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Contents contributed and discussions participated by lmunch

lmunch

Opinion: The one issue that could bring Democrats and Republicans together - CNN - 0 views

  • Political commentators continue to wonder whether President Joe Biden can deliver on his promise of national unity and healing.While his prospects for doing so seem increasingly limited, there is one area that offers some hope: criminal justice reform.
  • In 2010, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, a bipartisan bill that reduced the racist disparities in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. Over the course of his administration, he granted clemency to 1,715 people behind bars -- more than any president in US history, according to his administration. And to give people a fair shot at getting their lives back on, he signed an executive order banning federal agencies from asking about criminal records during the hiring process -- a reform known as "ban the box."
  • The result was the First Step Act -- a bill that addresses many aspects of the criminal justice system: curbing mandatory minimum sentencing, increasing compassionate and elderly release, reducing sentences for people who complete rehabilitative programs, and more. The bill, which passed in a bipartisan landslide during the Trump presidency, has already led to more than 16,000 people coming home early from federal prisons.
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  • Biden needs a way to begin bringing the country together. The past two administrations -- in different ways and for different reasons -- have left a door open for him to do so.
lmunch

Opinion: Look at everything the GOP wants to cancel - CNN - 0 views

  • This week we saw GOP elected officials and Fox News in full conniption mode falsely claiming that Democrats wanted to cancel Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. The reality, though, is that it's the GOP that is the party of cancel culture.
  • But facts don't matter when it comes to Republicans trying to distract from their lack of policies to help Americans in need or score political points.
  • Over on GOP TV, aka Fox News, there was a lot of time spent discussing Mr. Potato Head being "canceled." While channels such as CNN and MSNBC carried live Tuesday's testimony by FBI Director Christopher Wray about the details of the January 6 insurrection incited by Trump, Fox News did not.
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  • Just last Sunday, Trump announced to cheers of the right-wing audience at CPAC his plan to "get rid of" (aka "cancel") the 17 GOP members of Congress who voted to hold him accountable for his role in the January 6 attack on our Capitol.
  • Then there are the Republicans across the country trying to cancel access to the ballot box. In Pennsylvania, a battleground state Biden won, GOP lawmakers have announced proposals to "cancel" no-excuse mail-in ballots. The reason is obvious as Pennsylvania Democrats used mail-in ballots at three times the rate of Republicans in 2020.
  • In Arizona, a state Biden won by around 10,500 votes, GOP officials have alarmingly introduced a bill that would allow the GOP-controlled state legislature to "cancel" everyone's vote and award the state's electoral votes to the person of their choosing. Wow, talk about cancel culture!
lmunch

Greg Abbott's delusional ideas about Covid (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • Gov. Greg Abbott's decision to "open Texas 100%," lifting all Covid-19 restrictions and end his state's mask mandate on March 10, is a political ploy that places his poll ratings above the health and safety of 29 million Texans.
  • When Abbott issued his executive order on March 2, he said, "People and businesses don't need the state telling them how to operate." His remarks came not long after a brutal winter storm that crippled his state's power grid, leaving millions of Texans shivering in the dark, with Covid still very active in the state, and its vaccination program stumbling badly.
  • On March 2, Texas recorded a statewide test positivity rate over 12%, three times higher than the national average
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  • exas currently ranks 46th in the US for percentage of residents receiving at least one dose of vaccine. Only 8% of Texans are fully vaccinated.
  • "We're now beginning to see glimmers that the worst of Covid-19 may soon be behind us," and added, "We have demonstrated that we can corral the coronavirus." He was tragically wrong. By November, Texas had the highest number of coronavirus cases in the nation.
  • More than a year into this pandemic, we know which public health mitigations work. This week, the CDC published a report of the effect of mask mandates and indoor restaurant dining. The researchers found that mandating masks was associated with a decrease in daily Covid-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation. In-restaurant dining was associated with an increase in daily Covid-19 case and death rates.
lmunch

February 2021 was the coldest February on record since 1989 - CNN - 0 views

  • Thanks to the record-breaking Arctic outbreak that stretched all the way into Texas, February was the coldest it has been across the US in over 30 years, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. However, across the US, it was still in the top third of warmest winters on record.
  • The Arctic Oscillation may have resulted from a sudden stratospheric warming event that occurred in January, said NOAA.
  • "It goes to show how much humans have warmed the planet when even with such a powerful polar-vortex unleashing of arctic cold dominates the month, the Earth still manages to produce above-normal temperatures. Look no further than Europe, which was several countries set all-time record high temperatures for the month of February."
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  • "Even with La Niña in place, which tends to have an overall cooling effect on the planet, the winter of 2020-21 was still on pace to be one of the warmest on record," Miller says. "But the brutal cold snap, which was the coldest in decades for the Central US, likely kept that from occurring."
lmunch

