April 17-22, 2017: Trump Gets Climate Science Wrong - but White Supremacists Love Him

 

4/17/17: The lawyer for white supremacist Matthew Heimbach, charged with assaulting an African American woman at a Trump rally in March 2016, offers up a noteworthy new kind of defense. 

He blames the president. 

____________________ 

My client, “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.” 

Attorney for Matthew Heimbach

____________________ 

 

Really, no joke! His lawyer insists Heimbach can’t be faulted. His client “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.” If found liable for damages, he says, “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.” (See: 8/8/19.)

 

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TRUMP ADVISERS spend the day arguing over whether or not to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. New E.P.A. head and noted climate-change denier Scott Pruitt and Steve Bannon insist the president keep his campaign promise and exit. Secretary of State Tillerson and co-directors of the Bureau of Nepotism, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, warn that withdrawal will erode faith in the U.S., particularly where American allies in Europe are concerned. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: A 2014 poll found the United States had more climate deniers than any other advanced nation. This may prove that money invested in pseudo-scientific work by Big Oil and Big Coal pays Big Dividends. 

Of course, you could read all about climate change in that font of “fake news,” Scientific American magazine. You could go to NASA’s website. You could do your research. But act quickly before the Trump administration slashes funding for climate change research and scrubs the NASA site. The future looks grim unless you have your head so far up your posterior you can’t catch a glimpse of anything past your small intestine. You can also check out a letter signed by 375 scientists, including 35 Nobel Prize winners, stating emphatically that human activity is driving climate change. 

Meanwhile, Trump supporters can simply stick their heads in their freezers and pretend 2016 wasn’t the hottest year on record, beating out 2015 for the old record, which beat out 2014 for the record before that.

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4/18/17: The powerful armada Trump claims he sent steaming toward North Korea (see: 4/12/17) turns out to be steaming through the Sunda Strait, going the other way. We do have a great military, but it’s not going to be easy hitting North Korea from 3,000 miles away. 

(This is not the last time the president will prove he’s a complete numbskull, regarding the U.S. military.) 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/4/19): One of Trump’s greatest moments – his claim that in 1781, George Washington captured the airports at Yorktown. 

Almost impossibly ignorant.

Okay, not even close!

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4/19/17: The Hill reports: “A Moscow-based think tank linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin created a plan to swing the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.” 

Damn reporters! Always digging for facts and writing stories based thereon.

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4/20/17: Attorney General Jeff Sessions tells a conservative commentator he’s “amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific” could block Trump’s second travel ban.  

Sessions apparently forgets all federal judges have such power and that Hawaii is part of the United States.

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4/21/17: Six hundred icebergs have already been seen in waters near Newfoundland. Most years the number at this point is 60. This is more evidence that the Greenland ice sheet is breaking up. 

We need more snowballs! (See: 3/14/17.)

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4/22/17: Thousands of scientists, supporters, and environmentalists demonstrate across the nation. Organizers are motivated by Mr. Trump’s attacks on funding for NASA, his decision to turn the E.P.A. over to a man who could not, in confirmation hearings, name a single E.P.A. regulation he supported, and in the face of the president’s claims that global warming is a hoax and vaccines might be killing children.

Bring back measles and smallpox! (See: 4/29/19.) 

Dr. Naomi Oreskes, a professor at Harvard, who participates in the march, explains: “I can’t think of a time where scientists felt the enterprise of science was being threatened [emphasis added] in the way scientists feel now.” 

The president’s grasp of scientific truths has often proved tenuous. See, for example, his idiotic comments on hairspray.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: On the eve of the summit with North Korea, fourteen months later, The New York Times will report that the White House “has never added a science adviser or senior counselor trained in nuclear physics.” The State Department will still not have a chief scientist. Nor will the Department of Agriculture, although Trump did nominate Sam Clovis for that post, despite the inconvenient fact that Clovis had zero background in…science. The Interior Department and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will both have disbanded climate change panels. Joel Clement, an expert in climate change at Interior, will be reassigned to a new job. That new job: overseeing fees from fossil fuel drilling.)

December 17-18, 2017: Scientists Ordered Not to Cite...Science

 

12/17/17: The Thought Police are hard at work at the Centers for Disease Control. Today we learn scientists at CDC were admonished not to use these seven words or phrases in written reports: “science-based,” “evidence-based,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “diversity” “vulnerable,” or “entitlement.” Scientists will no longer blather on about “science-based” findings. 

Here's a NASA video on climate change.

(Updated to include 2021.)

 

Wow, hot enough today for you, buddy? 

