Executive Departments 4

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Nikki is now whining about a popcorn shipment being delayed. 

She ought to talk to fucknugget’s postmaster general if she has a problem. 

Some of the responses are terrific.

More under spoiler:

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I originally read this as "lock up", but I guess look up works for now.

[GreyhoundFan]

Wow:

That it has to be said is crazy.

[fraurosena]

43 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Wow:

That it has to be said is crazy.

I agree with the message of the letter, with one -- rather important -- exception:

In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath.

This is pertinently untrue. The Constitution is quite clear that a president's term in office ends at 12.00 o'clock on January 20. At precisely that moment next year, Miller will not have to defy a president. He will simply be removing a private citizen illegally occupying the premises.

That said, my guess is that when Trump realises he's lost the elections, I really believe he will flee the country at the earliest possible time. It wouldn't surprise me if he won't be sighted after the elections, and that we'll find out the administration was covering his escape.

 

[WiseGirl]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The level of corruption is insane:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Frankly, with all his crap, I wouldn't be surprised if Twitler signed an executive order outlawing the post office:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I would be thrilled if both of them were booted:

 

[fraurosena]

34 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I would be thrilled if both of them were booted:

Sadly, those who should be doing the booting won't.

[GreyhoundFan]

[WiseGirl]

 

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Good point:

[GreyhoundFan]

We need to keep up the pressure:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s appointees are working hard to maximize the damage in the time they have left"

Spoiler

President Trump has never had much interest in the nuts and bolts of governing. Upon taking office, he was surprised to learn that running the U.S. government was actually harder than managing a midsize brand-licensing firm, and his inability to concentrate on the novel coronavirus can now be measured in 5.4 million infections and nearly 170,000 deaths, not to mention the resulting economic cataclysm.

Now, with just two and a half months to Election Day, he may never have had less concern for the actual work of the presidency. But don’t mistake Trump’s personal distraction for his administration falling down on the job. Because while he whiles away the hours tweeting about Fox News, the people who work for him are as industrious as ever, doing all they can to leave us with a country that is harsher, less just, more unequal and dirtier than when they found it.

If they have only a few months left, they’re going to make the most of it. When it comes to laying waste to America, these people are going to run through the tape.

Consider the latest of the administration’s efforts to despoil the environment and accelerate climate change:

The Trump administration finalized plans Monday to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, a move that will auction off oil and gas rights in the heart of one of the nation’s most iconic wild places. Achieving a goal Republicans have sought for 40 years, it marks a capstone for an administration that has ignored calls to reduce fossil fuel consumption in the face of climate change.

The move will allow leasing on the 1.6 million-acre coastal plain, the center of a nearly pristine wilderness home to migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as polar bears and foxes that live there year-round. It marks a major step toward reviving fossil fuel development in an area that has been untouched for three decades.

The ANWR was an issue you may have forgotten about; it’s hardly high up on the conservative agenda anymore. But Trump’s appointees didn’t forget. This follows an announcement last week that the administration would scrap limits on methane leaks, leaving it up to oil and gas companies to decide how much of the potent greenhouse gas they’d like to let seep from pipelines, wells and storage tanks.

Even fossil fuel companies themselves greeted that measure with skepticism when it was first floated; they’ve been trying to capture methane and promote a greener image, and the administration came along and said, Don’t you want to pollute more? C’mon!

That’s at a time when Earth continues to get hotter; here in Washington, we had temperatures above 90 degrees on 28 days in the month of July, a new record. In Death Valley, it reached 130 degrees on Sunday, which might be the highest temperature ever recorded.

Trump hasn’t described global warming as a hoax in a while. But the people he put in the EPA and the Interior Department are doing everything they can to promote more fossil fuel production.

In fact, I suspect that Trump spent about 30 seconds signing off on drilling in the ANWR, if he knew about it at all. This is perhaps the single most important policy dynamic in his administration: Because he cares so little about policy, and because saner Republicans have refused to work for him, his administration is populated by a combination of grifters and far-right ideologues who are given free rein to enact whatever extremist policies their little hearts desire.

They are acutely aware that they could be out of their jobs come January. So they’re going to use every moment they have to do as much damage as they can. You can expect a steady stream of regulatory changes and policy initiatives coming out of federal departments, even if they’re drowned out in the news by the campaign.

Unlike Republicans in Congress — who all but gave up legislating after they passed a tax cut in 2017 and don’t seem to care about doing much else but confirming more conservative judges — the people ensconced in the departments have much more they want to do. There are public lands to despoil, people’s health insurance to take away, immigrants to expel and so much more.