This Deal Helped Turn Google Into an Ad Powerhouse. Is That a Problem? - The New York T... - 0 views

  • Google owns the world’s leading search engine, it operates the largest video-hosting service in YouTube, and its popular web browser, email, map and meeting software is used by billions of people.But its financial heft — the source of nearly all its enormous profits — is advertising.
  • Google owns the world’s leading search engine, it operates the largest video-hosting service in YouTube, and its popular web browser, email, map and meeting software is used by billions of people.
  • That internal debate, many experts say, points to the challenge facing antitrust enforcement in a fast-moving, complex tech business: Investigations are difficult, long and backward looking.
lmunch

The Political Divide In Health Care: A Liberal Perspective | Health Affairs - 0 views

  • Classical seventeenth-century liberalism, a response to autocratic monarchies, promoted the freedom of the individual. The concepts of equality and the rule of law were added to classical liberal doctrine in the eighteenth century, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. 1 Eighteenth-century liberalism also advocated a universal humanitarian morality: “It is the goal of morality to substitute peaceful behavior for violence, good faith for fraud and overreaching, considerateness for malice, cooperation for the dog-eat-dog attitude.” 2 These precepts, also in the writings of world religions, are best expressed in the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
  • ohn Stuart Mill introduced the utilitarian idea that societies should be responsible to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. A corollary to this argument was that governments should provide for the overall welfare of the population—a communitarian rather than individualistic strain of liberalism. Liberalism and conservatism went separate ways, with most conservatives advocating that government restrict itself to ensuring individual liberties.
  • “Health care” refers to medical services, but not to a healthy state of being. The right to health care is distinct from the right to health.
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  • Rawls deduced that a just society would guarantee personal freedoms as long as they did not impinge on the freedoms of others, would promote equality of opportunity, and would allow inequality only if it would benefit the least advantaged in society.
  • Recently, a neoliberal movement has moved away from New Deal liberalism, partially returning to the classical liberal belief that the free market is the best way to handle societal needs. Neoliberals join conservatives in supporting smaller government and privatization of some New Deal programs.
  • In the health care arena, many liberals feel that governments (although they can be and often are corrupted by power and money) are the only social institutions that can implement the balance between the needs of each individual and those of all individuals—that is, the community.
  • Neoconservatives believe in an aggressive U.S. foreign policy with a strong military, at times placing them at odds with fiscal conservatives. Most conservatives support small government and low taxes and oppose progressive and corporate taxes, believing that economic health is best guaranteed by wealthy individuals and corporations having money to invest in job creation.
  • “Right” means that the government guarantees something to everyone. Rights come in two categories: individual freedoms and population-based entitlements.
  • The nineteenth century also saw the growth of social democracy, a brand of liberalism arguing that the market cannot supply certain human necessities: a minimum income to purchase food, clothes, and housing, and access to health services; governments are needed to guarantee those needs.
  • The liberal belief in health care as a right is based on two varieties of liberal thinking, as noted in the discussion of liberalism above: (1) the social justice argument advanced by Rawls that anyone unaware of his/her position in society would agree with health care as a right because it promotes equality of opportunity and is of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged members of society; and (2) the utilitarian view that guaranteeing health services increases the welfare of the greatest number of people.
  • If health care is just another commodity, it can be supplied by the market; if a necessity, the market is not adequate.
  • One caveat concerns the impact of taxes on public opinion. A 1994 survey found that fewer than half of respondents would pay more taxes to finance universal health insurance.
  • “socialized medicine,” meaning government ownership of health care delivery institutions; social insurance of the single-payer variety is socialized insurance but not socialized medicine.
  • Liberal doctrine argues that social insurance unites the entire population into a single risk pool. The 80 percent of the population that incurs only 20 percent of national health spending pays for the 20 percent who account for 80 percent of spending.
  • The health care system is now financed in a regressive manner. Out-of-pocket payments (about 15 percent of health care spending) consume more than 10 percent of the income of families in the lowest income quintile, compared with about 1 percent for families in the wealthiest 5 percent of the population.
  • Private health insurance is also a regressive method of financing health care because employer-paid insurance premiums are generally considered deductions from wages or salary, and a premium represents a higher proportion of income for lower-paid employees than for those with higher pay. 27 Moreover, the tax deductions for employer coverage benefit the higher-income.
lmunch

