Smog now hangs over Trump swamp!

These were the most obvious and startling stories to come out this week. And it explains a whole lot about Trump's 19th-century authoritarian "Gilded Age" mentality.

1. Make Auto Emissions Worse: It all seems surreal, doesn't it? Trump attacked California for having tougher environmental standards on auto emissions than the nation, and then legally went after automakers who agreed to and wants to produce cleaner-running cars. So much for market forces? MSNBC:

NBC News’ Jo Ling Kent reports on the Trump administration’s attempts to actively sabotage efforts by the state of California and major automakers to raise emission standards above the national average. Aired on 09/20/19.

2. Climate Hoax, not a Hoax according to Exxon in the 70s and early 80s: Here's something I didn't know about climate change, and what Trump cultist believe is a global hoax; climate change was a serious concern by Exxon scientists before they realized their research would negatively affect their profitability:

Exxon: The oil giant's top scientists were clear-eyed about the potentially devastating impact of fossil fuels. But the company chose to raise doubts among the public. Exxon issued a statement in response to our story: "Reports that claim we reached definitive conclusions about climate change decades before the world’s experts are inaccurate. Climate change is a serious issue & it’s going to take efforts by business, governments and consumers for meaningful action."

3. Trump Impatient with Long Dishwasher Times: You can't make this stuff up? But then, Trump and the Koch group FreedomWorks just did...:

“Dishwashers used to clean a full load of filthy dishes in under an hour. But now they take an average of two and a half hours and STILL leave dishes dirty!” reads one online petition promoted by FreedomWorks, a libertarian offshoot of a group co-founded by the late David H. Koch. The decline of American dishwashers, the site says, is “all thanks to crazy environmentalist rules.”

The petition, titled “Make Dishwashers Great Again,” ... Trump administration emails made public as part of a lawsuit shed new light on the effort ... One such email, sent in June 2018 to supporters of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, urged them to write to the Department of Energy supporting the creation of “a new class of ‘fast dishwashers’ that can complete a cycle in an hour or less.”

4. Trump's Orange Color blamed on Light Bulbs: Not kidding...

“The light bulb. People said, ‘What’s with the light bulb?’ I said, ‘Here’s the story.’ And I looked at it, the bulb that we’re being forced to use, number one to me, most importantly, the light’s no good. I always look orange. And so do you. The light is the worst,” Trump said.

5. Trump Pollution NOT so Pro-Life! On a much more serious note...

Air pollution particles have been found on the foetal side of placentas, indicating that unborn babies are directly exposed to the black carbon produced by motor traffic and fuel burning.

The research is the first study to show the placental barrier can be penetrated by particles breathed in by the mother. The link between exposure to dirty air and increased miscarriages, premature births and low birth weights is well established. The research suggests the particles themselves may be the cause, not solely the inflammatory response the pollution produces in mothers.

Damage to foetuses has lifelong consequences ... A comprehensive global review concluded that air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the human body. Nanoparticles have also been found to cross the blood-brain barrier and billions have been found in the hearts of young city dwellers.

Here are a few tweets to reflect on:

It's just business! Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, allow Lung Damaging Smog via Foxconn and Steel Mills!!! And Let them Drink Lead?

Trading lives for business? You bet. That's the attitude of Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Trump, and Wisconsin's GOP "leadership."

This is only one of two huge developments that might even stun the senses of die-hard Scott Walker fans.

We're finally finding out that beyond Foxconn's ever changing plans, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Trump, and EPA's Scott Pruitt decided to ignore EPA scientists and game the system to benefit business over peoples lives. This is what Republicans are talking about when they say they're trying to "balance business with the environment." It's an absurd concept.

Trading your Life for Business Special Interests: Now you know how you rate in the eyes of Walker and the Republicans, and it's behind polluting business interests:

Chicago Tribune: The Trump administration exempted parts of the Chicago area last year from federal limits on lung-damaging smog, it delivered a huge financial break to steel mills, chemical plants and other industries that are some of the region’s biggest polluters.

Scott Pruitt, who at the time headed the EPA, also freed the Foxconn Technology Group from spending millions of dollars on pollution-control equipment in an area with some of the region’s dirtiest air.

Newly released emails show EPA scientists strongly objected to Pruitt’s decision, which they said could not be supported with data despite political pressure from Trump administration officials and Paul Ryan ... an EPA staff analysis concluded Wisconsin is at least partially responsible for its own smog problems, and documents filed with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources show Foxconn will be a major new source of smog-forming pollution.

“I do not see a sound technical basis for the areas we are being directed to finalize in Wisconsin,” Jennifer Liljegren, an EPA scientist, wrote to colleagues in an April 11, 2018, email. “I am still in disbelief.” “Our final (metropolitan) area designation for Chicago is not the result of an analysis with any technical support,” Eric Svingen, an engineer in the EPA’s Chicago office, wrote in an April 24, 2018, email.

By dramatically reducing the size of areas required to crack down on dirty air, Pruitt overruled the agency’s career scientists...

