Vacationless Nation

America, you're getting screwed out of your time off, and it's costing us tens of billions of dollars.

Workers in the United States left a record number of vacation days on the table last year, equating to billions in lost benefits, according to research from the U.S. Travel Association, Oxford Economics and Ipsos. 

A total of 768 million days went unused in 2018, a 9% increase from 2017. Of those, 236 million were completely forfeited, which comes out to $65.5 billion in lost benefits.

Fifty-five percent of workers reported that they did not use all of their vacation days. If American workers used their time off to travel, the study says, the economic opportunity amounts to $151.5 billion in additional travel spending and would create 2 million American jobs. 

One of the main culprits for the increase in unused vacation days is that the number of earned days off is increasing faster than workers are using them. Workers did not use an average of 27.7% of their earned days off in 2018, up from 25.9% in 2017. 

Although there was a large increase in unused vacation days, on average, American workers took more days off in 2018: 17.4, up from 17.2 off in 2017. However, that is a significant drop from the 20.3 average vacation days used from 1978 to 2000.

But of course in Trump's America, you do what you are told, worker.

The choice for thousands of union workers at Royal Dutch Shell’s petrochemical plant in Beaver County was to either spend Tuesday standing in a giant hall waiting for President Donald Trump to speak, or to take the day off with no pay.
“Your attendance is not mandatory,” read the rules that Shell sent to union leaders a day ahead of the visit to the $6 billion construction site. But only those that showed up at 7 a.m., scanned their cards, and prepared to stand for hours — through lunch but without lunch — would be paid.

“NO SCAN, NO PAY,” the rules said.

Those that decided to sit out the event would have an excused absence, the company said, and would not qualify for overtime pay on Friday. The company has a 56-hour workweek with 16 hours of overtime. That means those workers who attended Mr. Trump’s speech and showed up for work on Friday meeting the overtime threshold are being paid at a rate of time and a half, while those that didn’t go to hear the president are being paid the regular rate, despite the fact that both groups did not do work on the site on Tuesday.

This is just what Shell wanted to do and we went along with it,” said Ken Broadbent, business manager for Steamfitters local 449.

The local has 2,400 workers on the site and Mr. Broadbent said he would not “bad rap about it one way or another.”

“We’re glad to have the jobs. We’re glad to have the project built,” he said. “The president is the president whether we like him or dislike him. We respect him for the title.”

We all serve at the pleasure of Dear Leader Trump now, and our corporate masters will see to it that we do.

Now get back to work.

Last Call For The Purge: Trump Edition

The State Department's inspector general dropped a bombshell report this week finding the department's international affairs bureau was a disaster where career staffers found insufficiently loyal to Dear Leader Trump were targeted for harassment and even retaliatory action.

A report by the State Department’s inspector general concludes that leadership of a leading department bureau mistreated and harassed staffers, accused them of political disloyalty to the Trump administration, and retaliated against them.

In response to repeated counseling by more senior State officials that he address staff concerns, the report concluded, Kevin Moley, assistant secretary for international affairs, “did not take significant action.”

The report, released Thursday, is a sweeping condemnation of Moley and more specifically of his former senior adviser, Mari Stull. A former lobbyist and consultant for international food and agriculture interests, Stull left the department in January following press reports that, among other things, she had compiled a list of staffers deemed insufficiently loyal to the Trump administration.
The 30-page report — based on what it said were interviews with dozens of current and former employees, as well as documents — chronicled numerous episodes of Stull berating and belittling employees, and Moley’s repeated failure to deal with complaints reported to him.

Both Stull and Moley, it said, “frequently berated employees, raised their voices, and generally engaged in unprofessional behavior toward staff,” and reportedly moved to retaliate against those who had held their jobs under the previous administration.

Stull, it said, referred to some employees as “Obama holdovers,” “traitors,” or “disloyal,” and accused some of being part of the “Deep State” and the “swamp” — terms that President Trump has used to refer to federal employees. All of those so accused, the report said, were career staffers and not political appointees.

Some staffers said Moley accused them of “undermining the President’s agenda,” the report said.

In a response appended to the report, Moley said he had no recollection of much of the counseling, and said the description of his behavior with employees “does not represent the person I am or have ever been.” He said accounts of the departure of two senior bureau officials was inaccurate, and that he had not witnessed Stull’s reported behavior.

