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katherineharron

As Trump refuses to concede, his agencies awkwardly prepare what they can for a Biden t... - 0 views

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biden trump

shared by katherineharron on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The federal agencies were required by law to prepare for a transition before the 2020 election, but the flurry of activity that would normally be taking place during a presidential transition sits on hold thanks to President Donald Trump's refusal to accept the election results.
  • Agency officials in the Trump administration put in charge of the transition are in the awkward place of effectively twiddling their thumbs until the General Services Administration, an agency led by a Trump appointee, signs off on the election results
  • Cabinet leaders, meanwhile, have suggested there will be a second Trump term,
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  • "This is not direction from the current political appointees from the Trump administration, it's from basically the staff below the political level," the staffer said.
  • "We had a call yesterday and talked quite a bit about this, and the direction we received was to expect a transition, start planning for it, think about the things that the Biden team would likely want to see and start brushing up on those documents and start thinking about how do we frame our programs, and our work in a way that is attractive to the Biden administration," the staffer told CNN.
  • One Department of Energy division is starting to quietly prepare for the incoming Biden administration even though no official connection has been made, according to one staffer in the department.
  • "The silence is still deafening," a DHS official said when asked about outreach from leadership on the transition. The department seems to be in a "wait and see" mode, the official added, saying that any transactions with the Biden team prior to official certification appear "unlikely at this point."
  • "They have done everything they can do. Now they just wait," said a source familiar with the process.
  • department officials realize they have no other option but to remain patient, recognizing that they will eventually get to work with the incoming team, they also believe the department needs a tremendous amount of attention and would like the Biden team to get in as soon as possible.
  • A Treasury staffer said the Treasury Department has been "running through a standard transition process," which began a month out from the election. That process is ongoing, the source said, though there has been no communication regarding landing teams from the Biden transition yet.
  • until there is a declaration certifying the election, personnel should refrain from speaking directly with members of the Biden team and continue to go through the department's transition office, a department official told CNN.
  • The office spaces for the transition teams --- both the State Department career officials assigned to the job by the department and the Biden State Department team -- are sitting vacant.
  • Trump has refused to accept the outcome, spreading false claims of widespread voter fraud while his campaign has filed a flurry of lawsuits that aren't going to overturn the results of the election.
  • some of Trump's Cabinet officials have stayed loyal to his false claims, suggesting there will be a second Trump term.
  • At a news conference on Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."
  • "Obviously, if there's a transition here, we're going to ensure it's a professional, cooperative one," Azar said.
  • Biden's team is moving forward with its transition, naming a lengthy team for all of the agencies that is beginning the work of selecting Cabinet leaders and staffing up, even though it is currently shut out from funding -- and the agencies themselves. Biden's team is downplaying the significance the delayed transition will have on the incoming administration.
  • there are tangible effects to the delay.
  • Normally, a President-elect would immediately begin receiving the same classified briefings as the President. But so far those briefings have not happened for Biden, as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has not engaged with the Biden team.
  • While Biden's coronavirus team has been reaching out to states and the medical community to hit the ground running once Biden is inaugurated, the transition team does not have access to the administration's Covid-19 data and virus distribution plans.
  • "Not only are they not getting access to classified information or already appropriated funds, they aren't getting their review teams into the agencies, and getting ahold of the real budget picture in the agencies and the real personnel picture," said Denis McDonough, who was President Barack Obama's chief of staff.
  • "Much of the story of this last administration and the next couple of months is a disdain for the workings of government," Chertoff said. "It's almost as if it's a determination that they want to wreck government and make it as hard as possible for government to do its job. The problem is that leaves a lot of people dead, as we've seen with the virus."
  • The Biden team is also aware that even when they are able to speak with current defense officials after the General Services Administration signs off on Biden's victory, those officials may not be eager to engage or be as forthcoming as the ones who have already departed.
Javier E

The Bus Is the Best Public Transit for Cities - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...574399

public transit transportation urban city economics

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • A city is a place where many people live close together. The problem of urban transportation is a problem of sharing space.
  • When you drive alone (or take Uber alone) in a gridlocked street or freeway, you are taking more than your fair share of the limited space. When stuck in traffic, you are blocking others from moving freely.
  • If cities want to move people faster than walking while allowing them to take up only their fair share of space, two options arise. One is to use a vehicle that’s not much bigger than the human body, such as bicycles and scooters. Those tools work well for certain people in particular circumstances, but not for everyone. The other option is to share the ride in a vehicle. If space is really scarce, that vehicle will have to carry lots of people. In most cases, riders will have to share a vehicle with strangers, people who are not traveling for the same purposes or even to the same places. That’s what public transit is.
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  • So what technologies make sense in public transit? Efficient transit networks are made of many technologies, each the right one for its own situation. Rail is for high-capacity markets, where you need to move hundreds of people per vehicle. Ferries and aerial gondolas overcome certain obstacles. But everywhere else, the bus is the thing that’s easiest to make abundant. Because labor is the main limit on their quantity, they can be much more abundant after full automation.
  • Fixed public transit deploys large vehicles flowing along a set path, and riders gathering at stops to use them. That way, the vehicles can follow a fairly straight line, and they don’t need to stop once for every customer. That is what makes them worth walking to get to. It is one of the best ideas in the history of transportation
  • And walking is key to it. Out in low-density suburbs, residents can also drive to fixed-transit stops. But in the dense city, there’s no room for that. The microtransit promise of “service to your door” is a promise to abolish walking, and yet walking is the essence of how people share precious space.
  • If the buses are terrible in your city, you may think that buses are terrible in general. In truth, a city’s bus service is as good as its leaders and voters want it to be. Where voters have funded better bus services and cities have worked to give them priority, as in Seattle, ridership has soared.
  • The starvation of high-ridership public transit in America is a choice, one that Americans don’t have to make. I work in cities all over the developed world, but my U.S. clients always have the poorest transit budgets, requiring the most painful trade-offs. They can’t afford to run the frequent and reliable fixed-route services that would do well, so they are forced to run poor service, yielding low ridership, feeding the impression that transit is pointless
Javier E

