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  2. <rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"><channel><title>Common Dreams</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/</link><description>Common Dreams</description><atom:link href="https://www.commondreams.org/feeds/feed.rss" rel="self"></atom:link><language>en-us</language><lastBuildDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2024 07:39:37 -0000</lastBuildDate><image><url>https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8zMjEwMDM4OS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTc0OTE0ODI1N30.nWE-dO3LpGCfrP6HKKrgMGYA-9xT8aazabGiQTfcsrM/image.png?width=210</url><link>https://www.commondreams.org/</link><title>Common Dreams</title></image><item><title>Making Clorox Great Again: Sounds Interesting, Right?</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/further/making-clorox-great-again-sounds-interesting-right</link><description><![CDATA[
  3. <img src="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/a-man-pretends-to-drink-bleach-during-a-protest-against-covid-restrictions-in-2020.jpg?id=52080276&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=970%2C0%2C312%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>Happy Disinfectant Injection Day to those survivors who four years ago ignored the "stratospherically insane" advice, even for him, of a demented buffoon babbling hokum in the face of a pandemic he couldn't spin his way out of - which, thanks to his ineptness, needlessly killed over 200,000 Americans. "I see the disinfectant, it knocks it out in a minute," he raved to a stricken Dr. Birx. "And is there a way we can do something like that?" Yeah, sure, let's elect him again.</p><p><br/></p><p>Tuesday's fourth Bleachiversary, aka <a href="https://twitter.com/SarahBurris/status/1782759493958283313" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Stick a Light </a>Up Your Ass Day or  Bleach Injection Day, marks what's been deemed "the most surreal moment ever witnessed (in) a presidential press conference." For weeks, Trump had been <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/23/trump-bleach-one-year-484399" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">giving</a> "stream-of-consciousness" updates on a pandemic he insisted would soon  vanish, but wasn't. Earlier that day, the COVID task force had met, as usual without him, to discuss new findings on the effects of sunlight and humidity on the virus; Trump was briefed, didn't get it, went out and winged it 'cause he loved free TV airtime and what's a few hundred thousand deaths anyway? "So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And I think you said you're going to test it?" he <a href="https://digbysblog.net/2024/04/23/happy-disinfecta..." target="_blank">prattled </a>to Birx cringing behind him. "And then I see the disinfectant, it knocks it out in a minute...And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So you’re going to use medical doctors, right? But it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see..."</p><p>And we did. Because, alas, dumb people <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2020/04/25/calls-to-poison-centers-spike--after-the-presidents-comments-about-using-disinfectants-to-treat-coronavirus/?sh=14f4ab0d1157" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">listened.</a> Calls to Poison Control Centers after ingesting bleach, Lysol and other (deadly) household cleaners soared - this was even before he started touting hydroxychloroquine - and the day's deranged press bleaching went on to live in infamy. Ultimately, thanks to Trump's cumulative health policy cluster-fucks, America saw the highest number of COVID deaths in the world - over a million - of which, experts say, roughly 234,000 could have been prevented. In the moment, video shows a grim, mute Dr. Birx curled in horror - some swear you could see her soul leave her body, but it would have been far more useful, as the madman burbled, if she'd shrieked WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK?!?  "I wanted it to be 'The Twilight Zone' and all go away," she later <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/abc-news-exclusive-dr-birx-speaks-trump-disinfectant/story?id=84295724" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">said </a>in an interview. "I could just see everything unraveling." From then on, said a Dem official,  "We knew without any doubt the government was in way over its head, and its ability to respond effectively (was) not going to be anywhere close to meeting the moment."</p><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1782758407637729591">
  4. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  5.        <a href="https://twitter.com/BidenHQ/status/1782758407637729591"></a>
  6. </blockquote>
  7. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p>And so it went. And here we are. And now he is not just "gaspingly stupid" but, <a href="https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/john-gartne..." target="_blank">experts say,</a> "in the advanced stages of dementia," from word salad - “space capsicule" and "Yoonayded Nations" - to 4th grade vocabulary - big, strong, great - to memory issues - Pelosi/ Haley - to a growing inability to control his behavior: "All of this will only get worse. The Trump you see today is the best Trump you're ever going to see." Last week, he described  the Battle of Gettysburg - "What an unbelievable battle that was. Gettysburg. Wow" - as either a <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/177931088782580..." target="_blank">mash-up </a>of the Civil War and <em>Pirates of the Caribbean </em>or a <a href="https://ew.com/jon-stewart-mocks-donald-trump-gettysburg-speech-8634327" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">horse giving birth</a>. This week outside court, accordion hands flying,  he <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1782451743445365201" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">gabbled </a>about his hush money crimes to reporters: "It’s a case as to book-keeping, which is a very minor thing in terms of the law in terms of all the violent crime that's going on outside…"This is a case where you pay a lawyer, he's a lawyer and they call it a legal expense. That's the exact term they use. We never even deducted it as a tax deduction..."</p><p>In court, meanwhile, he slumps, glowers, nods off as his hapless lawyers - admonished by the judge with, "I have to tell you right now, you're losing all credibility with the court" - struggle to explain how he's innocent of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal in an act of election interference. Between sessions, he <a href="https://twitter.com/BidenHQ/status/178283963238569..." target="_blank">whines</a>: "I'm here in a courtroom, sitting here...Sitting up as straight as I can all day long. It’s a very unfair situation.” <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1782566769820848136" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">So does</a><em> Fox' </em>Jesse Watters, who evidently doesn't realize that before sitting up straight in court Trump spent his time riding a golf cart like a beached whale: "They're draining his brain and his body...You're taking a man who's usually (in) action and you're gonna sit him in a chair in freezing temperatures. He needs sunlight and he needs activity. It's really cruel and unusual punishment to make a man do that." But the Super Man of his digital trading cards is "extraordinarily resilient," a co-host reminds him. So yeah, sure, four more years, even from a prison cell. </p><p>"There are several stages of grief after someone dies," a wise patriot notes, and often even before they do. "Like realizing your own dad has lung cancer, realizing he is not well  and is not going to be well down the road...The fact is that Trump has a cancer, a cancer of his soul that affects us all...It is time to let ‘dad’ go...People need to let Donald Trump go. Let him fade into the shadows where he came from." For a reminder of why that is now vital, see Sarah Cooper four years ago recreate his ignominious moment of moronic lunacy, one of far, far too many, in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxDKW75ueIU" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>How To Medical.  </em></a>Biden is already <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/17828217515686..." target="_blank">on it. </a>“Remember when he told us, literally, inject bleach?" he asked last week. “Bless me, Father.” So many crimes, so few consequences, so much at stake. "Don't inject bleach," Biden urged on the anniversary of the day Trump bungled to make Clorox great again. "And don’t vote for the guy who told you to inject bleach." Sigh. This is where we are. Are we better off than we were four years ago? In a feckin' relative universe, yes.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2024 01:12:56 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/further/making-clorox-great-again-sounds-interesting-right</guid><dc:creator>Abby Zimet</dc:creator><media:content medium="image" type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/a-man-pretends-to-drink-bleach-during-a-protest-against-covid-restrictions-in-2020.jpg?id=52080276&amp;width=980"></media:content></item><item><title>First They Came For My Appliances: We Are Here For the Refrigerator Freedom Act</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/further/first-they-came-for-my-appliances-we-are-here-for-the-refrigerator-freedom-act</link><description><![CDATA[