Stull, the report said, declined to speak to investigators.

Recommendations included in the report advised Undersecretary of Political Affairs David Hale, who supervises the international affairs bureau, to develop a “corrective action plan to address the leadership and management deficiencies,” and to consider other action, “including disciplinary action.”

The State Department response, contained in the report and repeated Thursday by a Department spokesman, accepted the recommendations. Noting that Stull was “no longer with the Department,” it said that “with regard to the second employee,” Moley, it would submit a “corrective action plan” within 60 days.

A slap on the wrist at best.

You serve at the pleasure of Dear Leader Trump.  This government and this country now exists to benefit him.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Congressional Republicans are in their home districts for the August recess, avoiding town hall meetings and questions about Trump, but they have been given their talking points on mass shooters and white nationalism just the same, and they are absolutely disgusting lies.

Congressional Republicans recently circulated talking points on gun violence that falsely described the El Paso massacre and other mass shootings as “violence from the left.”

A document obtained by the Tampa Bay Times and sent by House Republicans provides a framework for how to respond to anticipated questions like, “Why won’t you pass legislation to close the ‘gun show loophole’ in federal law?” and “Why shouldn’t we ban high-capacity magazines?" The answers are boilerplate Republican arguments against tougher gun restrictions.

But it also included this question: “Do you believe white nationalism is driving more mass shootings recently?” The suggested response is to steer the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.

“White nationalism and racism are pure evil and cannot be tolerated in any form," the document said. “We also can’t excuse violence from the left such as the El Paso shooter, the recent Colorado shooters, the Congressional baseball shooter, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter and Antifa."

Yep.  It's the "left's" fault!

U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Palm Harbor, included the talking points in a newsletter that he emailed this week to his Florida constituents. His spokeswoman Summer Robertson said they were “provided by the House Republican Conference," the caucus arm in charge of devising messaging strategy for its members. The conference’s internal strategies are not usually made public.

Robertson said that the inclusion of El Paso was a mistake. It was supposed to say Dayton, the site of a second mass shooting 13 hours later where nine people died.

The El Paso shooter is alleged to have intentionally targeted Mexicans when he killed 22 people at a Walmart on the Texas-Mexico border on Aug. 3. In a manifesto published just before the attack he expressed white nationalist and anti-immigrant beliefs, using language that echoed President Donald Trump’s characterizations of illegal immigration.

The Dayton Daily News reported that the shooter in Ohio had attended a protest of a Ku Klux Klan rally and other outlets have reported his political leanings aligned with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist. The motivations of the Dayton shooters killing spree, though, are less clear. He reportedly was obsessed with violence and once made a list of girls he wanted to kill. He fatally wounded his sister in the rampage.

The GOP conference talking points ascribed other shootings as leftist violence despite ambiguous, if not contradictory, evidence. The shooter that wounded U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, a Democrat, was paranoid about government and obsessed with the Arizona Congresswoman, a law enforcement investigation found. His political persuasions were mixed and did not appear to be a factor. Nor does it seem that the May shooters at a Colorado high school — both teenagers and bullied students — were motivated by politics.

But that sure doesn't matter to Republicans who just want to blow smoke up your ass in order to have yet another excuse to avoid anything on gun safety or background check legislation that the vast majority of American adults want to see passed.

Just another day in Gunmerica.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

As I've said on multiple occasions, like most malignant narcissists, Donald Trump views the world through the lens of loyalty.  Specifically, people who please him are good, and people who oppose him are vermin to be crushed.  The Washington Post lists a pile of instances where Trump's penchant for petty vengeance has driven national and international policy.

By pressuring the Israeli government to bar entry by two members of Congress, President Trump once again used the power and platform of his office to punish his political rivals.

It’s a pattern that has intensified during the first two and a half years of Trump’s presidency, as he has increasingly governed to the tune of his grievances.

The president has grounded a military jet set for use by the Democratic House speaker, yanked a security clearance from a former CIA director critical of him, threatened to withhold disaster aid from states led by Democrats, pushed to reopen a criminal investigation targeting Hillary Clinton and publicly called for federal action to punish technology and media companies he views as biased against him.

Taken as a whole, Trump’s use of political power to pursue personal vendettas is unprecedented in modern history, said Matthew Dallek, a political historian who teaches at George Washington University.

