Category Archives: Badger

Owls Aren’t Wise & Bats Aren’t Blind – Warner Shedd

by Myrna Posted on November 13, 2017

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Owls Aren’t Wise & Bats Aren’t Blind

A Naturalist Debunks Our Favorite Fallacies About Wildlife

Warner Shedd

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: June 27, 2000

Publisher: Crown/Archetype

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


In this fascinating book, wildlife expert and enthusiast Warner Shedd refutes popular animal myths like squirrels remembering where they bury nuts, wolves howling at the moon, and oppossums "playing dead." Have you ever seen a flying squirrel flapping through the air, watched a beaver carrying a load of mud on its tail, or ducked when a porcupine started throwing its quills? Probably not, says Shedd, former regional executive for the National Wildlife Federation. Offering scientific evidence that refutes many of the most tenacious and persevering folklore about wild animals,  Owls Aren't Wise & Bats Aren't Blind  will captivate you with fascinating facts and humorous anecdotes about more than thirty North American species– some as familiar as the common toad, and others as elusive as the lynx.  Owls Aren't Wise & Bats Aren't Blind  is an entertaining dose of scientific reality for any nature enthusiast or armchair adventurer.

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Owls Aren’t Wise & Bats Aren’t Blind – Warner Shedd

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Why Is Mick Mulvaney Complaining About CBO’s Score of the Republican Health Care Bill?

by NorbertoSymons2 Posted on June 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Republicans have a problem. The party of fiscal discipline and a balanced budget really, really wants to pass a tax cut for the rich that will blow up the deficit. Unfortunately, Senate PAYGO rules don’t allow this,1 and Democrats can filibuster any attempt to change those rules.

But there’s a metaphysical issue embedded here: how can you know—really know—that a bill will increase the deficit? That’s like seeing into the future! What godlike intelligence could possibly do that? It’s impossible!

Nonetheless, in our fallen state this task has been given to the Congressional Budget Office. And they have an annoying tendency to produce results that Republicans don’t like. So Trump’s budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, is making the case that we should get rid of the CBO entirely:

“I would do my own studies here at OMB…And other folks would do their studies from the outside. And those would come with their natural biases. The Heritage Foundation comes in and says it’s going to cost a lot. Brookings comes in or the Center for American Progress says the benefits would be great.“

….Asked what would happen in a scenario in which, say, a Democratic administration says a bill costs $500 billion and Heritage Foundation puts out a report saying the same bill would cost trillions, Mulvaney responded, “Then they would do it and if it works, they would get re-elected and if it doesn’t, they don’t. And that was the way it worked before the Congressional Budget Office.”

In other words, there would be no rules at all. You’d just do whatever you wanted, and if you get reelected it must mean you were right. This is a fascinating ontological approach to budget estimation.

But what’s more fascinating is Mulvaney’s pretense that what he’s really upset about is the CBO’s score of the Republican health care bill:

Mulvaney was particularly critical of the CBO’s recent estimate that the House-passed healthcare bill would result in 23 million fewer people with health insurance. He argued that the CBO’s model assumed that the mandate requiring individuals obtain coverage has a lot more influence on people’s decisions than it does in real life.

“Did you see the methodology on that 23 million people getting kicked off their health insurance?” he said. “You recognize of course that they assume that people voluntarily get off of Medicaid? That’s just not defensible. It’s almost as if they went into it and said, ‘Okay, we need this score to look bad. How do we do it?'”

But CBO’s most recent estimate says the health care bill will reduce the deficit by about $100 billion. Mulvaney has no beef with this, nor any reason to be upset about the estimate of 23 million people losing insurance, since that’s the very thing that reduces costs enough to make the bill compliant with PAYGO rules. So why is Mulvaney kvetching about this?

In fact, Mulvaney doesn’t care a fig about AHCA. He’s just preparing the ground for an assault on the CBO when it comes time to score his cherished tax bill. A few years back Republicans finally badgered the CBO into accounting for the “dynamic” effects of tax cuts, but they’ve never been satisfied with CBO’s refusal to use the most fanciful dynamic models, which assume that tax cuts pay for themselves entirely. And CBO is obstinate about this even with a Republican in charge! What to do?

