Tag Archives: politico

Are Electric Cars Really Greener?

by FerminHammonds4 Posted on May 24, 2018

Electric cars are kind of a divisive issue. Those who drive electric vehicles often wax poetic about how much better they are for the environment while others, like the author of this Politico piece, like to point out all the ways that electric cars aren’t as green as they are made out to be.

What’s the truth about electric cars? It’s complicated.

Let’s talk about batteries.

On the one hand, the battery for electric cars is an environmental issue in its own right.

The rare, lightweight metals used in the batteries and throughout the cars often come from?not so eco mines?that are hugely environmentally polluting. Plus, as few as 5 percent of the lithium batteries used in electric vehicles actually get recycled (in the EU), which means they just sit in landfills and leach toxins into the environment. However,?Tesla claims to have a battery recycling plan that is actually cost-effective for both manufacturers and?recycling plants, which could improve the battery issue.

And while the manufacturing of electric cars produces more carbon emissions than manufacturing a gas-powered car, one look at Musk’s solar-powered Gigafactory puts that argument to rest.

Electric vehicle production may be secretly more dirty than you’d expect, it’s something that innovative companies like Tesla are working?to?tackle. When it comes to?of fueling electric vehicles, though, they’re as green as you make them.

The way you charge your electric car matters.

According to the author of Politico?s recent piece, increasing the number of electric vehicles on the road will actually increase pollution. The idea is that new models of internal combustion vehicles are actually extraordinarily efficient, which is true.

?Today?s vehicles emit only about 1% of the pollution than they did in the 1960s, and new innovations continue to improve those engines? efficiency and cleanliness,? according to author Jonathan Lesser.

When comparing that sort of low?emissions pollution with the pollution caused by traditionally-powered electric vehicles, yes. A new gas-powered car is probably greener than a new, grid-powered electric car right now. But that only factors in electric vehicles charged through the grid.

Solar power, one of the cleanest and most independent forms of renewable electricity, needs to be taken into?serious consideration. The author relies on a projection regarding?the increase of renewables pumped into the grid, which may hit 30 percent by 2030–not enough to keep things clean for electric cars. But that bleak outlook only takes into account our existing infrastructure.

We need to ditch fossil fuels.

When considering the environmental cleanliness of new gas cars versus electric cars, one big factor that needs to be taken into consideration is the importance of getting our planet off of a dependence on fossil fuels.

While less-polluting gas cars are wonderful, they are still gas cars. They will always only be powered by oil and gas. An electric car, on the other hand, can be powered just as easily by?wind or solar as by fossil fuels, if the infrastructure were?there to support it.

And that’s why we need more electric cars. Sure, as they currently exist?they may not be as pristine and clean as we like to believe, depending on how you fuel them. But the renewable energy infrastructure will not grow around them unless there is a demand.

We need people driving clean electric cars to push towns, cities, and states to enact widespread projects to provide clean sustainable energy for the surge in electrically powered vehicles. That’s how we will begin to cut off our dependence on polluting fossil fuels.

Solar is the future (and the present) for electric charging.

I have always associated electric cars with solar charging. The vast majority of electric car charging stations I see?are solar powered. Even?certain grocery stores?have implemented free solar charging stations to reward?environmentally-conscious customers while they shop.

While I?can’t speak for the whole country, buying an expensive electric vehicle like a Tesla only makes financial sense if the electricity is very affordable–as it is at many?solar charging stations, including long term use of a personal solar station at home.

Granted, not everyone will exclusively use solar to power their cars. With the rise in popularity of luxury electric vehicles, it is natural that those who are less eco-minded but desire to indulge?their wealth will?buy a fancy electric car and not discriminate between renewable charging stations and fossil fuels. But that?doesn?t mean electric cars are actually worse for the environment. It means we need to make it easier for the indiscriminate to cleanly charge them.

Our infrastructure needs to grow and evolve in tandem with our vehicles. An electric car is a move towards cleaner energy. It should be charged that way, too.