Which is why, should Joe Biden win, he’s going to have to create teams of experts who can catalogue the long list of horrors, then devise plans to undo what has been done in this dark period. We’re going to be focusing on the legislation he promotes in his first month in office, but this task will be just as important.

It may even intensify in the two and a half months between the election and the inauguration. If you were an EPA appointee looking to impress the oil companies you hope will hire you as a lobbyist once your tenure in “public” service is over, you’d take advantage of every minute you had left to advance their interests.

If Trump loses, it isn’t hard to imagine him beginning his post-presidential life a couple of months early, trudging back to Mar-a-Lago where he doesn’t have to solve problems more difficult than whether to buy new curtains for the ballroom or give his toilet a new coat of gold plating, and he doesn’t have to talk to anyone who isn’t being paid to pretend they admire him.

But the determined Trump appointees in the departments will still be working away. And they probably still have a few things up their sleeves.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Forget the Trump tweets. This is the Trump action that might actually kill us."

Spoiler

If you want to understand the long-term consequences of the Trump presidency, forget his Twitter feed. Instead, think about methane.

Methane is the main ingredient of natural gas. When released into the atmosphere, it traps 80 times as much heat as its better-known greenhouse-gas cousin, carbon dioxide, over 20 years. Because of methane’s potent heat-trapping abilities, this “super-pollutant” is the sleeper issue of climate change.

Unfortunately, scientists don’t know precisely how much methane is being released because there hasn’t been adequate measurement. But recent studies suggest emissions are much greater than previously believed. In fact, recent research estimates that the fossil-fuel industry emits about 13 million metric tons of methane annually. That’s 80 percent higher than estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. In heat-trapping terms, it is roughly equivalent to total carbon dioxide emissions from all of the United States’ remaining coal-fired plants.

Considering that Death Valley in California on Sunday notched the hottest temperature (130 degrees) recorded on Earth since at least 1931, this is not exactly welcome news.

Much of the methane emitted into the atmosphere comes from undetected leaks in oil and gas operations. So, in 2016, the Obama administration finalized new regulations to detect and plug methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage tanks. These totally reasonable regs were supported by energy companies such as Shell, BP and ExxonMobil; they knew methane leaks were a black eye for the fracking industry, which has marketed natural gas as a more climate-friendly alternative to coal.

“We need to control methane emissions now to maximize the advantages of gas and secure a role for decarbonized gas in the future energy system,” BP wrote in a public comment last year. “Otherwise, we risk losing the confidence of investors, consumers, policymakers and other stakeholders.”

On Thursday, the Trump administration rolled back the rules anyway. In so doing, it provided a useful encapsulation of virtually every awful theme of this administration — and what’s at stake if President Trump gets reelected.

The new rules, first and foremost, are not merely anti-science, but anti-measurement. That is, the rollback’s primary initial impact is to keep Americans in the dark about a climate-damaging pollutant.

“How could we as an advanced society not want to measure these emissions?” asks Michael Greenstone, director of the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. “This is such a concerted effort to stick our heads in the ground.”

Maybe so. But it would be of a piece with Trump’s musings about slowing coronavirus testing so Americans don’t learn how many cases there are; his administration’s decision to cease publishing economic forecasts so Americans can’t assess the problems facing the economy; and its actions to stop collecting or publishing inconvenient data on all sorts of other troubles.

Then, to the extent the administration did rely on data in justifying its methane deregulation, it cooked the books.

It did this by using accounting gimmicks in its official regulatory cost-benefit analysis. In technical documents, the administration said it was no longer taking into account harms that climate change might have outside U.S. borders; and also that it was changing the “discount rate” — that is, reducing how much weight it placed upon future costs. It was Trump’s trademark isolationism and short-termism, made mathematically explicit.

The result? The Obama-era estimate of methane’s social costs were ratcheted down from about $1,400 per metric ton to just $55 under a Trump accounting scenario. Incidentally, the Trump administration was admonished for this same phony math in a court case blocking a related environmental rule last month.

But again, funny accounting is par for the course with this president — for environmental rules or otherwise.

So, too, alas, is deregulatory action that disproportionately harms low-income families and people of color. As is Trump’s claim that such harms are necessary to help businesses, even though major businesses themselves reject the “help.”

Similar dynamics played out with the administration’s rollback of automotive fuel-economy standards (which were supposedly designed to help automakers, even though major auto companies opposed the rollback); and of mercury emissions regulations (likewise opposed by the utility plants Trump claimed to be aiding).