The IPCC: Who Are They | Union of Concerned Scientists - 0 views

  • The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess climate change based on the latest science.
  • Governments request these reports through the intergovernmental process and the content is deliberately policy-relevant, but steers clear of any policy-prescriptive statements.  Government representatives work with experts to produce the "summary for policymakers"
  • The fifth assessment report, AR5,  is the most comprehensive synthesis to date. Experts from more than 80 countries contributed to this assessment, which represents six years of work. More than 830 lead authors and review editors drew on the work of over 1000 contributors. About 2,000 expert reviewers provided over 140,000 review comments. 
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  • the purpose of assessing “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data. It bases its assessment mainly on published and peer reviewed scientific technical literature.”
  • And the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5, 2013/14) asserted that “[h]uman influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history.” These findings informed the climate negotiations resulting in the Paris Agreement of 2015, in which 197 countries committed to limiting global warming to below 2°C.
  • In the end, it is the authors who bear the sole responsibility for the content of their chapters. Government representatives, however, do participate in the line-by-line review and revision of the much shorter summary for policymakers, or SPM, for each technical report.
  • Each of these working groups has two co-chairs—one from a developed country and one from a developing country. An additional set of governmental representatives (frequently scientists) have been nominated by their countries to serve on the bureau of each working group. Together, the two co-chairs and the bureau members function as an executive committee, while the team of scientists drafting individual chapters of each working group’s assessment is sometimes referred to as the scientific core.
  • The technical support units, co-chairs, and bureaus of each working group together assemble a list of proposed authors for its assessment, but the lead authors are selected by the entire working group. Governments and non-governmental organizations around the world are invited to nominate potential authors. 
  • AR5 WG1 alone generated 54,677 review comments. Many authors attest that this review process ranks among the most extensive for any scientific document.
  • For the AR5, Working Group I  summarized the physical science basis of climate change. Working Group II  addressed the vulnerability of human and natural systems to climate change (i.e., the negative and positive consequences of global warming) and options for adapting to the changes. Working Group III  assessed options for limiting heat-trapping emissions, evaluated methods for removing them from the atmosphere, and examined other means of slowing the warming trend, as well as related economic issues.
  • The word “consensus” is often invoked, and sometimes questioned, when speaking of IPCC reports. In fact, there are two arenas in which a consensus needs to be reached in the production of IPCC assessments. One is the meeting of the entire IPCC, in which unanimity is sought among government representatives. Even though such consensus is not required (countries are free to register their formal dissent), agreement has been reached on all documents and SPMs to date—a particularly impressive fact.
  • Government representatives propose authors and contributors, participate in the review process, and help reach a consensus on the report’s major findings. This can result (especially in the SPMs) in language that is sometimes weaker than it otherwise might be. 
  • The full assessment is a multi-level document for a wide array of audiences ranging from planners investing in protecting their communities to political leaders.
  • But it also means that governments cannot easily criticize or dismiss a report that they themselves have helped shape and approved during political negotiations. As Sir John Houghton, co-chair of TAR Working Group I, once put it: “Any move to reduce political involvement in the IPCC would weaken the panel and deprive it of its political clout. . . . If governments were not involved, then the documents would be treated like any old scientific report. They would end up on the shelf or in the waste bin.” 
  • It is important, however, to reiterate a fundamental point about IPCC assessments: although governments are involved in the process and support it financially, science ultimately predominates. The chapters that underpin all the documents are written by and under the control of scientists, and scientists ensure that all the documents are both consistent with the findings of each chapter and scientifically credible in their own right.
lmunch

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities | Annual Re... - 0 views