“It’s both a sign of deep insecurity on his part and also just a litany of abuse of power,” he said. “I don’t think anyone really has done it as consistently or as viciously as Trump has. No one has used the power of the bully pulpit in such a public way.”

The Post needs to batten down the hatches for another round of FAKE NEWS and ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE. But at what point does Trump cross the line from Petty vindictiveness to full-blown abuse of executive power?

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III documented several instances in which Trump sought to pressure the Department of Justice to pursue a criminal investigation into his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, for her use of a private email server. In his report, Mueller found that Trump encouraged then-attorney general Jeff Sessions in 2017 to reverse his recusal from any Clinton-related matters to pursue new charges.

The FBI closed its investigation into Clinton’s email practices in 2016 without charges, a decision Trump pledged as a candidate to reverse. Sessions did not reverse his recusal but did assign the U.S. attorney in Utah, John Huber, to examine the Clinton investigation. Trump fired Sessions in November.

Democrats, some of whom have called for Trump’s impeachment, have said his attempts to have Clinton prosecuted represent a clear example of abuse of power.

Trump has also wielded his authority over the federal budget to intervene in spending decisions related to various natural disasters. He has publicly shown disdain toward disaster-stricken states where Democrats outnumber Republicans, and in some cases threatened to withhold disaster funding from them.

As historic wildfires ravaged California earlier this year, Trump lamented the amount of money the federal government was spending to provide relief.

I fully expect Democrats, when that impeachment rocket takes off, will nails Trump the hardest on his abuses of power.  And Trump has nobody but himself to blame for making them so visible and so easy to document.

StupidiNews!

• NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his wife avoided any serious injuries as the private jet they were in rolled off the runway in east Tennessee and caught fire, everyone was able to escape.
• Gibraltar officials have allowed an Iranian oil tanker to pass despite the Trump White House requesting that the tanker be held over for US naval inspectors to board the vessel.
• North Korea has fired at least two more missile test projectiles into the sea on Friday as South Korea is warning that dialogue between the two nations is now "over".
• The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as the White House plans to claim executive privilege over his testimony.
• Apple will unveil iOS 13 and its news lineup of Apple iPhones on September 10, the tech giant's flagship phone faces stiff competition from Samsung, LG, and Google and shrinking market share.

Last Call For The Also-Rans

As I noted earlier today, former Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper had the grace to step out of the 2020 Presidential contest to run for Senate, but he won't have an easy time in the primary.

Former presidential candidate John Hickenlooper is considering a Senate run.

In his announcement declaring he is dropping out of the presidential race, Hickenlooper said he'll "give some serious thought" to running for Senate. A decision could take weeks.

More than 10 Democrats are already hoping to challenge Sen. Cory Gardner in 2020.

On Thursday, several candidates announced they would not drop out should Hickenlooper join the race.

"This won't be a coronation," State Sen. Angela Williams, a current Senate candidate, said.

Senate candidate Mike Johnston also implied he is staying in the race.

“I am so grateful for the support we have received from people in places across the state, am energized by the campaign that lies ahead, and excited to win back control of the Senate and get to work for the people of Colorado," Johnston said in a statement.

Andrew Romanoff also told FOX31 he won't drop out.

"I'm running for Senate -- I intend to stay in this race -- because I'm running to get things done," Romanoff said.

Alice Madden also announced she would not drop out.

Beto O'Rourke on the other hand has no plans for running for the Senate in Texas, despite his near zero numbers in the polls.

Beto O'Rourke returned to the campaign trail Thursday with a speech in his hometown of El Paso. The former Texas congressman, who had effectively suspended his campaign after the mass shooting in El Paso earlier this month, laid out a new approach to his candidacy. He said that instead of prioritizing early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire, he would instead concentrate on communities where President Trump has been "terrorizing, and terrifying and demeaning our fellow Americans."

"As we head back on the campaign trail today, I know there is a way to do this better. And that came to me last week someone asked if I was going to be heading back to Iowa to go to the Iowa State Fair," O'Rourke, who has repeatedly accused the president of racism in recent weeks, said. "And I said, 'No, I can't go back for that, but I also can't go back to that.'"

During the speech, O'Rourke also announced plans to immediately visit Mississippi in the wake of the ICE raids that detained 680 people last week. O'Rourke also said he would travel to Arkansas, where he will keynote the Arkansas Democratic Party's Third Annual Clinton Dinner.