  8. <img src="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/people-marvel-at-a-refrigerator.jpg?id=51994338&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=818%2C0%2C552%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>Okay all you naysayers whining shambolic House GOPers aren't doing their job just 'cause they're blocking border solutions, ignoring infrastructure, enabling Ukrainian deaths and barely keeping the government afloat: Listen up. Boldly showcasing their astute priorities, they will fight  Monday to liberate your dishwashers, dryers, fridges and other home gizmos from a Marxist "avalanche" of new "Libby Boogyman" rules aimed at keeping the planet from vaporizing into air, and c'mon who cares about that?!</p><p>Ever-steadfast in  upholding their tradition of chasing fictional ills - Mike 'Election Chicanery' Johnson is now vowing to require proof of citizenship to prevent (brown-skinned) non-citizens from voting even though it's already illegal, also "not a thing" - the GOP-led House Rules Committee <a href="unveiled" target="_blank">meets</a> Monday to discuss six bills to prep them for final votes on the House floor. The six <a href="https://twitter.com/RepDonBeyer/status/17785438241..." target="_blank">bills</a> are the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act, the <em>Liberty in Laundry Act, the Affordable Air Conditioning Act, the Clothes Dryer Reliability Act, the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act and the Refrigerator Freedom Act</em>. Yes. They are real. They're in response to a number of Biden regulations or proposals aimed at addressing climate change,  part of a $369 billion <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/strategies-supporting-climate-economy-1887459" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Inflation Reduction Act</a> that seeks to lower costs, reduce energy use, cut pollutants and move to more green-energy practices.</p><p>To Republicans, however, they're aimed at letting tyrants "control everything Americans are able to do on a day-to-day basis," part of an insidious plot to allow "others" to come for their stuff, their choices and their God-given rights, evidently including the right to get a back-alley abortion with a coat hanger. (One sage: "REPUBLICANS: 'Keep gubmint OUT of our toasters and dish washers!' ALSO  REPUBLICANS: 'We need surveillance cameras inside every cha-cha so we can keep an eye on what women are doing!'") Thus did Arizona's Rep. Debbie Lesko,<a href="https://lesko.house.gov/2023/11/lesko-stands-up-fo..." target="_blank"> declaring</a> she is  "proud (to) stand on the side of choice for American consumers," devise the <em>Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act </em>to prohibit "federal bureaucrats" from issuing an  aforementioned "avalanche" of new energy standards "not technologically feasible and economically justified."</p><p>In March, Iowa's Rep.Mariannette Miller-Meeks echoed her, introducing and eventually passing the<em> </em><em>Refrigerator Freedom Act t</em>o prohibit the same offenses - now "not cost-effective or technologically feasible" - because Biden has "done nothing but implement outrageous regulations" that only limit choice, increase prices, disenfranchise toilets and blenders, and move us toward dictatorship. MAGA-ites, of course, applaud these red-meat efforts to rescue heat pumps, gas stoves, washing machines, showers and air fryers from domination. "Finally, following American and not Globalist priorities," said one. "I am sick and tired of the government telling us what we can and cannot buy and use." And after 11 GOP-run states sued over some of the changes, a judge <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-stinging-lawsuit-loss-department-energy-efficiency-1859053" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">dismissed</a> the rules as "arbitrary and capricious."</p><p>That could also apply to a House focused on fighting to be able to buy a $7 toaster even if, okay, so it may burn your house down but FREEDUMB! Of course, confronting issues like national security or infrastructure require actual, unflashy, conciliatory, negotiating, attention-to-detail legislative<em> work, </em>and they're barely able to co-exist with their <em>colleagues,</em> never mind opponents, and anyway it's probably about time for another two-week recess, so let's go with hair dryers and ceiling fans. Along with the petty stupidity is the economic irony: Most appliances are made in China, so they're protecting Chinese companies from U.S. regulations, and for things made here, they're ensuring big business can be left alone to make over-priced, planet-killing, deliberately-soon-obsolete crap. Your tax dollars at work!</p><p>Predictably, the cognitive dissonance drew its share of mockery, with<em> Digby </em>noting, "We all know the GOP likes to focus on kitchen table issues, but this is ridiculous." Others argued that, "Insurrectionists are now GOP Congresspersons" and that, thanks in part to such diversionary tomfoolery, "The GOP has Ukrainian  blood on their hands." "First they came for my appliances," one intoned. "I was not an appliance, so I said nothing." Another suggested a key addition to the GOP agenda: a "Stop Wasting Our Time on Meaningless Legislation Act." There were also triumphant stories of deliverance born of the GOP's hard and noble   work. "In honor of the <em>Refrigerator Freedom Act, </em>I just opened my front door and set my newly liberated Frigidaire free," one reported. "Needless to say, it's running."</p>]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Apr 2024 19:17:20 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/further/first-they-came-for-my-appliances-we-are-here-for-the-refrigerator-freedom-act</guid><dc:creator>Abby Zimet</dc:creator><media:content medium="image" type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/people-marvel-at-a-refrigerator.jpg?id=51994338&amp;width=980"></media:content></item><item><title>Biden Administration Rule Improves Accountability For Big Oil Corporations That Profit From Public Lands</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/biden-administration-rule-improves-accountability-for-big-oil-corporations-that-profit-from-public-lands</link><description><![CDATA[
  9. <p>Accountable.US today released the following statement in response to the publication of the Department of the Interior and Bureau of Land Management’s final oil and gas <a href="https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-ensures-fair-taxpayer-return-strengthens-accountability-oil-and-gas-operations" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">rule</a>:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">“The Biden administration deserves our thanks for holding accountable the companies who have gotten a sweetheart deal to drill public property for far too long. Anyone who wants to profit from resources that belong to all American taxpayers should pay their fair share. This is an important step toward fixing a wildly irresponsible system that has given so much to massive corporations at the expense of everyone who enjoys the great outdoors.” —Chris Marshall spokesperson for Accountable.US</p>An Accountable.US <a href="https://accountable.us/report-biggest-public-lands-drillers-made-100-billion-after-cheating-taxpayers/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report</a> last year found that the public lands oil and gas leasing system is broken in favor of some of the biggest, most profitable corporations in the world that lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands.]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:10:52 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/biden-administration-rule-improves-accountability-for-big-oil-corporations-that-profit-from-public-lands</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Sierra Club Statement on Reforms to Federal Oil and Gas Leasing Program</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/sierra-club-statement-on-reforms-to-federal-oil-and-gas-leasing-program</link><description><![CDATA[
  10. <p>Today the White House <a href="https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-ensures-fair-taxpayer-return-strengthens-accountability-oil-and-gas-operations" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">announced new reforms</a> to the federal oil and gas leasing system on public lands.</p><p>The new regulations bring much-needed balance to a system that has long favored corporate profits over public benefit. The reforms enacted by the Biden Administration include:</p><ul><li>Reasonable increases in bonding rates, ensuring oil and gas companies, not taxpayers, pay to clean up messes left by extractive activities; </li><li>New leasing criteria for future lease sales that will help reduce conflicts with wildlife, cultural, and outdoor recreation resources;</li><li>An end to “speculative leasing,” which allows oil and gas companies to tie up public lands with little to no chance of resource development;</li><li>Permanent increases to federal fees required to lease public lands for drilling, to the same levels required by many Western states; and</li><li>Ending noncompetitive leasing, which allowed public lands to be auctioned off for as little as $1.50 per acre.</li></ul><p><em><strong>In response, Sierra Club Lands Protection Program Director Athan Manuel, released the following statement:</strong></em></p><p>“These new regulations are the kind of common-sense reforms the federal oil and gas leasing program has needed for decades. The days of oil and gas companies locking up public lands for decades for pennies on the dollar and leaving polluted lands, water, and air in their wake are over.</p><p>“Simply put, the rules governing the leasing system weren’t working for communities, taxpayers, or the environment. The only people for whom they did work were oil and gas CEOs, who could pad corporate bottom lines while leaving the public to foot the bill to clean up their messes.</p><p>“The reforms announced by the Biden Administration are long-overdue, and will ensure that taxpayers get a fair return from the use of federal public lands while limiting harmful impacts to lands, wildlife, and community health.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:09:01 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/sierra-club-statement-on-reforms-to-federal-oil-and-gas-leasing-program</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Earthjustice Applauds Overdue Reforms to Federal Oil and Gas Leasing Program</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/earthjustice-applauds-overdue-reforms-to-federal-oil-and-gas-leasing-program</link><description><![CDATA[
  11. <p>Today, the Biden administration unveiled long-awaited reforms that will hold the fossil fuel industry to more reasonable standards when operators seek to lease and develop oil and gas on public lands. The Bureau of Land Management’s new <a href="https://www.blm.gov/onshore-oil-and-gas-leasing-rule" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Oil and Gas Rule</a> includes new provisions that will save taxpayers money, help ensure public lands are used for their highest value, and better protect communities and the environment.</p><p>Earthjustice applauded the announcement and issued the following statement:</p><p>“This new rule should be regarded as a long overdue win for communities and the environment. For decades, taxpayers have been left to foot the bill to clean up toxic messes left behind by oil companies across the West, while some of the same companies made record profits,” said Earthjustice attorney Mike Freeman. “BLM also has tolerated rampant speculation on leases that industry only purchased to pad its books and attract investors, while preventing those lands from being protected for other uses. On top of this, oil and gas drilling on public lands accelerates the climate crisis and results in oil spills and threats to drinking water. The Biden administration’s Oil and Gas Rule is an important step toward correcting these long-standing problems and holding oil and gas companies accountable. We look forward to seeing BLM’s next steps toward tackling the climate impacts of federal oil and gas drilling.”</p> <h2><strong>Background</strong></h2> <p>Public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management are essential to fishing and hunting, wildlife and land conservation, and outdoor recreation economies. The final version of BLM’s Oil and Gas Rule implements reforms included in the Inflation Reduction Act such as increased royalty rates, a realignment of rents and minimum bids to account for decades of inflation, a prohibition on non-competitive leasing, and a new fee to ensure oil and gas operators carefully consider the lands they nominate for lease. The new rule increases minimum bonding rates for the first time since 1960, to require oil and gas companies take more responsibility for covering the costs of well clean-up, contamination, and remediation. It will also help focus leasing decisions away from areas with significant cultural and wildlife value.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2024 17:57:02 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/earthjustice-applauds-overdue-reforms-to-federal-oil-and-gas-leasing-program</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Friends of the Earth Pushes for Climate Action Following BLM’s Final Oil and Gas Leasing Rule</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/friends-of-the-earth-pushes-for-climate-action-following-blms-final-oil-and-gas-leasing-rule</link><description><![CDATA[