  • In the most recent iteration, the AR5, each WG report contains more than 1,200 pages. An SPM of approximately 30 pages is produced for each WG report, as well as for the Synthesis Report.
  • The full WG reports are endorsed by government representatives by accepting them, which means that they have not been edited line by line. Each SPM, however, goes through a process of line-by-line editing during approval plenaries in which government representatives approve the final version of the SPM
  • Government representatives from any country can object to and potentially veto any line, requiring IPCC authors to rework the sentence in question until it is rewritten to everyone's satisfaction. In this sense, the SPM produces reports through processes of enforced consensus.
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  • Some authors argue that the consensus process in approval plenaries results in sharper messages, the identification of better and more relevant questions, and greater investment by policymakers in the ultimate outcomes (26). In contrast, a well-known early critique of the IPCC argued that it resulted in bland outputs that do not engage with questions of high disagreement (27). More recently, some authors argue that the process imposes unity in the form of least-common denominator generalities on the very issues that, because they are politically challenging, may be of greatest policy relevance (28–30).
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      pros and cons of consensus in SPMs
  • In their study of how eight SPMs produced for the AR4 and AR5 changed through the approval plenaries, Mach et al. (22) find that sensitive issues are often reworked and expanded through approval plenaries. But they also find that sometimes the most sensitive topics are expunged completely
  • When the newly elected Chair of the IPCC, Hoesung Lee (2015) declared that promoting the involvement of developing country scientists was a cornerstone for his tenure, he was articulating a theme of inclusivity that has been present since the IPCC's inception (82).
  • From 1990 to 2007, the number of IPCC authors from developing countries quadrupled, but their numbers are still proportionally low. The number of authors from developed countries also increased over the same period of time; only 17% of authors in the AR4 are from developing countries (83). As a result, there is still a significant “north-south divide” that results in an overrepresentation of science from OECD countries or countries that are classified as high income by the World Bank (84)
  • Quantitative bibliometric analysis of climate change publications reveals not only that climate change research is concentrated in the developed countries, but also that developed countries tend to focus more on issues of mitigation whereas developing countries focus more on adaptation, droughts, and disease impacts (86).
  • This tendency is also reflected in the composition of the IPCC; where representation from developing countries has improved, much of it is focused on WGII, which publishes regional chapters on impacts and adaptation (83). Science that is conducted in developing countries, which contribute the least to GHG emissions but are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, often has a different focus than in developed countries, which tend to focus more on large-scale positivist understandings of the physical system and the economics of mitigation (87). Many authors from developing countries who participated in WGIII's AR5 did so through coauthorship relationships and “institutional pathways” that are based in the developed world (88). This might be responsible for the “strong harmonization of views [in AR5 WGIII], compared with the diversity one finds across the social sciences of climate change more broadly” (88, p. 98). The forgoing considerations give rise to the question, how should the IPCC engage with the realities of unequal global development and the vast differences between rich and poor nations.
  • The IPCC has innovated strategies to improve capacity building, one of which was to recruit early-career scientists to managerial roles in chapter writing processes for WGII and WGIII. Such programs can assist with equalizing quality among chapters and can provide early-career scientists with an opportunity to participate in the IPCC process (89).
  • The justification for inclusivity of science produced in and for developing countries is multifaceted. The credibility of the IPCC in some countries is potentially undermined if it is seen as only representing Western science
  • But different geographical contexts often have different ways of judging the quality and relevance of scientific knowledge. Developing country scientists may have different but equally valid epistemological norms as those found in developed countries, but those norms might be downplayed in favor of so-called Western standards (93).
  • For this reason, redressing the imbalance of knowledge in GEAs requires more than simply increasing the numbers of authors from developing nations; it also is a matter of maintaining critical awareness of the assumptions that inform the social authority of science in developed countries (95, 96). As will be seen in the following case study, this comes to the fore when we consider how adaptation is framed in the IPCC.
  • The international politics of climate change, for most of the IPCC's history, retained this initial focus on abatement and mitigation. The topic of adaptation was shunned partly because it could be interpreted as giving the fossil fuel industry a free pass or capitulating to the status quo. However, since the IPCC's founding in 1988, the impacts of climate change have become more pronounced, and some of the world's most vulnerable people are already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change, which makes discussion of adaptation imperative (97–99).
  • The IPCC only gave scant attention to adaptation in its first two Assessment Reports, treating it primarily as a “residual” phenomenon that results from the failure to mitigate climate change in particular local contexts (109). Starting with the Third Assessment Report published in 2001, however, adaptation became increasingly important in the IPCC. Early work in climate change adaptation drew from the literature on natural disasters in which human vulnerability is conceptualized as exposure to hazards, as well as work on the resilience of complex social-ecological systems (110–112). This literature developed the concept of adaptive capacity that theorizes adaptation as a generalizable quality which allows human societies to adapt to negative events.
lmunch

The inside story of how Pennsylvania failed to deliver millions in coronavirus rent relief - 0 views

