At first, I was fixated by the Death Stare, figuring that Trump had rehearsed this ad nauseum in order to look as resolute as Winston Churchill in that famous WW II photo. Then, inevitably, my eyes became riveted on his ‘dome-icile’, and what does, or doesn’t, reside therein. If his hair is akin to, say, an ice shelf, it’s been melting from the inside out. Because ‘global warming’. I. Can’t. Stop. Looking. At. It.
Rethug Anti-Democracy Never Takes A Day Off. Wisconsin:
Republicans who control the Wisconsin Legislature asked that the newest Democratic-backed justice on the state Supreme Court recuse herself from lawsuits seeking to overturn GOP-drawn electoral maps, arguing that she has prejudged the cases.
Republicans argue in their motions filed with the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday and made public Wednesday that Justice Janet Protasiewicz can’t fairly hear the cases because during her campaign for the seat earlier this year she called the Republican-drawn maps “unfair” and “rigged” and said there needs to be “a fresh look at the gerrymandering question.”
You know, completely unlike the Rethug jurists who made this blatant gerrymander legal in the first place.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina redistricting ruling has set up a possible electoral windfall for congressional Republicans in preserving their U.S. House majority next year, declaring that judges should stay out of scrutinizing seat boundaries for partisan advantage.
While Democrats only need to flip five GOP seats overall to regain control, experts say the state Supreme Court decision means four Democratic incumbents in the state — three of them first-term members — are vulnerable.
Oil Trains Running Along Colorado River? Who thought this was a good idea? Turns out, the Feds. Until now:
Fears, concerns, and legal challenges over a proposed oil train route along the Colorado River were finally addressed in federal court last week. Until then, plans for the Uinta Basin Railway project, which would ferry vast amounts of crude oil from northeast Utah eastward alongside the Colorado River, sailed through federal agencies tasked with approving large transportation projects. But then the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, successfully challenged the project’s environmental impact assessments, siding with the railway’s opponents and striking a blow against what would have been the largest petroleum corridor in the United States.
A coalition of seven fossil fuel-producing counties in Utah allied with the investment bank Drexel Hamilton sought to quadruple oil production in Utah’s Uinta Basin, 12,000 square miles of desert floor crowned by mountains and currently accessible only by truck. The Ute Indian Tribe also has a stake in the project, as some of the oil would be extracted from Uintah and Ouray Reservation land. The $2 billion plan called for 88 miles of new track through the Ashley National Forest, connecting to an existing Union Pacific line into Colorado, which snakes another 150 miles along the Colorado River and into downtown Denver.
The crude would travel south from Denver toward the constellation of city-scale refineries on the Gulf Coast commonly referred to as “Cancer Alley.” Before the trains—up to five of them a day, each about two miles long—reached their final destination, a federal analysis predicted that, every other year, one of them was likely to experience an accident by the Colorado River.
Read the entire article. It’s almost impossible to understand how such a flawed analysis of the risks involved with this project were ignored by the Feds. Although–it’s not dissimilar to the rubber-stamping of projects here in Delaware with similar lack of interest from supposed environmental watchdogs.
Wine And Dine Two Supreme Court Justices–Get Your Case Heard. We’re talking two billionaires and a ‘wealth-tax’ case:
An influential thinktank closely linked to two billionaires who provided lavish travel gifts to conservative supreme court justices is behind a successful lobbying campaign to get the US high court to take on a case that could protect them and other billionaires from a possible future wealth tax.
The Manhattan Institute was one of eight conservative advocacy groups that filed amicus briefs urging the supreme court to take on Moore v US, a $15,000 tax case that Democrats have warned could permanently “lock in” the right of billionaires to opt out of paying fair taxes.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer is chairman of the Manhattan Institute and Kathy Crow, who is married to real estate mogul Harlan Crow, serves as a trustee of the group. Both have provided two of the justices – Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, respectively – with private travel gifts and have socialised with the judges on lavish vacations, according to reports in ProPublica and other media outlets.
“Give Us The Money, We’ll Build That Warehouse.” This is how ‘economic development’ works in Delaware, far from prying public eyes:
A Gainesville, Georgia, company wants $4.56 million in Delaware taxpayer money for a cold storage warehouse in Claymont.
Agile Cold Storage plans to be one of the first companies in First State Crossing, a mixed-use redevelopment of the former steel mill in Claymont. Spanning 425 acres, plans for the project include offices, retail, housing and additional industrial space.
The project will also take advantage of the new Claymont train station, which is expected to open in November before Thanksgiving, according to Delaware Transit Corp. CEO John Sisson.
Agile Cold Storage’s grant request will be heard at a Council on Development Finance meeting Monday. Applicants are brought to the council by the Delaware Prosperity Partnership, a privately run organization set up by Gov. John Carney to oversee the state’s economic development. Since the partnership’s founding in 2018, the council has never rejected a grant applicant.
I’m not opposed to the project. It’s possible a case could be made that it’s worth the $4.56 million state investment. But this privatization of state funding for economic development stands, along with budget-smoothing, as Carney’s two ‘legacies’. It’s up to the next governor to get rid of these legacies altogether.
What do you want to talk about?