Use of Public Transit in U.S. Reaches Highest Level Since 1956, Advocates Report - NYTi... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nce-1956-advocates-report.html

public transit transportation urban

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • More Americans used buses, trains and subways in 2013 than in any year since 1956 as service improved, local economies grew and travelers increasingly sought alternatives to the automobile for trips within metropolitan areas, the American Public Transportation Association said in a report released on Monday.
  • “Now gas is averaging well under $4 a gallon, the economy is coming back and people are riding transit in record numbers,” Mr. Melaniphy said in an interview. “We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how people are moving about their communities.”
  • From 1995 to 2013, transit ridership rose 37 percent, well ahead of a 20 percent growth in population and a 23 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled,
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  • “We’re seeing that where cities have invested in transit, their unemployment rates have dropped, and employment is going up because people can get there,”
  • The system is also being increasingly used during off-peak times, especially by younger people, who are encouraged by promotions like free transfers between subways and buses and by a decline in crime in the city
  • In Denver, the Regional Transit District topped 101 million passenger trips last year, its most ever, helped by an improving economy and an increasing acceptance that public transit is an attractive alternative to the automobile
  • Nationally, taxpayers are increasingly willing to finance public transportation improvements, Mr. Melaniphy said.In the last two years, more than 70 percent of transit tax initiatives have succeeded
  • the new data were the latest indication of changing consumer preferences as a result of increasing urbanization, an aging population, and environmental and health concerns.“A lot of people would prefer to drive less and rely more on walking, cycling and public transit, provided that those are high-quality options,
carolinehayter

Facing Pressure, Trump Relents on Starting Transition : Biden Transition Updates : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...relents-on-starting-transition

trump politics us biden election

shared by carolinehayter on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump is still not conceding that he lost the election, but he's getting closer.
  • Trump on Monday tweeted that he had directed the General Services Administration to begin the process of transferring the government to President-elect Joe Biden.
  • Those tweets may be as close to a concession as Trump will ever give. He maintains that he will continue to fight the election results in court and later tweeted that he would "never concede."
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  • He continued Tuesday to make unfounded allegations about the integrity of the process, and vowed more legal action.
  • Trump and Murphy faced increasing pressure to kickstart the transition process.
  • he shift comes as Trump's nearly impossible path to overturning the election outcome looks even more improbable.
  • The New York Times reported that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump's personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, all urged the president to allow the transition to begin.
  • Over the weekend, a federal judge issued a blistering order, dismissing the Trump campaign's bid to delay certification of votes in Pennsylvania. Biden leads Trump in the state by more than 81,000 votes.
  • Trump also failed to prevent the state of Michigan from certifying Biden's win there.
  • More Republican lawmakers are also calling on Trump to accept the election results.
  • "When you are in public life, people remember the last thing you do,"
  • The move by GSA will allow the Biden transition team to access millions of dollars in federal funding, as well as to begin meeting with government agencies to discuss policy ahead of the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021.
Javier E

Opinion | I've Seen a Future Without Cars, and It's Amazing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ban-cars-manhattan-cities.html

car transportation urbanism urban nyc future

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Rather than stumble back into car dependency, cities can begin to undo their worst mistake: giving up so much of their land to the automobile.
  • There is little evidence that public transit is responsible for the spread of the coronavirus in New York or elsewhere; some cities with heavily used transit systems, including Hong Kong, were able to avoid terrible tolls from the virus.
  • Without cars, Manhattan’s streets could give priority to more equitable and accessible ways of getting around, including an extensive system of bike “superhighways” and bus rapid transit — a bus system with dedicated lanes in the roadway, creating a service that approaches the capacity, speed and efficiency of the subway, at a fraction of the cost.
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  • Chakrabarti is among a group of urbanists who’ve been calling attention to a less-discussed problem with cars. Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment, they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us: Cars take up way too much physical space to transport too few people. It’s geometry.
  • In most American cities, wherever you look, you will see a landscape constructed primarily for the movement and storage of automobiles, not the enjoyment of people: endless wide boulevards and freeways for cars to move swiftly; each road lined with parking spaces for cars at rest; retail establishments ringed with spots for cars; houses built around garages for cars; and a gas station, for cars to feed, on every other corner.
  • In the most car-dependent cities, the amount of space devoted to automobiles reaches truly ridiculous levels. In Los Angeles, for instance, land for parking exceeds the entire land area of Manhattan, enough space to house almost a million more people at Los Angeles’s prevailing density.
  • in the most populated cities, physical space is just about the most precious resource there is. The land value of Manhattan alone is estimated to top $1.7 trillion. Why are we giving so much of it to cars?
  • rian paths for people to avoid intense overcrowding — transit might be no less safe than cars, in terms of the risk of the spread of disease. In all other measures of safety, transit is far safer than cars.
  • The amount of space devoted to cars in Manhattan is not just wasteful, but, in a deeper sense, unfair to the millions of New Yorkers who have no need for cars.
  • More than half of the city’s households do not own a car, and of those who do, most do not use them for commuting. Of the 1.6 million commuters who come into Manhattan every weekday (or, who did, before the virus), more than 80 percent make the trip via public transit, mostly trains and buses. Only around 12 percent of daily commuters get to the island by car.
  • New York’s drivers are essentially being given enormous tracts of land for their own pleasure and convenience. To add the overall misery of the situation, though, even the drivers are not especially happy about the whole deal, because despite all the roadway they’ve been given, they’re still stuck in gridlock.
  • cars are not just greedy for physical space, they’re insatiable. There is even a term for the phenomenon: “induced demand,” which holds that the more land you give to cars, the more attractive driving becomes, leading to more traffic, leading to more roads — an unwinnable cycle that ends with every inch of our cities paved under parking lot.
  • Even if you’re a committed daily driver, “it’s in your best interest for walking, biking and public transit to be as attractive as possible for everyone else — because that means you’re going to be able to drive easier.”
  • PAU’s plan bears this out. Banning private cars on Manhattan would reduce traffic by as much as 20 percent on routes that start and end within New York’s other boroughs — that is, in places where cars would still be allowed
  • Under PAU’s plan, road traffic in a car-free Manhattan would fall by about 60 percent. The absence of cars would allow pedestrians, buses and bikes to race across New York at unheard-of speeds. Today, a bus trip from uptown to downtown — for instance, from Harlem to City Hall — takes an hour and 48 minutes. With the sort of rapid bus system PAU imagines, and without cars in the way, the same trek would take 35 minutes.
katherineharron