  • As a result, Pennsylvania tenants in dire need of assistance, some of whom had been living day to day in fear of losing their homes, missed out on roughly $96 million of $150 million in federal coronavirus relief.
  • unemployment spiked to 16.1 percent in April.
  • In May, the state legislature approved a spending package that included $150 million for rent relief from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, as well as $25 million to help homeowners who had fallen behind on their mortgage payments
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  • They put a $750 monthly cap on the assistance each family could receive. In parts of Pennsylvania, that’s less than the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment. Assistance through the mortgage program was capped at $1,000 a month.
  • In addition, landlords who accepted the assistance payments had to agree to treat $750 as full payment of rent, regardless of the actual amount owed. Many balked. And tenants couldn’t receive the aid unless their landlords agreed to take part.
  • Some weren’t eligible because they weren’t yet behind on rent, or had landlords who wouldn’t participate. Others couldn’t produce the right paperwork. Many applications arrived incomplete, requiring hours of follow-up by local agencies.
  • To qualify, tenants couldn’t earn more than the median income in their county. They also needed to have filed for unemployment since March 1, 2020, or have lost at least 30% of their income. Both presented difficulties. To prove a loss of income, applicants needed paperwork to show their current income, as well as their income from before the pandemic — pay stubs from January or February, for instance.
  • A reform bill introduced by Democrats had been referred to the committee. But, despite pleas from officials and advocates for both landlords and tenants, Senate Republicans did not act on it.
  • A bill that would have made more sweeping changes to the program — replacing the $750 cap with a more flexible standard and allowing applicants who couldn’t document their loss of income to sign a certification form, instead — passed the state House unanimously later in October. But Republican leaders in the Senate did not bring it up for a vote, saying Wolf’s changes were enough
  • And this time, if Pennsylvania cannot spend the new funding quickly enough, the state could lose some of it to other states. Federal law says that, starting Sep. 30, the U.S. Treasury can redistribute unused money to state and local governments that have already spent at least 65% of their allocation.
  • While federal law allows state and local governments to spend up to 10% of their allocation on the cost of running their programs, Pennsylvania limits those expenses to 5%. That number was a compromise after Senate Republicans initially proposed a 2% cap that local officials said would be untenable.
  • Bryce Maretzki was in charge of a $150 million effort to keep Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable tenants in their homes.
lmunch

Home - COVID-19 EMERGENCY RENTAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAM - 0 views

shared by lmunch on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) extended the current order temporarily halting residential evictions until at least March 31, 2021.
  • Phase 1 accepted applications in mid-May Phase 2 accepted applications between July and November 4th. Phase 3 Tenants eligible for Phase 3 received an email notification. The deadline for submitting Phase 3 information is February 12, 2021. Phase 4 opening up in March. We are working to get applications open as soon as possible. When we have a definite launch date we will post it on this website. Click on Phase 4 for more program information.
  • Due to the volume of help requests, it may take between 24-36 hours before a Help Desk staff member is able to respond. Or Call our hotline at 215-320-7880.
lmunch

About Phase 4 - COVID-19 EMERGENCY RENTAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAM - 0 views

  • This new round of funding was authorized by the federal government, and Philadelphia will have about $97 million. We estimate that this will be able to help 10,000-15,000 renters.
  • Tenants are eligible if they meet all three of these criteria: Have a household income at or below 80 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI) (see Income Guidelines table below.) Qualify for unemployment benefits; or experienced a reduction in household income, incurred significant costs, or experienced some other financial hardship due to COVID-19. Demonstrate a risk of experiencing homelessness or housing instability. Tenants can meet this criteria if they have any past-due rent, past due utilities, received an eviction notice, or paying over one third of their household income on rent.
  • combined, arrears and forward rent cannot exceed 12 months. Utility payments can only be for utility arrears. The total amount of rent assistance cannot exceed $1,500 per month.
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  • We will accept online applications on this website (PHLRentAssist.org). You will also be able to also work with one of our housing counselors to fill out an application by phone.
lmunch

Opinion: The US government must end its war on the American economy - CNN - 0 views

  • As US Trade Representative-designate, Katherine Tai finds herself in an ironic situation: The most important country she will have to push to open its markets — a core component of USTR's mission — is the United States.
  • Instead of opening markets, the effect of the trade war has been to restrict market access, reduce economic opportunities and lower living standards
  • US businesses and consumers have suffered from higher prices and reduced choices for many imported items including solar panels, washing machines, steel, aluminum, olives, whiskey, wine, cheese, yogurt and airplanes, as well as tariffs on hundreds of different products from China.
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  • The harm done by the trade war has had measurable consequences. As of September 2020, the Tax Foundation reports the tariffs have cost Americans $80 billion in additional taxes and lowered employment by 179,800 jobs.
  • In essence, we are involved in a seemingly endless trade war being waged by the US government against the American economy. Ending it would honor USTR's stated mission of creating "new opportunities and higher living standards" for Americans.
lmunch