Answer: Get rid of the CBO. But Democrats would filibuster any attempt to do that. So what is Mulvaney up to? Just this: it turns out that the Senate Budget Committee isn’t actually required to use CBO estimates. They always have in the past, but that’s a custom, not a rule. They have the authority to make their own estimates, and all it takes to make them stick is a majority vote in the committee.2

Mulvaney is basically trying to start up a campaign to put some spine into the SBC’s Republican members to ignore the CBO and simply score the tax bill using a model that will pronounce it deficit-neutral. That’s what this is all about.

1The House has no PAYGO rules for tax cuts.

2There are also Byrd Rule problems with the tax cut bill, but Republicans already think they might have a way around those.

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Why Is Mick Mulvaney Complaining About CBO’s Score of the Republican Health Care Bill?

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Less Liberal Contempt, Please

by MerleBlackburn9 Posted on May 31, 2017

Mother Jones

Michael Tomasky writes today that elite liberals need to make peace with middle America. We need to be willing to welcome folks to our side of the aisle even if they don’t agree with every single liberal piety:

There are plenty of liberals out there in middle America, and plenty of liberalish moderates, and plenty of people who lean conservative but who aren’t consumed by rage and who think Barack Obama is a pretty cool guy and who might even have voted for him. These people are potential allies. But before the alliance can be struck, elite liberals need to recognize a fundamental truth: All of these people in middle America, even the actual liberals, have very different sensibilities than elite liberals who live on the coasts.

First of all, middle Americans go to church….Second, politics simply doesn’t consume middle Americans the way it does elites on the coasts….They talk kids, and local gossip, and pop culture, and sports….Third, their daily lives are pretty different from the lives of elite liberals. Few of them buy fair trade coffee or organic almond milk. Some of them served in the armed forces. Some of them own guns, and like to shoot them….Fourth, they’re patriotic in the way that most Americans are patriotic. They don’t feel self-conscious saluting the flag.

….We need to recognize that in vast stretches of this country, hewing to these positions doesn’t make someone a conservative.

There’s nothing especially new here. It’s basically the old problem of Reagan Democrats, which liberals have been wrestling with for a couple of generations. I’d argue that it has two fundamental origins.

First, the great sort. A century ago, hardly anyone had more than a high school education. Both of my grandfathers were plenty smart enough to go to college, but neither one did because they couldn’t afford it. (I don’t need to bother telling you about my grandmothers, do I?) Because of this, people of widely different intelligence mixed together all the time. There wasn’t really much choice.

After the war, that changed. College became widely available, and nearly everyone who was smart enough to go, did so. Thirty years later, their kids mostly went to college too. But among the postwar generation that didn’t go to college, their kids mostly didn’t either. Since then, there’s been yet another generation, and we’re now pretty solidly sorted out. Those of us with college degrees marry people who also have degrees. Our kids all go to college. Our friends all went to college. And we live in neighborhoods full of college grads because no one else can afford to live there.

On the other side, it’s just the opposite. Your average high school grad marries someone who’s also a high school grad. (If they get married at all.) Their kids are high school grads. Their friends are high school grads. And their neighborhoods are full of high school grads.

The two groups barely interact anymore. They don’t really want to, and they’re physically separated anyway. (More and more, they’re also geographically separated, as liberals cluster in cities and conservatives live everywhere else.)

Second, there’s the decline of unions. Fifty years ago, the working class commanded plenty of political respect simply because they had a lot of political power. No liberal in her right mind would think of condescending to them. They were a constituency to be courted, no matter what your personal feelings might be.

But young liberals in the 60s and 70s broke with the unions over the Vietnam War, and the unions broke with them over their counterculture lifestyle. This turned out to be a disaster for both sides, as Democrats lost votes and workers saw their unions decimated by their newfound allies in the Republican Party. By the time it was all over, liberals had little political reason to care about the working class and the working class still hated the hippies. Without the political imperative to stay in touch, liberals increasingly viewed middle America as a foreign culture: hostile, insular, vaguely racist/sexist/homophobic, and in thrall to charlatans.

