Month: August 2018

MORNING MESSAGE

Miles Mogulescu

Kavanaugh Threatens the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy

Will no single Republican Senator put conscience and Constitution ahead of efforts to ramrod the lifetime appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court? Kavanaugh is not simply a conventional conservative court nominee. He’s a threat to holding Trump accountable for his crimes, and a threat to the economy and the environment. He would join the Supreme Court as the nominee of a minority-elected President confirmed by a minority-elected Senate, putting our very democracy at risk. Long after Trump, McConnell, Bannon and Pruitt are gone, their ghosts will write laws through the pen of Brett Kavanaugh, pitting the Court against the will of the people and threatening the future of the planet.

Judge Issues Rebuke To Trump On Federal Workers

Trump’s power to fire federal workers curtailed by judge. NYT: “A federal district judge in Washington struck down most of the key provisions of three executive orders that President Trump signed in late May that would have made it easier to fire federal employees. The ruling, issued early Saturday, is a blow to Republican efforts to rein in public-sector labor unions, which states like Wisconsin have aggressively curtailed in recent years. In June, the Supreme Court dealt public-sector unions a major blow by ending mandatory union fees for government workers nationwide. (Federal workers were already exempt from paying such fees.) The ruling is the latest in a series of legal setbacks for the administration, which has suffered losses in court in its efforts to wield executive authority to press its agenda on immigration, voting and the environment.”

Dems Strip Superdelegates Of Nominating Powers

Dems strip superdelegates of power in picking presidential nominee. Politico: “Democratic Party officials voted Saturday to strip superdelegates of much of their power in the presidential nominating process, infuriating many traditionalists while handing a victory to the party’s left flank. The measure’s overwhelming approval – met by cheers in a hotel ballroom here – concluded a tense summer meeting of the Democratic National Committee, which had labored over the issue since 2016. Superdelegates that year largely sided with Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, enraging Sanders’ supporters. Under the new rule, superdelegates – the members of Congress, DNC members and other top officials who made up about 15 percent of delegates that year – will not be allowed to vote on the first ballot at a contested national convention. The change could dramatically re-shape the calculus of future presidential campaigns, rendering candidates’ connections to superdelegates less significant. ‘It’s a big victory for the base of the party,’ said Jeff Cohen, co-founder of the online activist group RootsAction.org. ‘Tom Perez realizes that he’d rather lose 10 dead-enders in the DNC than a couple million activists,’ he said of the party chairman. While long a priority of Sanders and his supporters, the effort to reduce superdelegates’ clout was embraced more broadly in recent months by Democratic Party officials desperate to win over young voters skeptical of centralized party power.”

WH Nixes Prison Reforms

Trump won’t endorse criminal justice bill before midterms. Axios: “President Trump has stymied a plan to push prison and sentencing reform before the midterms, according to an administration source with direct knowledge. In a White House meeting on Thursday afternoon, Trump decided that the compromise package that Jared Kushner, Sen. Chuck Grassley and others have been advocating for is too politically difficult to endorse before the elections, the source told Axios. Without the president backing the bill, which might have reduced some mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug crimes and sent around 4,000 prisoners home, it has zero chance of getting a vote before the midterms. Senate leadership was already reluctant to bring it up for a vote. The collapse of the bill is a win for opponents of the package, including law-and-order hardliners Sen. Tom Cotton and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.”

Immigration Judges Pressed To Fast-Track Rulings

Immigration judges reportedly instructed to hear more cases per day. ThinkProgress: “Immigration judges across the country are reportedly being told to speed-up the deportation process by cramming additional hearings into their schedules, according to a new report from BuzzFeed. The instruction comes as the Trump administration continues its efforts to round-up as many documented and undocumented immigrants as possible under the president’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which refers anyone detained at the border for criminal prosecution, including some asylum seekers. Advocates are worried the mandate, which reportedly came from assistant chief immigration judges, who supervise separate immigration courts, could violate the due process rights of immigrants, as it forces judges to rush through three merit hearings per day, starting in October.”

Veterans React To CA Rep. Hunter’s Misuse Of Charity Funds

Hunter and his wife have dismayed some wounded warriors. LA Times: “The congressman wanted to purchase ‘Hawaii shorts,’ but was out of money. His wife told him to buy them at a golf pro shop so they could claim the expense later as ‘some (golf) balls for wounded warriors,’ prosecutors allege. Hunter was an officer in the Marines and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was the first combat veteran of those wars to be elected to Congress. ‘He should have known better,’ Riley said. ‘As a Marine, to use other people’s sacrifices to enrich himself — it’s unbelievable.’ After reading the charges against the congressman, Riley said he changed his mind. ‘He’s the last person I’d want in Congress,’ he said.”

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MORNING MESSAGE

Ai-Jen Poo
Small Red-State Towns Team Up to Support Immigrants

In Eldora, Iowa, 67-year-old Julie Duhn reserved the lodge at her local state park and hosted her own Families Belong Together cookout. With a population of only 2,600, Eldora is home to the only prison in Iowa that maintains a contract with Immigration Customs Enforcement to hold immigrants in detention. “I’m a mother and a grandmother,” she says. “I cannot in a million years imagine what it was like for these families to come this far through all the danger of that journey, trying to find safety, then to have their children taken from them. On what planet is that right?” People arrived at the cookout with food made with ingredients fresh from their gardens. They introduced themselves to one another. Then, they passed around a hat to collect more than $1,000 to help reunite separated families, many of whom are still held in prison-like detention centers. A common sentiment was: “I’ve been on the sidelines for too long. With this policy, I realized I can’t stay on the sidelines any longer.”

Prisoners Strike To Protest ‘Modern-Day Slavery’

Prisoners nationwide go on strike to protest ‘modern-day slavery’. USA Today: “Prison inmates nationwide plan to put pressure on the country’s penal system by going on a two-week strike beginning Tuesday. The strike is timed to begin on the anniversary of the killing of jailed African American activist and inmate George Jackson. He was killed by a guard in 1971 after taking guards and two inmates hostage in a bid to escape from San Quentin State Prison in California. The final day of the strike — Sept. 9 — also carries symbolism. That’s the day in 1971 that the Attica Prison riots in New York began, eventually leaving over 40 people dead when police stormed in to re-take the facility. Prisoners leading the protests say the strike is aimed at ending what they call ‘modern-day slavery.’ Inmates complain they are paid pennies on the dollar per hour for labor. The event is spearheaded by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a network of imprisoned prisoner rights advocates based out of Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina and supported by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), a prisoner-led trade group. Inmates plan to abstain from reporting to their assigned jobs, halt commissary spending, hold peaceful sit-in protests and refuse to eat during the strike.”