Related on Care2

Keyless Cars are Killing People
The Dos and Don’ts of Washing Your Produce
Is Eco Toilet Paper Worth the Extra Cost?

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

View the original here:  

Are Electric Cars Really Greener?

Posted in alo, bigo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, solar power, sustainable energy, Uncategorized, Vicks | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are Electric Cars Really Greener?

Irma dredges up snakes, alligators, and, of course, the ‘Florida Man.’

by PhilippSweetappl Posted on September 13, 2017

There’s been a long decline in the nutrition of our crops, often attributed to people breeding plants for higher yields rather than health benefits. But, as is often the case, climate change is making it worse.

An altered atmosphere means altered food, because plants suck up CO2 from the air and turn it into sugars, Helena Bottemiller Evich points out in a new piece for Politico. That means we’re getting more sugar per bite, and less protein, iron, and zinc. The global phenomenon puts hundreds of millions of people at risk for nutrient deficiencies.

It’s not just a problem for humans. Analysis of pollen samples going back to 1842 shows that protein concentration declined dramatically as atmospheric CO2 rose. That makes yet another suspect in the great bee-murder mystery.

“To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement,” Evich writes for Politico. “It is simply not discussed in the agriculture, public health, or nutrition communities. At all.”

The world is changing in so many ways that it’s nearly impossible to track them all — even when those changes happen right at the ends of our forks.

View original:  

Irma dredges up snakes, alligators, and, of course, the ‘Florida Man.’

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Irma dredges up snakes, alligators, and, of course, the ‘Florida Man.’

Trump’s War on "Fake News" Is Chillingly Real

by ValenciCoble Posted on April 29, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

By now America mostly yawns when Donald Trump declares reporting from the New York Times, CNN, and other top media outlets to be phony. The president of the United States scornfully calling out “fake news” has essentially become normal. And that is exactly the point.

As a legion of pundits takes measure of how little Trump has accomplished during his first 100 days, the facts don’t lie about his quantifiable efforts to undermine the press. The Oval Office may require a bunch more work than Trump anticipated, but when it comes to weakening the immune system of our democracy he has given it the college try. To date Trump has used one of his biggest presidential megaphones—his Twitter accounts—to attack the media no fewer than 45 times. His railing against “fake news” to his more than 45 million followers caught the most attention in mid-February, when he declared, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

That’s just the social-media sum of his authoritarian invective on this front. Trump has also used press conferences and campaign-style rallies to go on the offensive against journalists whose critical coverage he didn’t like, as he often did on the road to the White House. He has made ominous threats about cracking down on press freedom, in particular singling out the New York Times when he suggested changing libel laws. His burn-it-all-down chief strategist Steve Bannon famously labeled the media “the opposition party” and demanded it “keep its mouth shut.” And, as the White House has worked vigorously to distract from a widening Russia investigation that could hobble or perhaps even bring down Trump’s presidency, Trump and his allies have focused on going after leakers to the press.

Recently, Politico‘s Ben Schreckinger and Hadas Gold made the case that Trump’s war on “fake news” is itself fake. The current occupants of the White House know they can’t in reality control the media, and moreover they’ve engaged in prodigious infighting through their own rash of leaks. (The Politico piece also informed us that White House officials have been lying to reporters for sport.)

But over the long term, Trump’s war on the media could have real consequences. Public confidence in the press flatlined last year. Add to that a White House repeating week after week that the most accomplished media institutions in our country are phony—while at the same time embracing actual purveyors of fake news—and the danger requires no fact-checking to be evident.

The good news is that many in the Fourth Estate have been rising to the challenge. Not too long ago, it was about as interesting and informative to tune into CNN as it was to watch a home shopping channel. But even though the cable network has shamelessly used duplicitous Trump surrogates to juice conflict and thereby ratings for its commentary shows, CNN reporters and anchors have come alive in the face of Trump, especially Jim Sciutto, Dana Bash, Jim Acosta, Jake Tapper, and Brian Stelter. The New York Times‘ tough-minded Maggie Haberman has provided a stellar window into how the neophyte president operates. The Washington Post‘s David Farenholdt won a much deserved Pulitzer Prize for his investigations of Trump’s bogus philanthropic claims (notwithstanding Donald Trump Jr.’s own risible pick for the prize). And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Mother Jones‘ own leading investigative work on the Russia scandal and Trump’s unprecedented financial conflicts of interest.