  12. <p>Today the Bureau of Land Management announced its <a href="https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2024-04/BLM-Fluid-Minerals-Leasing-FinalRule.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">final rule</a> to reform oil and gas leasing on federal lands. While the rule takes important steps to address some oil and gas subsidies in the leasing program, including increasing bonding requirements so industry is on the hook for cleanup instead of taxpayers, it fails to address climate despite nearly a quarter of U.S. emissions resulting from fossil fuel extraction on public lands.  </p><p><strong>Nicole Ghio, Senior Fossil Fuels Program Manager at Friends of the Earth, issued the following statement:</strong> </p><p>While we support BLM’s steps to curb financial giveaways to Big Oil, this rule fails to confront the massive tide of climate emissions stemming from its leasing program. If Interior intends to manage our public lands for the public good, then it must account for the future generations living under the threat of catastrophic climate change. Interior must do what the science demands and end the expansion of fossil fuels. <br/></p>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2024 16:53:29 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/friends-of-the-earth-pushes-for-climate-action-following-blms-final-oil-and-gas-leasing-rule</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Shame Shame Shame: On the Hovering Glory Of A Forced-Birth God Almighty</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/further/shame-shame-shame-on-the-hovering-glory-of-a-forced-birth-god-almighty</link><description><![CDATA[
  13. <img src="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/bridget-bishop-being-hanged-for-witchcraft-in-the-1600s.jpg?id=51979826&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=1392%2C0%2C0%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>Kudos to Arizona's wingnut Supreme Court, who in their deranged upholding of an 1864 abortion ban so extreme even GOPers are fleeing it have dragged us back to a time when doctors used leeches, snake oil, opiates and a nice long asylum stay to treat women with "hysteria." If the law's upheld, "People will die." Still, a stalwart group of zealots took to the Senate floor to  kneel, pray, babble in tongues and implore, "Let it be so, Father God." Be warned: "This is today's Republican Party."</p><p>The <a href="https://apnews.com/article/arizona-abortion-restrictions-1864-9c68866d69dca38c728dd27b80592e8f" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">court's ruling </a>came in the case <em>of Planned Parenthood v. Hazelrigg</em>, in which Dr. Eric Hazelrigg, <em></em>who owns a chain of anti-abortion clinics and declares himself "guardian ad litem for all Arizona unborn infants," appealed a 2022 decision upholding the state's current, already-extreme 15-week abortion ban. Instead, the good doctor urged the court to reinstate a long-dormant law   passed 160 years ago - as the Civil War still raged, before Arizona was a state, decades before the vast majority of those affected by it could vote - which allows abortions only if the mother’s life is in danger, provides no exceptions for rape, incest, non-viable fetuses or other ugly facts of life, and suggests abortion providers be prosecuted. </p><p>It also passed when male doctors with no clinical experience relied on the ancient concept of balancing the Four Humors: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Women - frail, submissive, emotional - were <a href="https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent..." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">deemed</a> especially prone to illness, most often hysteria, or "womb disease," because their uterus, "the great central pivotal organ of her existence," moved and caused mood swings. Aggravating factors: too-tight corsets, sexual urges, reading, challenging the status quo. Treatments: bloodletting, magnetizers, snake oil, smelling salts, leeches on the abdomen to reduce blood in the womb, clitoral stimulation via pelvic massage to create orgasm and release excess fluid, "patent medicine" or opiates - most addicts were women - and the asylum, a "convenient, socially acceptable excuse (for) potentially scandalous behavior."</p><p>Laws then on the books <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/here-are-some-other-laws-arizona-had-on-the-books-in-1864/ar-BB1loIUu" target="_blank">addressed </a>the possible pernicious results of said scandalous behavior: "If any woman shall endeavor, privately, either by herself or the procurement of others, to conceal the death of any issue of her body, which, if born alive, would be a bastard, so that it may not come to light, whether it shall have been murdered or not, every such mother being convicted thereof shall suffer imprisonment in the county jail for a term not exceeding one year." Other laws made it illegal to entice Black people to leave the state to be sold into slavery. But in the name of mercy another law creates the category of "excusable homicide" if, say, "a man is at work with an axe, and the head flies off and kills a bystander,” or a parent is "moderately correcting his child, or a master his servant."</p><p>Cue today's Arizona, or "Fetuzona, where all zygotes matter," the hateful likes of Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs can get elected, and GOP governors <a href="expanded" target="_blank">can  pack </a>a helpfully expanded Supreme Court - thanks then-Gov. Doug "Fucking Douchey, Anus Maximus" - with seven, male, far-right ideologues who can pass a "devastating, cruel" anti-choice law "wildly out of step with where Arizonan voters are at." Democratic, female state officials have made it<em> very clear </em>they will not go gentle into the night. "Let me be clear," said Gov. Katie Hobbs of an extreme ban that "hurts women." "Let me be completely clear," said A.G. Kris Mayes of an "unconscionable" <a href="https://www.azag.gov/press-release/attorney-general-mayes-statement-planned-parenthood-az-v-mayes" target="_blank">ruling </a>and "stain our state" she's already vowed not to enforce, with help from a proactive Hobbs who already <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2024/04/09/arizona-abortion-ruling-will-county-attorneys-try-to-enforce-ban/73262740007/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">gave </a><em><a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2024/04/09/arizona-abortion-ruling-will-county-attorneys-try-to-enforce-ban/73262740007/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a></em>Mayes' office sole enforcement authority. <br/></p><p>Last week, reproductive rights  organizers <a href="https://arizonaforabortionaccess.org/arizona-abortion-rights-amendment-backers-says-theyve-gathered-signatures-needed-for-2024-ballot/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">announced</a> they'd collected over 500,000 signatures, far over the requisite 383,923, for a November referendum on a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion, and activists and lawmakers <a href="https://twitter.com/BeccaBalintVT/status/1777764428546793621" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">vow,</a> with abortion on the ballot, extremists will "feel the power of pissed-off women voters." Sadly, doctors and those they care for are caught in the middle. Lamenting she'll be "phoning lawyers for guidance on what i can do" rather than "making clinical decisions based on what my patients are telling me," one doctor decried "legal jargon (with no) ability to capture the nuance of taking care of a patient." "It completely wreaks havoc on our ability to do our job," she said. "And patients are going to be the ones who suffer."</p><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1777799954339188880">
  14. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  15.        <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1777799954339188880"></a>
  16. </blockquote>