More broadly, the new methane rules are emblematic of this administration’s faulty assumption that there’s always a trade-off between what’s good for the economy and what’s good for public health. In fact — whether we’re talking about controlling the novel coronavirus or curbing climate change — the twin goals are complementary. In the long-run, a healthy populace (and environment) are necessary for a healthy economy.

If Joe Biden prevails in November, and Democrats control both houses of Congress, Trump’s new methane regulations will probably be reversed. Barring that, methane presents an ominous preview of what Americans can expect from four more years of Trump: An invisible, deadly, possibly existential threat, ignored for flashier distractions.

 

[47of74]

Former Iowa Governor Brainfart is stepping down as ambassador to China

Quote

The U.S. Ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, is stepping down amid tensions with Beijing. Branstad was Iowa’s longest serving governor.

Sources tell CNN the ambassador is planning to leave Beijing before the November presidential election. He’s been there for three years.

This comes as tensions rise between the U.S. and China.

On Friday, the Chinese government announced it would impose unspecified restrictions on senior U.S. diplomats and personnel in China.

This is the guy who gave us #CovidKim. I hope he slithers away and never enters politics again. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Lock him up:

 

[Audrey2]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Lock him up:

 

But Hillary's emails...

[47of74]

How long til this fucker is heading off into the corn fields to spend more time with his family?

Quote

The health department's top spokesperson Michael Caputo called an emergency staff meeting on Tuesday to apologize for drawing negative attention to the Trump administration's health care strategy and signaled that he might be soon departing his role, according to five people with knowledge of the meeting.

The departure of Caputo, who has closely controlled the health agencies' dissemination of information about coronavirus, would be a blow to the Trump administration's efforts to promote a possible vaccine, if one is approved in the fall.

Caputo told staffers that his series of false accusations on Facebook Live this weekend — which included unfounded allegations that the Centers for Disease Control was harboring a “resistance unit” — reflected poorly on HHS’ communications office. He blamed his recent behavior on a combination of physical health issues and the toll of fielding death threats against his family. Caputo also acknowledged that he had never read one of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, despite his team's ongoing efforts to try to edit those documents.

Caputo told staff that he is scheduled to meet with HHS Secretary Alex Azar later Tuesday, the people with knowledge of the meeting said.

 

[PsyD2013]

On 9/14/2020 at 6:49 AM, 47of74 said:

This is the guy who gave us #CovidKim. I hope he slithers away and never enters politics again. 

He'll be back in Iowa politics in some way or another.  #CovidKim owes him.  Braindead with be there to collect.

[47of74]

Yeah that didn't take long

Quote

Michael Caputo, a former member of the 2016 Trump Campaign and the Acting Head of the Department of Health and Human Services, is apparently stepping down from his position to focus on his mental health, according to several of his staffers.

Caputo told staffers that his series of false accusations on Facebook Live this weekend — which included unfounded allegations that the Centers for Disease Control was harboring a “resistance unit” — reflected poorly on HHS’ communications office. He blamed his recent behavior on a combination of physical health issues and the toll of fielding death threats against his family. Caputo also acknowledged that he had never read one of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, despite his team’s ongoing efforts to try to edit those documents. Caputo also lashed out at CDC scientists whom he suspects of “conspiring against the White House”, and later told the New York Times that politically motivated scientists “are all going to hell.”

I object to him characterizing this as a mental health break though.  He said all this because he's an asshole, not because he's mentally ill. 

[mamallama]

1 hour ago, 47of74 said:

Yeah that didn't take long

I object to him characterizing this as a mental health break though.  He said all this because he's an asshole, not because he's mentally ill. 

Well you could argue that this means those espousing similar beliefs are unfit to hold public office due to mental illness.

[GreyhoundFan]

So.much.corruption.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting: "Montana judge ousts Trump’s temporary Bureau of Land Management director, casting doubt on range of decisions"

Spoiler

An order by the chief judge of the Montana federal court on Friday not only ousted William Perry Pendley as the top official at the Bureau of Land Management but might also invalidate a wide range of decisions he took to open up vast parts of the American west to oil and gas drilling.

Pendley has been effectively serving as BLM’s acting director even though President Trump never sent his name to the Senate for confirmation, Judge Brian Morris said in his order. The judge gave the Interior Department and the plaintiffs in the case 10 days to submit examples of actions Pendley took that might be set aside.