People of color make up nearly half of Biden transition team - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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biden

shared by katherineharron on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office in January, nearly half of the transition team laying the groundwork for his administration is made up of people of color, and women are in the majority.
  • Forty-six percent of the transition staff are people of color, according to new diversity data of the transition team provided to CNN, and 41% of the senior staff are people of color. The majority of transition staff -- 52% -- are women, and 53% of the senior staff are women.
  • The new diversity figures come as Biden is set to announce his Cabinet picks and senior staff for the White House in the coming weeks
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  • Biden's first major step toward diversity in his administration came when he selected Kamala Harris, a Black and South Asian woman, as his vice president.
  • The transition team's diversity also extends to its advisory board -- where 43% are people of color and 52% are women. Nine of the 13 members of Biden's Covid-19 advisory board are people of color and five of the members are women, according to the data.
  • The teams consist of roughly 500 people, more than half of whom are women.
  • "My administration's going to look like America, not just my staff, the administration from the vice president straight down through Cabinet members to major players within the White House, and the court," Biden said
  • "For months, the Biden-Harris transition has laid the groundwork for a Biden-Harris administration, and at the core of that work is an unrelenting commitment to diversity," said Ted Kaufman, co-chair of the Biden-Harris transition. "As we continue working full-speed ahead to Inauguration, our diverse group of leaders and staff are reflective of America -- upholding President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris' belief that through diverse voices we can develop and implement a policy vision to tackle our nation's toughest challenges."
  • The diversity figures mirror that of Biden's presidential campaign, which in September said 46% of its full-time staff and 40% of its senior staff were people of color.
  • Biden has repeatedly promised that ensuring diversity in his administration and his Cabinet will be a top priority.
  • About 40% of the team "represent communities historically underrepresented in the federal government," a transition official said, which includes people of color, individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities.
  • "It's going to be a reflection of who we are as a nation."
lmunch

Trump Administration Approves Start of Formal Transition to Biden - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-transition-biden.html

Trump Biden POTUS transition

shared by lmunch on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump’s government on Monday authorized President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to begin a formal transition process after Michigan certified Mr. Biden as its winner, a strong sign that the president’s last-ditch bid to overturn the results of the election was coming to an end.
  • But the president said on Twitter on Monday night that he accepted the decision by Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, to allow a transition to proceed.
  • But in conversations in recent days that intensified Monday morning, top aides — including Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel; and Jay Sekulow, the president’s personal lawyer — told the president the transition needed to begin.
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  • Hours later, he tried to play down the significance of Ms. Murphy’s action, tweeting that it was simply “preliminarily work with the Dems” that would not stop efforts to change the election results.
  • In a letter to Mr. Biden, which was first reported by CNN, Ms. Murphy rebutted Mr. Trump’s assertion that he had directed her to make the decision, saying that “I came to my decision independently, based on the law and available facts.”
  • Mr. Trump continued to solicit opinions from associates, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, who told him there were still legal avenues to pursue, the people said.
  • On Capitol Hill, most of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies had stood by his side for the past two weeks as he tried to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory. But on Monday, some of the Senate’s most senior Republicans sharply urged Ms. Murphy to allow the transition to proceed.
  • Earlier in the day, Senators Rob Portman of Ohio and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, both Republicans, issued statements breaking from Mr. Trump and calling for Mr. Biden to begin receiving coronavirus and national security briefings.“At some point, the 2020 election must end,” Ms. Capito said.
  • The pressure on Mr. Trump extended beyond the political sphere. More than 100 business leaders sent a letter to the administration on Monday asking it to facilitate a transition, and a group of Republican national security experts implored Republican members of Congress to demand that Mr. Trump concede.
  • By late Monday, Mr. Biden’s team had already taken its first steps toward a more formal transition, moving its website, buildbackbetter.com, to its new home on government servers made possible by Ms. Murphy’s decision: Buildbackbetter.gov.
carolinehayter

Biden Makes Historic Picks In Naming Foreign Policy, National Security Teams : Biden Tr... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...policy-national-security-teams

biden Policy us trump politics pandemic cabinet

shared by carolinehayter on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joe Biden has named six leaders of his foreign policy and national security teams, showing a continued push for historic firsts in his administration.
  • He's also set to name former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen as his treasury secretary
  • Yellen, 74, was the first-ever female Fed chair and would be the first-ever female head of the U.S. Treasury.
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  • Alejandro Mayorkas, who was a deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, is the first Latino and immigrant nominated as DHS secretary
  • Mayorkas was born in Havana, Cuba, and his family fled as political refugees to Miami.
  • he worked on the development and implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and headed the department's response to the Ebola and Zika health crises.
  • Avril Haines is tapped to serve as director of national intelligence, and if confirmed, she would become the first woman to lead the intelligence community.
  • She previously was deputy national security adviser and deputy director of the CIA, the first woman to hold the position
  • Additionally, former Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the negotiations over the Paris climate accords, has been named as special presidential envoy for climate to sit on the National Security Council. It will be the first time the NSC has included a member solely devoted to the issue of climate change.
  • Jake Sullivan, another close Biden aide, has been announced for the position of national security adviser in the new administration.
  • Sullivan previously was the former vice president's national security adviser and worked at the State Department under Hillary Clinton.
  • Linda Thomas-Greenfield for the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The role would mark Thomas-Greenfield's return to public service after retiring from her 35-year career with the Foreign Service in 2017.
  • Biden is elevating the ambassadorship to a Cabinet-level position. The announcement also puts a Black woman in a highly visible role.
  • The staffing announcements come after reporting that Biden had selected longtime adviser Antony Blinken for the coveted secretary of state post. Blinken was deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama.
  • Four of the six roles require Senate confirmation, with Sullivan's and Kerry's positions not needing such a vote.
  • "These individuals are equally as experienced and crisis-tested as they are innovative and imaginative," Biden said in a statement.
  • they also reflect the idea that we cannot meet the profound challenges of this new moment with old thinking and unchanged habits — or without diversity of background and perspective. It's why I've selected them."
  • And dozens of House Democrats are urging Biden to name their colleague, Rep. Deb Haaland, as interior secretary. She would be the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.
katherineharron