  17. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p>Of course the "Republi-nazi terrorist attack" in Arizona, while more extreme than some, reflects a nationwide GOP war on women; today, more than one in three women of reproductive age live in a state with an abortion ban. Still, a glaring dissonance persists: Since the 2022 Dobbs ruling on Roe, voters in <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/03/enormous-victory-kansas-voters-resoundingly-defeat-anti-abortion-amendment" target="_self">Kansas</a>, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/kentucky-voters-reject-constitutional-amendment-on-abortion" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Kentucky</a> and other states have voted for expanding not restricting access to abortion, and similar proposals are on ballots in multiple states. Meanwhile, right-wingers on the wrong side of history remain stubbornly clueless about the grim possible consequences  - fury, sorrow, sepsis, bleeding out in parking lots - facing  millions of women. Citing Arizona's "earthquake of epic proportions," one GOP strategist admitted, "Anytime Republicans are talking about abortion, they’re losing."</p><p>Cue hapless rich white dude in a bad Beatles wig Mark Simone, who went on <em>a Fox </em>panel of more rich white dudes to <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1777799954339188880" target="_blank">discuss</a> lady parts and say it's all good. A radio host who online <a href="https://twitter.com/MarkSimoneNY" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">trashes</a> "Biden's kids who've all been involved in horrible drug scandals," lauds a brilliant Trump "who builds 100-story skyscrapers in his sleep," and claims Bernie Sanders "never held a job until age 53 and lived off welfare and four different women," he <a href="sg.news.yahoo.com/fox-guest-sparks-anger-h..." target="_blank">shrugged</a> that any sloppy, pregnant ho has it easy with  a simple, solo bus ride: "If you had to travel to another state for an abortion, buying a bus ticket to (go) get it is not the worst thing in the world." Says the guy who def doesn't know how grief, terror, vaginal bleeding, abdominal pain, financial panic, ectopic pregnancy or worrying about who's watching the kids feels.</p><p>Nationally, he's got much oblivious company, with even anti-choice GOPers so  freaked out by Arizona's illustration of "what <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/r/entryeditor/2667731547#stats" target="_blank">happens </a>when abortion policy is left up to the (often rabid) states" they're running away from it. That night, <em>Fox </em><em><em></em><em></em></em>talking heads literally <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-new..." target="_blank">ignored</a> the ruling, though they found time to accuse NPR of being liberal and Kamala of doing "abortion hit jobs." While a coalition of right-wing sages has reportedly published a 920-page, <a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/08/opinion/comstock-laws-abortion-texas.html__;!!Ivohdkk!gR24r1un6YBrGsFQp3_zKP6QVDIazfGBXsFgz-DRHPB-2UPFNzqCOnEbj6WYX-QCYZiMiBopKk0%24" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Comstock Act </a>-based plan for a Trump Mandate for Leadership to target abortion pills, Trump continues to just say whatever he thinks will keep him out of jail - which rightly hasn't stopped anyone from laying Arizona at his tacky door, from Elizabeth Warren - "Remember, this is brought to you by Trump" - to Biden: "<a href="https://crooksandliars.com/2024/04/biden-ad-goes-g..." target="_blank">This </a>is Trump's fault."</p><p>Arizona's GOP pols are flip-flopping so fast they forget what they just said. Kari Lake, who once <a href="https://twitter.com/RubenGallego/status/1777767180022726961" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">proclaimed </a>she was "incredibly thrilled we (have) a great law that's already on the books" - from 1864 - now <a href="https://www.threads.net/@bidenharrishq/post/C5ldNo0IyYd" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">says </a>the law is "out of step with Arizonans,” which never stopped her before. <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PgoIlwJzpImRAX3Rgfdmi4dGwG12b0LnLbRdm0G9OlQ/edit#gid=1031791735" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a>Rep. David Schweikert, a Roe opponent and <a href="https://twitter.com/jamisonfoser/status/1777799381841789183" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>six-time</em> sponsor</a> of a radical Life at Conception Act up for <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PgoIlwJzpImRAX3Rgfdmi4dGwG12b0LnLbRdm0G9OlQ/edit#gid=1031791735" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">re-election</a>, now says abortion should "not be legislated from the bench." Rep. Juan Ciscomani, who <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/hr7/cosponsors" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">fought </a>to ban health insurance that covers abortion, <a href="https://twitter.com/RepCiscomani/status/1777757519504380389" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">called</a> the ruling a "disaster" and wants the 15-week ban back please. As stupid as these people are, they've evidently grasped that "Let The Men Decide" - the sign of a protester rigged in top hat and mutton chaps - may not be the greatest campaign slogan.</p><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1777829756400263618">
  18. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  19.        <a href="https://twitter.com/tcani/status/1777829756400263618"></a>
  20. </blockquote>
  21. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p>Not state Sen. and Jan 6-er Anthony Kern, though. The day before the ruling, Kern led a small prayer group onto the Senate floor - the Senate seal, actually - where they kneeled, cried out in tongues and <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2024/04/09/anthony-kern-prayer-circle-arizona-capitol-floor/73264047007/" target="_blank">summoned </a> "the hovering glory of God almighty" to, yes, let the men decide. "Lord, we ask thee to release the presence of the Lord in the Senate chamber," Kern bellowed, as acolytes who regrettably missed out on 1692 Salem <a href="https://twitter.com/tcani/status/1777829756400263618" target="_blank">wailed,</a> "Let it be so, let it be so, let it be so." Kern was an apt guru. Now under investigation as a fake elector for Trump in 2020, he turned his back on Gov Hobbs during her State of the State speech and just successfully pushed through a Senate bill permitting the  Ten Commandments to be recited aloud in public schools: "This is the guy the writers of our Constitution warned us about."</p><p>After the head of <em>Secular Arizona</em> <a href="https://twitter.com/JeanneCasteen/status/1777462284396437816" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">pointed </a>out Kern's garish play-acting on government property - "So this happened today" - the  reaction was swift. Most people agreed, "If you believe, fine, but believe on your own time, not mine." Also on "archaic beliefs in imaginary bearded sky daddies": "Yup. Freedom of religion. Support sky pilots, that's your option. But keep it out (of) public facilities." They raged - "The Taliban has infiltrated state government" - mourned - "God cringes" - snarked - "The state of Arizona is showing the long-term effects of living in an Easy Bake Oven," "Oh those zany GOP politicians - next he's bringing snakes and a goat to sacrifice" - mused, in the 21st century, "You actually have to put effort into being as willfully ignorant." Many imagined the furor if, say, Muslim prayers were recited. </p><p>The "speaking in tongues" shtick also sparked debate. Given they're Repubs, maybe it's just gibberish, or one of the migrant languages Trump says "no one has ever heard of." In the Bible, it was  noted, the apostles spoke in tongues when the Holy Spirit filled them, and each person heard them in their native tongue; if it's not understood by all, it's just showmanship. Or theocracy. "They weren't speaking in tongues - they were articulating Republican policy," one argued. And, "This is how Republicans make decisions for your family and future." Our fave: "My wife spoke to me in tongues and I couldn't understand her, so with her preacher's advice she divorced me. We were 'unyoked.' After a few years, I met and married a wonderful woman. Best thing that ever happened to me!"</p><p>After the response, Kern sneered, "Looks like our prayer team stirred up some God-haters." In the venerable  traditiion of learning nothing, ever, his House colleagues also<a href="https://www.azfamily.com/2024/04/10/arizona-house-..." target="_blank"> acted</a> like douchebags - or kids sneaking out before their mom can make them clean their room - by twice blocking Dem efforts to repeal the 160-year-old baby mama law and then up and quitting, voting to adjourn until "cooler heads prevail." "Democrats were screaming at us and engaging (in) insurrectionist behavior," one whined, and besides, "removing healthy babies from healthy mothers is not health care." Jesus. They never seem to realize maybe they have to go so far back in time to strip women's rights because it's been that long since we wanted to live like that. As GOPers left, Dems chanted, "Shame! Shame! Shame!" If only they had some.   </p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/17/gloria-steinem-activist-interview-memoir-my-life-on-the-road" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><em>"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."</em> - George Orwell.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:54:28 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/further/shame-shame-shame-on-the-hovering-glory-of-a-forced-birth-god-almighty</guid><dc:creator>Abby Zimet</dc:creator><media:content medium="image" type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/bridget-bishop-being-hanged-for-witchcraft-in-the-1600s.jpg?id=51979826&amp;width=980"></media:content></item><item><title>Ahead of Earth Day, Youth Climate Groups Plan Hundreds of Demonstrations to Demand President Biden Declare A Climate Emergency, End The Era Of Fossil Fuels</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/ahead-of-earth-day-youth-climate-groups-plan-hundreds-of-demonstrations-to-demand-president-biden-declare-a-climate-emergency-end-the-era-of-fossil-fuels</link><description><![CDATA[
  22. <p>Thousands of youth activists, led by groups including the Sunrise Movement, Fridays For Future USA, and the Campus Climate Network, will hold protests in hundreds of cities nationwide around Earth Day to demand President Biden and other decision-makers take action to end fossil fuels and respond to the climate emergency. </p><p>The groups are demanding President Biden declare a climate emergency and use his executive powers to create green union jobs, phase out fossil fuels, and prepare for climate disasters. This can and must include: reinstating the 2015 crude oil export ban, stopping approvals of new fossil fuel projects, and building resilient and distributed renewable energy systems in climate-vulnerable communities. </p><p>Thousands of young people will participate in the actions, which include: </p><p>● Friday, April 19: Fridays For Future USA leads a Day of Climate Action, in solidarity with actions being organized in hundreds of cities around the world, to demand action from President Biden to end the era of fossil fuels. In New York City alone, thousands of students will walk out of their classes and march from Foley Square in Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn Borough Hall. </p><p>● Monday, April 22nd: The Sunrise Movement is leading dozens of Earth Day Teach-Ins at congressional offices and other locations to urge Members of Congress to publicly call on President Biden to declare a national climate emergency. </p><p>● Monday, April 22: Student organizers with the Campus Climate Network will lead Reclaim Earth Day actions on more than 100 college campuses, demanding that universities become true environmental justice leaders and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry.</p><p>Background: </p><p>President Biden promised to be a climate president. Ahead of the 2024 election, young people are mobilizing to hold him accountable to that promise. Despite critically pausing the authorizations for some new LNG export infrastructure in the Gulf, under the Biden administration, U.S. oil and gas production has surged to record highs. </p><p>Hundreds of thousands of young people took action to demand the administration reject fossil fuel projects like the Willow drilling project in Alaska, and tens of thousands joined the March to End Fossil Fuels last September calling on Biden to phase out fossil fuels and declare a climate emergency. In February, over 21 young people were arrested at Biden’s campaign offices calling for a climate emergency. </p><p>As the election approaches, young people are mobilizing to demand President Biden take bold action to protect young peoples’ futures. That begins with declaring a climate emergency that meaningfully addresses fossil fuels, creates millions of good-paying union jobs, and helps us prepare for incessant climate disasters. <br/></p>]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Apr 2024 12:44:36 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/ahead-of-earth-day-youth-climate-groups-plan-hundreds-of-demonstrations-to-demand-president-biden-declare-a-climate-emergency-end-the-era-of-fossil-fuels</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>PFAS Drinking Water Limits Are First Step to Safer Water, But Polluters Must Be Held Accountable</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/pfas-drinking-water-limits-are-first-step-to-safer-water-but-polluters-must-be-held-accountable</link><description><![CDATA[
