US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9605

On December 28 2017 22:40 Ciaus_Dronu wrote:


The later Doug reaches the senate the less he can vote on. I thought it too when I saw that.
Under normal circumstances this would be dismissable. But with McTurtle and Trump being the people they are and with the records they have, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

Scientists say 2017 is set to be the third warmest year on record in the US as they look back on a year littered with stark signals of climate change.

The year-to-date average temperature across the contiguous US has been 2.6F above the 20th century average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), placing it only behind 2012 and 2016 in terms of record warmth.

December may influence the overall 2017 ranking, but according to Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at Noaa: “We can say with confidence that the year will be in at least the top five,” for record warmth.

“It’s been another really warm year for the contiguous US,” Crouch said. “The last time we saw a year with below average temperatures was 1996. So this will be the 21st consecutive year that’s above average. And even though it’s not a record, we are seeing climate change manifest itself.”

Eight states – Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Western Virginia – have in fact experienced record warmth for the first 11 months of the year. A national record, however, is out of reach due to the lack of an El Niño, a periodic climatic event that appeared last year and spurred extra heat.

But the fingerprint of climate change extends beyond just temperature. California’s deepest drought on record was broken by intense rainfall at the start of the year, an example of the long dry spells interrupted by ferocious downpours that scientists say are becoming more frequent in a warming world.

To the north, Arctic sea ice reached a record low wintertime maximum extent as, incredibly, temperature instruments in Alaska malfunctioned due to the surging warmth.

Further south, there was a hurricane season that was unusually punishing. There were six major hurricanes, defined as category three or above, including the first two major hurricanes – Harvey and Irma – to hit the continental US in 12 years.

“This was a hurricane season that wouldn’t quit,” said Timothy Gallaudet, acting Noaa administrator.

While these hurricanes may well have formed without human-induced warming, the extra heat in the Atlantic and in the atmosphere helped fuel the storms. Harvey, which dumped around 25tn gallons of water on the Houston area in just a few days, derived perhaps a third of its strength from the extra heat added to the planet since industrialization, according to one estimate.

“The number of hurricanes wasn’t related to climate change, that was bad luck, but the hurricanes were different because of climate change,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.

“It’s very reasonable to assume that Harvey was made worse by climate change. Maria and Irma were consistent with the idea that the most powerful hurricanes will get more powerful. This is the kind of stuff we will have to get used to.”

Ultimately, 2017 may well be remembered more for the political response to climate change. The newly-installed Trump administration set about tearing up policies deigned to address global warming, such as Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, announced the US was to withdraw from the Paris climate accord and repeatedly questioned the scientific basis of climate change.

Meanwhile, specific regulations curbing planet-warming gases from vehicles and drilling operations were scaled back, with more federal land and water opened up for fossil fuel exploration.

“The US is moving backwards as far as rational climate policy goes and I guess we will have to see whether this is a blip or a long term trend,” said Dessler. “A lot will depend on the elections next year and whoever the president is in 2020.

“Everyone recognizes that the weather is weird and things are getting warming, but climate change has become an identity issue. If you see yourself as a good Republican, you don’t believe in climate change. It’s hard to change that viewpoint when it’s part of someone’s identity. It’s like trying to convince someone they should be Jewish rather than Catholic.”

As for 2018, as the Environmental Protection Agency holds a sort of show trial, perhaps televised, of climate science itself, the planet will continue to warm.

“My expectation is that it will be another hot year,” said Dessler. “The climate of the past has gone. This is our new normal. I doubt we’ll ever see a record cold year again.”

So Tennessee Senator Bob Corker is in trouble now, because he flip-flopped to vote for Donald Trump's tax bill after a provision was included that reportedly helps him personally.

Color me not shocked. I spent most of this past summer investigating Corker, whose personal finances have been the subject of inquiry for years. Everything you need to know about the Senator can be discerned from this chart.

Click on that link and you’ll see what non-partisan research group Center for Responsive Politics has tracked: Corker's net worth has risen by millions since before being elected, to the point of being the fourth wealthiest man in the upper chamber, worth $69 million as of 2015.

How do you increase your net worth so significantly while you're working full-time as a Senator? That is not an easy story to explain.

According to his own disclosure forms, Corker in 2006 carried a series of huge loans.

Corker took office in January, 2007, during the last gasp of the Bush/Rove political juggernaut. The Iraq war had gone south and the Republicans had just been routed in midterms. The financial crisis was just around the corner. And nobody paid attention to the smooth-talking freshman Senator from Tennessee, who turned out to have some financial issues.