I'm really kid of hoping Hickenlooper loses the primary and Republican Sen. Cory Gardner then loses in November to whoever beats Hickenlooper, just so we can go "I told you so" to both these jackasses.

You should have run for the Senate from the beginning.

The Cruelty Is The Point, Con't

As I said last week, there was very little doubt that the Netanyahu government of Israel would risk angering Donald Trump over banning two Democratic Muslim congresswomen from the country.  Today Israel made it clear they will do whatever it takes to stay in Trump's good graces.

Israel will bar Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country as part of a landmark visit, in a move that is already fueling a political firestorm in Washington.

Omar and Tlaib — the first two Muslim women in Congress — were slated to arrive this weekend, but President Donald Trump had lobbied Israeli leaders to block them from entering the country and lashed out again at the pair on Thursday.

The controversial decision announced by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely comes despite pleas from top lawmakers in both parties to allow the delegation visit to take place.

“The decision has been made. The decision is not to allow them to enter,” Hotovely told an Israeli radio station.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who returned from his own visit to Israel this month, repeatedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to allow the freshman lawmakers to enter the country, only to be rejected.

Hoyer and other pro-Israel Democrats like Nita Lowey of New York, Brad Schneider of Illinois, Ted Deutch of Florida and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey also personally lobbied Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., to allow the visit.

And the trip got a bipartisan endorsement after Hoyer and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced their support for the Omar-Tlaib visit during a press conference last week in Jerusalem.

But Trump slammed Tlaib and Omar — two fierce critics of the president who have called for his impeachment — on Twitter Thursday morning and encouraged Israel to block them.

"It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep.Tlaib to visit. They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds," Trump said. "Minnesota and Michigan will have a hard time putting them back in office. They are a disgrace!"

And so Israel did what it was told, because Donald Trump wanted to hurt two black Muslim women who dared to oppose him, and the message that he now has the power to do as much harm as he can to anyone who wrongs him, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.  He's even dragging other countries into doing his bidding now.

A sitting US leader openly exacting revenge against his political opposition like this is repugnant.

But only if people actually do "do something about it".

So the question is what do Democrats do about this?  Will they be cowards like the GOP that now openly fears Trump and will do whatever he wants?  Will they be cowards like Israel's government and do whatever Trump wants?

Because if the answer is "nothing" then it's not repugnant.

It's the new normal.

Trump's Labor Pains

The Trump regime is moving ahead with a major priority in the workplace and one I warned for years was coming: allowing any federal contract employer to obtain a religious exemption in order to nullify existing fair labor and discrimination laws.

The 46-page draft rule from the Labor Department would apply to a range of so-called religious organizations — including corporations, schools, and societies — provided that they claim a “religious purpose.”

Labor Department spokesperson Megan Sweeney confirmed to BuzzFeed News on Wednesday that the rule would apply to for-profit corporations with federal contracts. This would allow those companies discriminate and keep their contract, given that they obtain a religious exemption.
The Trump administration makes clear that a corporation needn’t focus entirely on religion to qualify, saying, “The contractor must be organized for a religious purpose, meaning that it was conceived with a self-identified religious purpose. This need not be the contractor’s only purpose.”

“A religious purpose can be shown by articles of incorporation or other founding documents, but that is not the only type of evidence that can be used,” says the rule, which grants companies many opportunities to claim that faith or morals guide their intent.

The National Center for Transgender Equality said in a statement the rule could allow “firing or refusing to hire someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. It could also lead to federal contractors refusing to hire women or unmarried workers who are pregnant or parents, or even discrimination on the basis of race.”

For example, the policy could allow a company that supplies machinery to the federal government to fire a woman simply because she’s a lesbian if it obtains a religious pass.

Workers could still take employers to court, but there is no federal law explicitly protecting LGBTQ workers. And under the proposed rule, the Labor Department wouldn’t need to take enforcement action or cancel lucrative contracts with businesses that make religious claims as the basis for bias.

The new rule would not eliminate longstanding nondiscrimination executive orders — such as a 2014 order banning LGBT discrimination — but rather create a pathway to get around them.

Echoing a sentiment from a Labor Department press release, Sweeney tried to downplay that fact that the plan would allow discrimination, saying in a statement, “The proposed regulation does not exempt or excuse a contractor from complying with other applicable requirements outside of the religious employer exemption.”