By the early 90s this transformation was complete. On the liberal side, elites rarely interacted with working-class folks at all and had no political motivation to respect them. Republicans swooped in and paid at least lip service to working-class concerns, and that was enough. It didn’t put any more money in their pockets, but at least the Republicans didn’t sneer at their guns and their churches and their fatigue with rapid cultural change.

I don’t think there’s any good answer to the great sort. Certainly not anytime in the near future. But this affects Republicans too, so it doesn’t have to be a deal breaker. The bigger problem, I think, is the decline of unions, which broke the political ties between working-class and middle-class liberals. There’s no realistic way that unions are going to make a comeback, which means that liberals need to come up with some other kind of working-class mass movement that can repair those ties. But what? This has been a pet topic of mine for years, but I’m no closer to an answer than I was when Reagan took office.

In the meantime, we can still try to do better. Rhetorically, the big issue dividing liberal elites and middle America is less the existence of different lifestyles, and more the feeling that lefties are implicitly lecturing them all the time. You are bad for eating factory-farmed meat. You are bad for enjoying football. You are bad for owning a gun. You are bad for driving an SUV. You are bad for not speaking the language of microaggressions and patriarchy and cultural appropriation. Liberals could go a long way toward solving this by being more positive about these things, rather than trying to make everyone feel guilty about all the things they enjoy.

Substantively, liberals might have to shift a little bit, but not by a lot. We don’t have to become pro-life, but we need to be more tolerant of folks who are a little uneasy about the whole subject. We don’t need to become Second Amendment zealots, but we should be more tolerant of folks who don’t want to be sneered at for keeping a gun around the house for self defense. We don’t need to tolerate racism, but we should stop badgering folks for not being able to express themselves in the currently approved language of wokeness.

It goes without saying—which is why I need to make sure to say it—that the whole point here is to broaden our appeal to people who are just a little bit on the conservative side of center. That is, persuadable, low-information folks who agree with us on some things but not on others. The hard-right conservatives are out of reach, and there’s no reason to try to appeal more to them.

In the same way that right-wing Republicans need to learn how to talk about women’s issues (see Akin, Todd), Democrats need to learn how to talk about middle America. No more deplorables. No more clinging to guns and religion. Less swarming over every tin-eared comment on race.

In general, just less contempt. Does it matter that working-class folks often display the same contempt toward us? Nope. As any good lefty knows, contempt from the powerful is a whole different thing than contempt from the powerless. We need to do better regardless of what anyone else does.

Can we do it? It’s worth a try.

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Less Liberal Contempt, Please

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Republicans Who Backed Trumpcare Aren’t Holding Town Halls. So Democrats Are Going in Their Place.

by JadaMcBride3335 Posted on May 10, 2017

Mother Jones

On Monday evening, about 500 residents of New York’s 19th Congressional District gathered at a wedding venue near the Hudson River to ask a local congressman about the American Health Care Act. But the congressman holding the town hall wasn’t the area’s newly elected representative, Republican John Faso, who had voted for the bill. Instead, they heard from Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney, who represents a neighboring district.

Members of Congress don’t often invade each other’s turf without an invitation—and Faso had most certainly not invited his colleague—but Maloney told the attendees he hoped to start a trend. “Let’s just imagine for a minute if in every district in this country where a member of Congress voted for this terrible health care bill and they won’t hold a town hall meeting, what if somebody else adopted that district?” he said. “Might be a Democrat! And then went in and did what we’re doing doing tonight. What do you think? We can adopt a district anywhere.”

It was a gloves-off affair from there. “He may be upset that I’m in his district, but I will just point out that he is not,” Maloney joked, noting that Faso was at a fundraiser in Albany. “I mean, they say nature abhors a vacuum, right?” Before Maloney began taking questions, he asked attendees to take out their phones and send a mass of tweets to Faso about the town hall. Maloney even brought an empty chair—just in case, he said, Faso decided to show up after all.

“This guy should not be on some milk carton—he’s your congressman,” Maloney said. “He should be here.”