  23. <p>Today, EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced the final regulations that set enforceable limits on six PFAS — the toxic lab-made compounds known as “forever chemicals” — in drinking water. The EPA set maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) for PFOA and PFOS of 4 ppt each; MCLs for PFHxS, PFNA and GenX at 10 ppt, and limits on a combination of four PFAS types (PFNA, PFHxS, PFBS and GenX) based on a hazard index. Utilities will have five years to comply with the new limits.</p><p>Water systems serving at least 100 million people are expected to be contaminated with PFAS, and the new rule requires water systems to complete testing within three years. The EPA estimates the total cost of compliance would be $1.5 billion a year; the American Water Works Association puts that figure closer to $3.8 billion. </p><p>The EPA has yet to finalize regulations that would designate certain forms of PFAS as “hazardous substances” under the superfund law to facilitate holding polluters accountable for clean-up costs. This topic has been the subject of heavy lobbying from the chemical industry. A <a href="https://u7061146.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=u001.gqh-2BaxUzlo7XKIuSly0rC1TE0ObG9e-2BL-2BjWVPxWxReOD3hHGDpRtc5ON0hX5sdDmBvifN8HJTXYTNlgva4mGxcNGNG0p0KAkSQSzjFkXpV3PMlLHQWqxh6OPXlCQoXKTIvjm_s0lTyPdoyuzn-2FJTE9fjR8nSlryGpLl-2B7mxK4it06DfKhpucLPiMkMsi-2BcoCz3G4i3By-2F6hPHPoGqGY0FGOHDfMwcZPlujCYW1mLICn3chPNPYqIlibaLXSeEGJuaaYkyBLQP-2B7PW0-2FbbBfXHQu3CmMf5YhYa5bMxfwhHhm2hNIrpjw8nDwvSAOihWZ3t2DJZepXc2TIgGIwal9oaW17ykUsrdL0shGQ68JOT-2FMhv1tMi1bIHOzMUjPQQOAUrjDk1Xbt7SVhKM1DA6OQ4P6GBKGcqXDQHWTKLRIrgID5JA7dX-2BwMBGzeCWp9B9hBkreUAggB3Bz6Z71qp5Hn3Cbzb0QyUnnGzuTtopk2lsAPcJys-3D" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Food & Water Watch report</a> found that from 2019 to 2022, PFAS manufacturers spent more than $55 million lobbying on PFAS and other issues, and the American Chemical Council spent an additional $58.7 on lobbying on PFAS and other issues during that period. </p><p><strong>In response, Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter issued the following statement: </strong></p><p>“At long last, the EPA has set enforceable limits to remove toxic forever chemicals from drinking water that will help protect public health nationally. These regulations come after decades of community organizing and will save many lives. While we applaud the EPA for not bowing to industry pressure to weaken the regulations, this must mark the beginning — not the culmination — of its efforts to rein in these toxic PFAS. </p><p>“The science is clear: No amount of PFAS in water is safe. Today’s action addresses just six of thousands of these toxic chemicals. The EPA must regulate the entire class to remove all PFAS from our drinking water, ban the manufacture of nonessential PFAS, and hold polluters accountable to pay to clean up their toxic mess. The brunt of the compliance costs must be borne by the PFAS polluters, so that households already struggling with unaffordable water bills are not stuck picking up the tab of corporate water pollution. </p><p>“Corporate polluters long hid evidence of the toxicity of these chemicals, and they have spent millions of dollars lobbying against regulations that would protect people from this harm. Congress must reject corporate efforts to carve various polluters out of liability, and it must pass the PFAS Action Act to continue the work to address this toxic crisis. </p><p>“Communities also need more federal support to comply with these necessary new standards. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided a down payment of $9 billion to address PFAS in drinking water, but our communities deserve a permanent source of federal funding. The WATER Act is the right vision to fully fund our public water infrastructure at the level that is needed to ensure safe and clean water for all.”</p>]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:00:03 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/pfas-drinking-water-limits-are-first-step-to-safer-water-but-polluters-must-be-held-accountable</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Global: Dow shareholders must help ensure justice for victims of Bhopal disaster</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/global-dow-shareholders-must-help-ensure-justice-for-victims-of-bhopal-disaster</link><description><![CDATA[
  24. <p>Amnesty International is urging shareholders in the US-based Dow to consider withdrawing their investment from the chemicals company if it fails to rapidly meet its human rights responsibilities towards the more than 500,000 people still suffering from the Bhopal disaster, one of the world’s worst industrial incidents.</p><p>Ahead of the company’s annual general meeting tomorrow 11 April, Amnesty International has written to Dow’s largest investors, sharing its recent report <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa20/7817/2024/en/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Bhopal: 40 Years of Injustice</em></a><em>, </em>and asking them to help address Dow’s failure to adhere to international business and human rights standards since it purchased Union Carbide Corporation in 2001. Union Carbide Corporation was the ultimate owner of the pesticide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal at the time of the disastrous gas leak in 1984.</p><p>Mark Dummett, Amnesty International’s Head of Business and Human Rights said:</p><p>“Bhopal is not a case of the past. The human rights abuses resulting from the gas leak and site contamination are unresolved and ongoing. Survivors and their descendants are still awaiting just compensation, a thorough clean-up of their environment, adequate medical assistance and treatment, punishment of all perpetrators, and comprehensive economic and social rehabilitation.”</p><p>“We have written to major investors in Dow and asked them to engage with us and to raise concerns directly with the company about the continuing human rights abuses in Bhopal. We have asked shareholders to end their relationship with Dow if it fails to take meaningful and rapid action to address the suffering.”</p> <blockquote>We have asked shareholders to end their relationship with Dow if it fails to take meaningful and rapid action to address the suffering. —<cite>Mark Dummett, Amnesty International’s Head of Business and Human Rights</cite></blockquote> <p>“More than half a million people continue to suffer some degree of permanent injury from the disaster in Bhopal. Those who survived the initial exposure were often permanently injured or developed chronic and debilitating illnesses, as well as experiencing miscarriages and the birth of children with congenital disorders.”</p><p>The facility was never cleaned-up, leading to increasing contamination of local water sources from the chemicals left on site, with often catastrophic and enduring health consequences for local communities.</p><p>Investors in Dow which Amnesty International have written to include the US-based investment groups or financial institutions Vanguard Group, Blackrock, and State Street.</p><p>The letter asks investors to ensure that Dow reports on its responsibilities regarding Bhopal based on the UN Guiding Principles, and publicly discloses its findings without delay. Amnesty International is asking investors to request that Dow meets these following specific recommendations:</p> <ul><li>Provide additional compensation to Bhopal survivors, their children and grandchildren, to cover the actual number of deaths and injuries caused by the gas disaster.</li></ul> <ul><li>Provide compensation for the adverse health, economic and social impacts caused by the ongoing contamination at the plant site and of the groundwater.</li></ul> <ul><li>Contribute an appropriate and fair financial sum towards clean-up works at the contaminated plant site and surrounding areas, and towards the cost of health monitoring and healthcare for the affected population.</li></ul> <ul><li>Disclose all information about the leaked Methyl Isocyanate gas, and other chemicals released, including their toxicity, long-term impact on people’s health, and the most appropriate medical treatment.</li></ul> <p>The letter follows Amnesty International’s request to Dow’s customers and suppliers in <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa20/7817/2024/en/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Bhopal: 40 Years of Injustice</em></a><em> </em>to consider withdrawing their business from the company if it fails to rapidly act to offer remedy and prevent future harms in Bhopal.</p><p>It says Dow became directly linked to its adverse human rights impacts from the disaster, and the ongoing failure to remediate them, from the moment in 2001 it purchased Union Carbide Corporation, which was the ultimate owner of the plant at the time of the gas leak. </p><p>The letter says the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights make clear that companies should exercise their leverage to prevent or mitigate adverse impacts to the greatest extent possible. In choosing not to do so, and disavowing its human rights responsibilities, Dow is failing to live up its own publicly stated commitments to international business and human rights standards.</p> <h2>Background</h2> <p>At about midnight on 2 December 1984, a leak of about 40 tonnes of lethal Methyl Isocyanate gas (MIC) from the pesticide plant in Bhopal, then owned by US-based Union Carbide Corporation, quickly killed thousands of people in the informal housing around the plant. It is estimated that more than 22,000 people have died prematurely as a direct result of exposure to the gas, with deaths continuing to occur.</p><p>More than 500,000 were injured or have suffered permanent harms, including through the inter-generational impact of MIC exposure on reproductive health, and through water sources contaminated by chemicals left on the site.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2024 13:28:43 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/global-dow-shareholders-must-help-ensure-justice-for-victims-of-bhopal-disaster</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Come For the Satanic Eclipse, Stay For the Commie Earthquake, Illegal Invaders and Bootlegged Baby Parts</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/further/come-for-the-satanic-eclipse-stay-for-the-commie-earthquake-illegal-invaders-and-bootleg-baby-parts</link><description><![CDATA[
