Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Polls show Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum with a very solid lead over GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis in Florida, along with Dem Sen. Bill Nelson with the edge over GOP Gov. Rick Scott in defending his seat, but I don't buy that lead for a second, because I know Trump and the GOP have an army of angry old white people ready to turn up at the polls in two weeks.

President Donald Trump’s loyalists here at Florida’s premier retirement community fear Andrew Gillum.

It has nothing to do with his race, they insist, when asked about the 39-year-old Democrat who could become the state’s first African-American governor. Instead, The Villages’ deeply conservative residents are convinced a Gillum victory would trigger an era of high crime, higher taxes and moral failing.

“He’ll kill everything that’s good about Florida,” says Talmadge Strickland, a 66-year-old retired firefighter wearing a “Trump 2020″ baseball cap at a rally for Gillum’s opponent. “He will hurt us; he will physically hurt us with his socialist mentality.”

In an era defined by deep political partisanship, there’s perhaps no state where the divide runs deeper than Florida, which is in the grip of a fierce culture clash over guns, race, climate change and the president. Gillum sits at the center of the melee, his campaign a proxy for the larger fight between Democrats and President Donald Trump’s GOP.

Gillum’s fate is inexorably linked to fellow Democrats whose success could determine control of Congress. That’s especially true for three-term Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, who could benefit from Gillum’s appeal among young voters and minorities.

As early voting begins in Florida this week, that link is tenuous.

“New voters and infrequent voters are everything to us winning,” Gillum told The Associated Press when asked about his impact on Nelson’s race. “I think they will vote for both of us, and that will be to his benefit.”

Young people and minorities are traditionally among the least reliable voters, particularly in midterm elections. Meanwhile, white voters in place like The Villages are lining up behind his opponent, former Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis.

Some 50,000 Trump voters guaranteed to turn out in a midterm election could make the difference.  It did in 2016.  I've talked about The Villages in Florida before, how it's the core of Trump Country in the Gunshine State, and how the flood of retiring Boomers means even more of them will have the time and the anger to go vote.

The rest of us have to show up and vote, because there's about a 99% chance guys like Talmadge Strickland will show up and vote.  If we don't, they win every time.  And there's every reason to believe that Americans have been so burnt out by the Trump regime that they just don't see the need to vote, maybe ever and have simply tuned everything out.

So no, I don't buy the big turnout numbers at all.  Like I said a month ago, I'll be shocked if total turnout is above 40%.

But we have to vote or it really won't matter, ever again.

Oil's Not Well That Doesn't End Well

So, turns out one of America's biggest Gulf oil drilling companies has been sitting on a 14-year-long oil leak that has now dumped 500 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf since 2004, and now the fact that the Trump regime doesn't want to get stuck with the clean-up bill.

An oil spill that has been quietly leaking millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico has gone unplugged for so long that it now verges on becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history.

Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century. With no fix in sight, the Taylor offshore spill is threatening to overtake BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster as the largest ever.

As oil continues to spoil the Gulf, the Trump administration is proposing the largest expansion of leases for the oil and gas industry, with the potential to open nearly the entire outer continental shelf to offshore drilling. That includes the Atlantic coast, where drilling hasn’t happened in more than a half century and where hurricanes hit with double the regularity of the Gulf.

Expansion plans come despite fears that the offshore oil industry is poorly regulated and that the planet needs to decrease fossil fuels to combat climate change, as well as the knowledge that 14 years after Ivan took down Taylor’s platform, the broken wells are releasing so much oil that researchers needed respirators to study the damage.

“I don’t think people know that we have this ocean in the United States that’s filled with industry,” said Scott Eustis, an ecologist for the Gulf Restoration Network, as a six-seat plane circled the spill site on a flyover last summer. On the horizon, a forest of oil platforms rose up from the Gulf’s waters, and all that is left of the doomed Taylor platform are rainbow-colored oil slicks that are often visible for miles. He cannot imagine similar development in the Atlantic, where the majority of coastal state governors, lawmakers, attorneys general and residents have aligned against the administration’s proposal.