L.A. Tenants Lead Largest Rent Strike In History

These tenants are leading the largest rent strike in L.A. history. The Nation: “os Angeles’s housing market is in crisis. Low-income communities of color across the city are facing systematic displacement due to gentrification. Skyrocketing housing costs have created a homelessness epidemic that has left almost 60,000 people living on the streets. And now, the city is undergoing its largest rent strike in recent history. In three buildings on South Burlington Avenue in the rapidly gentrifying Westlake neighborhood, an estimated 200 families in about 80 units are currently refusing to pay rent. After years of neglect, the buildings’ management company began rolling out exorbitant rent increases this February, hiking residents’ rents anywhere from 25 to 40 percent. For the buildings’ working-class tenants, these rent increases are just not affordable—so they’ve joined together and have been on a rent strike since March. The tenants of the three Burlington Avenue buildings have been living in deplorable conditions for years. Back-flowing drains cause leaks and floods, leading to serious mold issues; trash is left to pile in the dumpsters, filling the trash chute to the top floor of the three-story building; and large sewage pipes in the first-floor parking garage repeatedly become backed up and flood the area with the building’s collective waste. Maintenance requests are only selectively resolved, if not completely ignored, by the property-management company, which has made the buildings breeding grounds for roaches, bedbugs, and rodents. And when repairs and fumigations are completed, they are routinely charged to tenants.”

UNC Protests Topple Monument To White Supremacy

Students tear Confederate ‘Silent Sam’ statue from its campus pedestal. ThinkProgress: “On the eve of first day of classes, a group of mostly protesting students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill toppled the statue of Silent Sam, the Confederate monument that’s stood at the entrance to campus since 1913 as a memorial to ‘white supremacy.’ According to mainstream and social media reports, a planned demonstration to protest the statue began about 7 p.m. and swelled to an estimated crowd of 250 students, faculty, and community residents who exchanged shouts with a group of the monument’s supporters. At about 9:30 p.m., with a heavy police presence looking on, some among the anti-statue demonstrators revealed rope that had been hidden in their banners and wrapped it around the statue. Witnesses told The Daily Tar Heel, an independent, student-led newspaper that covers the university, that it took about 10 seconds for the monument to plummet from its pedestal. ‘I feel liberated — like I’m part of something big,’ said first-year student Natalia Walker. ‘It’s literally my fourth day here. This is the biggest thing I’ve ever been apart of in my life just activist-wise. All of these people coming together for this one sole purpose and actually getting it done was the best part.’”

EPA To Ease Coal Restrictions

New E.P.A. rollback of coal pollution regulations takes a major step forward. NYT: “Andrew Wheeler, the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, on Monday signed a plan to weaken regulation of coal-fired power plants, advancing a proposal that the coal industry has hailed as an end to burdensome regulation and environmentalists have criticized as a retreat in the battle to address climate change. Mr. Wheeler’s signature officially sets in motion one of the Trump Administration’s most significant rollbacks yet of former President Barack Obama’s climate change legacy, alongside an earlier decision to let automobiles pollute more. A senior E.P.A. official confirmed the signing late Monday. The agency is expected on Tuesday to discuss the details of its proposal, which it is calling the Affordable Clean Energy rule, to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which was designed to curtail greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The long-anticipated Trump administration overhaul of those rules is likely to set the stage for years of legal clashes. President Trump is expected to head to West Virginia coal country, where in May 2016 that he donned a coal miner’s helmet and vowed to strip away regulations on the industry.”

Trump Judges Impact The Law

Federal judges appointed by Trump are starting to leave their mark. LA Times: “In 2015, Donald Zimmerman, a conservative city councilman in Austin, Texas, tried a novel strategy to win reelection: suing his own city. Zimmerman thought the city’s $350 limit on municipal campaign donations violated the 1st Amendment. A federal judge disagreed. After Zimmerman appealed, the full U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to hear his case, with one judge writing a dissent. That was James C. Ho, newly appointed to that court by President Trump. He argued that not only did Zimmerman have a case, but that all donation limits in the U.S. should be abolished. ‘The 1st Amendment protects the freedom of speech, and that freedom emphatically includes the right to speak about who our elected leaders should and should not be,’ he wrote, concluding: ‘The 1st Amendment therefore protects campaign contributions.’ As Washington prepares for a Senate showdown over whether Brett Kavanaugh will join the Supreme Court, Trump has already put his stamp on the judiciary with the lifetime appointments of at least 43 federal judges. Ho was confirmed by the Senate in December by a 53-43 vote. Trump’s total of 22 successfully appointed appeals court judges — as of last month — is more than either of the last two presidents at this point in their terms, according to an analysis last month by the Pew Research Center. ‘The real kind of big news is the sheer amount of change that’s happening on the court of appeals,’ said Harsh Voruganti, founder and editor of the Vetting Room, a website that tracks judicial appointments. ‘I think we’re going to see a fair amount of change in jurisprudence.’ Trump has reportedly received input in selecting nominees from right-leaning groups such as the Federalist Society. While conservative groups have celebrated his picks, liberal court-watchers are worried. ‘What we’ve seen in only a very limited amount of time is deeply disturbing, and confirms concerns that we had before these individuals were approved by the Senate,’ said Daniel Goldberg, legal director for the Alliance for Justice, a liberal-leaning judicial advocacy group.”

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Erica Johnson

Turning Back the Tide of Hate In Iowa and Beyond

There’s a phrase we use to say how people should treat one another: “Iowa Nice.” Out here, we think of ourselves as kind, generous, and family friendly. But “Iowa Nice” takes on a different ring in the Trump-Sessions era, when forced family separations and mass arrests of immigrants in small towns like the one where I grew up, Mount Pleasant, in southeast Iowa, are on the rise. That’s why I joined others in Des Moines to confront Attorney General Jeff Sessions and say, “not in our name, not in our state.” If there’s going to be any zero tolerance policy in Iowa, it should be a zero tolerance for hate.

WH Says We Don’t Need To Save Energy

Reversing decades of US policy, the Trump administration says conserving oil is no longer an economic imperative. AP: “Conserving oil is no longer an economic imperative for the US, the Trump administration declares in a major new policy statement that threatens to undermine decades of government campaigns for gas-thrifty cars and other conservation programs. The position was outlined in a memo released last month in support of the administration’s proposal to relax fuel mileage standards. The government released the memo online this month without fanfare. Growth of natural gas and other alternatives to petroleum has reduced the need for imported oil, which ‘in turn affects the need of the nation to conserve energy,’ the Energy Department said. It also cites the now decade-old fracking revolution that has unlocked US shale oil reserves, giving ‘the United States more flexibility than in the past to use our oil resources with less concern.’ With the memo, the administration is formally challenging old justifications for conservation — even congressionally prescribed ones, as with the mileage standards. The memo made no mention of climate change. Transportation is the single largest source of climate-changing emissions. President Donald Trump has questioned the existence of climate change, embraced the notion of “energy dominance” as a national goal, and called for easing what he calls burdensome regulation of oil, gas and coal, including repealing the Obama Clean Power Plan.”