Trump's transition sabotage threatens Covid-19 vaccine rollout - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump's refusal to coordinate with President-elect Joe Biden on the critical Covid-19 vaccine is bringing a staggering possibility into clearer view: that an outgoing US commander in chief is actively working to sabotage his successor.
  • Trump's denial of his election defeat, his lies about nonexistent mass coordinated voter fraud and his strangling of the rituals of transferring power between administrations are not just democracy-damaging aberrations.
  • they threaten to cause practical fallout that could damage Biden's incoming White House not just in a political sense.
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  • Trump's obstruction will slow and complicate the delivery of the vaccine that brings the tantalizing prospect of a return to normal life amid stunning news from trials showing doses are effective in stopping more than 90% of coronavirus infections.
  • Attacks by the President and aides on governors stepping into his leadership vacuum as the pandemic rips across all 50 states mean the situation Biden will inherit will be worse than it needed to be.
  • The inoculation campaign will require a high level of public trust and will involve sharp ethical debates among officials about who should get the vaccine first.
  • The entire program could be damaged if it is politicized.
  • The distribution operation will be a massively complex and historic public vaccination effort targeting hundreds of millions of Americans
  • Biden does have a sense of urgency and new proposals, and he is calling for a coordinated national effort to mitigate the harrowing impact of the nationwide spike in infections.
  • "More people may die if we don't coordinate," Biden warned bluntly
  • The victims of this neglect will be thousands of Americans whom health experts expect to die or get sick in the absence of a coordinated national response to the winter spike in infections and workers caught up in new restrictions imposed on business by local leaders trying to get the virus under control -- as well as the millions of schoolchildren who are already falling behind while classrooms remain shuttered
  • CNN reported on Monday that Trump has no intention of abandoning his false attacks on the election to initiate an orderly transition process or to accept that Biden is the rightful next president.
  • Two weeks after the election, it remains surreal and extraordinary that the President is refusing to accept Biden's victory, which matched the 306 Electoral College votes that he himself stacked up in 2016.
  • consistently prioritized his own goals and gratification over a traditional view of the national interest.
  • The 44th President then ordered his team to make life as easy as possible for Trump's incoming White House -- a fact Michelle Obama recalled in a tartly worded Instagram post Monday: "I was hurt and disappointed -- but the votes had been counted and Donald Trump had won. ... My husband and I instructed our staffs to do what George and Laura Bush had done for us: run a respectful, seamless transition of power -- one of the hallmarks of American democracy."
  • There are also expectations that the President will take steps in foreign policy, including stiffened tariffs on China or strengthened sanctions on Iran, that will further trim the next White House's negotiating room.
  • The New York Times reported Monday that the President sought options to strike Iran after his "maximum pressure" policy failed to rein in its nuclear program.
  • Such action would make it almost impossible for Biden to revive the Obama administration's agreement with Tehran and international powers.
  • In recent years, presidents of both parties have prioritized a peaceful and effective transfer of power over personal political pique, recognizing their duty to secure the health, security and welfare of the American people.
  • Warm letters of welcome left in the Oval Office desk -- for instance, from President George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton -- have become the norm.
  • Military commanders expect orders in the coming days from the commander in chief to begin significant drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan to be completed by January 15, CNN's Barbara Starr reported on Monday. If there are consequences from such a move -- like a collapse of the Afghan government under a Taliban resurgence -- it will be up to Biden to deal with the fallout.
  • Ironically, Trump's mood, characterized by wild tweets divorced from any factual anchor, is detracting from his administration's own undeniable achievement in shepherding the swift development of vaccines.
  • Moderna vaccine currently in trials is 94.5% effective against the coronavirus. This followed news that Pfizer's vaccine was more than 90% effective. The news brought the prospect of a return to normal life and economic activity in 2021.
  • One of Trump's few recent references to the worsening pandemic was a tweet on Monday in which he demanded that historians recognize his role in the vaccine breakthroughs.
  • Biden initially reacted with circumspection to the move, apparently eager not to further antagonize Trump as the President comes to terms with his dashed hopes of winning a second term. But increasingly, the President-elect is warning of the damage caused by the impasse and is highlighting the vaccine in particular.
  • "The sooner we have access to the administration's distribution plan, the sooner this transition would be smoothly moved forward,"
  • "Transitions are important, and if you don't have a smooth transition, you would not optimize whatever efforts you're doing right now," Fauci told CNN's Jim Sciutto on "Newsroom" Tuesday morning, comparing the task to a "relay race in which you're passing the baton and you don't want to slow down what you're doing, but you want the person to whom you're giving the baton to be running with it as opposed to stopping and starting all over again."
  • obstruction from the administration on the vaccine could have a serious impact on its eventual distribution.
  • "The Vice President clearly articulated a strategy for distributing the vaccines across the country," Brown said. "But the conversation was extremely disingenuous when we have a new administration coming in in a matter of weeks. There was no conversation about what the hand-off was going to be and how they were going to ensure that the Biden-Harris administration would be fully prepared and ready to accept the baton."
Javier E

What The History of Fossil Fuels Teaches Us About Renewable Energy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...415749

energy renewable policy economics history

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • First, the resources. Pretty much all available energy on the earth comes from energy radiated by the sun.
  • The exceptions to the sunlight rule are: geothermal energy, which comes from the very hot core of the earth (often in the form of volcanoes); tidal energy, which is the result of water interacting with the gravity of the earth, moon, and sun; and nuclear energy
  • Some of these resources are renewable, but at the moment, the dominant suppliers of energy to human civilization (the fossil fuels) are not.
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  • Smil’s “prime movers,” which he defines as “energy converters able to produce kinetic (mechanical) energy into forms suitable for human use.” For most of the time that there have been humans on earth, the best prime movers have been people
  • while Smil agrees with pretty much everyone else that the next big energy transition is from nonrenewable to renewable resources, he is cautious about the timing. At one level, the change is plainly inevitable.
  • Things really kicked off with the invention of the steam engine in the 1700s—the first prime mover powered by fuels (100,000W in 1800; 3,000,000W in 1900). This was followed by the steam turbine (75,000W in 1890; 25,000,000W in 1914). The prime-mover revolution is rounded out by the internal-combustion engine in the later half of the 1800s and the gas turbine in the 1930s
  • Smil is concerned with the series of transitions that have occurred throughout human history, both in terms of resources and prime movers. These transitions are somewhat interrelated, but not completely. For example, you can run a steam turbine off of wood, coal, or nuclear power so a transition between those resources does not necessitate a change in prime movers. On the other hand, you can’t feed an internal-combustion engine with wind or wood. At the moment, all of our best prime movers rely heavily on fossil fuels.
  • how prime movers have increased in power over the course of history. Remember that orange lifted to a counter? If you expend that effort over a second, that's 1W (a watt) of work. Smil calculates that the average healthy human can sustain 60W–100W of work throughout a working day. At some point in prehistory, people started yoking domesticated animals (250W–800W depending on the breed). Then came sails, then a few thousand years later, waterwheels (2,000W–4,000W in medieval times) and then a thousand years after that, windmills (1,000W–10,0000W in 1900).
  • Where he does differ is in his opinion about how quickly it can happen. Where Gore calls for a complete conversion to renewables in 10 years, Smil thinks the transition will take generations.
  • The barriers to total conversion—much like the problems that plague our energy infrastructure—are a funny mixture of policy, technology, infrastructure, and physics
  • For example, the possibility that nuclear power might take up any of the load in the U.S. seems extremely low, given that no new plants have been built since the 1970s. That’s not a physics problem, that’s a policy problem.
  • As far as converting to wind and solar, Smil sees much bigger technological and infrastructural hurdles. A switch to renewables means a transition in terms of both resources and prime movers.
  • The character of renewable resources is fundamentally different from that of fossil fuels. Where fuels are highly dense stores of energy and relatively easy to reliably transport, the renewables are characterized by the highly fickle ebbs and flows of nature. Some days are sunny, others have clouds.
  • Energy density is sometimes used to discuss the capacity of volumes of batteries and fuel. Smil is interested instead in measuring energy per unit of the earth’s surface. He uses the figure as a means to try to compare the various means of producing energy and the demands for using it.
  • to measure the energy density of coal, you look at how much energy you get from burning coal and divide that by how much of the earth’s surface needs to be given over to coal production to get it.
  • Because the best way of mitigating the irregularity in how they generate power is to create interconnected grids, an energy regime based on wind and solar needs to lay a lot of power lines through a lot of jurisdictions and permitting regimes. Physics meets infrastructure, and policy. Renewables are simply more diffuse.
  • “Mass adoption of renewable energies would thus necessitate a fundamental reshaping of modern energy infrastructures,” Smil writes. We'd go from harvesting energy from concentrated sources and diffusing it outwards, to gathering energy from diffuse sources and concentrating it inwards towards relatively few centers. This is, fundamentally, a very different way of organizing how we use land.
  • This is not impossible, and in the long run it is probably inevitable. But we underestimate the effort required and changes that will be necessary at our peril.
  • The switch from wood to coal ushered in industrialization which completely upended social-structures and human relationships all over the world. The rise of oil transformed geo-politics, turning some countries into energy superpowers overnight. No one knows how deeply our society might be transformed by the transition to renewables. Or whether we'll be able to do it fast enough.
knudsenlu