In Trumpistan changing the wording passes for draining the swamp. You rebrand the swamp a “swimming pool.”  

The Thought Police have already “drained the swamp” at the E.P.A., at NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by scrubbing all mention of climate change. 

Now, government scientists may only ask in conversation or for publication, “Wow, hot enough today for you, buddy?”

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12/18/17: The Thought Police expand their efforts regarding the E.P.A. Scott Pruitt gives approval to hire Definers Public Affairs to provide “media monitoring.” Definers, which won a no-bid contract, just so happens to be affiliated with America Rising, a Republican research group.

 

America Rising spent a good chunk of 2016 submitting Freedom of Information requests demanding the emails of various E.P.A. employees who had the nerve to: 

A)    Speak up at a private lunch and say the nation might be headed for an “environmental catastrophe.” 

B)     Write a letter to Pruitt, raising similar concerns. 

C)    Attend a rally to protest budget cuts, which would very possibly cripple the agency.

November 13, 2018: Trump Insults Another Ally, EPA Now Pro-Pollution, Hate Crimes Increasing

 

11/13/18: Trump has his undies in a wad and he’s not going to let a foreign enemy make him look bad! Is it Kim Jong-un, who won’t give up a single nuke? Vladimir, who interfered in the election? 

Nope. Trump is mad because Emmanuel Macron, leader of France, a longtime U.S. ally, has said “nationalism” is bad. 

Time for Trump to tweet-insult an ally again: 

Emmanuel Macron suggests building its own army to protect Europe against the U.S., China and Russia. But it was Germany in World Wars One & Two - How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along [emphasis added]. Pay for NATO or not!

 

Did our president just mock the French because they suffered millions of war dead between 1914 and 1918, and got overrun by the Nazi juggernaut in 1940? 

Jesus. He did.

Nazis in Paris - somehow this amuses Trump.

 

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OKAY, MAYBE KIM JONG-UN still has all his nuclear weapons. And maybe crazy haters are shooting up bars and synagogues and yoga parlors. Still, we’re safe from the immigrant caravan for now. 

Sadly, it turns out not even all our military leaders are convinced the troops we have guarding the border are serving a useful purpose. “Now that the political utility of troops on the southern border to face a fictitious caravan invasion threat is over [emphasis added throughout],” Admiral James G. Stavridis, a former commander of the military’s Southern Command, tells reporters, “let’s hope the president will stand down the troops so they can be with their families – especially over the holidays.” 

John A. Nagl, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who served in Operation Desert Shield in 1990 and 1991, compares his experience with that of troops stationed along the border. “Having spent months in the desert with nothing to do,” Nagl says, “at least we had scorpions to have scorpion fights with. But we had a real mission,” he adds.  “These guys don’t have that.”

 

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DEVELOPMENTS REGARDING the midterms rile up an already riled president. The Democrats continue to pick up seats in the House of Representatives, several governorships, and hundreds of seats in state legislatures. Martha McSally concedes defeat in Arizona and Democrats take the Senate seat once held by Trump nemesis, Sen. Jeff Flake. 

McSally’s calm concession speech blows a giant hole in Trump’s claim of rampant voting fraud across Arizona. 

Grant Woods, a former Republican state attorney general in that same state, who recently registered as a Democrat, warns that Trump and the Republican Party have simply moved too far right for Southwest voters. “The extremism of the current Republican Party is a losing strategy for the future,” he says. “In the Southwest in particular, where we’re talking about a diverse population and, increasingly, a younger population, people just aren’t going to put up with it.”

 

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ALSO UNAPPEALING to younger voters, and humans generally, the noxious smell emanating from the Trump version of the EPA. That is the version where “protection” is secondary. 

The latest example of malfeasance comes with the indictment of Trey Glenn, the regional director for EPA’s southeast region, on six felony counts. Before he was chosen to help run the EPA, by turning a blind eye to pollution, generally, Glenn was a lawyer, earning $250 per hour, who worked to block EPA efforts to clean up contaminated Superfund industrial sites in north Birmingham and Tarrant, Alabama. His client was Drummond Co., a coal company, which would have been responsible for the expensive cleanups. 

A federal jury has already convicted a partner in Glenn’s law firm and a VP from Drummond on charges of bribing an Alabama state lawmaker – who charged $7,000 per month – in an effort to stop the EPA effort. Glenn has been charged with various ethical and criminal lapses in the same case. 

As one U.S. attorney involved in the case explained, “It’s cheaper to pay for a politician than it is to pay for an environmental cleanup.”

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: On November 21, Glenn resigned his position with the EPA, marking a major defeat for industrial polluters. 