Maloney’s stunt may indeed mark the beginning of a trend. On Tuesday evening, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) followed suit, appearing at a Tucson high school for a “Rally to Stop Trumpcare” in a district represented by one of its supporters, Republican Martha McSally. Unlike Maloney’s event, which he attended as part of his official duties, Gallego’s town hall was sponsored by the Arizona Democratic Party and more closely resembled a campaign function. McSally, who was not seriously opposed in 2016, is one of 14 Republican “yes” votes in districts won by Hillary Clinton.

Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan has planned a town hall in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s district. Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat and a rising star in the party who was (briefly) floated as a 2020 presidential candidate, has also expressed interest in adopting a district, although he would have to travel a bit further to find one; there are no Republican congressional districts in southern New England. A group in Yolo County, California, has launched a campaign to get local Democratic Rep. John Garamendi to hold a town hall in a neighboring district represented by Republican Tom McClintock, a supporter of the bill. Organizers even included a sample call script to help constituents lobby Garamendi.

The adopt-a-district campaign is a new form of trolling for the Trump age. But it also marks an evolution for the Democratic grassroots, which since January have seized on town halls to put their representatives on the spot, express their anger, and produce viral moments. That was part of the idea behind the Indivisible Guide, a user’s manual for bugging the hell out of Congress, drafted by a group of ex-congressional staffers in December. Indivisible quickly went from a Google Doc to a movement with thousands of registered groups, in every congressional district in the country. It offered a blueprint for badgering congressional offices ahead of key votes and showing up to hassle officials in their own districts.

The problem: Most Republicans aren’t holding town halls, and many of the town halls that are being held require constituents to enter a lottery or present a driver’s license to get in. As Maloney noted, of the 217 Republicans who voted for the House health care bill last week, just 14 have scheduled town halls to talk about it. So the tactics of raising hell had to evolve, too. Indivisible groups have turned the town-hall schedule into a guerilla marketing campaign. They’ve put images of their representatives on milk cartons and cardboard cutouts and put up “missing” posters on telephone poles. In February, the national Indivisible group put out a “Missing Member Toolkit” to encourage local groups to set up their own “citizen” town halls. One of the suggested ideas for giving the events some zest (and legitimacy) if the local representative turned down their invitation was to invite another elected official to the event instead.

What’s happening in Faso’s district neatly illustrates the role these new (and some old) progressive grassroots groups have played in the Democratic Party’s attempts to block President Donald Trump. New York’s 19th District is a sprawling, largely rural swing area that veered hard toward Trump in 2016 after twice voting for Barack Obama. In early February, Indivisible CD-19 held its first big rally, a demonstration and concert outside Faso’s office in Kinderhook followed by a march to the congressman’s home nearby. Faso was not home at the time, but when he arrived 40 minutes later, he came out to speak to the protesters. Among them was a local woman named Andrea Mitchell, who has a brain tumor. She asked Faso if he would protect the Affordable Care Act’s ban on denying insurance on the basis of pre-existing conditions, and when Faso said yes, the two hugged.

But Faso voted for AHCA, and Mitchell—and NY-19 Indivisible—want answers. “I honestly believed after the first vote he wouldn’t repeal it,” Mitchell said in an interview with Rachel Maddow last week. “A lot of my friends and constituents thought that that was very naive of me.” It was Mitchell’s interview with Maddow that first got Maloney thinking about adopting a district, and when he saw that the group’s invitation to Faso to attend the Monday event had gone unanswered, he accepted on Twitter. If Mitchell couldn’t get a straight answer from her congressman, Maloney concluded, he could at least offer one.

Helen Kalla, a spokesperson for the national Indivisible group, said the group is hoping the Maloney and Gallego events are the start of something bigger. “This is going to be a major push over the next several weeks across the country, with what we hope is a huge turnout during the Memorial Day recess in a few weeks,” she said. On Wednesday, the group unveiled a new “toolkit” on how to promote adopt-a-district town halls. Four months after the inauguration, with national Democrats bickering over a big-picture strategy, the cart is still dragging the donkey. And for now, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

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Republicans Who Backed Trumpcare Aren’t Holding Town Halls. So Democrats Are Going in Their Place.

