massive cache of national secrets does at least rate an appearance in the Times, even if it doesn’t get the screaming headlines and full-page coverage of someone who kept secure an ambiguously labeled email.

Exactly what subjects were covered by the materials recovered in the FBI raid is not specified, but there are two things of immediate note. First, the 15 boxes of material recovered in January reportedly held “documents from the C.I.A., the National Security Agency and the F.B.I. spanning a variety of topics of national security interest.” 

The nature of these documents was such that,” not only did the National Archives immediately continue their correspondence with Trump in an effort to secure the remainder of the documents he had taken to Mar-a-Lago, they almost immediately began preparing to contact the FBI.

The second notable fact about these documents is that Trump claimed to have gone through all the information personally. According to the Times, multiple people have reported that Trump “went through the boxes himself in late 2021.” So even if Trump can claim to be ignorant of what got tossed into the boxes that he illegally hauled away from the White House, he certainly knew what he had even before sorting out the documents that were given to the Archives in January, And he gave no more than half of the documents that were classified.

That includes Trump taking documents that former White House officials had selected to be returned and putting them in a set of boxes for things he wanted to keep. Boxes that Trump labeled “Mine.”

The 26 boxes that the FBI carried away from Mar-a-Lago following the raid reportedly contain at least 11 sets of material clearly marked as classified, including that set of Top Secret/SCIF material. Earlier this month, Trump all but admitted that the documents recovered included information on the nation’s nuclear secrets after reports that nuclear weapons information was part of what drove the urgency in getting the material back.