In a few densely worded paragraphs buried at the end of a 63-page document, attorneys for the EPA and Justice Department asked a federal appeals court this month for what, in legal terms, amounts to a do-over ... they can see EPA data showing the region’s smog problems are getting worse, not better, and that polluters in four counties singled out by Pruitt for special treatment are contributing to chronically dirty air breathed by millions of people.

Republicans say leave the Lead in the Drinking Water: Apparently, Republicans don't seem to care how many children are poisoned by lead. In fact, they seem more concerned about dividing rural and urban voters over gets funding for getting the lead out.

Shepherd Express: Toxic rhetoric reached a new low this spring when Republican legislative leadership indicated they would not support a proposal from the new Democratic governor to replace lead pipes across the state because too much of the money would be going to Milwaukee ... Wisconsin Republicans are playing politics with something that quite literally is poisoning children in the state’s largest city.
Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette), a powerful member of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, said on Wednesday, April 10, “(I thought we'd) provide assistance at the local level, rather than people from Marinette funding lead replacements in Milwaukee. I’m not sure that that’s necessarily fair from a taxpayer standpoint. My understanding is that the proposal, a vast majority of it, is going to Milwaukee. 

The infrastructure bringing water into people’s homes is a public safety threat, one that puts children and pregnant mothers at particular risk. Gov. Tony Evers is proposing to add a $40 million budget item to begin the process of replacing the 200,000 lead lateral service lines in Wisconsin, 77,000 of which are in Milwaukee. I’m not sure that that’s necessarily fair from a taxpayer standpoint.”

Data actually show the opposite. Milwaukee is subsidizing Marinette. Tax revenues ... going to the state are greater than the amount of money coming back to Milwaukee from the state.

Republicans reacted that way, knowing just how bad the lead poisoning problem is...from May 10, 2018:

A 2016 report by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families relied on a 2015 Wisconsin Department of Health Services report, which reported on blood tests of children under 6 years old statewide ... noted that the statewide percentage of children tested who were diagnosed with elevated blood lead levels was 4.6 percent, a figure close to Flint’s 4.9 percent.

However, 2016 data show that the proportion of children tested who were lead poisoned in Wisconsin jumped to 5 percent — higher than Flint’s. That same year, 2.4 percent of Flint children tested had elevated blood lead levels at or above 5 micrograms per deciliter ... Milwaukee’s rate is even higher — four times higher than in Flint. In 2016, DHS data show 10.8 percent of Milwaukee children who were tested had elevated levels of lead in their blood. Those children accounted for nearly 60 percent of the 4,348 Wisconsin children found to be lead poisoned that year. DHS reports that half of all of the children with elevated blood lead levels that year were black.

The Good, Bad and Ugly in Trump (and Walker) Energy News...

Like everything else in Scott Walker's Wisconsin, unless you're a well established major Republican corporate campaign contributor, don't expect to do business here. New and reemerging industries like solar and wind that don't quite fit into the conservative dystopian vision, or haven't been pre-approved by ALEC, sadly won't be allowed to prosper or create thousands or millions of next-gen jobs. We have a Groundhog Day governor.

Areas not on Walker's radar: Hemp products, legalized marijuana, solar, wind, climate science dealing with changing weather patterns affecting cities and farmers, mass transit, border to border rollout of rural high-speed broadband, college affordability, prison reform, etc..  But Walker loves that eggs-in-one-basket Foxconn deal with its itty-bitty satellite offices around the state. 

Even more revealing is the fact that so many other deeply red states are actually moving forward with many of the vilified items I listed above. 

Take energy for instance.

Solar Growth Slow in Wisconsin: While the "free market" and so many big energy producers are giving up coal for resource free solar and wind, Walker won't get behind it:

Jim Tinjum, an associate professor of engineering with a specialty in renewable energy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, (went on a) #bikethewind tour last year ... Tinjum noted that on the solar front, Wisconsin leaves a lot to be desired. “Even though I’m from Wisconsin, I see Wisconsin as playing catchup in the role of advancing solar,” noting that his department teaches a course for solar installers, engineers and designers. He noted that the Wisconsin utility WPPI was a sponsor of his trip, and that he expects to see utilities and other players invest more in solar in the Midwest and Wisconsin in coming years.

Walker's "Sand Rush" feeds draconian Fossil Fuel Thinking: And why is solar and wind on the backburner?  Walker's gift; tearing up the most incredibly scenic part of our state:

Domestic drilling for oil and natural gas is expected to drive “extreme” demand for the frac sand prevalent throughout western Wisconsin. Wisconsin has historically produced about a third of the domestic supply of industrial sand.

But on the horizon, we're already being told cheaper solar and wind-generated electricity will flip how we're going to heat our homes. Yup, they're now predicting a return to...electric heat.

Where are the "Pro-lifers? "Pollution Illnesses and Deaths Hard to Prove in Court Pt. 1, so...

Reuter: The EPA said it was reconsidering part of an Obama-era rule on emissions of mercury from coal-fired plants. Under the 2011 Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, rule, coal plants have had to reduce emissions of mercury, a pollutant that can be dangerous to pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems.

The U.S. Supreme Court which left MATS intact in 2015. But it sent one issue, the justification for creating the rule, back to a lower court ... In 2016, the Obama EPA found the costs justified as the rule saved consumers on healthcare bills, a finding that industry challenged. 