The Taylor Energy spill is largely unknown outside Louisiana because of the company’s effort to keep it secret in the hopes of protecting its reputation and proprietary information about its operations, according to a lawsuit that eventually forced the company to reveal its cleanup plan. The spill was hidden for six years before environmental watchdog groups stumbled on oil slicks while monitoring the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster a few miles north of the Taylor site in 2010.

The Interior Department is fighting an effort by Taylor Energy to walk away from the disaster. The company sued Interior in federal court, seeking the return of about $450 million left in a trust it established with the government to fund its work to recover part of the wreckage and locate wells buried under 100 feet of muck.

So, back of the envelope math says 14 years times 365 days times 500 barrels is roughly 2.5 million barrels of oil, so you can see why this might be an issue.   And yes, I understand that this means this went on for six years under Obama since the leak was discovered in 2010, and the Obama administration thought Taylor Energy would actually clean this up instead of sitting on the leak for eight more years and then demanding the taxpayers pick up the tab.

Of course, this isn't a new story in Louisiana, Taylor energy sued the Obama administration in 2016 for the same thing.

In hindsight, probably not a good idea.

 

The Trans-National Race To Erase

The Trump regime is pondering defining trans Americans out of existence at both the federal and state levels, yet another reversal of Obama-era federal policy that would eliminate basic civil rights protections for more than a million Americans.

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

“This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from a 2020 census survey and a national survey of elderly citizens.

For the last year, health and human services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

As I have said time and time again, the goal is absolute cruelty to the Obama coalition, not to just break it up and render it politically non-viable, but to smash it to bits and make sure that those who need federal protections the most never get them, to make sure that they never have the political power again to ever dare challenge the status quo of white, Christian, cisgender male patriarchy.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asserted on Sunday that Democrats would impose “mob rule” if they won the U.S. House of Representatives in November.

During an interview on Fox News, the senior senator from South Carolina adopted President Donald Trump’s talking points on so-called Democratic “mobs.”

“I think people are going to be voting on the mob rule of the Democratic Party,” Graham told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “If you elect Democrats to run the House, you know exactly what you’re going to get. They’re going to try and impeach the president and impeach [Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh].”

“They don’t care about your wallet — they just want to get in your wallet,” he continued. “[Kavanaugh’s confirmation], to me, was a despicable episode in the history of the Senate. These [migrant] caravans will never be stopped by Nancy Pelosi. And when it comes to standing up to the world, you need a strong leader like President Trump.”

Graham revealed that he had been handpicked by Trump to campaign for Republicans in 13 states.

“I’m going to let everybody in these states know what happens if you put the Democratic Party in charge of this country,” he said. “You’re rewarding mob rule. You’re undercutting the rule of law. Don’t give these people power.”

“The best thing you can do to make sure [the Kavanaugh confirmation battle] never happens again is punish them for what they were willing to do to this good man,” the senator added. “Two weeks from Tuesday, we can decide what kind of country you want to be. Do you want to be the country of people who run you up and down the halls [of Congress] and spit on you. Or do you want to be a country of Republicans who can actually deliver for working families out there?”

“Nancy Pelosi will welcome the caravans here,” he concluded. “Donald Trump and the rest of us will stop them.”

Or as Adam Serwer keeps saying, "The cruelty is the point".

Besides, the Trump regime's base runs on fear and hatred, and must always be fed new enemies lest the base turn on Trump.  And history tells us that deadly violence against "the other" will only get exponentially worse in the months and years ahead.  They're letting us know exactly what is coming, and they want us so terrified that we hide forever.

I don't plan to let that happen, and if you care about this country, neither should you.

 

StupidiNews!

• The world's longest sea-crossing bridge opens this week connecting Hong Kong to Macau after two years of delays, the bridge/tunnel system is more than 34 miles long.
• A new Public Religion Research Institute poll finds that self-identified white Christians now make up less than 43% of Americans as they are a minority in America for the first time.
• Moscow says it will retaliate if the Trump regime abandons the bilateral Reagan-era intermediate range nuclear missile treaty and that Russia will develop new nuclear weapons in Europe.
• Boring Co. CEO Elon Musk says the first test tunnel for his company's hyperloop transportation system will be operational in December, but many questions remain about the technology.
• Following a lawsuit against California, the broadband internet industry is now suing Vermont to stop that state's net neutrality legislation requiring ISPs to comply for government contract eligibility.