  25. <img src="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/a-swiss-student-in-spacesuit-costume-flies-a-paper-rocket-during-a-mission-to-mars-science-project.jpg?id=51934111&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=367%2C0%2C887%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>
  26. Lordy. Our apocalyptic circus of bigots, morons, loudmouths and clowns has stayed in town too long. To wit: a ceaseless GOP House "shit show," racists freaking out at too-tanned NCAA players "invading," pastors cancelling autism awareness as "demonic," Klan Mom decrying black market harvesting of baby organs - thanks Dr. Fauci! -  and now, from God or the Gazpacho police, an earthquake and end-of-the-world eclipse telling us to "repent." First, maybe  repent for an electoral college that gave us this lunacy. </p><p>The seedy grandstand for the mayhem is the (barely) GOP-controlled House, which for a while has been "imploding in plain sight." After skipping town for Easter,  they left behind yet more flops earning yet more <a href="https://x.com/Victorshi2020/status/1771242265853186053" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">declarations</a> of "Republicans in disarray." Amidst a "Great Resignation" that's <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/16/congress-lawmakers-resignations/?itid=lk_inline_manual_21" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">seen </a>the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/16/congress-lawmakers-resignations/?itid=lk_inline_manual_21" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a>highest number of lawmakers quitting in 40 years, two more Reps - Gallagher and Buck - are bowing out, leaving the GOP a paltry one-seat majority. The showboats of what Raskin calls the "chaos-and- cannibalism caucus" still don't <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4549392-chip-roy-republicans-who-vote-for-funding-bill-are-the-ones-risking-the-election/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">like </a>their Speaker for (five months late) keeping the government open with a $1.2 trillion spending bill, Comer's Biden impeachment effort has crashed and burned like his other "investigations," the sole accomplishments of the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/days-in-session" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">shortest</a> and <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/19/2212619/-It-s-official-GOP-House-did-a-whole-lot-of-nothing-this-year" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">least productive </a>House session since the Great Depression are re-naming some Veterans Affairs clinics and authorizing a coin to mark the Marine Corps' 250th anniversary, and even George Santos says he's (inexplicably) running again as an Independent 'cause the GOP is too "embarrassing." </p><p>
  27. For once, he has a point. Self-righteous blowhards venting ignorance and hate, they seem to do nothing but voice imaginary grievances when grownups do things they don't like. When the effort to remove  Fani Willis from Trump's election interference case  failed, they <a href="https://www.meidastouch.com/news/maga-melts-down-o..." target="_blank">shrieked,</a>   "It's all rigged!" and "There is no justice in America today." When Kamala Harris touted an <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-launches-national-extreme-risk-protection-order-resource-center" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">effort</a> to keep guns away from dangerous people, yahoos who send out Christmas cards of their kids cradling AR-15's bayed, "What the hell is this evil?" When a Transgender Day of Visibility <em>coincidentally</em> fell on Easter, they <a href="https://twitter.com/BasedMikeLee/status/1774291695133503834" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ranted </a>it was part of a "years-long assault on the Christian faith" and the Catholic Biden - to Trump, one of "MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA,"  would now "commandeer" Christmas with a Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing and say what? When a Florida school planned <a href="https://www.wptv.com/news/palm-beach-county/region-c-palm-beach-county/lake-worth-area-private-school-cancels-autism-awareness-week-after-pastor-calls-it-demonic" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> Autism Awareness Week</a>, the pastor cancelled it as "demonic" (like "Santa Clause") because "anything that exalts itself above the name of Christ should be brought down."</p><p>And when racist moron and Michigan state rep Matt Maddock - who boasts he's America's "Most Conservative" pol, tried to imprison "war criminal" Gretchen Whitmer for requiring masks during COVID, got <a href="https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/matt-maddock-trump-favorite-ousted-michigan-gop-caucus" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">kicked out </a>of the  House GOP Caucus as too conspiracy-y even for them, <a href="https://twitter.com/matthewmaddock" target="_blank">posts</a> things like "the left hates farmers," "government controls your air conditioning," "bail reform kills people," "communists are lonely, bitter, angry cowards with sad kids," and whose wife is under indictment as one of Michigan's fake electors - saw three buses at Detroit Airport and some scary dark guys alight, <a href="https://twitter.com/matthewmaddock/status/1773143040724451761" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">squawked </a>they were "illegal invaders" and "<a href="https://twitter.com/matthewmaddock/status/1773430260811399511" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">everyone knows" </a>Whitmer is "bussing in illegals and asking (us) to shack them up in their homes for $6,000 a year." Except they were the <a href="https://brobible.com/tag/gonzaga-bulldogs/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gonzaga Bulldogs</a> basketball team there to <a href="https://twitter.com/MalloryMcMorrow/status/1773324424504111303" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">play </a>in the NCAA Mens Sweet 16 March Madness against Purdue.<a href="https://apnews.com/article/michigan-republican-march-madness-6217e5cda406954993a299329b98572b" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> Confronted </a>with his "spectacular stupidity" and the facts, even by supporters, he <a href="https://twitter.com/matthewmaddock/status/1773157120524894656" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">snarled </a>back - “Sure kommie. Good talking point" - and <a href="https://twitter.com/matthewmaddock/status/17731198..." target="_blank">doubled down</a> with replacement theory: "How long till the #HostileMedia calls the invaders homesteaders?" He seems nice.<br/></p><p>The implausible queen of this GOP rabble is grandstanding, hate-mongering, self-promoting "purveyor of political pageantry" Marjorie Taylor Greene, a useless, performative troll most recently appointed to chair the "useless, performative impeachment" of Homeland Security's Alejandro Mayorkas by Mike Johnson in hopes of shutting her up as she <a href="https://x.com/RepMTG/status/1771209341015617711" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tries </a>to oust him for keeping the government running, or something. Among other memorable ventures since her Jewish Space Laser and school-shooting-survivor-harassing days: Inventing an Antifa plan for a "Trans Day of Vengeance," arguing 8-to-10-year-old Uvalde victims should've been armed with JR-15 rifles, <a href="https://twitter.com/mtgreenee/status/1771683515223..." target="_blank">spreading</a> a replacement theory video about "the Democrat (sic) open border plan to entrench single party rule," and after Mexico's president proposed several U.S. actions to ease border crossings, refuting them with a <a href="https://x.com/RepMTG/status/1704941489485136277?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">"Declaration </a>of War" against Mexican cartels for fentanyl trafficking, even though it's mostly produced in China and smuggled into this country not by migrants but U.S. citizens or other legal visitors.</p><p>Last month she also hosted, with <a href="https://greene.house.gov/forms/form/?ID=63" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">live stream,</a> a "Hearing Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting" to explore "the "aborrent (sic) truth of the industrial abortion complex (to) profit off the murder of unborn babies." She'd announced the event, based on repeatedly <a href="cleared" target="_blank">debunked</a> conspiracy theories that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit - including grafting "the scalps of unborn babies onto the backs of rodents in a study funded by Anthony Fauci under the NIH" - with a beaming photo of herself that, noted one observer, "looked oddly bubbly for a hearing on dead babies." Her two speakers were David Daleiden, who in 2015 released heavily edited videos of himself as a fake biomedical researcher trying to buy fetal tissue, after which Planned Parenthood successfully <a href="https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/fd/de/fddee2ba-5ae1-4a89-9c4f-7e72c8a4db02/210218-fact-sheet-cmp-fetal-tissue-backgrounder-prod.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">sued </a>him for $2 million; and  Terrisa Bukovinac, who in 2022 was <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2023/08/indicted-anti-abort..." target="_blank">convicted</a> with another anti-abortion activist of blocking access to a health clinic, stealing 115 aborted fetuses from a medical waste truck, burying most of them,  and keeping five they<a href="https://sg.news.yahoo.com/marjorie-taylor-greenes-..." target="_blank"> claimed </a>without evidence were "born alive and then murdered."