Morris’s order could also call into question decisions made by officials in similar positions across the administration, which has not nominated people to fill 133 of the more than 750 key positions that require Senate confirmation. Many of the people carrying out those responsibilities may now be challenged for doing so in violation of a law about filling federal vacancies.

“We’re talking here about an acting official or someone designated to be the equivalent who may have no authority to make decisions,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service. “It creates uncertainty across the board and there are many other instances where the same or similar circumstances might exist.”

The court case has also stirred up the already close political campaign to fill Montana’s Senate seat. Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, who filed the lawsuit that led to Friday’s court order, is running against incumbent Republican Steve Daines.

The BLM manages 27 million acres in Montana, nearly one-third of the state. In his lawsuit, Bullock sought to protect two vast swaths of land in the southwest part of the state — the Lewistown and Missoula areas. Pendley had signed resource management plans for both of them; the one for Lewistown would have opened up 95 percent of the 650,000-acre area to leases for oil and natural gas drilling. Judge Morris said that by analyzing comments and protests about resource management plans Pendley “actually exercised powers reserved to the BLM director.”

“This ruling enshrines in law what Montanans already knew: William Perry Pendley has no business overseeing our public lands,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said in a statement. “Montanans and future generations will benefit from Governor Bullock’s work protecting our public lands from Pendley’s reckless agenda.”

While the Federal Vacancies Reform Act limits a person to serve in an acting capacity for 210 days, Pendley had been serving for 424 days. And the Interior Secretary David Bernhardt had extended Pendley’s tenure four times, the court noted.

“The President cannot shelter unconstitutional ‘temporary’ appointments for the duration of his presidency through a matryoshka doll of delegated authorities,” Morris said, referring to the popular Russian nesting dolls.

“If this case becomes a template in other districts, then it would follow that all other land use plans that have been approved during Pendley’s illegal tenure could also get thrown out,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities. “The potential implication there is stunning — effectively erasing all of the planning work BLM has finalized over the last year, possibly longer.”

He said in an email that resource management plans were “the products of YEARS of work and designed to stay in place for 20 year spans, and lay out where oil and gas companies can expect to drill down the road. They also affect grazing, mining, and recreation.”

Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation, said the Montana ruling would encourage his organization and other environmental groups to reexamine BLM decisions that might have been signed by Pendley, a longtime critic of federal land management before joining Interior.

BLM drew up similar resource management plans for a portion of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, O’Mara said. (A separate, larger portion of Bears Ears was covered by Trump’s executive order.) He said a reexamination of BLM policies could also affect an oil and gas lease sale in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.

O’Mara said groups would also seek to learn whether Pendley signed documents regarding moving most of the BLM from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colo.

“This puts a question mark over every decision he has made,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, associate vice president for public lands at the NWF. “And that’s the price the administration pays for not going through the normal process of nominating a director and having that approved by the Senate.”

Weiss said another policy that might be reviewed was the update of the sage grouse plan from March 2019. Pendley wasn’t acting director at that point, but the people who were carrying out the duties of BLM director were Brian Steed and Casey Hammond, who both exercised duties past the window allowed in the Vacancies Reform Act.

“In that case, the legal challenges are coming from conservation groups, not governors,” Weiss said. “But this could add another legal argument that the conservation groups use to get the plans permanently thrown out.”

Pendley has been a lightning rod ever since his appointment to the BLM. In 1982, while Pendley was head of the Minerals Management Service, he and another Interior official, along with their wives, attended a dinner with two coal company attorneys on the same day Pendley and his colleague had made a favorable decision regarding bids on Powder River Basin coal leases, as outlined in a General Accounting Office report. The coal company officials picked up the entire $494.45 dinner tab, or $1,343 in today’s dollars.

Pendley, who had moved from Interior to the Department of the Navy, resigned the year after the GAO’s findings became public.

He later became president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, founded in 1977 and initially run by Reagan’s controversial first Interior secretary, James G. Watt. The foundation received backing from ultraconservative groups and individuals such as the Koch-linked Donors Trust and beer tycoon Joseph Coors.

Pendley was later counsel of record representing aging businessman Sidney Longwell and his small company, Solenex. Solenex leased 6,247 acres in northwestern Montana in 1982 during the Reagan administration for about $1 an acre. Long­well wanted permission to build a six-mile service road and bridge over the Two Medicine River on lands considered sacred by the Blackfeet tribe. The dispute lasted decades.

Pendley also wrote opinion pieces. “The Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold,” he wrote in a National Review magazine article in 2016.