But this ignores the heart of the plan: The draft rule exists to create a carveout that protects businesses that raise a religious motive. The Labor Department, according to the proposal, “will find a violation of [the nondiscrimination order] only if it can prove by a preponderance of the evidence that a protected characteristic other than religion was a but-for cause of the adverse action.”

So, all a federal contractor has to do is go to the Trump Labor Department and request a religious exemption.  Once that's granted, the business is free to do what it wants as far as employees hired and fired that work on federal contracts.

That's expected to affect about 450,000 employees, but it's only the beginning of this mess.

StupidiNews!

• Six police officers were wounded in a shootout with a gunman in Philadelphia, the suspect was captured and the officers escaped serious harm after a SWAT team evacuated the suspect's home.
• The White House and congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle are "deeply concerned" by Chinese troops massing on the border with Hong Kong in response to recent protests.
• A Russian passenger jet made an emergency landing at Moscow's airport after striking a flock of gulls shortly after takeoff, four minor injuries were reported and all 233 on board were safe.
• South Korean President Moon dialed down the rhetoric against Japan in a speech on the anniversary of WWII as tensions between the two nations remain high over trade and historical disputes.
• The former Amazon employee who is accused of stealing data on millions of Capital One accounts is now being accused of having data from over 30 other corporations according to US attorneys.

Last Call For Trump Trades Blows, Con't

As I keep saying, the one thing that would absolutely end Donald Trump in 2020 is an economic recession, and America got another market red alert today that indicates we're careening towards a nasty one right now.

Recession signals intensified Wednesday in the United States and in some of the world’s leading economies, as the damage from acrimonious trade wars is becoming increasingly apparent on multiple continents.

The U.S. stock market tumbled to its worst day of the year on Wednesday, after a reliable predictor of looming recessions flashed for the first time since the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 800 points, or about 3 percent, and has lost close to 7 percent over the past three weeks.

Two of the world’s largest economies, Germany and the United Kingdom, appear to be contracting even as the latter forges ahead with plans to leave the European Union. Growth also has slowed in China, which is in a bitter trade feud with the United States. Meanwhile, Argentina’s stock market fell nearly 50 percent earlier this week after its incumbent president was defeated by a left-wing opponent.

Whether the events presage an economic calamity or just an alarming spasm are unclear. But unlike during the Great Recession, global leaders are not working in unison to confront mounting problems and arrest the slowdown. Instead, they are increasingly at one another’s throats.

And President Trump has responded by both claiming the economy is still thriving while dramatically ramping up his attacks on Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell, seeking to deflect blame.

Wednesday’s sharp sell-off was caused by an unusual development in the bond market, called an “inverted yield curve,” that often foreshadows a recession.

For the first time since the run-up to the Great Recession, the yields — or returns — on short-term U.S. bonds eclipsed those of long-term bonds. Normally, the government needs to pay out higher rates to attract investors for its long-term bonds. But with so many losing confidence in the near-term prospects of the economy and rushing to buy longer-term bonds, the U.S. government now is paying more to attract buyers to its 2-year bond than its 10-year note.

That inverted yield curve usually precedes a recession by about a year, which would be lethal to Trump's reelection prospects if that holds true.  I say "usually" because the yield curve first inverted in December 2005 before the Great Recession, and it basically took two years for that to happen.

We'll see what happens, but with the Trump regime running things, I would expect that massive recession sooner rather than later.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr gave a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police on Monday and it not only confirmed Barr has no interest in criminal justice reform and will absolutely roll it back by decades if given the option, but it also made it very clear that the nation's top cop wants a fascist police state, and that he wants the nation's law enforcement officers to help him establish it.

Attorney General William Barr delivered an emotionally charged speech defending law enforcement this week to the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) for its 64th Biennial Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. FOP is the US' largest fraternal police organization. 

"To my mind, there is no more noble profession than serving as a police officer," Barr said. "You put your own life and well-being on the line to protect your communities."
He added: "Your families spend anxious nights, so we can sleep in peace. You never know what your day may bring — what uncertainty, danger, or threat you might face. But you still get up, put on your uniform and badge, kiss your loved ones, and head out to face whatever risks might come your way." 

But Barr went on to say that police officers are "fighting a different type of war ... an unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society."