</p><p>Greene said she wanted the<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXIYGBMoIsc" target="_blank"> hearing,</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXIYGBMoIsc"></a> attended by five people though she <a href="https://uproxx.com/viral/marjorie-taylor-greene-ba..." target="_blank">invited</a> every member of Congress, to be a graphic, gory, in-your-face rebuttal to genteel talk of "women's health care." And so it was, with her use of pointedly incendiary language and images: "abortionists," not doctors, "babies sucked out while still alive" by an instrument "more powerful than a household vacuum," "tiny brains and hearts," "over 63 million people murdered in the womb" - misinformation so prevalent House Dems <a href="created" target="_blank">created </a>a website to refute it - and no <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/roe-wade-embryo-research/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">mention </a>of vital medical advances facilitated by fetal tissue <a href="https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2016/fetal-tissue-research-weapon-and-casualty-war-against-abortion" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">research. </a>Still, wise-acres weren't buying it: "Baby Organ Harvesting is my Norwegian Death Metal cover band," "Marge hungry," "Do you know how many fetus livers it would take to make a single kabob?", "Curious how she'll tie it into Hunter's dick pics," "She should do her genealogy - she would have led lots of witch trials if she was alive back then," and, "This is absolutely ridiculous. No one harvests baby organs. Infants are only run through hydraulic presses to make baby oil, and THAT'S IT!"</p><p>But not even abortion, or terrorists collapsing Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, or earthquakes in what Rudy Giuliani <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/rudy-giuliani-earthquakes-targeting-communist-us-states-1887603" target="_blank">called</a> "the communist states" of New York and New Jersey - with its epicenter at Trump's Bedminster golf course deemed "Ivana's revenge" -come close to the "Super Bowl for Conspiracists" that is an <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/solar-eclipse-conspira..." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">eclipse. </a>Marge was<a href="https://twitter.com/mtgreenee/status/1776282144416..." target="_blank"> on it</a><a href="https://twitter.com/mtgreenee/status/1776282144416...">: </a> "God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent." So was her squinty-eyed, right-wing boyfriend Brian Glenn - <em>Wonkette </em>calls him "the <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/r/entryeditor/fucking" target="_self">dude</a> she has been having what we assume is very sweaty, pale, Godly white-person sex with" - who very scientifically "<a href="https://www.rawstory.com/brian-blenn-eclipse-signal/" target="_blank">explains</a> astronomy" and eclipses with, “I think we're going to see where the largest kind of a spiritual awakening in this country that people are realizing how much evil has creeped (sic) into (our) lives." He also <a href="https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1776640004715839767" target="_blank">warned </a>of its fallout, "combined with earthquakes, and this infestation of locusts that have been dormant for years that all of a sudden will attack mankind, and oh then throw in Joe Biden trying to get into a war with eye-ran." He seems nice too, also smart.</p><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1777337618490933584">
  28. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  29.        <a href="https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1777337618490933584"></a>
  30. </blockquote>
  31. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p>There are about three, mathematically predictable solar eclipses a year, and many unpredictable earthquakes caused by shifting tectonic plates, not God being mad about gay marriage; both have occurred since creation, and you can read about them <a href="https://t.co/fSGlPrB6Y3" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here </a>and<a href="https://t.co/gt4sFeAZqM" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> here. </a>Regardless, news of these events made the right wing lose whatever's left of their minds. Alex Jones - not much left there - <a href="podcast." target="_blank">called t</a>he eclipse "a dress rehearsal" for declaring martial law if Trump wins the election. He <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/t/solar-eclipse/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">cited </a>“Major Events" like "Masonic rituals (to) usher in a New World Order," noting the eclipse trajectory in the U.S. forms an “Aleph” and “Tav,” the first and last Hebrew letters, signaling end times. Another genius saw a "perfect cover story if our terrorist government wanted to take down the power grid and cause mass chaos while blocking citizen communications (to) unleash a dictatorship" before Trump can win. And to ensure "no Satanic forces come through" during the eclipse, Steve Bannon <a href="https://crooksandliars.com/2024/04/bannon-mass-eclipse-satan" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hosted </a>a live Mass with newly <a href="https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2023/11/11/231111d.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">fired</a>, financially sketchy, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/pope-francis-dismiss..." target="_blank">MAGA Bishop</a> Joseph Strickland "in prayer and penance for our country."</p><p>It didn't help that a nerdy NASA project in Virginia measuring changes in electric and magnetic fields - Project APEP, short for Atmospheric Perturbations Around the Eclipse Path, referencing  the snake god of darkness - planned to shoot rockets at the moon during the eclipse. To one wise wingnut, that meant there would be "rituals performed by Masonic, Satanic, Esoteric, Gnostic, Brotherhood of the Snake and other occult-like groups." And because if it's  Monday, it must be the frog-raining end of days, several red states, Oklahoma and Texas among them, issued various disaster warnings and executive orders because when in doubt or fear just go totalitarian. In Arkansas, "out of an abundance of caution," lying Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders <a href="https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/apr/05/sanders-declares-state-of-emergency-in-arkansas/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> declared</a> a state of emergency over a possible "backlog of deliveries by commercial vehicles transporting essential items of commerce" during maybe four minutes of darkness. In truth, <a href="https://twitter.com/middleageriot/status/1777100232397885708" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">noted </a>one of her constituents, "The real emergency is that "the governor of an entire state is a fucking moron."</p><p>In honor of the fraught occasion, <em>Fox News </em>took its usual, balanced, erudite approach and went with  racist paranoia on the subject of the dangers of an eclipse at the border even though it was so cloudy it wouldn't have much effect. Host Dana Perino: <strong></strong>"A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground." Host Bill Hemmer: Officials bracing for higher traffic under cover of darkness "means a <em>real opportunity</em><strong></strong> for smugglers and cartels and migrants to <em>come right in...</em>" Vile correspondent Bill Melugin<strong>: </strong>"While everybody is gonna be looking up, if you're looking down here at the border, here's some of what you're gonna see." He offers video of "a surge of illegal alien evaders" (two poor guys scrambling through brush) with, "You'll see illegal immigrants dressed in dark clothing, sometimes camouflage...And you'll see outnumbered border agents trying to respond as these guys <em>flood</em>  in" (one sad guy gets caught) "as they're trying to sneak into the United States." Cruelty, as usual, is the point here, and the eclipse gives us one more ugly, feckless chance to flaunt it.</p><p>Four years ago, amidst a pandemic needlessly killing hundreds of thousands, the "leader" of all these loathsome, inept people was showing them how it's done, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n83WQC06t4&t=43s" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">sputtering </a>nobody's thanking him for the great job he's doing, yet more tests bring more cases: "So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'" Somehow, now it's worse. For the eclipse, he<a href="https://twitter.com/Mollyploofkins/status/1777285027740414056" target="_blank"> released</a> a deeply weird, insanely narcissistic ad declaring, to the soaring music of <em>2001, </em>"The Most Important Moment In Human History." As awe-struck crowds watch, we see the sun slowly <a href="https://time.com/6964573/trump-bizarre-solar-eclip..." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">eclipsed</a> by....his wattled, blubbery, grotesque silhouette. Comments: "The most accidentally honest ad Trump's team ever put out," "this fucking moron won't even let himself be upstaged by the solar system," "what a freak," "not a cult," "how can I make this about me?," "going all in with the anti-Christ thing," "Stephen Miller is no Leni Riefenstahl," "fat boy ate the sun," "total eclipse of the brain," "dark side of the buffoon," "totalitarian eclipse." For a laugh, someone <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1bz72th/trump_posts_new_eclipse_photo/?share_id=tmTgHMHm7eKOsD_KaUbBn&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">added</a> light passing ear to ear. Not a laugh: "So, Trump will bring darkness to us. Got it."</p>]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2024 08:05:25 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/further/come-for-the-satanic-eclipse-stay-for-the-commie-earthquake-illegal-invaders-and-bootleg-baby-parts</guid><dc:creator>Abby Zimet</dc:creator><media:content medium="image" type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/a-swiss-student-in-spacesuit-costume-flies-a-paper-rocket-during-a-mission-to-mars-science-project.jpg?id=51934111&amp;width=980"></media:content></item><item><title>Common Cause Urges SCOTUS to Rule Quickly in Trump v. US to Avoid Perception of Bias</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/common-cause-urges-scotus-to-rule-quickly-in-trump-v-us-to-avoid-perception-of-bias</link><description><![CDATA[