Opinion: Texas governor's appalling decision on masks - CNN - 0 views

  • Abbott's announcement may have been cheered by some in the business community, but make no mistake: those of us who want to see a thriving economic climate are far from universally on his side. Instead, we recognize that to save lives and build a strong long-term future we have to put science first. And the science does not back up his decision.
  • The number of Covid-19 cases increased in Texas in the two weeks leading up to Abbott's announcement, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Meanwhile, less than 8% of the state's population has been fully vaccinated, according to the university's running tally. To make matters worse, a new study shows that Houston -- Texas' most populous city -- is the first US city to detect all the major Covid-19 strains among patients.
  • In a larger sense, there's a major irony in Abbott simultaneously celebrating Texas' independence and bucking science: science made Texas great.
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  • Scientists, meanwhile, have helped Texas become a leader in renewable energy. Texas leads the nation in wind-generated power, and produced more energy from wind and solar combined than from coal, according to 2020 data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
  • What Texans, and people everywhere, need from our leaders now is a good example. Put science first. Put life-saving measures first. Take the long view, rather than worrying about short-term political repercussions among a base of supporters. That's how we'll get through this together.
lmunch

Why Democrats may look back on the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill with regret - CNN - 0 views

  • The US Senate is expected to pass a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill in the coming days before it heads to President Joe Biden's desk to be signed into law. This may seem like a major win for the new administration and congressional Democrats, but it's actually a Pyrrhic victory -- one that they may come to regret in the weeks and months ahead.
  • Because this is the first major legislative initiative of Biden's presidency, the Democrats' unwillingness to compromise may have poisoned the well when it comes to future bipartisan action.
  • There's a second reason why Biden and the Democrats erred when they decided to push the spending package forward without bipartisan support: They handed Republicans an opportunity to unite when the prevailing narrative is that the party and the conservative movement, more broadly, are fundamentally divided.
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  • Both Republicans and Democrats have also signaled support for legislation to strengthen the US supply chain in critical areas like public health and defense, and a number of Republican lawmakers recently attended a White House meeting to discuss possible legislative reforms
  • To pass their spending bill, Democrats are using a legislative maneuver called budget reconciliation -- which allows legislation directly impacting spending or revenues to advance in the Senate on a simple majority vote. In recent years, budget reconciliation has been used to advance policies that have little or no hope of securing bipartisan support. For example, Republicans used reconciliation in 2017 to advance their proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which didn't work in their favor.
  • If all goes according to plan for Senate Democrats, they'll be able to deliver a spending bill that Biden will sign into law sometime next week. Democrats will celebrate the accomplishment, but the win will ultimately cause long-term challenges and dissuade any Republicans who may have been open to working across the aisle from believing President Biden's calls for bipartisanship are genuine.
lmunch

Opinon: Democrats, keep your promise on the $15 minimum wage - CNN - 0 views

  • Though raising the minimum wage is supported by two thirds of Americans, corporate interests have successfully framed the issue as a give-and-take between better wages and fewer jobs.
  • Their argument was simple: this wasn't a debate about their needs versus the needs of their employers. It was about what kind of society we wanted to be.
  • During the 1930's, the Social Gospel was a popular religious social reform movement in America and offered a moral framing for many of the reforms of the New Deal. Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted this moral argument when he declared that "no business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."
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  • This free market libertarianism still captivates the leadership of the Republican Party, which has touted the most extreme projection of job losses from the Congressional Budget Office's report on the potential impact of raising the minimum wage and suggested, in the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, that anything more than poverty-level unemployment benefits for service workers who have been hit hard by the pandemic would "discourage a return to work."
  • Raising the minimum wage is not a "far left" or "liberal" issue. It is a moral issue that would, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, lift pay for up to 33 million low-wage workers— including nearly 40% of all African-American workers.
lmunch

Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries' | Technology... - 0 views

  • The cryptocurrency’s value has dipped recently after passing a high of $50,000 but the energy used to create it has continued to soar during its epic rise, climbing to the equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of Argentina, according to Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a tool from researchers at Cambridge University that measures the currency’s energy use.
  • Now that over 18.5m bitcoin have been mined, the average computer can no longer mine bitcoins. Instead, mining now requires special computer equipment that can handle the intense processing power needed to get bitcoin today. And, of course, these special computers need a lot of electricity to run.
  • Proponents of bitcoin say that mining is increasingly being done with electricity from renewable sources as that type of energy becomes cheaper, and the energy used is far lower than that of other, more wasteful, uses of power. The energy wasted by plugged-in but inactive home devices in the US alone could power bitcoin mining for 1.8 years, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.
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  • But environmentalists say that mining is still a cause for concern particularly because miners will go wherever electricity is cheapest and that may mean places that use coal. According to Cambridge, China has the most bitcoin mining of any country by far. While the country has been slowly moving toward renewable energy, about two-thirds of its electricity comes from coal.
  • A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the site.
  • “Computers and smartphones have much larger carbon footprints than typewriters and telegraphs. Sometimes a technology is so revolutionary and important for humanity that society accepts the tradeoffs,” wrote investor Tyler Winklevoss on Twitter.
  • Vitalik Buterin, the computer scientist who invited ethereum, told IEEE Spectrum that mining cryptocurrency can be “a huge waste of resources, even if you don’t believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue”, Buterin said. “There are real consumers – real people – whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff.”
lmunch