As Trump’s attacks against the press go on, and they will, the American news media should take nothing for granted. But journalists can also keep the faith given what history has shown about this battle. “Four hostile newspapers,” as Napoleon once said, “are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”

Visit site:

Trump’s War on "Fake News" Is Chillingly Real

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s War on "Fake News" Is Chillingly Real

Bird Flu Is a Big Deal. Of Course Trump Wants to Defund the Best Way to Contain It.

by Rebekah83F Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For the second time in less than three years, avian flu is moving through industrial-scale US chicken facilities. Republicans in power seem too fixated on budget-cutting to notice.

First, President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan pushed a healthcare plan that would have slashed funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that tracks farm flu outbreaks and works with the US Department of Agriculture and local authorities to “minimize any human health risk” they cause.

That effort collapsed, but now Trump is taking a more direct whack at flu-tracking funding. A couple of Politico reporters got hold of a budget-cutting proposal the Trump team is circulating in Congress. The document lists $1 billion in suggested cuts to the US Department of Agriculture’s discretionary spending in 2017—which is is separate from the “21 percent proposed reduction for USDA that the administration included in its 2018 budget outline released earlier this month,” Politico reports.

Among the cuts being sought for 2017, the Trump team seeks to extract funds from a USDA program funded by Congress in 2015 to address the flu problem that swept through the Midwest that year, triggering the euthanasia of 50 million birds and causing egg prices to spike. Congress had allocated $1 billion for it, of which $80 million is left. Given that avian flu is on the march again, one might think it prudent to keep that cash that cash around, devoting to monitoring the 2017 outbreak. Trump’s budget people have other ideas—they want to take away $50 million of the $80 million left over. Politico quotes the document:

The response to the FY15 fiscal-year 2015 outbreak is complete, and USDA should still have enough balances to respond to the two recent HPAI high pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks in TN Tennessee this year.

Of course, this year’s avian flu, albeit a less virulent strain, has broken out of Tennessee, swept into Alabama, and has now alighted in Georgia, the nation’s number-one chicken producing state. It would be interesting to know what Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, Trump’s still-pending pick to lead the USDA, thinks of that proposed money-saving measure.

While the CDC insists that the risk that people will come down with the current avian flu strain is “low,” it does work with the Department of Agriculture and state authorities on tracking outbreaks. That’s because health officials have been warning for decades that massive livestock confinements make an ideal breeding ground for new virus strains, including potentially ones that can jump from bird to human, and then spread among humans. Meanwhile, a different strain of avian flu has swept across Japan, South Korea, and China. It has killed 140 people, but has not proven capable of spreading human-to-human.

More here: 

Bird Flu Is a Big Deal. Of Course Trump Wants to Defund the Best Way to Contain It.

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bird Flu Is a Big Deal. Of Course Trump Wants to Defund the Best Way to Contain It.

The Dead Pool – 26 February 2017

by SylvestMccord Posted on February 26, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Man of the people that he is, Donald Trump likes to pick rich guys for high-level positions in his administration. Unfortunately, that poses a problem:

President Donald Trump’s nominee for Navy secretary, investor Philip Bilden, is expected to withdraw from consideration, sources familiar with the decision told Politico, becoming the second Pentagon pick unable to untangle their financial investments in the vetting process….Like billionaire investment banker Vincent Viola, who withdraw his nomination to be secretary of the Army earlier this month, Bilden ran into too many challenges during a review by the Office of Government Ethics to avoid potential conflicts of interest, the sources said.

To become Secretary of State, maybe all this divesting of huge fortunes is worth it. But Navy Secretary? Probably not.