WH To Unveil Coal-Friendly Emissions Policies

Former Koch lawyer turned top Trump EPA official to deliver major win for big polluters. Common Dreams: “With President Donald Trump expected to unveil a plan on Tuesday that would enable states to decide whether to regulate coal plant emissions, defanging former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the New York Times on Sunday published a detailed profile of William Wehrum, an ex-lawyer for corporate clients like Koch Industries who now leads air pollution policy at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). With Wehrum’s climate-wrecking deregulatory agenda and ethics conflicts so clearly outlined in the report, journalist Jonathan M. Katz warned on Twitter, ‘Even if the president ends up in prison, we’re going to be paying for this era for the rest of our lives.’ Wehrum is credited with pushing for the anticipated coal-friendly policy, and numerous other rollbacks of Obama era regulations on big polluters. As Bruce Buckheit, who led the EPA’s air enforcement office under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, put it, “They basically found the most aggressive and knowledgeable fox and said, ‘Here are the keys to the henhouse.’”

Trump Remaking U.S. Judiciary At Record Pace

Inside Trump’s judicial takeover. Rolling Stone: “(White House Counsel) Don McGahn has spearheaded the administration’s unprecedented campaign to reshape the American judicial system, filling courts with judges who share Trump’s goals of dismantling environmental protection, rolling back civil and reproductive rights, and gutting labor laws — in other words, destroying the so-called administrative state. ‘These efforts to reform the regulatory state begin with Congress and the executive branch,’ McGahn said in his speech, ‘but they ultimately depend on courts.’ On the campaign trail, Trump told evangelicals and other wavering Republicans they had no choice but to vote for him: “You know why? Supreme Court judges, Supreme Court judges.” He talked about judges nonstop and even released a list of 21 potential Supreme Court picks that he had gathered with the help of the Federalist Society and the archconservative Heritage Foundation. He would enter office with the most judicial vacancies since Bill Clinton — largely thanks to Republican filibustering of Obama’s nominees — and his administration has filled those vacancies as fast as possible. As of this writing, Trump has put 26 new judges onto the appellate courts, more than any other chief executive at this point in the presidency. He has also nominated over 100 district-court judges and gotten 26 of those picks confirmed. These judges are overwhelmingly young, ideological and now set to serve lifetime appointments. And then, of course, there’s Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first pick for the Supreme Court, and Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s second Supreme Court nominee, who stands a strong chance of confirmation.”

U.S. Mercenaries Want To Privatize War In Afghanistan

Erik Prince is launching a cable news tour to convince Trump to privatize the war in Afghanistan. ThinkProgress: “Growing impatient with the conflict in Afghanistan as it stretches into its 17th year, President Trump is becoming more receptive to appeals to privatize the war, advisers to the president told NBC News. The privatization proposal would involve replacing soldiers with mercenaries who report to a special U.S. envoy, who would in turn report directly to the president. The idea is the brainchild of Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who claims the scheme will save billions of dollars and help quickly resolve the conflict. Military experts disagree, disputing the purported savings and raising alarm about the ethical dilemmas, most notably the potential lack of accountability, sparked by relying on private contractors to fight U.S. wars. Last summer, Prince pitched his idea to hand over Afghanistan to mercenaries in a PowerPoint presentation to Trump advisers as the White House mulled its next move in the region. The administration ultimately decided to authorize a troop surge instead. Now, in a move that coincides with the one-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s troop surge announcement, Prince told NBC News he’s launching an ‘aggressive’ media campaign to convince Trump to reconsider his proposal. Prince, who is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, told NBC News he is confident he’ll be able to schedule time to speak more with Trump officials about his ideas in the coming days.”

Trump’s Mega-Deficits May Become Permanent

Trump trillion-dollar-plus deficits are putting America on a path to fiscal ruin. USA Today:“It became very clear this month that neither the Trump White House nor its allies on Capitol Hill want you to know that the federal budget is already in very bad shape … and getting worse. It happened when the U.S. Treasury, the official keeper of Washington’s financial results, issued its monthly statement for the first 10 months of fiscal 2018 about federal revenues and spending and, therefore, the budget deficit. Treasury showed what no president ever wants to admit: the deficit is spiking. The federal government’s red ink this year is already 21 percent above what it was in 2017 and there are few prospects that the bottom line will improve anytime soon. Except with infrequent and unsubstantiated platitudes about how the situation is going to get better, the Trump White House and Republicans in Congress have been doing everything possible not to talk about the budget this year. To avoid tough questions and politically embarrassing votes, the House and Senate have even refused to consider a budget even though they are required by law to adopt one. Unlike the trillion-dollar budget deficits that occurred during the Obama administration that were temporary and largely the result of the Great Recession, the Trump deficits that will soon reach and exceed $1 trillion are permanent and will only get worse in the years ahead.”

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Robert Borosage

How to Win Elections from the Ground Up

Tuesday’s primaries are proof that populist progressives are slowly remaking the Democratic Party. They are running to win at the state and local level, building momentum for reform and a deep bench for change in the future. This is the story that’s often missed in national headlines: What’s going on in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Vermont exemplifies the stirring that is taking place all across the country.

Sessions Fast-Tracks Deportations

U.S. attorney general issues order to speed up immigrant deportations. Reuters: “U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday sought to speed up the deportation of illegal immigrants, telling immigration judges they should only postpone cases in removal proceedings ‘for good cause shown.’ Sessions, in an interim order that was criticized by some lawyers, said the ‘good-cause’ standard ‘limits the discretion of immigration judges and prohibits them from granting continuances for any reason or no reason at all.’ Unlike the federal judiciary system, U.S. immigration courts fall under the Department of Justice and the attorney general can intervene. Sessions, a Republican former U.S. Senator appointed by President Donald Trump, has been unusually active in this practice compared to his predecessors. Stephen Kang, an attorney with the ACLU immigrants rights project, described Sessions’ order as ‘troubling’ and one of a series that “has moved in the direction of restricting due process rights for individuals who are in removal proceedings.”

Intelligence Veterans Condemn Muzzling Of Free Speech

Former intelligence chiefs rally around Brennan and slap down Trump. WaPo: “A group of esteemed former intelligence officials on Thursday released a statement to respond to “the ill-considered and unprecedented remarks and actions by the White House regarding the removal of John Brennan’s security clearances.” They praised Brennan’s service as a former head of the CIA and declared that ‘allegations of wrongdoing on the part of Brennan while in office are baseless.’ They noted that Brennan decided “to speak out sharply regarding what he sees as threats to our national security.’ The former officials said that some of them had done the same, but others ‘elected to take a different course and be more circumspect in our public pronouncements.’ Whatever their decision, the intelligence professionals agreed that “the president’s action regarding John Brennan and the threats of similar action against other former officials has nothing to do with who should and should not hold security clearances — and everything to do with an attempt to stifle free speech.”

Senate Report Slams Family Separations

Bipartisan report finds Trump’s policies Made reuniting migrant families more difficult. Bloomberg: “President Donald Trump’s short-lived policy of separating families entering the country illegally worsened the U.S.’s already troubled efforts to protect unaccompanied migrant children from trafficking and abuse, a bipartisan Senate investigation found. ‘The Trump administration took steps that exacerbated’ problems that emerged during Barack Obama’s administration, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a report released Wednesday that examines the government’s treatment of what it calls unaccompanied alien children.”