Mary Anne Hitt, who fights coal plants at the Sierra Club: “This is outrageous and appalling. The American people are not going to stand for (a MATS) repeal just to please a few millionaire coal executives.”

Pollution Illnesses and Death Hard to Prove Pt. 2, so...: This is a subscription story I could not find anywhere else, so here's the screen capture and link. Breathtaking? These are our public servants?

Pollution Illnesses and Death Hard to Prove Pt. 3, so...: We have a right to Life, Liberty, and Property, right? It's right there in the 5th and 14th Amendment. Is it now time to change this meaning too, just like the Supreme Court did with the 2nd Amendment?

National Geographic: Juliana v. United States, a lawsuit filed by 21 children against the federal government over climate change, is headed to trial later this year, after the Supreme Court rejected the Trump Administration’s efforts to derail the case. Justice Anthony Kennedy rejected the government’s request ... noted that the “breadth of the (children’s) claim is striking…” The trial is scheduled to begin October 29 in Eugene, Oregon. The Obama Administration sought unsuccessfully to have the case dismissed, arguing remedies for climate change are better addressed by Congress than in court. 

The children’s suit, filed in federal court in 2015 by the non-profit Our Children’s Trust, alleges that the government has failed to protect Earth from the effects of climate change, putting the lives of future generations at risk and violating their basic constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.

Trump Hides National Monuments Successes Undercutting Claims to Reduce Parks: Thanks to Trump accidentally releasing unredacted Interior Department docs. These lying sacks of sh*t:

As the Trump administration downsized Utah's Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, Department of the Interior officials dismissed evidence that the monument designations brought benefits, the Washington Post reports.

The Interior Department's Freedom of Information Act team uploaded thousands of pages of documents that had not been completely redacted. The next day, officials took down these documents and replaced them. The erroneously un-redacted documents contain facts that cast some monuments in a positive light. 

1. One 2017 analysis by the Bureau of Land Management mentioned that once Grand Staircase-Escalante became a national monument, the annual rate of archaeological listings in the area more than doubled, and vandalism dropped. In December 2017, President Trump moved to shrink the monument by 46 percent.

2. In another document, Interior Department official Randal Bowman recommended deleting fishing data from an assessment of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument. The administration reviewed the Atlantic Ocean monument—which President Obama created in 2016—amid concerns that the monument's ban on fishing hurt local fishers. Bowman sought to nix data showing that from 2005 to 2014, about two-thirds of the area's shipping vessels generated less than five percent of their annual landings from the waters that became the monument. “This section is based on information provided by NOAA and the Fishery Management Council, and so can be presumed accurate,” he wrote in a comment. “However, including all this information undercuts the case for the ban being harmful.”

So what does the Trump administration propose doing about the slip?

According to legal experts interviewed by the Post, Trump officials could argue that the intended redactions fall under the “deliberative privilege” exemption of the Freedom of Information Act. That clause aims to protect executive branch staffers as they honestly discuss and hone policies.

Trump's Warped Gas Guzzler Fantasy!

There's nowhere to go now but...crazy. Trump lies so much now that when he tells the truth, that's news alert stuff.

But lying is only half of Trump's appeal to his devoted obsessed base. They pant even louder when he makes something ridiculous up that can't possibly be true in the real world...unless Trump says so.

Gas Guzzlers Safer, keep us Off the Roads? Enjoy the clip (until MSNBC pulls it) of Brian Williams dryly lays out Trump's latest brain burp:

Just in case you don't have time for the video, here are the video captures that tell the whole story. Every Trump mouthbreather will think this makes sense. And even if it doesn't, they won't care:

Maybe Trump's cheap stripped-down out-of-Marketplace health care plan, with almost no coverage, will force people to live healthier lives? Don't laugh...

A textbook for a required fitness class at UNC-Chapel Hill is under review by the university after criticism about its content, including statements calling cancer and diabetes “diseases of choice.” It maintains that “many if not most women” who are obsessed with weight have become habitual dieters.

And hell, why not include this bubble world fantasy...

And it describes a theory by Holocaust survivor and Austrian psychotherapist Victor Frankl about concentration camps: “The people in the camps who did not tap into the strength that comes from recognizing their intrinsic worth succumbed to the brutality to which they were subjected.”

Remember, health care is a privilege, for the privileged, or so says Wisconsin's Dumb Sen. Ron Johnson. The Republican Party of ghouls has been telling us this for years, it's just that they didn't come right out and say it. Oh, and add to that the privilege of food and clothing:

“I think it’s probably more of a privilege. Do you consider food a right? Do you consider clothing a right? Do you consider shelter a right? What we have as rights is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Past that point, we have the right to freedom. Past that point everything else is a limited resource that we have to use our opportunities given to us to afford those things.

“Sen. Rand Paul talked about this on the floor of the Senate. He’s a doctor. He said the minute you consider health care a right, well, who’s going to satisfy that right? And those people who have the skills to satisfy that right, what does that make them if they’re forced to provide you with that rightful product or service?”