In October 2020, he managed to have his felony charges knocked down, and pled guilty to three misdemeanors.

 

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IN OTHER NEWS, the F.B.I. reports that hate crimes increased for a third year in a row, up 17 percent in 2017. The leading motivators are race and ethnicity, followed by religion and sexual orientation. 

The groups being attacked with increasing regularity are the same groups Donald J. Trump and extremists on the right most love to hate. These include Muslims, Jews, Sikhs (usually mistake as Muslims), dark-skinned immigrants, African Americans, gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals. 

The New York Times provides detail: 

A spate of seemingly racially motivated incidents grabbed headlines last year, including a white man’s fatal stabbing of two men who were protecting a woman wearing a hijab in Portland, Ore.

 

Black people accounted for nearly half of hate crime victims last year, according to the F.B.I. report. Of those targeted based on religion, 58 percent were Jewish.

 

“For the N.A.A.C.P., we began to see this during the presidential election in 2015,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the organization. “The level of tribalism that was being fueled by presidential candidates, the acceptance of intolerance that has been condoned by President Trump and many others across the country has simply emboldened individuals to be more open and notorious with their racial hatred.”

From the start, neo-Nazi types have liked Trump.

July 18, 2019: Big Coal Lobbyist Running EPA - High-End Russian Hookers Running Business Out of Trump Tower Miami

 

7/18/19: Andrew Wheeler, the rebranded Big Coal lobbyist, continues to run the EPA as if the initials stand for “Every Pollutant Allowed.” 

Despite warnings from EPA scientists, Wheeler and the political hacks he brought in to run the agency, decide not to ban chlorpyrifos. The chemical is linked to serious health effects in children. This is seen as a victory for the chemical industry – and farmers. 

Children? 

Not so much.

 

According to EPA experts, now ignored with Wheeler at the wheel, “Chlorpyrifos can cause cholinesterase inhibition in humans at high enough doses; that is, it can overstimulate the nervous system causing nausea, dizziness, confusion, and at very high exposures (e.g., accidents or major spills), respiratory paralysis and death [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted].” 

Other recent EPA decisions allowed the increased use of pesticides that beekeepers say, “decimate beneficial insects,” and rolled back regulations regarding the use of asbestos, a known carcinogen.

 

Meanwhile, “Snowball” Jim Inhofe gives a speech on the U.S. Senate floor. He claims that the “Trump Administration may go down as one of the truly great environmental administrations” in the history of our country. He has a chart, showing that since 1970 combined emissions of the six most common pollutants have declined by 74%. Apparently, all environmental progress in the last half century is the result of the efforts of Donald J. Trump. 

To prove his point – that the United States needs to do nothing more to protect the environment, because the environment is doing great – Snowball Jim cited the work of Richard Lindzen of MIT. Lindzen, he said, has been “calling out climate alarmists for years.” 

It takes almost no effort to find a letter in which 22 leading scientists at MIT make clear. Lindzen’s positions regarding climate change and contributing pollutants are pretty much BS. (See: 8/29/19.)

Andrew Wheeler - probably thinking about how much he hates bees.

 

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A “HIGH-END Russian hooker ring” is broken up in Florida, operating out of Trump Tower Miami.  

You can’t make this up.

December 31, 2019: Lev Parnas Forgets a Million Dollars - And Someone Is Messing with the Science

 

12/31/19: In three of four draft reports, the Scientific Advisory Board for the E.P.A. warns that planned regulatory rollbacks conflict with established science. Someone then cleans up the fourth draft, and, presto! 

At least two new rules, one making it easier for coal-fired power plants to release mercury into the air, and another loosening rules about what chemicals can be used near waterways, are set to go into effect in January. 

So, Happy New Year! A little extra mercury never hurt anyone. Well, not counting people who have brains, hearts, kidneys, lungs, and immune systems.

Mercury poisoning can cause serious birth defects.

 And unborn babies.

 

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A LESS THAN HAPPY NEW YEAR may be in store for Mr. Rudy Giuliani. It turns out one of his associates in Ukraine, Lev Parnas, has agreed, through his lawyer, to comply with a subpoena from the House Intelligence Committee. 

Parnas, who has already been indicted, is willing to produce documents and phone records that House investigators would like. 

Parnas, if you have forgotten – as Parnas himself is prone to forget important matters – is currently residing in jail. He was denied bail after prosecutors showed that he and his wife “forgot” a $1 million check written on a Russian bank account, when listing assets as part of the bail process. 

As for Rudy, we all remember what happened to Trump’s last personal lawyer. The association did not end well. (See: 1/14/20.)