Link to original: 

The Dead Pool – 26 February 2017

Posted in Anker, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Dead Pool – 26 February 2017

Andrew Puzder Withdraws as Labor Secretary Nominee

by GPPGarryfs Posted on February 15, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Wednesday, millionaire fast-food executive Andrew Puzder withdrew his nomination to become President Donald Trump’s secretary of labor. Puzder’s confirmation hearing, delayed weeks due to his failure to submit required financial and ethics paperwork, was set for Thursday.

With his nomination facing stiff opposition from labor groups, Puzder had been bleeding support in recent days. On Wednesday, Mother Jones published details of some of the 39 labor violation claims that have been brought against his company, CKE, which owns both Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. Also on Wednesday, Politico obtained and published video of a 1990 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, in which Puzder’s ex-wife, Lisa Fierstein, wore a disguise and claimed he abused her. (Winfrey handed over the tape at the request of senators.)

Earlier in the day, National Review tried to get ahead of the nomination’s impending collapse by opposing it on immigration grounds. But as MoJo‘s Kevin Drum noted, it was probably just to change the narrative.

Well, it turns out he’s soft on immigration: he supports comprehensive immigration reform rather than walls and high-profile raids. Can’t have that. And just by coincidence, NR’s opposition comes shortly after we learned that Puzder “employed an undocumented housekeeper for several years and failed to pay related taxes.” I don’t think NR actually cares about that, though. They only care that it gives Democrats a hook to fire up the opposition. Why give them a victory that will just make them even smugger than usual? Might as well pull the plug now and pretend that it was all because conservatives have such high moral standards.

This is a developing story and we’ll update as more information becomes available.

Visit site:

Andrew Puzder Withdraws as Labor Secretary Nominee

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Andrew Puzder Withdraws as Labor Secretary Nominee

The "Oprah" Tape That May Have Sunk Andrew Puzder’s Nomination

by AshlyETLxckhqj Posted on February 15, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Update, 2/15/17, 3:24 pm: The White House is expected to withdraw Puzder’s nomination as labor secretary. Politico’s story featuring the “The Oprah Winfrey” footage reportedly played a significant role in the decision.

At the request of senators reviewing the nomination of Andrew Puzder, President Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary, Oprah Winfrey on Tuesday handed over a 1990 recording featuring Puzder’s former wife, Lisa Fierstein, in which she details allegations of spousal abuse against the embattled fast-food CEO.

The footage, which Politico obtained and released on Wednesday, shows Fierstein dressed in a disguise and using a pseudonym to conceal her identity alongside other women who experienced spousal abuse. In the episode entitled “High-Class Battered Women,” she claimed Puzder once threatened revenge after she first made the allegations public two years before “The Oprah Winfrey Show” appearance.

“‘I will see you in the gutter,” Fierstein claimed he told her. “This will never be over. You will pay for this.”

“I wound up losing everything, everything,” she continued. “I have nothing. He has a Porsche and a Mercedes-Benz. He has the home. He has everything. He was an attorney, and he knew how to play the system.”

In 1988, Fierstein filed a petition accusing Puzder of physically assaulting her on the face, chest, and back, leaving her with “severe and permanent injuries.” The couple divorced in 1987. She has since said that she regretted her decision to appear on the show.

The tape’s review comes amid sinking support for Puzder’s nomination as further questions arise about his labor practices. Employees from his fast-food empire have also come forward complaining about his vehement opposition to raising the minimum wage and protecting workers. His hearing was repeatedly delayed after he failed to properly file the ethics and financial paperwork required of all Cabinet picks.