Senate Panel Questions Separation Policy

Who’s responsible for unaccompanied migrant children? Senators press officials for answers. PBS: “Since 2012, more than 200,000 undocumented kids have entered the U.S. unaccompanied, without an adult. Last night, the Senate Homeland Security Committee released a three-year investigation finding that once the kids are with sponsors, no one in the federal government is keeping track of them. Now Senators are concerned U.S. agencies are failing these children.”

Trump To Restrict Medicaid

Trump administration poised to approve restrictive changes to Medicaid. ThinkProgress:“The Trump administration is preparing to approve a number of changes to Medicaid — the government health care program that provides coverage to low-income people — that could leave tens of thousands of people without coverage. As Politico first reported Friday, the administration is set to approve waivers from some states that would impose work restrictions and allow questions about illegal drug use to be included on applications for Medicaid. The report comes two days after numbers out of Arkansas showed more than 5,000 people could be in jeopardy of losing their Medicaid coverage after failing to meet the state’s work requirements.”

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MORNING MESSAGE

Miles Mogulescu

The Constitution’s Case for Impeachment

Is there nothing those who care about the survival of American values and democracy can do but hope and pray that this manifestly unfit President is not reelected and that the United States survives until then? The authors of a newly released book make a powerful case that Donald Trump has committed numerous impeachable offenses, individually and in the aggregate, and that failure to act endangers the future of American democracy. If our political leaders will not take up this call, then it must come from the people.

Coast-To-Coast Editorials Rebuke Trump

Hundreds of newspapers denounce Trump’s attacks on media in coordinated editorials. NPR: “More than 300 news publications across the country are joining together to defend the role of a free press and denounce President Trump’s ongoing attacks on the news media in coordinated editorials publishing Thursday, according to a tally by The Boston Globe. The project was spearheaded by staff members of the editorial page at the Globe, who write, ‘This relentless assault on the free press has dangerous consequences. We asked editorial boards from around the country – liberal and conservative, large and small – to join us today to address this fundamental threat in their own words.’ Editorials are typically written by opinion writers and are considered separate from organizations’ news coverage. NPR, for example, has a separate ‘opinion’ category. Trump made bashing the news media — ‘horrible, horrendous people’ — a staple of his candidacy and a constant throughout his presidency.”

Monsanto Faces $289m Glyphosate Ruling

One man’s suffering exposed Monsanto’s secrets to the world. The Guardian: “It was a verdict heard around the world. In a stunning blow to one of the world’s largest seed and chemical companies, jurors in San Francisco have told Monsanto it must pay $289m in damages to a man dying of cancer which he claims was caused by exposure to its herbicides. Monsanto, which became a unit of Bayer AG in June, has spent decades convincing consumers, farmers, politicians and regulators to ignore mounting evidence linking its glyphosate-based herbicides to cancer and other health problems. The company has employed a range of tactics – some drawn from the same playbook used by the tobacco industry in defending the safety of cigarettes – to suppress and manipulate scientific literature, harass journalists and scientists who did not parrot the company’s propaganda, and arm-twist and collude with regulators. Indeed, one of Monsanto’s lead defense attorneys in the San Francisco case was George Lombardi, whose resumé boasts of his work defending big tobacco. Now, in this one case, through the suffering of one man, Monsanto’s secretive strategies have been laid bare for the world to see. Monsanto was undone by the words of its own scientists, the damning truth illuminated through the company’s emails, internal strategy reports and other communications. The jury’s verdict found not only that Monsanto’s Roundup and related glyphosate-based brands presented a substantial danger to people using them, but that there was ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that Monsanto’s officials acted with ‘malice or oppression’ in failing to adequately warn of the risks.”

Court Orders Full Environmental Review Of Keystone Pipeline

Federal Court Rules State Dept. Must Conduct Full Environmental Review of Keystone XL in Nebraska. Common Dreams: “A federal judge today sided with environmental, landowner and Tribal plaintiffs in their challenge to the Trump administration’s approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The State Department had attempted to fast-track its environmental review of the pipeline’s new route in Nebraska, and today U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris ruled that this sham review process was not legally sufficient. Today’s ruling mandates that the State Department go back and conduct a more robust supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the ‘Mainline Alternative’ route, which was approved by the Nebraska Public Service Commission in November 2017. If built, Keystone XL would carry up to 35 million gallons a day of Canadian tar sands — one of the world’s dirtiest energy sources — across critical water sources and wildlife habitat to Gulf Coast refineries.”

U.S. Opioid Deaths Are Rising

A record 72,000 overdose deaths in 2017. NYT: “Drug overdoses killed about 72,000 Americans last year, a record number that reflects a rise of around 10 percent, according to new preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. The death toll is higher than the peak yearly death totals from H.I.V., car crashes or gun deaths. Analysts pointed to two major reasons for the increase: A growing number of Americans are using opioids, and drugs are becoming more deadly. It is the second factor that most likely explains the bulk of the increased number of overdoses last year. Nationwide, the crisis worsened in the first year of the Trump presidency, a continuation of a long-term trend.”

Indiana Dad Hunts Russian Trolls

Meet the Indiana dad who hunts Russian trolls. CNN: “By day, the 39-year-old father of two works as a systems analyst and programmer at Indiana University. Once the kids are tucked in, he spends hours scouring social media to unmask the operatives behind the disinformation campaigns roiling Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Russell is part of a growing network of online sleuths using public information to conduct open source investigations into Russian accounts posing as Americans. Officially, their work is called open-source intelligence, or OSINT, and it often identifies trolls before the platforms do. Russell’s work in particular has helped journalists at CNN, NBC News, The Daily Beast, and other outlets cut through the lies and disinformation. Russell’s interest in troll hunting started in the waning weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, when he started investigating some of the most slanderous lies circulating online about Hillary Clinton. He’d been leaning toward voting for Donald Trump, but realized he could not find any evidence supporting some of the most outlandish allegations against Clinton circulating on Twitter. Russell is part of a growing network of online sleuths using public information to conduct open source investigations into Russian accounts posing as Americans. Officially, their work is called open-source intelligence, or OSINT, and it often identifies trolls before the platforms do. Russell’s work in particular has helped journalists at CNN, NBC News, The Daily Beast, and other outlets cut through the lies and disinformation. ‘My main motivation is to kind of help people understand what happened,’ Russell says. ‘Just documenting what happened and that what different bots may have been up to on Twitter, so people can see and look at the data for themselves and maybe think, ‘I’ve been consuming this disinformation and maybe I should stop.’ Russell’s interest in troll hunting started in the waning weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, when he started investigating some of the most slanderous lies circulating online about Hillary Clinton. He’d been leaning toward voting for Donald Trump, but realized he could not find any evidence supporting some of the most outlandish allegations against Clinton circulating on Twitter. ‘I had been consuming alt-right news for three or four years without knowing,” he says. ‘Someone had been lying to me.’ That got him thinking about how people’s perceptions of the world, and their decisions about whom to vote for, can be shaped by what they see online.”