"Even in a healthy society, violence, lawlessness, and predation lie just below the surface," the attorney general said. "In the final analysis, what stands between chaos and carnage on the one hand, and the civilized and tranquil society we all yearn for is the thin blue line of law enforcement. You are the ones manning the ramparts — day in, and day out." 

After telling the crowd that "we need to get back to basics," Barr said that public figures in the media and elsewhere should "underscore the need to 'Comply first, and, if warranted, complain later.'" 

"This will make everyone safe — the police, suspects, and the community at large," he said. "And those who resist must be prosecuted for that crime. We must have zero tolerance for resisting police. This will save lives."

If a law enforcement official in any other country said these words in public, we would call it what it is: pure violent police state fascism.  But this what America's Attorney General is saying, that it is the responsibility of the media to tell people to comply with law enforcement, and that resistance will have zero tolerance.

That, along with Barr's lionization of police as "soldiers" who are "manning the ramparts" in a "never-ending fight" against the people they are supposed to serve and protect, should warrant his immediate dismissal.

Sadly, he has just given the nation's largest police union the green light for "zero-tolerance" to be used against the people.  But he was far from done in naming enemies of the police.

During his speech Monday, Barr singled out local prosecutors for being soft on crime and accused them of making police officers' jobs more difficult. 

"There is another development that is demoralizing to law enforcement and dangerous to public safety," he said. "That is the emergence in some of our large cities of district attorneys that style themselves as 'social justice' reformers, who spend their time undercutting the police, letting criminals off the hook, and refusing to enforce the law."

The Trump regime has made it clear that they have no respect for the judicial in any way if it ever criticizes the White House, and rule of law is what Donald Trump and Bill Barr says it is.  Getting hundreds of thousands of armed police on your side in a "different kind of war" is exactly as dangerous as it sounds.

Barr isn't just covering for Trump.  He's a dangerous fascist.  Period.

Climate Of Extremities, Con't

Global warming in the US has now exceeded two degrees Celsius average temperature increase over 1895 levels in dozens of US counties, and the cities involved: NYC, LA, Boston, Providence, Phoenix, and all of Long Island, are already having to deal with the infrastructure and system stress of growing temperatures.

Nationwide, trends are clear. Starting in the late 1800s, U.S. temperatures began to rise and continued slowly up through the 1930s. The nation then cooled slightly for several decades. But starting around 1970, temperatures rose steeply.

At the county level, the data reveals isolated 2-degree Celsius clusters: high-altitude deserts in Oregon; stretches of the western Rocky Mountains that feed the Colorado River; a clutch of counties along the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan — home to the famed Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore near Traverse City.

Along the Canadian border, a string of counties from eastern Montana to Minnesota are quickly heating up.

The topography of warming varies. It is intense at some high elevations, such as in Utah and Colorado, and along some highly populated coasts: Temperatures have risen by 2C in Los Angeles and three neighboring counties. New York City is also warming rapidly, and so are the very different areas around it, such as the beach resorts in the Hamptons and leafy Westchester County.

The smaller the area, the more difficult it is to pinpoint the cause of warming. Urban heat effects, changing air pollution levels, ocean currents, events like the Dust Bowl, and natural climate wobbles such as El Niño could all be playing some role, experts say.

The only part of the United States that has not warmed significantly since the late 1800s is the South, especially Mississippi and Alabama, where data in some cases shows modest cooling. Scientists have attributed this “warming hole” to atmospheric cycles driven by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, along with particles of soot from smokestacks and tailpipes, which have damaging health effects but can block some of the sun’s intensity. Those types of pollutants were curtailed by environmental policies, while carbon dioxide remained unregulated for decades.

Since the 1960s, however, the region’s temperatures have been increasing along with the rest of the country’s.

The Northeast is warming especially fast.

Anthony Broccoli, a climate scientist at Rutgers, defines an unusually warm or cold month as ranking among the five most extreme in the record going back to the late 1800s. In the case of New Jersey, he says, “since 2000, we’ve had 39 months that were unusually warm and zero that were unusually cold.”
Scientists do not completely understand the Northeast hot spot. But fading winters and very warm water offshore are the most likely culprits, experts say. That’s because climate change is a cycle that feeds on itself.