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Your Morning Trump

by Margari21M Posted on February 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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First up, here is Haaretz today on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s phone conversation with President Trump a couple of weeks ago:

Netanyahu said that he told Trump that he supports the two-state solution and a final status agreement, but stressed that he told the president that the Palestinians are unwilling and detailed the reasons why a peace deal cannot be reached at this time….”Trump believes in a deal and in running peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians,” Netanyahu stressed. “We should be careful and not do things that will cause everything to break down. We mustn’t get into a confrontation with him.”

The strong implication here is that Netanyahu has no intention of negotiating a two-state final agreement, but he’s telling everyone to smile and nod when Trump insists on trying to broker one. Eventually Trump will give up, and in the meantime he has to be suckered into believing that Israel was earnest about a peace deal all along.

Next up, a Trump friend throws Reince Priebus under the bus:

One of President Trump’s longtime friends made a striking move on Sunday: After talking privately with the president over drinks late Friday, Christopher Ruddy publicly argued that Trump should replace his White House chief of staff.

….Ruddy went on to detail his critique of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus: “It’s my view that Reince is the problem. I think on paper Reince looked good as the chief of staff — and Donald trusted him — but it’s pretty clear the guy is in way over his head. He’s not knowledgeable of how federal agencies work, how the communications operations work. He botched this whole immigration rollout. This should’ve been a win for Donald, not two or three weeks of negative publicity.”

The fact that Ruddy said this on national TV and then to the Post right after talking with Trump means that he must have Trump’s implicit blessing to run this up the flagpole and see what happens. It’s remarkable that there are so many rumors about senior administration officials leaving or getting fired a mere three weeks into Trump’s term.

And speaking of senior officials, the odious Stephen Miller was on TV this morning, and with only a couple of exceptions nearly every word out of his mouth about voter fraud was a lie:

Here’s a detailed takedown of Miller’s claim that 14 percent of all noncitizens are registered to vote. Here’s the Washington Post with “bushels of Pinocchios” in a long fact check of everything Miller said. And here’s Josh Marshall pointing out that Miller also lied this morning about foreigners pouring into the country to plot acts of terrorism. Naturally Trump was delighted: “Congratulations Stephen Miller- on representing me this morning on the various Sunday morning shows. Great job!”

I honestly don’t know how TV networks should handle the Trump White House. On the one hand, they have to cover the president. And that means putting his aides on the air.

On the other hand, his aides have made it clear that they will use these opportunities to flatly lie over and over and over. They don’t care if the interviewer badgers them for evidence and they don’t even care if the interviewer chastises them for fibbing. They just want to give their lies a public airing, and they know that most of the audience can’t judge who’s right and probably doesn’t trust TV interviewers all that much anyway. And unlike print reporters, TV folks pretty much have to allow unedited remarks to go on the air.

So what’s the answer? This is not a new problem, but the scale has changed so much under Trump that it might as well be new.

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Your Morning Trump

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What Trump’s Interior pick means for federal lands and national parks

by TeganRignall Posted on January 12, 2017

President-elect Trump tapped Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke to head the Department of the Interior, the cabinet position tasked with management of 500 million acres of federal lands — about one-fifth of the entire United States. As Secretary of the Interior, Zinke’s decisions will impact conservation, recreation, wildlife refuges, endangered species, tribal lands, clean air and water, energy development, and the economy, as well as the beloved National Parks.

So who is this guy anyway? Watch our video above.

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What Trump’s Interior pick means for federal lands and national parks

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Republicans of Color Who Opposed Trump Find Themselves on the Margins

by NoelChildress8 Posted on November 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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If the presidential election had gone according to expectations, Donald Trump’s loss might have been a win for one group of Republicans. Prominent Republicans of color who had been critical of Trump’s racially divisive campaigning and poor minority outreach efforts were positioned to become powerful voices in the party, working to pull it back onto the path outlined in the 2012 post-election “autopsy” report that called for increasing its appeal to nonwhite constituencies.