Transitional Brexit deal must be agreed this year, City warns government | Politics | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...be-agreed-soon-chancellor-says

Britain Brexit economics politics

shared by knudsenlu on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The City of London has warned that businesses will start activating Brexit contingency plans unless there is a transitional deal by the end of 2017, as Philip Hammond tried to calm fears that a final agreement may not be reached for another year.
  • In a letter to Hammond before next month’s budget, McGuinness said the UK was facing a “historically defining moment” and warned that the timetable for business to prepare for transition was “tightening very rapidly”.
  • “We must have agreement with the EU on transition before the end of 2017,” she added.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The City of London Corporation added its warning on Wednesday in McGuinness’s letter to the chancellor. She said some businesses were already activating contingency plans and more would do so without more substance from the UK and EU on the length and nature of a transitional period to smooth the path to a future relationship after Brexit in March 2019.
  • John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said: “The prime minister yesterday sowed more confusion in her statement, giving the impression that a transition is to be negotiated only after we have settled on what the future partnership will be. Businesses cannot wait. They need to plan now. Jobs are in jeopardy now.
  • What the prime minister said is that the implementation period is about building a bridge and obviously in order to do that you need to know what the future relationship is going to look like. But what we would also say is that in terms of the broad outline of an implementation period, we believe that we can agree that quickly.
osichukwuocha

Election Live Updates: Republicans Insist There Will Be a Peaceful Transition of Power ... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-vs-biden-election

election power transition politics crisis pandemic policy

shared by osichukwuocha on 24 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • “The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th,” Mr. McConnell wrote on Twitter. “There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792.”
  • Mr. Trump went on to question the integrity of “the ballots” — apparently referring to mail-in voting
  • The peaceful transfer of power and accepting election results are fundamentals of democracy.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Kate Bedingfield, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, said that he “has participated in a peaceful transition of power before. He certainly will this time around as well.”
  • Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable,”
  • It may take longer than usual to know the outcome, but it will be a valid one
  • “I don’t know what his thinking was, but we have always had a controlled transition between administrations.”
  • That promise comes as Mr. Graham and other Republicans face sharp criticism for changing their positions on their past vow not to fill a Supreme Court seat during an election year.
  • The comments by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York were made in a message to progressives as a rallying cry after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and were not a call to contest or resist the election results.
  • Democratic lawmakers warned Americans on Thursday to take deadly seriously President Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the results of November’s election
  • The most important thing, she said, was for Americans to vote and insist their ballots are counted.
  • “Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus
  • “Donald Trump is trying to distract from his catastrophic failures as president of the United States in order to talk about something that frankly, you know, spins up the press corps,
  • Calling Mr. Trump “the greatest threat to democracy,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the party leader in the Senate, demanded that Republicans join Democrats in insisting Mr. Trump accept the election results
  • everal prominent Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, insisted Thursday that there would be a peaceful transition, but they stopped short of criticizing the president directly for his remarks.
  • Earlier Wednesday, he flatly predicted that the presidential election would end up in the Supreme Court and said that was why he wanted a full slate of justices, barely concealing his hope for a friendly majority on the court.
  • The night before that, at another rally, Mr. Trump said the coronavirus “affects virtually nobody” — never mind that the country’s death toll from the virus just crossed 200,000.
  • The F.B.I. has not seen evidence of a “coordinated national voter fraud effort,”
  • Any fraud would have to be widespread and well coordinated to change the election outcome, and carrying it out would be a “major challenge for an adversary,”
  • President Trump paid his respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Thursday morning, standing silently by her coffin at the top of the Supreme Court steps as he was jeered by protesters on the street below.
  • Mr. Trump continues to face a wall of opposition from women
  • r. Trump’s vulnerability even in conservative-leaning states underscores just how precarious his political position i
  • Mr. Trump’s large advantage among men in Texas is enough to give him a small advantage there, 46 percent to 43 percent. Men prefer the president to his Democratic challenger by 16 points, while women favor Mr. Biden by an eight-point margin.
Javier E

iHeartMedia laid off hundreds of radio DJs. Is AI to blame? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...io-artificial-intelligence-djs