DV.load(“https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3462120-Andrew-Puzder-Petition.js”,
width: 630,
height: 354,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-3462120-Andrew-Puzder-Petition”
);

Visit link: 

The "Oprah" Tape That May Have Sunk Andrew Puzder’s Nomination

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The "Oprah" Tape That May Have Sunk Andrew Puzder’s Nomination

Donald Trump Is Lying About His Weight

by RooseveTeal Posted on December 27, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Politico reports that Donald Trump’s driver’s license lists his height as 6-foot-2:

Size apparently matters to Trump. A letter that the businessman candidate displayed this summer from his longtime gastroenterologist — while appearing on the Dr. Oz show — stated he was 6-foot-3, though media reports were quick to point out discrepancies.

Slate, for example, posited that Trump was adding an inch to his height to avoid crossing into obesity territory — he also weighed 236 pounds — on the BMI index. That Slate article pointed to multiple media that pegged Trump as 6-foot-2, including Google, though the search engine now has Trump at 6-foot-3.

ZOMG! Trump is a vain, narcissistic liar? Who knew?

But this reminds me of something. By a remarkable coincidence, I happen to be 6-foot-2 and weigh exactly 236 pounds. I have an unfortunate amount of belly fat to show for this, but nowhere near what Trump does. At a conservative guess, Trump weighs at least 30 pounds more than I do. So he’s lying not only about his height, but also about his weight.

And before you ask: yes, it’s fairly likely that this week will be filled with posts like this. There’s just never much real news during the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Link:

Donald Trump Is Lying About His Weight

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Is Lying About His Weight

Obama’s USDA Just Played Chicken With the Trump Transition Team

by Hadwin Partize Posted on December 17, 2016

Mother Jones

In its waning days, President Barack Obama’s US Department of Agriculture injected an extra dose of drama into President-elect Donald Trump’s chaotic transition of the ag department this week.

The USDA issued a blunt assessment of the state of the poultry industry, portraying it as dominated by a handful of chicken processors that “often wield market power” against the farmers who raise the nations’ chickens, “treating them unfairly, suppressing how much they are paid, or pitting them against each other.” The USDA has a point, as Christopher Leonard showed in his excellent 2014 book The Meat Racket (my review here): Farmers own the growing facilities and are responsible for upgrading them according to the companies’ whims, while the companies supply the chicks and the feed and dictate the price farmers are paid.

And it put substance behind the critique, rolling out long-delayed proposed rules designed to give chicken farmers “protections against the most egregious retaliatory practices” used by the big companies. The USDA has been required to release a version of these rules, known as GIPSA, since being charged to do so by the 2008 farm bill, but GOP stalwarts in the US House have been pushing back ever since, using legislative chicanery to block them. This 2015 Washington Monthly piece by Lina Khan details the Obama USDA’s tortured and—until now—failed attempts to release the rules. The farmers’ rights group RAFI has a good summary of what’s in them.

But there’s a catch—the new rules can’t go into effect until a 60-day comment period has passed. And that means it will be up to the Trump USDA to implement and enforce them—or choose not to.

And that plunges GIPSA into the dark heart of Trump’s USDA transition. For weeks, as I reported here, Team Trump has been floating Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), a moderate Democrat, as his top pick to take the USDA helm. But the motley crew of right-wing farm state pols, agribiz flacks, and donors who make up Trump’s agricultural advisory committee has been pushing back hard against Heitkamp—and the GIPSA rules will likely heighten their fervor. They could spell the end of the Heitkamp trial balloon.

According to the trade journal Agri-Pulse, Heitkamp has “consistently supported” strong GIPSA rules, and in 2014, “she opposed industry efforts to put a provision in the farm bill that would have prohibited USDA from issuing the regulations.” If Heitkamp were to get the job, Agri-Pulse reported, “she would immediately face a confrontation with livestock and poultry groups over the new contracting rules.”