But with Trump’s surprise victory, these potential leaders now find themselves standing on the margins, wondering how or even if they should engage with a party whose voters delivered the presidency to a man who often appeared hostile to the concerns of minorities.

“If he governs the way he campaigns, then I will have no part of that,” says Charles Badger, a black GOP political strategist who worked on Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign as director of coalitions, leading its outreach efforts to African Americans, Asian Americans, and issue-based voters. “If that is the future of the Republican Party—if it’s going to be protectionism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and discriminatory acts from voting rights to policing—if that’s what it’s going to be, then I’m having no part of that whatsoever. I’ll just be a man without a party if I have to.”

Trump’s unorthodox presidential campaign disrupted much of the Republican Party, but for Republicans of color, the damage was considerably worse, fully exposing the racism, xenophobia, and bigotry the GOP had once said it would leave in the past. As the general election approached, some nonwhite Republicans became outspoken opponents of the Republican presidential nominee, arguing that he would damage the GOP for years to come.

Badger was among them, criticizing Trump on social media and joining Republicans for Clinton in 2016 (R4C16), a grassroots network urging conservative voters to pick Hillary Clinton over Trump. Even Michael Steele, the first African American chairman of the Republican National Committee, couldn’t bring himself to vote for the party’s presidential nominee, announcing at a Mother Jones forum in October that he wouldn’t back Trump.

“I think that Trump’s victory makes addressing the GOP’s approach to race even more stark and important,” Steele says now. “The electorate of this country is changing. The demographic makeup of this country is changing, and the party had better get on the front end of that change and lead it as opposed to following it.” He says Republican critics of Trump must continue to apply pressure if they want to see the president-elect change his tone. But Steele, who led the national party from 2009 to 2011, could find himself with limited influence under the famously vindictive Trump.

Hughey Newsome, a black Republican, attended the 2012 Republican National Convention and was heartened by the party’s outreach to minority voters. This year, he was so disgusted by Trump’s campaign that he voted for a third-party candidate and wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post after the election explaining why he was leaving the party. “I can no longer associate with a party that supported such a man and such an indifferent campaign,” he wrote.

“He isn’t willing to communicate with me, communicate with people that think like me,” Newsome says. He believes the Trump campaign worked to intensify white Americans’ fears of minorities. “Instead of addressing those things and wiping them out of the party, they’ve placated those feelings to make sure those people don’t feel ostracized. In my mind, those feelings need to be ostracized.”

Prominent Latino Republicans feel just as frustrated with the direction of the party. Artemio Muniz, the chairman of the Texas Federation of Hispanic Republicans, criticized Trump’s call to deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants and build a wall on the Mexican border. “During the election period, the rhetoric absolutely was a concern,” he says. Trump’s actions since winning the election have hardly been reassuring. Muniz says that Trump’s decision to include Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach—a prominent immigration hardliner—on the presidential transition team has heightened his concerns that the administration will follow through on Trump’s aggressive campaign promises. (On Monday, Kobach was photographed outside of Trump’s New Jersey golf club holding copies of a plan that would broaden the definition of “criminal aliens” during Trump’s first year in office.)

Despite his concerns and his continued opposition to Trump’s position on immigration, Muniz is cautiously optimistic that Congress will be able to keep Trump in line. If Trump moderates his position on deporting undocumented immigrants without criminal records, Muniz would be open to working with him. But Muniz also says that if the Republican Party doesn’t change its stance on immigration soon, it will suffer the electoral consequences of alienating large numbers of Hispanic voters.

Badger doesn’t see any signs that the Trump administration will be more receptive to minority concerns than the Trump campaign.

“My initial reaction to the election result was disbelief,” he says. “Two weeks later, my disbelief hasn’t waned very much.” He was particularly dismayed by Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon as chief strategist. Bannon previously ran Breitbart News, which he proudly described to Mother Jones as “the platform for the alt-right,” the fringe movement dominated by white nationalists.