automation radio media robot culture communications

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • When iHeartMedia announced this month it would fire hundreds of workers across the country, the radio conglomerate said the restructuring was critical to take advantage of its “significant investments … in technology and artificial intelligence.” In a companywide email, chief executive Bob Pittman said the “employee dislocation” was “the unfortunate price we pay to modernize the company.
  • But laid-off employees like D’Edwin “Big Kosh” Walton, who made $12 an hour as an on-air personality for the Columbus, Ohio, hip-hop station 106.7 the Beat, don’t buy it. Walton doesn’t blame the cuts on a computer; he blames them on the company’s top executives, whose “coldblooded, calculated move” cost people their jobs.
  • It “ripped my [expletive] heart out,” Walton said. “The people at the top don’t know who we are at the bottom. They don’t understand the relationships and the connections we had with the communities. And that’s the worst part: They don’t care.”
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The dominant player in U.S. radio, which owns the online music service iHeartRadio and more than 850 local stations across the United States, has called AI the muscle it needs to fend off rivals, recapture listeners and emerge from bankruptcy
  • The company, which now uses software to schedule music, analyze research and mix songs, plans to consolidate offices around what executives call “AI-enabled Centers of Excellence.”
  • The company’s shift seems in line with a corporate America that is increasingly embracing automation, using technological advances to take over tasks once done by people, boosting profits and cutting costs
  • While the job cuts may sound “inhumane,” she added, they made sense from a Wall Street perspective, given the company’s need to trim costs and improve its profit margins.
  • “This is a typical example of a dying industry that is blaming technology for something that is just absolutely a reduction in force,”
  • iHeartRadio spokeswoman Wendy Goldberg declined to make executives available for comment or provide a total layoff count, saying only that the job cuts were “relatively small” compared with the company’s overall workforce of 12,500 employees
  • Del Colliano estimated that more than 1,000 people would lose their jobs nationwide.
  • iHeartMedia was shifting “jobs to the future from the past,” adding data scientists, podcast producers and other digital teams to help transform the radio broadcaster into a “multiplatform” creator and “America’s #1 audio company.
  • the long-running medium remains a huge business. In November, iHeartMedia reported it took in more than $1.6 billion in broadcast-radio revenue during the first nine months of 2019, and company filings claim that a quarter of a billion listeners still tune in every month to discover new music, catch up on the news or hear from their local DJs.
  • Executives at the Texas-based company have long touted human DJs as their biggest competitive strength, saying in federal securities filings last year that the company was in the “companionship” business because listeners build a “trusted bond and strong relationship” with the on-air personalities they hear every day.
  • The system can transition in real time between songs by layering in music, sound effects, voice-over snippets and ads, delivering the style of smooth, seamless playback that has long been the human DJ’s trade.
  • its “computational music presentation” AI can help erase the seconds-long gaps between songs that can lead to “a loss of energy, lack of continuity and disquieting sterility.”
  • One song wove cleanly into the other through an automated mix of booming sound effects, background music, interview sound bites and station-branding shout-outs (“Super Hi-Fi: Recommended by God”). The smooth transition might have taken a DJ a few minutes to prepare; the computer completed it in a matter of seconds
  • Much of the initial training for these delicate transitions comes from humans, who prerecord voice-overs, select songs, edit audio clips, and classify music by genre, style and mood. Zalon said the machine-learning system has been further refined by iHeartMedia’s human DJs, who have helped identify clumsy transitions and room for future improvements.
  • “To have radio DJs across the country that really care about song transitions and are listening to find everything wrong, that was awesome,” Zalon said. “It gave us hundreds of the world’s best ears. … They almost unwittingly became kind of like our QA [quality assurance] team.”
  • he expects that, in a few years, computer-generated voices could automatically read off the news, tee up interviews and introduce songs, potentially supplanting humans even more. The software performed 315 million musical transitions for listeners in January alone.
  • The company’s chief product officer, Chris Williams, said last year in an interview with the industry news site RadioWorld that “virtual DJs” that could seamlessly interweave chatter, music and ads were “absolutely” coming, and “something we are always thinking about.”
  • That has allowed the company, she said, to free up programming people for more creative pursuits, “embedding our radio stations into the communities and lives of our listeners better and deeper than they have been before.”
  • In 2008, to gain control of the radio and billboard titan then known as Clear Channel, the private-equity firms Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners staged a leveraged buyout, weighing the company down with a mountain of borrowed cash they needed to seal the deal.
  • The audacious move left the radio giant saddled with more than $20 billion in debt, just as the Great Recession kicked off and radio’s strengths began to rust. The debt would kneecap the company for the next decade, forcing it to pay more toward interest payments some years than it earned in revenue.
  • In the year the company filed for bankruptcy, Pittman, the company’s chief and a former head of MTV and AOL, was paid roughly $13 million in salary and bonus pay, nearly three times what he made in 2016
  • The company’s push to shrink and subsume local stations was also made possible by deregulation. In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission ditched a rule requiring radio stations to maintain a studio near where they were broadcasting. Local DJs have since been further replaced by prerecorded substitutes, sometimes from hundreds of miles away.
  • Ashley “Z” Elzinga, a former on-air personality for 95.6 KISS FM in Cleveland, said she was upbeat about the future but frustrated that the company had said the layoffs touched only a “relatively small” slice of its workforce. “I gave my life to this,” she said. “I moved my life, moved my family.
  • Since the layoffs, they’ve been inundated with messages from listeners who said they couldn’t imagine their daily lives without them. They said they don’t expect a computer-generated system will satisfy listeners or fill that void.
  • “It was something I was really looking forward to making a future out of. And in the blink of an eye, all of that stopped for me,” he said. “That’s the painful part. They just killed what I thought was the future for me.”
katherineharron

As Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transition, Pentagon stresses it will play no ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

election

shared by katherineharron on 25 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump this week refused to commit to a peaceful transition should he lose the November election, leading some to speculate that he might seek to use the tools of presidential power including his role as commander in chief of the armed forces to prolong his time in office.
  • "The Constitution and laws of the US and the states establish procedures for carrying out elections, and for resolving disputes over the outcome of elections ... I do not see the US military as part of this process," Milley said in the letter to two members of the House Armed Services Committee.
  • "The Department of Defense does not play a role in the transition of power after an election,"
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Pentagon leaders have been concerned Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty troops as well as civilian law enforcement to quell protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in June.
  • "Those who suggest that the military would have any role in transition, they are being equally irresponsible," he added, saying "the military should have nothing to do with partisan politics and nothing to do even with any talk of a transition between administrations."
  • While Trump has not suggested he'd call on the military to decide the election, his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has publicly floated the idea of top military leaders playing a role in ousting Trump should he refuse to leave office following an electoral defeat, a suggestion that drew pushback from Pentagon officials and experts on civilian military relations.
  • Defense Secretary Mark Esper made the Pentagon's position on the Insurrection Act clear in a June press conference. "The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act," he told reporters.
  • While the Insurrection Act does empower a president to deploy armed forces in certain situations to restore law and order, some experts believe doing so would be problematic in the event of an electoral dispute.
  • "While the President could invoke the Act on his own relating to an election dispute, that invocation would be immediately subject to legal challenge and, barring drastic and completely unforeseen circumstances, would be struck down in the courts," Elie Honig, a CNN legal analyst, said.
  • "All this bulls--- about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I've never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I'm the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it," Barr told the Chicago Tribune earlier this month.
  • "Our laws and history make clear that the military has no formal role in resolving electoral disputes; that job falls in various manifestations to voters, the states, Congress, and the courts, and if there is any need for enforcement of electoral procedures or security, that is the job of civilian law enforcement in the first place, not the military," Honig said.
  • "It is not entirely certain that the president holds power to declare martial law -- particularly relating to his own election -- and any such attempt by a president almost certainly would be challenged in court and deemed illegal hence, not recognized by the military," Honing said.
  • "There is the mechanism of governing, I have spoken to our defense leaders about this issue," the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Democrat Rep. Adam Smith, told CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday.
  • "No matter what, President Trump is going to be President until January 20.
  • In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall Thursday, Milley encouraged US troops to remain apolitical.
Javier E