Warmer winters mean less ice and snow cover. Normally, ice and snow reflect solar radiation back into space, keeping the planet relatively cool. But as the ice and snow retreat, the ground absorbs the solar radiation and warms.

With the exception of Phoenix, the areas that are heating up are seeing much milder winters, not much hotter summers.  But those are causing positive feedback loops that are starting to lead to much warmer summer months, too.

And all this will continue to get worse.  We're decades past the point of stopping global warming.

We're now at the point of mitigation for survival.

StupidiNews!

• Federal prosecutors plan to indict a 24-year-old friend of the Dayton shooter on firearms charges for providing the gunman with body armor and an drum magazine.
• Some 22 states and 7 major cities are banding together to sue the Trump regime over clean power plant rules that were gutted by the White House last year.
• The warden at the Manhattan correctional facility where financier and convicted sex felon Jeffrey Epstein died last week has been reassigned pending both state and federal investigations.
• Republican donors in Kansas are being told by the party to hold steady as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo considers leaving the White House for a Senate run in 2020.
• Mobile carrier Vewrizon is suing the city of Rochester, New York in order to stiff the city on fees for 5G mobile towers and fiber lines.

Last Call For Chasing Smoke

Democrats need to stop chasing white Republican suburban women, because no matter how racist Trump is they will never, ever, vote for Democrats.  They may not vote for Trump, but they'll happily vote for every other Republican on the ticket if they do vote.  The best outcome you'll get is that they stay home completely. 

Vanessa Steinkamp is the kind of voter that Texas Republicans counted on. She’s a devoted conservative who volunteered for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, interned for former GOP Sen. Bill Frist and lives in an affluent suburb between Fort Worth and Dallas that is the reddest pocket of a reliably Republican district.

These days, though, Steinkamp feels alienated, not energized, by her party. The thought of voting in 2020 brings on a weary sigh.

“It feels like there’s no place for lifelong Republicans like me,” she said.

Her unease underscores a larger problem for Texas Republicans: Female suburban voters like Steinkamp are no longer a sure bet for the party, injecting new competitiveness into the Lone Star State’s politics.

That dynamic captured the national spotlight last week when U.S. Rep. Kenny Marchant, a Republican who represents the communities outside Dallas and Fort Worth, including Steinkamp’s home of Colleyville, said he would not seek reelection next year — the fourth Texas Republican congressman to announce plans to retire.

Across the nation, Republicans are increasingly worried about their strength in once-friendly suburban terrain. Last week, Democrats officially took the lead in voter registrations in California’s Orange County, the storied GOP stronghold. Suburban districts in red states such as Georgia and North Carolina have become hotly contested.

I'll take voters like Steinkamp staying home in November 2020.  But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that they believe their own GOP members of Congress are the problem, or that they'll ever believe Democrats are the answer.

Steinkamp is among those who despair over Trump’s behavior, which she said falls short of statesmanlike.

“I just wish he would talk about policy and he wouldn’t tweet all the time,” she said as she ferried her three children to the dentist for back-to-school checkups. “He tweets every thought that goes through his mind. I can’t stand that.”

Steinkamp, 42, and her family moved to Colleyville four years ago for her husband’s financial services job. Once predominantly pasture, the town boasts well-manicured subdivisions of big houses sitting on even bigger lots. The median income is $165,000.

Speaking in her spacious brick home at the end of a leafy cul de sac, Steinkamp fretted about how she saw Trump’s vitriolic approach to politics spilling into her community. When she ran for city council this year, her opponent branded her as a liberal interloper from Chicago. The sting of her defeat is still raw.

Her objections extend to Trump’s policies as well. Steinkamp, a government teacher at Tarrant Community College, credited the president with signing bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation, but blanched at him pursuing an $8-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia over the objections of Congress and toying with granting clemency to imprisoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

“Now, will I vote for a Democrat over Trump?” Steinkamp said. She thought of the leading progressives seeking the Democratic nomination: Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I do not agree with almost anything Warren says, what Sanders says. So it’s hard.”

Steinkamp said she might consider a write-in vote.

Most likely Mike Pence.  And I guarantee you Steinkamp will be out campaigning for whichever GOP nutjob runs for Kenny Marchant's old seat.

Go after gettable Democrats, not disloyal Republicans.  Because white suburban women who voted for Trump in 2016 are 98% OK with current GOP racism.

