DL Open Thread: Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026
Total ‘Victory’ Over Climate Change. As in ‘no more pesky regulations’:
But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, were high-profile allies of Donald Trump. Mr. Vought, who has railed against “climate alarmism,” and Mr. Clark, who has called climate rules a “Leninistic” plot to seize control of the economy, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives.
The other two, Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, were lesser-known conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate initiatives. Ms. Gunasekara, a onetime aide to the most vocal global warming denialist in the Senate, and Mr. Brightbill, who had argued in court against Obama-era climate regulations, collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming, documents show.
Their efforts are now paying off. In the coming days, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to revoke a determination that has underpinned the federal government’s ability to fight global warming since 2009.
That scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are supercharging storms, wildfires, drought, heat waves and sea level rise, and are therefore threatening public health and welfare. It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.
Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show–‘Authoritarian Spectacle Meets Cultural Defiance’?:
In the summer of 1936, Adolf Hitler sat in the VIP box of his newly constructed ‘Olympiastadion’ in Berlin, watching the greatest propaganda spectacle the modern world had ever seen. The Games were designed to be a coronation, proof that the Aryan race stood above all others, that Nazi Germany’s social order was not just legitimate but inevitable. Television cameras captured the Olympics for the first time. Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist and film maker, captured every frame for posterity. The torch relay was invented for the occasion. Everything had been choreographed to project power, order, and supremacy.
Then a 22-year-old Black sharecropper’s son from Alabama named Jesse Owens walked onto the track and shattered it all.
Tonight, a 31-year-old Puerto Rican from Vega Baja named Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known to the world as Bad Bunny, will walk onto a different stage at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, and the parallels will be impossible to ignore. He will be the first solo Latino artist to headline the Super Bowl halftime show. He will perform in Spanish. And he will do it as the president of the United States has publicly called his selection “absolutely ridiculous,” declared himself “anti-them,” and announced he will watch a rival “All-American Halftime Show” headlined by Kid Rock instead.
The comparisons between Berlin 1936 and Santa Clara 2026 are not a perfect analogy. No analogy involving Hitler ever is. But the historical parallels between these two cultural collisions deserve serious examination, because they reveal something enduring about how authoritarian movements use mass spectacle to project dominance, how the aesthetic of fascism works and how non-white excellence disrupts that project in ways the architects of power never anticipate.
Bad Bunny breaks the mold wide open.
Not because a Latino has never performed at the Super Bowl. Shakira and Jennifer Lopez co-headlined in 2020. But because Bad Bunny will perform almost entirely in Spanish. Because he refused to bring his world tour to the continental United States out of concern that ICE would target his fans. Because at last week’s Grammy Awards, where he became the first artist in history to win Album of the Year for a record sung entirely in Spanish, he opened his acceptance speech with two words that landed like a thunderclap: “ICE out.”
There’s a lot more, all well worth reading. Hitler refused to shake Owen’s hand, Trump refused to go to the game, and claimed he would watch the Kid Rock halftime show. Unfortunately, Owens’ victory didn’t halt the surge of Nazism. Will Bad Bunny’s embrace of multiculturalism help stop ICE and Trump?
18,000 File Challenges To ‘Illegal Detention’. By far a record:
The Trump administration’s push for mass deportations has resulted in more than 18,000 challenges in federal court from immigrants claiming their detention is illegal, more than were filed under the last three administrations combined — including President Donald Trump’s first term.
So far this year, immigrants are filing on average more than 200 of these cases, known as habeas petitions, daily across the country, with California and Texas accounting for about 40% of new cases, a ProPublica analysis of federal court filings found. To keep tabs on this historic rise, ProPublica is publishing a habeas case tracker.
“I don’t recall a time that anything like this has ever happened,” said Daniel Caudillo, director of the Immigration Law Clinic at Texas Tech University School of Law and a recently departed immigration judge.
The wave of habeas petitions comes in response to new administration policies aimed at ramping up the number of deportations. Among those are policies that require the majority of immigrants who entered the country illegally to remain in detention while their immigration cases are proceeding.
Lawyers say these policies upend decades of legal precedent that previously allowed immigrants who had been in the country for years and posed no security or flight risk a chance to remain in their communities until an immigration judge could determine whether they could stay in the country legally.
Good Money After Bad? DE Turf gets over $4 mill for a domed field:
Delaware Tourism Office sports sales leader Ryan Wolfe says the goal is to make that facility a year-round attraction.
“So the 13th field will be domed, which is very new, very exciting. So not only will they have the additional field to play, but they will also be able to bring events during the colder months and the winter season when it’s normally slower,” said Wolfe. “So that adds a whole, another element of not only programming or sports tourism, but during months that normally don’t have much going on because all their other fields are just open, not covered.”
Other grant recipients include the Chase Fieldhouse in Wilmington, Dover Motor Speedway and Georgetown Speedway.
In the last few years, scientists have learned more about lead and PFAS in artificial turf, as well as the risks of some of the newer infill materials that are available to replace tire crumb. Tire crumb has well-known risks, as noted in the studies above, containing “hormone-disrupting chemicals” also known as “endocrine-disrupting chemicals.” By affecting the hormones that children need for healthy development, these chemicals have the potential to increase obesity; contribute to early puberty; cause attention problems such as ADHD; exacerbate asthma; and eventually cause cancer.
The use of silica sand and other infill materials also has substantial risks. For example, it is well known that tiny, often microscopic particles known as “particulate matter” can cause lung problems and eventually cause lung cancer. For that reason, silica sand and zeolite used as infill are of great concern. Envirofill is a brand of infill that used to advertise its product as made of polymer coated “silica sand” but now that the American Lung Association and other experts explain that inhaling silica can cause lung damage and even lung cancer, the company now refers to their product as containing “sand” instead of “silica sand.” The manufacturers and vendors of these products claim that the silica stays inside a plastic coating. However, sunlight and the grinding force from playing on the field breaks down the plastic coating. For that reason, the Envirofill product warranty used to specify that only 70% of the silica will remain encapsulated, which would imply that the other 30% can be very harmful as children are exposed to it in the air as particulate matter that can harm the lungs. The currently worded warranty states that the warranty lasts 16 years but does not specify the percentage of pieces of infill where the sand remains intact inside the plastic coating.
PFAS chemicals are of particular concern because they enter the body and the environment as “forever chemicals,” which means that they are not metabolized and do not deteriorate, accumulating over the years. Although manufacturers often claim that their products do not contain PFAS, that is based on very limited testing. There are thousands of PFAS chemicals, and some worrisome PFAS chemicals have been found by independent researchers studying artificial turf, including but not limited to BrockFILL artificial turf. Please note that while the manufacturer claims that BrockFILL “meets the requirements of the FIFA quality programme for synthetic turf systems as well as those of World Rugby” those requirements do NOT evaluate long-term safety for either children or adults. Unfortunately, there are zero testing criteria for artificial turf materials’ long-term safety, making such claims misleading as well as meaningless.
In addition to the infill, the plastic grass itself exposes children and adults to dangerous levels of PFAS, microplastics, and other toxic chemicals as well.
Hey, it’s a worthwhile trade-off–all these tourists dropping dollars in Delaware. And by the time the first of these cancers surface, those who enabled this cluster will be happily receiving their state pensions.
A ‘win-win’.
What do you want to talk about?
Great correlation between Adolf & Bad Bunny. Superb write up on effects of forever chemicals. You’re very informative.
Thank you.
I prefer ‘very snarky’ to ‘very informative’.
But I’m happy to accept compliments wherever I can get them.