I told conservatives to work for Trump. One talk with his team changed my mind. - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html

trump transition resentment presidency

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Trump was not a normal candidate, the transition is not a normal transition, and this will probably not be a normal administration. The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty.
  • By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless.
  • In the best of times, government service carries with it the danger of compromising your principles. Here, though, we may be in for something much worse.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • One bad boss can be endured. A gaggle of them will poison all decision-making. They will turn on each other. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes — because there will be mistakes — will be exceptional.
  • Nemesis pursues and punishes all administrations, but this one will get a double dose. Until it can acquire some measure of humility about what it knows, and a degree of magnanimity to those who have opposed it, it will smash into crises and failures. With the disarray of its transition team, in a way, it already has.
  • My bottom line: Conservative political types should not volunteer to serve in this administration, at least for now. They would probably have to make excuses for things that are inexcusable and defend people who are indefensible.
  • At the very least, they should wait to see who gets the top jobs. Until then, let the Trump team fill the deputy assistant secretary and assistant secretary jobs with civil servants, retired military officers and diplomats, or the large supply of loyal or obsequious second-raters who will be eager to serve. The administration may shake itself out in a year or two and reach out to others who have been worried about Trump. Or maybe not.
  • Do what you can do in other venues, and remember that this too will pass, and some day a more normal kind of administration will either emerge or replace this one.
cartergramiak

How Coronavirus Has Changed New York City Transit, in One Chart - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nyc-transit-covid.html

politics US Culture economics pandemic

shared by cartergramiak on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • At 8:30 on weekday mornings, there is now enough space in the Main Concourse at Grand Central Terminal for travelers to walk at least six feet apart. Most move at a stroll rather than the New York City speedwalk. Early last year, about 160,000 people passed through the station each weekday. Ridership is now less than a quarter of that.
  • Keeping the city’s buses and subways moving has been crucial for transporting medical and essential workers, but, with fewer riders, the city’s public transit organization is facing its worst budget crisis in history.
  • Neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which are home to more people of color and families with lower annual income than most parts of Manhattan, are also home to many of the city’s essential workers — and have retained more of their subway riders. Those subway stations report closer to 40 percent of their pre-pandemic ridership.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In March, the M.T.A. implemented rear-door boarding on buses to keep passengers distanced from drivers until plastic partitions could be installed around the driver’s seats. On local buses, the fare box is near the front door, so the policy effectively eliminated fares on those routes. When those partitions were completed in September, fares were reinstated and ridership dropped a second time.
  • For New York City to hit its climate goals, it will be critical for more people to use public transit, bikes or walking to commute than before the pandemic. When offices and businesses begin to reopen, more flexible remote options for workers could also be friendly for the planet.
  • “If you think of a place like New York City, the challenges around owning a car, like parking and traffic, will not have gone away after the pandemic, and the benefits of biking to work or taking public transit will also still be there.”
yehbru

Opinion: Trump's wrecking ball of a transition - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Trump Biden Election Transition Power US Politics

shared by yehbru on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump has managed to use his remaining time in office to act as a political wrecking ball while the country is still being ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Trump, who had been spouting false claims of voter fraud for months, launched several failed lawsuits in an attempt to challenge the election results in key swing states, and also contacted state legislatures to try to persuade them to intervene on his behalf
  • While the President has been unsuccessful in his efforts to overturn the election, he may have succeeded in sowing distrust among many in our democracy, fanning the flames of the toxic political atmosphere and likely making governing that much more difficult for President-elect Joe Biden.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Trump has also set a dangerous precedent for future Presidents to dispute the election results on spurious claims
  • President Trump has turned a blind eye to the millions of families that are suffering as a result of the pandemic. Despite 18 million cases, more than 330,000 deaths, and millions facing economic hardship, there has been little direction from Washington about what states need to be doing right now to curb the spread of this horrible virus.
  • Although 1 million Americans have already gotten the Covid-19 vaccine, that falls far short of the administration's goal of inoculating 20 million Americans by the end of December
  • President Trump's 11th hour decision to blow up the stimulus negotiations has also jeopardized much needed financial relief for millions of Americans. Rather than showing a genuine effort to pressure Senate Republicans to agree to legislation House Democrats passed in May, which would have provided $1,200 checks for individuals and up to $6,000 per household, Trump decided to intervene only after Congress finally agreed on individual payments of $600 -- saying he wanted $2,000 checks instead.
  • President Trump has also used his remaining time in office to dole out presidential pardons that exemplify the absolute worst use of this constitutional power.
  • Russia-gate alumni Roger Stone, who was convicted of seven felonies including obstruction, threatening a witness and lying under oath; Paul Manafort, who was convicted of eight counts of financial crimes; Alex van der Zwaan, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators; George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI; and Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, were all pardoned, likely as a reward for their loyalty.
  • Trump also offered presidential relief to corrupt Republican Congressmen Duncan Hunter, who pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to misuse campaign funds, Steve Stockman, who was convicted of a number of felonies including fraud and money laundering, and Chris Collins, who was serving time on charges of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and making a false statement -- along with Charles Kushner, the father of son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was sentenced to two years in federal prison for retaliating against a federal witness, evading taxes and lying to the Federal Election Commission.
  • Four Blackwater guards were also pardoned after a lengthy trial found them guilty of killing 14 Iraqis in 2007.
  • Given all that has happened during this transition, some commentators wonder whether Congress should reduce the time between election and inauguration even more
  • This transition has given us more than enough reason to revisit our election laws, provide more clarity about the Electoral College certification process, and rein in the executive power that a lame duck President can wield.
martinelligi