The former Chattanooga mayor's election was not without controversy. Corker was a country-club Republican who used an old Southern formula to get elected. He benefited from a lurid race-baiting RNC ad that showed a white woman winking and asking Corker's African-American opponent, Democrat Harold Ford, to "Call me!"

But no one knew about Corker's private peccadilloes.

It wasn't until Corker took office and filled out disclosure forms that his finances became public – sort of. Few in the media seem ever to have read the "liabilities" section of Corker's first disclosure, where the former mayor and construction magnate listed a series of massive outstanding loans. At the low end, Corker appeared to owe a hair-raising $24.2 million. At the high end, $120.5 million.

He had been in debt to some of the nation's biggest lenders – including somewhere between $12 million and $60 million in debt to GE Capital alone.

Corker had been a construction magnate in Tennessee before taking office, a sort of mini-Trump. Before he ran for office, he sold off his business to a local developer named Henry Luken.

It has always been Corker's contention that when he sold his business, his debts were also sold, meaning he was not technically in debt when he went to Washington. Still, he continued to list the loans as liabilities.

This is what Corker spokeswoman Micah Johnson told me this summer, about Corker's outstanding loans back then, and why they were listed on his Senate disclosure:

"On January 4, 2006, in preparation for his run for the Senate and to avoid conflicts, Senator Corker sold the majority of his commercial real estate portfolio. The loans… were transferred with the properties," Johnson wrote. "While the sale took place in January, 10 months before he was elected and one year before he took office, they still would have been listed on his 2007 financial disclosure since the sale took place in 2006."

Many of Corker's critics have disagreed with this interpretation of events. But even if the loans were discharged when he sold his company, it's what happened after Corker got elected that boggles the mind.

Ten years before reporters would swarm over Trump for (among other things) raising fees at his Mar-a-Lago resorts before making a series of taxpayer-funded visits, Corker tested the limits of the moonlighting possibilities in the legislative branch, essentially becoming a full-time day-trader who did a little Senator-ing in his spare time.

In the first nine months of 2007, Corker made an incredible 1,200 trades, over four per day, including 332 over a two-day period.

When I asked Johnson about this, and asked if Corker was making those trades himself or through a broker, Johnson gave a curious answer.

"Soon after taking office in January of 2007, rather than continuing to have a broker make discretionary transactions on his behalf throughout the day or week on a wide range of stocks in various companies, the senator felt it would be prudent to eliminate this arrangement," Johnson said. "The closing out of this arrangement would have added substantially to the number of trades normally made in the broker's discretionary account."

Johnson seems to be saying that Corker would have made substantially more trades if he had executed them through a broker. So, he didn't. I can offer no commentary shedding light on what this means, except to say that at the bottom of all of this is the still-incontrovertible fact that Corker made a truly awesome number of financial transactions while in office.

By 2014, when Corker sat on the Senate Banking Committee, a position that gave him regular access to prime information about the future direction of the markets, the Tennessee Senator still had his foot on the gas. He made 930 stock trades that year.

Of his colleagues on the committee, Rhode Island's Jack Reed made 39 trades, Pennsylvania's Patrick Toomey 26, and nobody else made any – meaning Corker made 93.5% of all trades made by the legislators most plugged-in to the country's finances.

When I asked about that extraordinary volume of trading in 2014, when Corker sat on the Banking Committee, Johnson answered thusly: "In 2014, Senator Corker entered a separately managed account (SMA), which is a portfolio managed by a professional asset management firm. Since he had not previously been in a SMA, he asked the Senate Ethics Committee for a ruling on how they should be reported," she said.

She went on: "The Senate Ethics Committee studied the issue for several weeks, and out of an abundance of caution, advised us to report all underlying positions of the account, even though the senator was making no investment decisions."

A Separately Managed Account is not the same thing as a blind trust. That the Senate Ethics Committee advised Corker to continue reporting his positions even if the senator was making "no investment decisions" was noteworthy. And no matter what, it continued to be true that Corker was making a dizzying number of financial moves while sitting on the Senate Banking Committee.

Corker's activities didn't go completely unnoticed. A few ethics groups and reporters cried foul over the years. He had to amend his Senate disclosures after the Wall Street Journal in 2015 found unreported income from "quick" trades in a Chattanooga company called CBL enterprises. As Fortune noted at the time, Corker went back and made "dozens" of amendments to earlier disclosures, to reveal about $3.8 million in previously unreported income.

Meanwhile, Bethany McLean of Yahoo! News later reported that Corker had invested in a Tennessee hedge fund that made profitable short bets against the housing market with Goldman Sachs.