Indeed, the meat industry is acting like an aggrieved rooster in response to the GIPSA rules. The National Chicken Chicken Council, a trade group for the big poultry packers, declared that the rules “threaten to upend the structure of the livestock and poultry industries, raise the price of meat/poultry and cost jobs in rural America.” These claims are nonsense. According to the USDA’s economic analysis, the GIPSA rules, once implemented, will likely trigger “price increases of approximately one-hundredth of a cent or less in retail prices for beef, pork, and poultry,” because the “increase in total industry costs triggered by the GIPSA rules is very small in relation to overall industry costs.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Trump team appears to be moving on from Heitkamp and is now looking at Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, Politico reports. A “74-year-old cowboy hat-wearing Republican,” as Politico puts it, Otter is likely to be friendly to meat industry interests if he takes the USDA helm. Regarding the GIPSA rules, the National Meat Institute quotes Otter like this: “Why are we trying to fix something that isn’t broken? Anybody ought to be free to sell at any price that they want to whomever they want.”

And back in 2014, Otter signed into law one of those infamous “ag gag” bills, championed by Big Ag, that make it a crime to secretly document conditions inside livestock farms. The Idaho law was so overreaching that a federal judge struck it down in 2015, declaring that its only purpose was to “limit and punish those who speak out on topics relating to the agricultural industry, striking at the heart of important First Amendment values.” While serving in the US House from 2002 to 2006, Otter was a magnet for agribusiness cash. And he’s a former executive at Simplot, the enormous potato-processing company founded by Otter’s ex-wife.

Otter sounds like a man after Trump’s heart—and that of his ag advisers.

Link:  

Obama’s USDA Just Played Chicken With the Trump Transition Team

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama’s USDA Just Played Chicken With the Trump Transition Team

Donald Trump Overhauls His Campaign Team. Again.

by TawnyaKilpatrick Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As Donald Trump loses ground in the polls to Hillary Clinton and his campaign continues to falter, he is once more shaking up his political operation. Declaring “I want to win” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published early Wednesday morning, Trump announced that he is bringing on veteran Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manger and Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart, as chief executive officer of the Trump Team.

Paul Manafort, who has been running the Trump campaign since the ouster of Corey Lewandowski, will continue in his role as campaign chairman, but the reshuffle signals that his authority will be significantly curtailed, if he has not been altogether sidelined. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that a “secret ledger” listed $12.7 million in cash payments to Manafort from Ukraine’s pro-Russian ruling party, which he advised up until recently. Manafort denied receiving the payments, but his controversial background as a lobbyist who has specialized in representing some of the world’s most notorious strongmen and dictators has dogged him ever since he signed on with Trump. On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that Manafort and another Trump aide, Rick Gates, had failed to disclose their efforts to influence US policy on behalf of the Ukrainian governing party of Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s ousted leader, possibly circumventing rules requiring “foreign agents” to register with the US government. But it may have been Manafort’s inability to rein in Trump, as much as his past clientele, that led to his de facto demotion.

Conway—whose roster of clients has included Newt Gingrich and Trump’s running mate Mike Pence—has been advising the Trump campaign since at least July. Prior to signing on with Trump, Conway backed his rival Ted Cruz. She served as a strategist for Keep the Promise I, a pro-Cruz super-PAC bankrolled by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that ran attack ads against Trump during the primary campaign, including one blasting the real estate mogul for supposedly supporting government-run healthcare.

Along with Conway, Bannon also has close ties to Mercer, who Politico has reported is a top investor in Breitbart. A Navy veteran and former Goldman Sachs banker, Bannon has no political experience to speak of, though his news outlet has been one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders throughout the campaign. This has led to some uncomfortable moments for the conservative news outlet, including this spring when Corey Lewandowski roughly yanked then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields away from Trump at a campaign rally as she tried to ask the candidate a question. Breitbart went out of its way to bolster the Trump campaign’s version of events, at the expense of its own reporter. Fields ended up resigning and is now a reporter at the Huffington Post.

According to Politico, Bannon has been “quietly advising people around the Trump campaign for months,” an unusual move for a top executive at a news organization covering the presidential campaign. Bannon’s outlet didn’t even get the scoop of his new role with Trump. After the news broke, it ran the AP’s version of the story.

* This is a developing story.

Continued: 

Donald Trump Overhauls His Campaign Team. Again.

Posted in alo, Anker, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Overhauls His Campaign Team. Again.