But Badger also acknowledges that Trump’s rise was facilitated by the Republican Party. “Trump is the GOP’s chickens coming home to roost,” he says. “When you spend 40 to 50 years doing racially coded stuff in your campaigns, Trump is the illegitimate child that’s born of that. He is the logical consequence of a lot of this coded language and dog-whistle stuff.”

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Republicans of Color Who Opposed Trump Find Themselves on the Margins

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Um, where did all of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just go?

by KatherineUbc Posted on November 17, 2016

Many have agreed that President-elect Donald Trump has some questionable ideas when it comes to climate policy. Today, we get to add anthropomorphized gym sock O’Reilly and known cup goblin Starbucks to that list!

On Wednesday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, he advised Trump on a number of items to consider as he prepares to take office. On this list:

“Finally, President-Elect Trump should accept the Paris treaty on climate to buy some goodwill overseas. It doesn’t really amount to much anyway, let it go.”

Well, the thing is, it does actually amount to a lot.

Here’s a confusing screenshot, because this action item appears under the heading “What President Obama Failed to Do,” when President Obama did, in fact, succeed in accepting the Paris Agreement.

On Thursday morning, a coalition of 365 major companies and investors submitted a plea to Trump to please, come on, just support the goddamn Paris Agreement, because to do otherwise would be a disastrous blow to the United States’ economic competitiveness. The list includes Starbucks (the nerve!!!!), eBay, Kellogg, and Virgin.

Anyway, Trump’s whole “refusing to acknowledge climate change” thing seems like a bad look.

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Um, where did all of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just go?

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A woman who fought predatory oil and gas leasing on Native lands got the Presidential Medal of Honor.

by TrentSeeley753 Posted on November 17, 2016

Many have agreed that President-elect Donald Trump has some questionable ideas when it comes to climate policy. Today, we get to add anthropomorphized gym sock O’Reilly and known cup goblin Starbucks to that list!

On Wednesday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, he advised Trump on a number of items to consider as he prepares to take office. On this list:

“Finally, President-Elect Trump should accept the Paris treaty on climate to buy some goodwill overseas. It doesn’t really amount to much anyway, let it go.”

Well, the thing is, it does actually amount to a lot.

Here’s a confusing screenshot, because this action item appears under the heading “What President Obama Failed to Do,” when President Obama did, in fact, succeed in accepting the Paris Agreement.

On Thursday morning, a coalition of 365 major companies and investors submitted a plea to Trump to please, come on, just support the goddamn Paris Agreement, because to do otherwise would be a disastrous blow to the United States’ economic competitiveness. The list includes Starbucks (the nerve!!!!), eBay, Kellogg, and Virgin.

Anyway, Trump’s whole “refusing to acknowledge climate change” thing seems like a bad look.

Link:

A woman who fought predatory oil and gas leasing on Native lands got the Presidential Medal of Honor.

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If this Republican donor loves clean energy, then why did he back fossil-fuel friendly candidates?

by BrainWatkin415 Posted on November 17, 2016

Many have agreed that President-elect Donald Trump has some questionable ideas when it comes to climate policy. Today, we get to add anthropomorphized gym sock O’Reilly and known cup goblin Starbucks to that list!

On Wednesday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, he advised Trump on a number of items to consider as he prepares to take office. On this list:

“Finally, President-Elect Trump should accept the Paris treaty on climate to buy some goodwill overseas. It doesn’t really amount to much anyway, let it go.”

Well, the thing is, it does actually amount to a lot.

Here’s a confusing screenshot, because this action item appears under the heading “What President Obama Failed to Do,” when President Obama did, in fact, succeed in accepting the Paris Agreement.

On Thursday morning, a coalition of 365 major companies and investors submitted a plea to Trump to please, come on, just support the goddamn Paris Agreement, because to do otherwise would be a disastrous blow to the United States’ economic competitiveness. The list includes Starbucks (the nerve!!!!), eBay, Kellogg, and Virgin.

Anyway, Trump’s whole “refusing to acknowledge climate change” thing seems like a bad look.

Continue at source:

If this Republican donor loves clean energy, then why did he back fossil-fuel friendly candidates?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Badger, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If this Republican donor loves clean energy, then why did he back fossil-fuel friendly candidates?