Anne Weismann, director of the Campaign for Accountability, which filed a complaint against Corker in 2015, described Corker's trading history in damning terms.

"Senator Corker's trades followed a consistent pattern," she said. "He bought low and sold high. It beggars belief to suggest these trades – netting the senator and his family millions – were mere coincidences."

On December 29 2017 01:04 IyMoon wrote:


This I kinda get. Why would the FBI lead this, someone else who isnt involved in what he was going to testify about should lead it

On December 29 2017 01:07 brian wrote:

because a cop being murdered the day before testifying against his fellow cops shouldn’t be investigated by the people he was testifying against.

On December 29 2017 01:12 Plansix wrote:

I think the problem for the FBI is that they are also investigating the department for the corruption, so they are not without some specter of bias. So unless there is some clear evidence that he was killed in connection with the corruption case, they don't have cause jump in on the matter. Even if the department is requesting it.

It looks shady as fuck, but that isn't enough.

On December 29 2017 01:16 brian wrote:

Wouldn’t this sort of logic also preclude the usefulness of a district attorney? the entire point of the FBI conducting the investigation is the presumption of their impartiality is it not?

On December 29 2017 01:07 brian wrote:

because a cop being murdered the day before testifying against his fellow cops shouldn’t be investigated by the people he was testifying against. even assuming the conclusion is correct, it’s still not something that should be conducted by the baltimore PD.

California regulators say Nestle may have to stop collecting a large portion of the water it bottles from the San Bernardino National Forest, because it lacks the legal permits for millions of gallons of water. Nestle sells the water under the Arrowhead label.

The State Water Board says that of the 62.6 million gallons of water that Nestle says it extracted from the San Bernardino spring each year on average from 1947 to 2015, the company may only have a right to some 8.5 million gallons. Those numbers come from a nearly two-year investigation.

The state says Nestle should apply for a new permit and ensure that all of its water diversions comply with California regulations, laying out a timeline for the company to respond.

The Water Board began investigating after several complaints were made against Nestle during California's recent drought. Spurred by a 2015 report in the Desert Sun newspaper, the allegations against Nestle ranged from accusation that the giant company lacked full rights to the water it was selling to claims that its actions were harming the natural environment and its inhabitants.

Nestle has said it monitors its spring sites to be sure they don't cause problems, and the Water Board's report was less conclusive on those points. But Nestle wasn't able to satisfy Water Board investigators who wanted to clarify how much water the company could lawfully extract.

"While Nestlé may be able to claim a valid basis of right to some water in Strawberry Canyon," the board says in its report, "a significant portion of the water currently diverted by Nestlé appears to be diverted without a valid basis of right."

When the Desert Sun published its story about Nestle's Arrowhead operation back in 2015, the newspaper's Ian James told NPR, "Nestle has 11 spring sources that it uses in California as well as five bottling plants. And the water that's bottled comes both from springs as well as from other supplies pumped directly from groundwater or from municipal supplies."

In that 2015 story, James said that he found California lacked reliable state-wide oversight data on the bottled-water industry.

California's State Water Board recently sent Nestle a letter summarizing its report. As for what the company must do now, the board issued a string of recommendations, giving Nestle 60 days to submit a compliance plan and 90 days to submit an investigation and monitoring plan.

Member station KPCC reports:

"Nestle said it was too soon to say what impact, if any, the letter would have on Arrowhead bottled water. A spokeswoman said she was pleased that the report reaffirms Nestle holds valid rights to 'a significant amount' of water."

Water from the headwaters of Strawberry Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest has been bottled since the late 1800s — and Nestle had told California regulators that the claim to the water by the original owner of the Arrowhead Springs Hotel had extended through the years to the Swiss multinational.

Water Board officials did not agree, saying that while the hotel's use was riparian — taking place at the water's origin — Nestle couldn't convert that to an "appropriative use."

The board left open the possibility that Nestle could make a valid claim to extract more water from the forest land.

On December 29 2017 01:16 brian wrote:

Wouldn’t this sort of logic also preclude the usefulness of a district attorney?(edit: oops bad analogy, the states attorney has a jury. i see why this fails.) the entire point of the FBI conducting the investigation is the presumption of their impartiality is it not?

i think him being a witness the day after the murder is plenty cause. And again, since i had edited it into my last post after you had quoted it, assuming their conclusion that it is not connected to their case, i think it should still be the fbi investigation to get that conclusion, not the investigation by the department he was testifying against. it’s just impossible to assume the BPD’s impartiality here isn’t it? even if the idealist in me really wants to.

On December 29 2017 02:44 TheLordofAwesome wrote:

Wow. That article is pretty incredible and very, very damning.