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Robert Kraig

Progressives Win Big in Wisconsin Primary

Mandela Barnes, Marisabel Cabrera, Jeff Smith and Sarah Godlewski: remember these names. These four members of Citizen Action Wisconsin, who all won primary races Tuesday night by wide margins, are proof the blue wave Democrats hope will crest in November continues to rise. But there’s more to this story. These four are the tip of a progressive iceberg, which is much bigger just below the surface. And like an iceberg, they’re getting ready to crash the GOP’s “unsinkable” ship of gerrymandering and dark money and send it straight to the bottom of Lake Superior.

Diversity Wins In Tuesday’s Primaries

Diverse candidates rule the night and other takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries. CNN:“The nation’s first transgender governor, its first Somali-American woman in Congress and its first black woman in Connecticut’s congressional delegation could all be on the horizon after Tuesday’s slate of four primaries. Christine Hallquist’s bid to become the nation’s first transgender governor cleared a major hurdle Tuesday when Vermont Democrats nominated her to take on incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott. Hallquist is now the first openly transgender person to be nominated for governor by a major party. It’s a breakthrough of both substantial and symbolic importance for LGBTQ Americans — and particularly the trans community, which has long been shut out of the highest levels of elected office. Another “first” from Tuesday night: In Minnesota’s 5th District, Democrats nominated state Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American progressive woman. She’s likely to join Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib as the first Muslim women in Congress. The 2016 National Teacher of the Year, Jahana Hayes, defeated an opponent endorsed by the local Democratic Party to win a House primary in Connecticut. She’d become the first black Democratic member of the state’s congressional delegation.”

GOP Reshapes Judiciary With Little Scrutiny

With little fanfare, Trump and McConnell reshape the nation’s circuit courts. WaPo: “As the Senate moves toward confirming Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are leading a lower-key yet deeply consequential charge to remake the entire federal judiciary. The Senate will return Wednesday from an abbreviated summer recess to confirm two more federal appeals court judges by the end of the week. That would come on top of a record-breaking string of confirmations: The Senate already has installed 24 appellate judges since Trump was sworn in, the highest number for a president’s first two years in office. While much of the focus has been on Kavanaugh and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, the Senate’s rapid approval of appellate judges is likely to have its own broad impact on the nation, as the 13 circuit courts will shape decisions on immigration, voting rights, abortion and the environment for generations. For McConnell, this is the culmination of a years-long gambit that started with stymieing President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees, most notably Supreme Court choice Merrick Garland, and creating a backlog of vacancies on the nation’s highest courts.”

Trump EPA To Ease Pollution Limits

Draft details Trump’s plan for reversing Obama climate rule. Politico: “The Trump administration is preparing to unveil its plan for undoing Barack Obama’s most ambitious climate regulation — offering a replacement that would do far less to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, according to POLITICO’s review of a portion of the unpublished draft. The new climate proposal for coal-burning power plants, expected to be released in the coming days, would give states wide latitude to write their own modest regulations for coal plants or even seek permission to opt out, according to the document and a source who has read other sections of the draft. That’s a sharp contrast from the aims of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a 2015 regulation that would have sped a shift away from coal use and toward less-polluting sources such as natural gas, wind and solar. That plan was the centerpiece of Obama’s pledge for the U.S. to cut carbon dioxide emissions as part of the Paris climate agreement, which President Donald Trump has said he plans to exit. The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that both carbon emissions and pollutants such as soot and smog would be higher under its new proposal than under the Clean Power Plan. And Trump’s critics call it a recipe for abandoning the effort to take on one of the world’s most urgent problems.”

UCIS Traps Immigrants For ICE at Status Hearings

Officials set up ‘trap’ to arrest immigrants at legal status interviews. CNN: “A Boston-area US Citizenship and Immigration Services office appears to have been coordinating with local ICE officials to arrest undocumented immigrant spouses married to US citizens when they appeared at government offices to interview for legal status, according to newly released internal emails. The documents, included in a court filing made in an immigration case brought by the ACLU, which is working with the law firm WilmerHale in Massachusetts, show officials from the Boston-area offices of ICE and US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for processing legal immigration requests, discussed scheduling interviews with immigrants at times that were convenient for ICE agents who would be waiting to arrest them — and in some cases initiate the deportation process. The ACLU calls the moves a ‘trap’ in their filing and highlights emails that show ICE officials asking to spread the interviews over time to avoid media scrutiny and for logistical reasons, and, in one case, requesting USCIS delay an immigrant’s meeting by 15 minutes because ICE agents were ‘getting a late start.’”

Stephen Miller Denies Family’s Immigrant Origins

Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. Politico:“Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration. It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America. He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister. I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”

Omarosa’s Virtue And Martha Mitchell

Omarosa and the forgotten Martha Mitchell: Unlikely heroes who brought down a president? Salon: “As I watched Omarosa on the various news programs and talk shows this week I was reminded of another famous gadfly who made the White House very nervous in similar circumstances. Back in the early 1970s, a garrulous Southern belle who was married to one of the most powerful men in Washington used to have a drink or two and then call up reporters to share information she’d overheard eavesdropping on her husband’s meetings. I’m speaking of Martha Mitchell, the wife of John Mitchell, who was attorney general in the first Nixon administration and ran the Committee to Re-elect the President, also known as CREEP. Martha Mitchell too was something of a TV star and household name, known for speaking her mind and causing no end of heartburn for the Nixon administration, largely because they didn’t know what she knew and who she was going to tell it to. As it happened she knew a lot because her husband was a corrupt schemer who was in charge of any number of nefarious doings in his capacity as Nixon’s campaign chairman. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Martha Mitchell was considered a ticking time bomb and Nixon’s supporters went to great lengths to portray her as a lunatic who was not to be believed. At one point a bodyguard physically restrained her from speaking to UPI reporter Helen Thomas by yanking the phone out of the wall. Later, on her husband’s supposed orders, Mitchell was held down, tranquilized and kept under lock and key for several days. Richard Nixon himself told David Frost in their famous series of interviews, ‘If it hadn’t been for Martha there’d have been no Watergate. The point of the matter is that if John had been watchin’ that store, Watergate would never have happened.’ If that’s so, here’s to Martha Mitchell, unsung hero of that scandal. And if reality show villain Omarosa can prove that Donald Trump knew about the Russian hacking operation in advance, then whatever her motives are she’ll be a hero too.”

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MORNING MESSAGE

Adrienne Evans

What’s At Stake When We Vote This Year

A lot is at stake when we go to vote this year. It’s about restoring our faith in our leaders. But more than that, it’s about restoring our faith in one another. The good news is that our government and its institutions are creations of people. People like us, working together, have the power to remake them. Our work is to create intentional communities that represent the spectrum of our diversity that work together to break down the barriers that divide us, deepen our understanding of one another. And that is just what is beginning to happen.