Biden Transition: Trump Administration To Allow Biden Protocols To Begin : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...gin-biden-transition-protocols

biden transition trump

shared by martinelligi on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joe Biden can finally, formally begin his transition to power, after the General Services Administration on Monday officially ascertained the Democrat's victory over President Trump.
  • "Contrary to media reports and insinuations, my decision was not made out of fear or favoritism. Instead, I strongly believe that the statute requires that the GSA Administrator ascertain, not impose, the apparent president-elect."
  • The decision means that Biden's team should now have access to government office space, will be able to formally meet with Trump administration officials to discuss policy issues, and will receive some $7.3 million to pay staffers and other expenses.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Trump also said Monday his "case strongly continues." The president has not conceded the election despite numerous legal setbacks and the certification of votes in some key states, including Michigan on Monday.
  • The GSA decision was the second major blow on Monday to Trump's effort to overturn the election's result. Earlier in the day, the Michigan Board of State Canvassers voted to certify Biden's win in the state.
katherineharron

Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transition of power after Election Day - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 24 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump on Wednesday would not commit to providing a peaceful transition of power after Election Day, lending further fuel to concerns he may not relinquish his office should he lose in November.
  • "Well, we're going to have to see what happens," Trump said
  • Trump has previously refused to say whether he would accept the election results,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • His reluctance to commit to a peaceful transition was rooted in what he said were concerns about ballots, extending his false assertion that widespread mail-in voting is rife with fraud.
  • "You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,"
  • "(G)et rid of the ballots and you'll have a very ... there won't be a transfer, frankly. There'll be a continuation," he added, saying "the ballots are out of control."
  • "Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus," Romney tweeted. "Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable."
  • Trump has previously said his rival Joe Biden would only prevail in November if the election is "rigged,"
  • National polls currently show Trump trailing Biden,
  • Democrats have long fretted that Trump may attempt to cling to power using the authorities of the president.
  • Trump has not sought to tamp down on speculation he won't leave office.
katherineharron

President Donald Trump's GOP wall is cracking as he fights election result - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 13 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • As President Donald Trump's lawyers cling to their far-fetched schemes to overturn the presidential election, it was increasingly clear Thursday that cracks are forming in Trump's Republican wall of support, as more GOP members stepped forward to say that President-elect Joe Biden should receive national intelligence briefings
  • There is still no sign that Trump and leading Republicans plan to actively congratulate Biden.
  • Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford told a local radio station Wednesday that the President-elect should begin receiving presidential intelligence briefings by the end of the week, a number of senior GOP senators spoke up Thursday to say they shared that thinking,
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Lankford noted that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bipartisan committee that investigated them found that the compressed time frame for the transition after the contested 2000 election may have contributed to the lack of preparedness for the attack.
  • In their report after the attacks, the commission said that the dispute over the election and the "36-day legal fight" following "cut in half the normal transition period." The loss of time, the commission said, "hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing, and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees,"
  • The intermediary step by Republicans in the President's orbit illuminated the widening divide between the practical reality that Biden must be equipped with key national security knowledge to begin running the country in January and the political fiction being perpetrated by the President and his supporters.
  • Ohio's Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who heads a state the President won last week, said on CNN's "New Day" that "we need to consider the former vice president as the President-elect."
  • Trump has showed little interest in addressing the most important issue facing the country: the record-breaking climb in US coronavirus cases.
  • The illusory quality of Trump's election fraud claims was once again underscored by a set of election integrity checks that are being conducted in Arizona, which CNN called for Biden late Thursday night.
  • post-election audits filed with the Arizona Secretary of State's office from more than half of Arizona's counties showed that there is no evidence of systematic voter fraud or major discrepancies that would affect the outcome of the race.
  • A group of national, state and private election officials said in a joint statement Thursday that there is no evidence that "any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
  • "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result," the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees said.
  • The most surreal feature of the suspended reality at the White House is still the behavior of the President himself. A leader who jealously dominated television coverage on the campaign trail and in office has not made public remarks for an entire week
  • "I'm worried about this virus, I'm not looking at what the merits of the case are. It would appear that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States," DeWine said, adding that America needs to "come together as a country."
  • But the President's Twitter feed Thursday indicated that he was much more fixated on what he views as his mistreatment by Fox News, his once favored network, which he believes should be defending him more vociferously in the midst of the twilight zone that he has created by refusing to acknowledge Biden's victory.
  • The President, whom CNN quoted sources as describing as increasingly "dejected" on Thursday, continues to tweet falsehoods about election fraud.
  • there are few signs that his campaign has convinced any court to take his complaints seriously. In this odd limbo between defiance and admitting defeat, the President is wavering between fighting on and a recognition that his hold on power is coming to an end,
  • While his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have urged their father to continue challenging the election results, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have taken a more measured approach, CNN reported Thursday, encouraging the President to think about potential damage to his legacy as they weigh their own post-White House ambitions.
  • In addition to Biden's win in Arizona, the President trails in Georgia, where a hand recount is beginning, by 14,000 votes -- a cushion for Biden unlikely to be overturned.
  • Meanwhile, Biden's political choreography -- which late Wednesday included the naming of Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff -- and his departure to his family beach house to decompress after the election is meant to signal that his ascent to power is assured.
  • In what may have been a signal to establishment Republicans -- in a venue that the President himself might take account of -- former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove wrote in a Wall Street journal op-ed that the election will not be overturned whatever the result of Trump's legal gambits.
  • Lankford, who referred to Biden as President-elect at his church last week, has said he will intervene if the victorious Democrat remains unable to access intelligence briefings.
  • "I've been a little concerned about it," Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe said of the Pentagon firings, adding he'd been told "now it's come to an end."
  • As Republican lawmakers stake out safe ground -- trying to appear that they are still supporting the President's legal pursuits while also signaling that the transition should begin -- some Democrats have been hammering their GOP colleagues for indulging the President's election fantasies.
  • "These Republicans are all auditioning for profiles in cowardice," Schumer said.
  • On Thursday, the US broke the record for Covid-19 hospitalizations for the third consecutive day, surpassing 67,000 hospitalizations.
  • The glimmer of hope on the horizon continued to be Pfizer's promising announcement earlier this week that their vaccine trial is more than 90% effective with officials widely expecting that the company will apply for emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration before the end of this month.
  • "By the end of March to early April, we think across all of the vaccines that we have invested in, we have enough for all Americans who wish to get vaccinated," Azar said.
  • "If you think of it metaphorically, you know, the cavalry is coming here," Fauci said, touting the major positive impact that the vaccines will have."If we could just hang in there, do the public health measures that we're talking about," Fauci said. "We're going to get this under control, I promise you."
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