The Tax For Being Black

A new study puts a dollar figure to the lack of banking services available for African-American neighborhoods and instead saturating them with check-cashing stores and payday lenders: being black in America costs you $40,000 over your lifetime in fees, interest charges, and lost savings interest.

Many African Americans have difficulty accumulating savings in part because they lack access to mainstream financial services like banking, a new study on the contributing factors to the U.S. racial wealth gap by McKinsey & Co found on Tuesday.

Many minorities in the United States depend on more expensive financial services like check-cashing counters since there are fewer banks in non-white neighborhoods. Increasing access to basic banking services, like checking and savings accounts, could save individual black Americans up to $40,000 over their lifetime, the report found.
“Black families are being underserved and overcharged by institutions that can provide the best channels for saving,” said the report authored by McKinsey partners Shelley Stewart and Jason Wright.

In majority-white counties, there are an average of 41 financial institution for every 100,000 people compared with 27 in non-white majority neighborhoods. However, more expensive services like pay-day lending are more readily available in black neighborhoods, the report said.

Further, banks in black neighborhoods typically require higher account balances to avoid service fees. The average minimum balance in white neighborhoods was $626, compared with $871 in black neighborhoods.
The racial wealth gap, or the difference between the average white and black households’ net worth, has expanded over the last two decades, according to federal data. As of 2016, the wealth of the average white family was 10 times higher than the average wealth of a black family. The white household had a net worth of $171,000 while average black and Hispanic households had a median net worth of $17,600 and $20,700 respectively.

McKinsey says closing the gap between black and white wealth in the United States could increase GDP by up to 6% by 2028 through increased investments and consumption.

That would equal a trillion dollars over ten years in wealth growth for black households, and that's precisely the reason it'll never happen.

It's crushingly expensive to be poor in America.  It's crushingly expensive to be black in America.  It's devastatingly near-inescapable poverty if you're both.  The payday lender, title lender, and subprime lender industries exist to prey on black and brown people, to strip them of everything, and America is only too happy to "create jobs" to do it.

And that brings us to the other major systemic racism issue in the country: criminal justice reform and mass disenfranchisement of black voters.  With Florida finally taking steps to allow ex-cons to vote, many of them black, Kentucky now stands as the state that disenfranchises the black vote to most.

Since 1990, changing attitudes have led many other states to ease bans on political participation by those with felony records.

Kentucky is an outlier. Nearly one in 10 of the state’s adults, and one in four African-Americans, has a felony record that bans them from voting for life, according to The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice advocacy group. It is the nation’s highest rate of black disenfranchisement, the group says, and among African-American males like Mr. Harbin, the rate is considered even higher: an estimated one in three.
Those astounding rates are the product of the tough-on-crime ethos of the 1980s and 1990s, when crushing penalties were imposed for nonviolent violations like low-volume drug sales and failure to pay alimony.

The share of voting-age Kentuckians with felony records rose nearly fourfold from 1980 to 2010. Among the state’s black residents, it grew nearly sevenfold. Despite changes to criminal sentencing guidelines seven years ago and a declining crime rate, the state’s prison population continues to rise, with well over half the 24,000-plus prisoners warehoused in overcrowded county jails.

But politicians have been whipsawed between the progressive impulses of the state’s cities and its traditional culture. In 2015, Kentucky’s departing Democratic governor issued an executive order restoring voting rights to 140,000 residents with nonviolent felony records, only to see his Republican successor reverse the edict shortly after taking office. The state legislature voted in 2016 to erase records of the least serious felonies, but only after a costly and sometimes arduous expungement process. In two years, the state has granted expungements in only 1,663 cases, and denied them in another 171.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, staked out an unequivocal position on voting rights for those with felony records earlier this year. His political rise is rooted in Louisville, the state’s largest city and a Democratic bastion.

“Voting is a privilege,” he said. “Those who break our laws should not dilute the vote of law-abiding citizens.”

Political scientists suggest that Mr. McConnell might never have attained the Senate had those with felony records been allowed to vote when he first sought the seat in 1984. An analysis of that campaign in 2002 concluded that Mr. McConnell’s 5,200-vote victory in that razor-thin race would have been converted to a narrow loss had felons been allowed to cast ballots. 

When I say America is built and designed around institutional racism from the ground up, this is only a small fraction of what I mean. And the Trump regime is bound and determined to make it worse.