Primary Votes In Four States

What To Watch In Tuesday’s primaries: WI, MN, CT, VT. NPR: “Primary voters in four more states — Connecticut, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Vermont — go to the polls on Tuesday. This year’s been dominated by talk of Democratic gains, but today Republicans will pick nominees in several places where they hope to flip House seats and even governors’ mansions. Two Republicans who failed to win the White House are hoping voters will elect them to lead their states for a third time — but one’s trying to make a political comeback after almost a decade out of office. We’ll find out who could replace House Speaker Paul Ryan in his Wisconsin district. And Vermont Democrats could make history by nominating a transgender women for governor.”

WI Dems Hope To Unseat Gov. Walker

Wisconsin Dems jump at chance to finally beat Walker. Politico: “Wisconsin Democrats on Tuesday will choose from a field that once swelled to over a dozen candidates — an array of businessmen, state legislators, the mayor of Wisconsin’s most liberal city and the chief of the state firefighters union — to realize their long-elusive goal of defeating Republican Gov. Scott Walker. But the clear frontrunner is state education superintendent Tony Evers, a 66-year-old white man who stands out in a year when Democrats have put forward high numbers of women, young people and first-time candidates for office. What Evers lacks in sizzle, Democrats are hoping he compensates for with a record of clashes with Walker over education that could energize his party and deny the Republican governor a third term. After years of doing battle with unions and pushing conservative legislation, Walker may be the one Republican who gets Wisconsin Democrats as agitated as President Donald Trump does. And that, say some Democratic officials in the state, might be enough in a year like this. ‘If there’s a rub on Tony Evers, it might be that he’s too nice,’ said Joe Wineke, a former Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman. ‘But I’m not convinced Midwestern nice is going to be a bad thing in the year of Trump.’”

Trump Trade Boss Enriched Himself

Top Trump appointee may have committed serious crimes while trying to enrich himself in office. Alternet: “On Monday, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Commerce Department’s Office of the Inspector General, alleging serious misconduct and potential criminal violations by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. The complaint, according to the overview, calls for ‘an investigation into whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated the criminal laws on conflicts of interest and false statements.’ Specifically, CLC alleges that Ross, a billionaire investor, holds assets in multiple companies that are directly impacted by decisions of the Trump administration, in potential criminal violation of federal conflict of interest laws, including Air Lease, Sun Bancorp, and a “major” holding in Chinese steel. Altogether, the document cites 46 different assets Ross has not accounted for despite pledging to divest.”

NextGen To Register 180,000 Millennial Voters

Tom Steyer plans to register 180,000 millennials to vote. Axios: “Tom Steyer’s NextGen America organization is working to register 100,000 students in one month at college campuses across 11 states as part of its ‘Welcome Week’ program launching this week. This is the group’s biggest voter registration effort yet, focused specifically on the most crucial bloc of non-voters, and it’s happening just three months before the 2018 midterm election. They’ve already registered 80,000 millennials, and now they want to register 100,000 more through mid-September. NextGen will deploy 765 organizers to 420 campuses — including 135 community colleges and 14 historically black colleges and universities — to engage with students during “Welcome Week” as they’re headed back to school.”

What It Means To Say ‘Abolish ICE’

Why activists want to ‘Abolish ICE.’ The Conversation: “‘Abolish ICE’ is no mere campaign slogan. It is a goal focused on dismantling a single young agency. I believe that, in its historical context, ‘Abolish ICE’ is part of a larger vision to build a new a social order committed to the liberation of all. This wider abolition movement is not solely about dismantling what advocates believe to be harmful institutions and rectifying the social conditions that feed them, like income inequality. As activist Angela Davis argues, the goal is ‘not even primarily about abolition as a negative process of tearing down, but it is also about building up, about creating new institutions.’ Abolition advocates want resources redirected from policing and prisons to community-centered institutions like health care, housing and education. Is this vision feasible?”

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MORNING MESSAGE

Jeff Bryan

WI Governor’s Race Puts Education in the Spotlight

The race to be Wisconsin’s next governor is a strong indicator of how the education debate in the Democratic party will play out across the nation. GOP incumbent Scott Walker has a horrible record of slashing school funding, undermining teachers, and redirecting taxpayer money to charter and private schools. Polls show Walker is highly vulnerable to a Democratic party opponent, so in the slew of candidates vying for the chance to take him on, voters have a critical decision to make about which candidate would be more pro-public school.

Midwest Primary Voters At Crossroads

WI faces a political crossroads Tuesday. Which way will it go? NYT: “Wisconsin’s urgent struggle to define — or redefine — its political direction is part of a larger identity crisis that has rippled across the Upper Midwest since 2016. Like Wisconsin, union-rich Michigan had been seen as a given for Democrats in presidential years, but narrowly sided with Mr. Trump, revealing the possibility of a shifting set of concerns and priorities and a changed political landscape. Minnesota, which is also holding primary elections on Tuesday, stayed in the Democratic column in 2016, but Mr. Trump lost by a far slimmer margin than expected, setting off a flurry of re-examination there. Much is at stake for Democrats in November. Losing Ms. Baldwin’s seat would mark an end of any real sense that Wisconsin remains purple, and that possibility has stirred more urgency for both parties. On the flip side, the prospect of regaining some measure of influence — if not the governor’s job, then control of the State Senate — would give Democrats a stake in state policy that they have been all but excluded from since Mr. Walker arrived.”

Far-Right Rallies Fizzle

Unite the Right 2018 was a pathetic failure. Vox: “It was supposed to be the start of another show of force by white nationalists: Unite the Right 2, the follow-up to last year’s disastrous and violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, which concluded with a Nazi sympathizer ramming his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing one. But Dan, who said he was a supporter of ‘peaceful’ ethnic cleansing, was the only white nationalist to be seen at the march’s starting point, the Foggy Bottom metro station in Washington, DC. This was around 5 pm, when the march was supposed to start toward Lafayette Square for a two-hour rally. I asked Dan, who said he had turned 19 on Sunday, where his friends were. ‘I don’t know.’ What are you going to do now? ‘I don’t know.’ What Dan didn’t know was that his friends had already left. A couple of hours before the march was supposed to start, around 20 to 25 white nationalists, led by rally organizer Jason Kessler, had arrived at Foggy Bottom. Instead of waiting around, and swarmed by media, police, and a lot of counterprotesters, they had forged ahead on the march route hours earlier than scheduled. There, Kessler complained to reporters about the police in Charlottesville and counterprotesters, and then left.”

Peaceful Protests Dwarf White-Nationalist Hatred

Counter-protesters dwarfed a White Nationalist rally in DC. Time: “The several dozen white supremacists who showed up outside the White House on Sunday to mark the one-year anniversary of their movement’s violent gathering in Charlottesville, Va., were overwhelmingly outnumbered by thousands of counter-protesters. For the anti-racist and anti-fascist demonstrators, it was a successful attempt to wrest the narrative away from the alt-right, who had initially expected the gathering — called Unite the Right 2 and organized by prominent white nationalist Jason Kessler — to draw as many as 400. ‘It’s one of the few things they’re afraid of: being outnumbered,’ Nick Wood, a 30-year-old demonstrator affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, told TIME outside of the park. ‘I was a Marine, and I see these guys as domestic enemies of the Constitution, so.’ The gathering was a non-event in part because of the rigor of local and federal law enforcement agencies, who kept the blocks surrounding the White House under tight control in the hours preceding the rally. But more than anything else, it was the simple fact that not that many white supremacists showed up.”