Giuseppe Conte to Resign as Italian Prime Minister - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy will offer his resignation on Tuesday, his office said on Monday evening, likely leading to the collapse of Italy’s teetering government and plunging the country deeper into political chaos as it faces a still serious coronavirus epidemic and a halting vaccine rollout.
  • The coronavirus has killed more than 85,000 Italians, one of the world’s highest death tolls. The government, which was making slow but steady progress in vaccinating public health workers, has hit a speed bump and threatened to sue Pfizer for a shortfall in vaccine doses.
  • Mr. Conte, who is serving his second consecutive stint as Prime Minister — first as the head of an alliance of right-wing nationalists and populists, and then as the leader of a coalition of populists and the center-left establishment — desperately wants to stay in power.
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  • He could, in theory, ask the current coalition to continue, but it is seen as all but certain that he will accept that the government has collapsed. He could task Mr. Conte with forming a new government, which would essentially require the support, and appeasement, of Mr. Renzi’s party, with or without him. That would lead to what was in essence a glorified cabinet reshuffle.
  • Mr. Renzi, once a popular prime minister, is down to the low single digits in public support. But he has proved a skillful internal operator. He used the levers of power at his disposal 17 months ago, during the last government crisis, to prevent snap elections and banish Mr. Salvini to the opposition.
  • “No negotiation is taking place, neither on my part nor by my collaborators,” Mr. Berlusconi, leader of the center-right Forza Italia party, wrote in a post on social media, “to potentially support in any way the ruling government.”
  • Mr. Berlusconi indicated as a possible solution to the crisis a broad new coalition that would include conservatives and “represent the substantial unity of the country in a time of emergency.” If not, he said, there should be new elections.
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Trump's Pardons: The List - The New York Times - 0 views

  • With hours to go before President Trump left office, the White House released a list early Wednesday of 73 people he had pardoned and 70 others whose sentences he had commuted.
  • On the list were at least two people who had worked for Mr. Trump: Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, and Elliott Broidy, a former top fund-raiser. Both received full pardons.
  • The rapper Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., received a full pardon after pleading guilty to possession of a firearm and ammunition by a felon in December. Mr. Trump also granted a commutation to another rapper, Kodak Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri (though he was born Dieuson Octave). In 2019, he was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for lying on background paperwork while attempting to buy guns.
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  • Mr. Trump issued full pardons to Nicholas Slatton and three other former U.S. service members who were convicted on charges related to the killing of Iraqi civilians while they were working as security contractors for Blackwater, a private company, in 2007.
  • Mr. Manafort, 71, had been sentenced in 2019 to seven and a half years in prison for his role in a decade-long, multimillion-dollar financial fraud scheme for his work in the former Soviet Union. He was released early from prison in May as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and given home confinement. Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed sympathy for Mr. Manafort, describing him as a brave man who had been mistreated by the special counsel’s office.
  • Mr. Stone, a longtime friend and adviser of Mr. Trump, was sentenced in February 2020 to more than three years in prison in a politically fraught case that put the president at odds with his attorney general. Mr. Stone was convicted of seven felony charges, including lying under oath to a congressional committee and threatening a witness whose testimony would have exposed those lies.
  • Mr. Kushner, 66, the father-in-law of the president’s older daughter, Ivanka Trump, pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 counts of tax evasion, a single count of retaliating against a federal witness and one of lying to the Federal Election Commission. He served two years in prison before being released in 2006.
  • Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat, and whose prosecution Attorney General William P. Barr tried to shut down, was the only White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russia investigation.
  • The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution gives presidents unlimited authority to grant pardons, which excuse or forgive a federal crime. A commutation, by contrast, makes a punishment milder without wiping out the underlying conviction.
  • Joe Arpaio, an anti-immigration crusader who enjoyed calling himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” was the first pardon of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
  • Conrad M. Black, a former press baron and friend of Mr. Trump’s, was granted a full pardon 12 years after his sentencing for fraud and obstruction of justice.
  • Former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in prison for trying to sell or trade to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Mr. Obama vacated after he was elected president.
  • Susan B. Anthony, the women’s suffragist, was arrested in Rochester, N.Y., in 1872 for voting illegally and was fined $100. Mr. Trump pardoned her on Aug. 18, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to women.
  • Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., a former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, pleaded guilty in 1998 to concealing an extortion plot. Mr. DeBartolo was prosecuted after he gave Edwin W. Edwards, the influential former governor of Louisiana, $400,000 to secure a riverboat gambling license for his gambling consortium.
  • Alice Marie Johnson was serving life in a federal prison for a nonviolent drug conviction before her case was brought to Mr. Trump’s attention by the reality television star Kim Kardashian West.
  • Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, was tarnished by a racially tainted criminal conviction in 1913 — for transporting a white woman across state lines — that haunted him well after his death in 1946. Mr. Trump pardoned him on May 24, 2018.
  • Dinesh D’Souza received a presidential pardon after pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions in 2014. Mr. D’Souza, a filmmaker and author whose subjects often dabble in conspiracy theories, had long blamed his conviction on his political opposition to Mr. Obama.
  • Zay Jeffries, a metal scientist whose contributions to the Manhattan Project and whose development of armor-piercing artillery shells helped the Allies win World War II, was granted a posthumous pardon on Oct. 10, 2019. Jeffries was found guilty in 1948 of an antitrust violation related to his work and was fined $2,500.
  • Ten years ago, Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner, was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.
  • I. Lewis Libby Jr., known as Scooter, was Vice President Dick Cheney’s top adviser before Mr. Libby was convicted in 2007 of four felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice, in connection with the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame.
  • Mr. Trump’s decision to clear three members of the armed services who had been accused or convicted of war crimes signaled that the president intended to use his power as the ultimate arbiter of military justice.
  • Michael R. Milken was the billionaire “junk bond king” and a well-known financier on Wall Street in the 1980s. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, though his sentence was later reduced to two. He also agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties.
  • Dwight Hammond and his son, Steven Hammond, were Oregon cattle ranchers who had been serving five-year sentences for arson on federal land. Their cases inspired an antigovernment group’s weekslong standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 and brought widespread attention to anger over federal land management in the Western United States.
  • David H. Safavian, the top federal procurement official under President George W. Bush, was sentenced in 2009 to a year in prison for covering up his ties to Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist whose corruption became a symbol of the excesses of Washington influence peddling. Mr. Safavian was convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements.
  • Angela Stanton — an author, television personality and motivational speaker — served six months of home confinement in 2007 for her role in a stolen-vehicle ring. Her book “Life of a Real Housewife” explores her difficult upbringing and her encounters with reality TV stars.
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Covid-19 Live Updates: U.S. Air Travel Hits Pandemic High - The New York Times - 0 views