ICE Targets Law-Abiding Immigrants

Under Trump arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record have tripled. NBC:“Federal arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record have more than tripled under President Donald Trump and may still be accelerating, according to an NBC News analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from his first 14 months in office. The surge has been caused by a new ICE tactic of arresting — without warrants — people who are driving or walking down the street and using large-scale “sweeps” of likely immigrants, according to a class-actionlawsuit filed in June by immigration rights advocates in Chicago. ICE arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions have spiked 203 percent in the first full 14 months of his presidency compared to the final 14 months of the Obama administration, growing from 19,128 to 58,010, according to NBC’s review of ICE figures. During the same time period, the numbers show that arrests of undocumented immigrants with criminal records grew just 18 percent.”

Rents Fall For Rich, Rise For Poor

In expensive cities, rents fall for the rich — but rise for the poor. WaPo: “U.S. cities struggling with soaring housing costs have found some success in lowering rents this year, but that relief has not reached the renters most at risk of losing their housing. Nationally, the pace of rent increases is beginning to slow down, with the average rent in at least six cities falling since last summer, according to Zillow data. But the decline is being driven primarily by decreasing prices for high-end rentals. People in low-end housing, the apartments and other units that house working-class residents, are still paying more than ever. Since last summer, rents have fallen for the highest earners while increasing for the poorest in San Francisco, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, Pittsburgh, Washington and Portland, Ore., among other cities. In several other metro areas — including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston and Miami — rents have risen for the poor and the rich alike.”

Economists Assess Risk Of Economic Meltdown

The end really is near: a play-by-play of the coming economic collapse. Salon: “ince June, 2009, the pit of one of the biggest recessions in American history, the U.S. economy has been growing, slowly but steadily. That’s just over nine years of uninterrupted growth. If the good times roll for another year — and most economists expect they will — this expansionary period will go down as the longest ever in American history, surpassing the 120-month-long period during the ‘90s tech boom. But don’t be so quick to pop bubbly and send the confetti raining down. There’s precedence for unprecedented growth: It always ends. The economy, of course, moves in cycles. And no matter how you slice it, it would seem there’s only so much more climbing before a fall. But what will set off a downturn? How bad will it be? And when will it actually happen? To answer these questions and more, Salon consulted with five economists, three of whom (Peter Schiff, Steve Keen and Dean Baker) predicted the 2008 financial crisis before it hit.”

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MORNING MESSAGE

Negin Owliaei

How to Turn Back a Giant

What’s the best way to push profit-seeking corporations out of the public sphere? Don’t let them take over in the first place. Residents of Lancaster County, Penn. were thrilled to learn this lesson with their recent victory against Geo Group, a giant of the private prison industry. Geo’s bid to take over reentry services for formerly incarcerated people failed after Lancaster residents leapt into action, planning town halls and packing prison board meetings to protect a valuable community institution. People filled the commissioner’s meetings — religious leaders, nonprofit leaders, formerly incarcerated citizens — as the normally empty gatherings turned into standing room only events. “I don’t think they were expecting to have to make this decision in the light of day,” said Michelle Hines, an organizer for Lancaster Stands Up.

Judge Halts Deportation, Threatens Sessions With Contempt

Judge halts deportation of mother and daughter, threatens to hold Sessions in contempt. WaPo: “A federal judge in Washington halted a deportation in progress Thursday and threatened to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt after learning that the Trump administration started to remove a woman and her daughter while a court hearing appealing their deportations was underway. ‘This is pretty outrageous,’ U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said after being told about the removal. ‘That someone seeking justice in U.S. court is spirited away while her attorneys are arguing for justice for her?’ Lead ACLU attorney Jennifer Chang Newell, who was participating in the court hearing via phone from her office in California, received an email during the hearing that said the mother and daughter were being deported. During a brief recess, she told her colleagues the pair had been taken from a family detention center in Dilley, Tex., to the airport in San Antonio for a morning flight. After being informed of the situation, Sullivan granted the ACLU’s request to delay deportations for Carmen and the other plaintiffs until the lawsuit is decided, and ordered the government to ‘turn the plane around.’”

Court Overrules Trump EPA To Ban Pesticide

Court bans popular farm pesticide defended by Trump. Sacramento Bee: “In a rebuke to the Trump administration, an appeals court Thursday ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to ban a widely used farm pesticide that environmentalists say can damage the nervous systems of farmworkers, their children and even consumers. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals told the EPA to ban the chemical known as chlorpyrifos within 60 days. The ruling by the 9th Circuit is a major victory for environmentalists and a defeat for agricultural interests and the Trump administration, which had refused to ban the pesticide. In the late stages of the Obama administration, the EPA was in the process of banning the chemical. Shortly after President Donald Trump took office in 2017, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced he was “reversing the previous administration’s steps” and would allow farmers to keep using chlorpyrifos. In a 2-1 decision, the court rejected the EPA’s arguments, saying the agency hadn’t demonstrated with “reasonable certainty” that the chemical is safe. The court declared there ‘was no justification for the EPA’s decision in its 2017 order to maintain a tolerance for chlorpyrifos in the face of scientific evidence that its residue on food causes neurodevelopmental damage to children.’”

Trump Rule Change Gives Banks $2.5b Tax Break

Buried in the fine print, Trump rule would give $2.5b tax cut to big banks. Alternet: “As Wall Street banks continue to enjoy record profits thanks to President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax scam, Trump’s Treasury Department—headed by former Goldman Sachs executive Steve Mnuchin—quietly moved to hand big banks yet another major gift on Wednesday by hiding a $2.5 billion tax cut in the fine print of an “esoteric” new rule proposal. At first glance, the Trump administration’s rule appeared to be little more than a mundane set of regulations aimed at providing owners of so-called pass-through businesses everything they ‘need to comply with the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,’ as Reuters put it. But Capital & Main journalist David Sirota decided to take the radical step of actually reading the proposal in its entirety, and he found that the White House’s rule also seeks to exclude banking from the “financial services” category—a move that would allow thousands of large banks to take advantage of the controversial tax cut for pass-through income included in Trump’s tax bill.”

Kobach Tries To Decide Own Primary Outcome

KS governor calls on Kobach to stop advising election officials in his own race. ThinkProgress:“Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer (R) is calling on Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to stop advising election officials as the two are locked in a tight battle to be the state’s Republican gubernatorial nominee. As of Wednesday, Kobach was up by 191 votes, but on Thursday, news broke that a counting error had shortchanged Colyer 100 votes. As of Thursday evening, Kobach leads by just 91 votes out of more than 311,000 cast. The county clerk blamed the secretary of state’s office for the discrepancy. Despite the obvious conflict of interest, Kobach has not recused himself from the vote tabulation for his own race. As secretary of state, Kobach oversees voting in the state, but no law requires him to step aside and he says he sees no problem in staying in his role — even if a recount is requested. ‘The recount thing is done on a county level, so the secretary of state does not actually participate directly in the recount,’ Kobach said after initial results showed him winning by fewer than 200 votes. ‘The secretary of state’s office merely serves as a coordinating entity overseeing it all but not actually counting the votes.’ In a letter Thursday, however, Colyer argued that Kobach was advising county election officials, not serving as merely a coordinating entity. ‘It has come to my attention that your office is giving advice to county election officials — as recently as a conference call yesterday — and you are making public statements on national television which are inconsistent with Kansas law and may serve to suppress the vote in the ongoing Kansas primary election process,’ Colyer wrote in a letter addressed to Kobach.”

Ranked-Choice Voting Can Elect More Progressives

Dems complain about split votes, but few back the obvious solution. The Intercept: “Ballots are still being counted in Ohio’s nail-biting special election in the 12th Congressional District, but it looks like Republican Troy Balderson will narrowly defeat Democrat Danny O’Connor. Of course, even with all of Manchik’s votes, O’Connor would still come up 435 votes short. But math hasn’t stopped Democrats from blaming the Green Party. But even if we were to credit the assessment that Green Party candidates are responsible for spoiling multiple presidential elections, and now, Ohio’s 12th District, it remains true that the Democratic Party has shown little interest in addressing the underlying cause of the spoiler effect: our first-past-the-post voting system. In our current system, the person who wins the most votes wins the election. As a result, if a third-party candidate who is ideologically similar to one of the main two parties enters a race, they can split the vote, causing the less popular platform to cary the day. However, in a ranked-choice voting system, voters “rank” the candidates in order of preference. If none of the parties get to 50 percent of the vote, the least popular candidate is stricken, and their votes are allocated according to the second choice of the voter.”

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MORNING MESSAGE

Jake Jacobs

New York’s Religious Schools Reveal Hazards of “School Choice”

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos wants to remove limits on the state funding of religious schools. The hazards of this approach are evident in New York, where a bitter dispute has escalated over the lack of academic instruction offered by ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, which accept state funding but reject state education laws. Former students and parents have gone public to expose yeshivas that do not provide required secular studies. This includes basic English instruction. The Trump administration seems perfectly content to deny fundamental courses like social studies, science, history, civics, physical education, health and geography to students who invariably grow up to bloc-vote in lockstep behind their religious leaders.

MO Blocks Right-To-Work Law

Missouri blocks right-to-work law. NPR: “Voters in Missouri have overwhelmingly rejected a right-to-work law passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature that would have banned compulsory union fees — a resounding victory for organized labor that spent millions of dollars to defeat the measure. With about 98 percent of the precincts reporting, the “no” vote on Missouri’s Proposition A, which supported the law, was running about 67 percent, with nearly 33 percent voting ‘yes.’ In 2017, the right-to-work law passed Missouri’s Republican legislature and was signed by then-Gov. Eric Greitens. However, union organizers gathered enough signatures to keep it from going into effect pending the results of a statewide referendum. The rejection of Proposition A effectively kills the law. ‘It’s a truly historic moment,’ said Mike Louis, president of the Missouri AFL-CIO. ‘Tonight we celebrate, but tomorrow we’re getting back to work. We’re going to take this energy and momentum and build more power for working people across Missouri.’”

Congress To Get First Muslim Woman

Congress to get 1st Muslim woman as Rashida Tlaib wins nomination. Boston Globe: “Former Michigan state Rep. Rashida Tlaib has won the Democratic nomination to run unopposed for the House seat long held by former Rep. John Conyers, setting her up to become the first Muslim woman elected to Congress. No Republicans or third-party candidates ran in Tuesday’s District 13 primary race, meaning Tlaib is set to win the seat in November’s election and begin serving a full two-year term in January. The special primary race to serve the last two months of Conyers’ term was still too close to call as of early Wednesday morning, with Tlaib and Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones were neck and neck. The winner of that race will also run unopposed in November’s election. Tlaib, 42, served in the Michigan House from 2009 until 2014. She defeated five other candidates to win the nomination to run for a full term representing the heavily Democratic district, which covers much of Detroit and some of its suburbs.”

WH Wants Curbs On Legal Immigration

Stephen Miller wants to deny more legal immigrants Green Cards and citizenship. Slate: “The White House is planning to add new restrictions to green card and citizenship applications for a wide range of legal immigrants who have used public services in their time in the United States, NBC News reported. NBC News said that under the proposal, ‘immigrants living legally in the U.S. who have ever used or whose household members have ever used Obamacare, children’s health insurance, food stamps and other benefits could be hindered from obtaining legal status in the U.S.’ The move is part of a broad campaign by White House adviser Stephen Miller and other immigration hawks to persecute immigrants of various legal statuses whom they can portray as a drain on public resources. Even without any new formal guidance, the administration’s current immigration restrictions mean the U.S. ‘is on track for a decline in immigrants granted green cards by 20 percent and naturalized citizenship will drop by 10 percent by the end of October compared to fiscal year 2016,’ NBC News reported.”

Judge Orders Release Of Immigrant Detained At Green Card Interview

Man nabbed At Green Card interview ordered released. Law360: “A New Jersey federal judge Friday ordered the release of a Salvadoran man whom immigration officers had detained when he attended a green card interview, determining that they violated the Constitution by trying to deport him before he could complete the process. U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo determined that the federal government violated the Fifth Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act by trying to deport Antonio de Jesus Martinez before he could complete the process of obtaining a green card through his marriage to a U.S. Citizen.”

Indy Workers Walk Out To Defend Latinos

We Rise Together, Homie. Jacobin: ” U.S. labor history is full of moments of tremendous drama and upheaval. That history is riveting stuff, but getting a raw, unfiltered view of the human drama of workers fighting their bosses on the shop floor, the place where the day-to-day confrontation between workers and bosses takes place (and occasionally boils over), is rare. Which is what makes Antoine Dangerfield’s recent viral video a must-watch. A thirty-year-old welder in Indianapolis, Dangerfield worked for a construction contractor building a UPS hub. On Tuesday, he says that a small number of Latino workers (millwrights, welders, and conveyor installers, in his telling) working for a different contractor but in the same hub were ordered home after disobeying the orders of a white boss he calls racist. In response, the entire group of workers — over a hundred, in Dangerfield’s estimation — walked out. Dangerfield caught their wildcat strike on camera at the moment they walked of the job. In his video, he is positively giddy watching them shut down their massive workplace. ‘They are not bullshitting!’ he says as Latino workers walk off. Referring to the boss, he says, ‘They thought they was gonna play with these amigos, and they said, ‘aw yeah, we rise together, homie.’”

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