  • With the coronavirus raging in many parts of the country and hospitals dangerously overstretched, public health officials warned on Sunday that more calamitous days may be ahead, as infections tied to holiday gatherings fuel a fresh spate of illness and death.
  • This is also the first holiday period in which the new, more transmissible variant of the virus, first found in Britain, was known to be circulating in the United States.
  • Although air travel is down markedly from years past, American airports had their busiest day of the pandemic on Saturday, with 1,192,881 passengers passing through security checkpoints, according to the Transportation Security Administration. Since Dec. 18, the agency has counted more than 16.3 million trips through its airport checkpoints, down from more than 35.4 million in the same period a year ago. And tens of millions more people were expected to travel by car.
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  • Because of the time lag between when people catch the virus and when they become ill and are hospitalized — and also because of holiday reporting anomalies — public health officials say a post-Christmas spike may not emerge clearly until the second week of January.
  • greater than 50 percent of the spread now is among people who are asymptomatic.
  • The United States reported at least 291,300 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, a single-day record, but one inflated by holiday reporting backlogs.
  • Los Angeles County, the most populous in the United States, may already be experiencing a post-Christmas surge. Over the past week it has averaged 16,193 cases a day, about 12 times the average rate of 1,347 a day at the start of November.
  • in Los Angeles County in particular, some Angelenos celebrated the new year at clandestine parties. Police dispersed more than a thousand people who had attended a warehouse party, The Los Angeles Times reported.
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Crowds fill streets in China's pandemic-hit Wuhan to celebrate New Year - CNN - 0 views

  • Large crowds took to the streets at midnight on Friday in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, celebrating the arrival of 2021 after a year marred by a deadly pandemic that killed thousands there and required the city to be locked down between the end of January and early April.
  • As per tradition, hundreds gathered in front of the old Hankow Customs House building, one of the city's more popular New Year's Eve spots.
  • There was a heavy police presence and strict crowd control. Some security personnel were seen telling several of the few people without masks that they must put one on if they wished to stay. Still, the countdown appeared to proceed peacefully, in a relaxed atmosphere.
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  • Wuhan has been largely virus free for months, and in recent days it has been vaccinating some specific groups of the local population. But a recent small rise in cases in various Chinese cities, including Beijing, has reminded people in Wuhan that the pandemic is not over yet.
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