  32. <p>Today, Common Cause filed an <a href="https://www.commoncause.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-0408-Trump-v-US-Immunity-Amicus-Brief.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">amicus brief</a> in the Supreme Court of the United States urging the court to decide <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/23a745.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Donald J. Trump v. United States</em></a> expeditiously in order to avoid perceptions of political bias and to allow a lower court trial of the former president on conspiracy and corruption charges to be held before the November presidential election.</p><p>“The American people deserve a trial and a verdict on these serious charges <em>before</em> they go to the polls in November,” said <strong>Virginia Kase Solomón</strong><strong>, president of Common Cause</strong>. “The presumptive Republican presidential nominee stands criminally charged with conspiracy and obstruction stemming from his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It is critically important that the Supreme Court rule quickly, as it has in past presidential cases, so that justice can be rendered before Americans cast their ballots.”</p><p>The brief emphasizes that Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution for the criminal acts alleged in his pending indictment is “untenable and poses a direct threat to the rule of law.” In urging the High Court to rule quickly in the case, the Common Cause brief cites previous cases – including <em>United States v. Nixon</em> and <em>Bush v. Gore</em> – where the Justices acted quickly when the presidency was at stake and the public interest demanded speed.</p><p>The brief asks the Supreme Court to act with the same expediency it did earlier this year in deciding <em>Trump v. Anderson</em> in the former president’s favor when it ruled that states cannot disqualify any candidate for federal office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In light of that ruling, the brief warns that a failure to act quickly could open the Court to the perception that it is attempting to influence the 2024 election in favor of Trump.</p><p>“Any impression that the Supreme Court is slow-walking a decision about presidential immunity when they have acted with speed in <em>Anderson, Bush and Nixon</em> could dangerously undermine public faith in the court,” said <strong>Kathay Feng, vice president of programs for Common Cause.</strong> “The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved above the main entrance to the Supreme Court, and Americans expect no less. There is no caveat.”</p><p>A grand jury indicted Trump in In August 2023, on four charges related to his actions to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the trial should move forward.</p><p>Oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States will be held on April 25.</p><p>To read Common Cause’s amicus brief, <a href="https://www.commoncause.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-0408-Trump-v-US-Immunity-Amicus-Brief.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">click here</a>.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Apr 2024 20:25:32 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/common-cause-urges-scotus-to-rule-quickly-in-trump-v-us-to-avoid-perception-of-bias</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Trump’s Legal Argument Threatens Constitutional Democracy</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/trumps-legal-argument-threatens-constitutional-democracy</link><description><![CDATA[
  33. <p>Public Citizen today filed an <a href="https://u7061146.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=u001.gqh-2BaxUzlo7XKIuSly0rCxXwZR0L9lem-2B5XpAYqIXzMF5mip17uJeQSXRepNCjUJKY8UfLWg8OGGOFLVgOXU7-2B-2FU1wCBsJVfZnk3Bhn5qHMKaj92mDcl7sJYsDQ-2FnQ-2BNQa3kjthMgvkkHh-2FzNH3YXA-3D-3DV3jQ_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPyhKWA4iiF6MSH6OJ2-2BUNtBAHsM9WPS35FVKJVmFTjW3m2IwgUo3u6HhitOgrMHtKgCE9epr3PLoQ3Dbn013y3z3WslD0tQitK4w-2BF8fXHwju9NW-2Bq-2FmLm1Y9A53e6-2Blu2sXc9y-2B4DvzvrRqB8cvnBgIUXLY8DQcjiJwXwV9-2FXJL0cMp8vneoXxhOBo56dczIHLzUAMLFSmolzEZEUMh5td9O15htXLOULyqWMAXsDDRoy4hU82xw1ECm-2B2nmr6OiU0HbQbbXbzjBWvtlrX9ySK9tzlHJZer4e6yShiTTi6RddKtSl5DsPaX99OgCuAr8-3D" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">amicus brief </a>in <em>Trump v. United States</em>. Donald Trump is charged in that case with federal crimes allegedly committed to keep himself in power and prevent Joe Biden, the lawful winner of the 2020 Presidential election, from taking office. In the U.S. Supreme Court, Trump is arguing that he is immune from prosecution because, he claims, the acts with which he is charged fall within the scope of a president’s duties. </p><p>Public Citizen’s <a href="https://u7061146.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=u001.gqh-2BaxUzlo7XKIuSly0rCxXwZR0L9lem-2B5XpAYqIXzMF5mip17uJeQSXRepNCjUJKY8UfLWg8OGGOFLVgOXU7-2B-2FU1wCBsJVfZnk3Bhn5qHMKaj92mDcl7sJYsDQ-2FnQ-2BNQa3kjthMgvkkHh-2FzNH3YXA-3D-3DoWgz_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPyhKWA4iiF6MSH6OJ2-2BUNtBAHsM9WPS35FVKJVmFTjW3m2IwgUo3u6HhitOgrMHtKgCE9epr3PLoQ3Dbn013y3z3WslD0tQitK4w-2BF8fXHwju9NW-2Bq-2FmLm1Y9A53e6-2Blu2sXc9y-2B4DvzvrRqB8cvnBgIUXLY8DQcjiJwXwV9-2FXJKhVjtgogOUcYOjozjc5Ryvmh9Ym-2BVCQnMUSyylC9Ssd5TOz76HChyfCxi9Y9diwOcqERfceqCOaWlChFnZjkziLV-2FQOoNoN6N8BvtTmsS2esW-2FtPpumC1HvJNpyX9uVZB5dhK1Kk5JOoD-2BTjnMqzno-3D" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">amicus brief</a> explains that the acts cannot reasonably be claimed to fall within a president’s duties. A president has no specific constitutionally assigned role in the conduct of presidential elections. Any assertion that a president’s authority empowers him to conspire to overturn the result of a valid election and retain power beyond his term in office would be absurd.</p><p>“Accepting a view of the outer limits of presidential authority that would sweep in a conspiracy to overturn an election and remain in office unlawfully would have exceptionally broad implications and threaten severe damage to our constitutional democracy,” the brief states. “The Constitution does not silently prohibit holding a former president accountable to the law when he is alleged to have engaged in criminal violations aimed at overthrowing our constitutional form of government.”</p><p><strong>“Trump’s legal theory defies common sense and would enable an almost limitless tyranny. Nothing in the Constitution – which aims to prevent tyranny – supports Trump’s theory,” stated Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.</strong></p>]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Apr 2024 20:09:56 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/trumps-legal-argument-threatens-constitutional-democracy</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>CODEPINK’s Ann Wright and Medea Benjamin Join a Coalition of Human Rights Activists on International Civilian Aid Flotilla to Break the Siege of Gaza</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/codepinks-ann-wright-and-medea-benjamin-join-a-coalition-of-human-rights-activists-on-international-civilian-aid-flotilla-to-break-the-siege-of-gaza</link><description><![CDATA[
  34. <p>CODEPINK's Ann Wright, Medea Benjamin and hundreds of other human rights activists with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition are due to set sail on multiple vessels in mid-April to carry 5,500 tons of aid for Gaza. Their mission, aside from delivering the much-needed humanitarian aid, is to challenge Israel's illegal blockade of Gaza amid dire conditions, including widespread hunger and lack of medical attention intentionally caused by Israeli policies. Time is running out for many in Gaza as Israel threatens an all-out attack on Rafah and experts warn hunger and disease could soon surpass casualties from bombings.</p>
  35. <p>“I have been walking the halls of Congress every day since October, going to rallies every weekend, writing letters of outrage to President Biden every night–and nothing has worked to stop Israel from murdering thousands upon thousands of innocent people. What more can I do? I can go on this flotilla to try to break the criminal siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza,” said CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin. </p>
  36. <p>“President Biden waited six months, waited until 33,000 had been killed, mostly women and children, before picking up the phone and demanding that Netanyahu reduce civilian harm, allow more aid in, and protect aid workers,” said CODEPINK Ret. Army Colonel and former U.S. Diplomat Ann Wright. “But even if Israel allows more humanitarian aid in, it is still bombing Gaza with U.S. bombs, shooting innocent people and imprisoning the 2.2 million people that live in Gaza. Getting humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza is urgent, but it is not sufficient. We must end Israel’s unlawful, deadly blockade as well as Israel’s overall control of Gaza. That’s why we need this flotilla, filled with unarmed civilians, human rights observers from 30 countries, to challenge Israel’s brutal grip on the Gaza strip.”</p>
  37. <p>Israel's longstanding neglect of its responsibility as an occupying power to safeguard the health and wellbeing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has escalated into genocidal actions, including using starvation as a weapon of war. Israeli leaders have openly declared intentions to collectively punish Gaza's population. The Freedom Flotilla opposes Israel's authority over aid and will refuse any inspection of our cargo. For safety and effective aid distribution, the flotilla will deploy numerous international humanitarian observers from diverse backgrounds and countries.</p>
  38. <p>Despite air drops of food and temporary docks, Israel continues to block thousands of aid trucks from entering Gaza through land crossings. The International Court of Justice's rulings on January 26 and March 28 emphasize Israel's obligation to ensure the safety and security of Palestinians in Gaza, including facilitating humanitarian assistance without obstruction.</p>
  39. <p>"The International Court of Justice's preliminary measures ordered against Israel are very clear," comments Ismail Moola of South Africa's Palestine Solidarity Alliance, which is part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. "The court's ruling requires the whole world to play their part to stop the genocide unfolding in Gaza, including unobstructed access to vital aid. While our governments fail to lead in these urgently required humanitarian responses, people of conscience and our grassroots organizations must act to take leadership. When governments fail, we sail!"</p>
  40. <p>The Freedom Flotilla Coalition is a non-partisan international coalition of campaigns that stand for freedom and human rights in Palestine. They have sailed since 2010 with the goal of breaking the blockade of Gaza, and in solidarity with Palestinians cries for freedom and equality. Their non-violent direct action missions support the dignity and humanity of Palestinians, working with civil society partners, rather than any party, faction or government.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Apr 2024 14:54:35 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/codepinks-ann-wright-and-medea-benjamin-join-a-coalition-of-human-rights-activists-on-international-civilian-aid-flotilla-to-break-the-siege-of-gaza</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>To Tame the Savageness Of Man: We Honor You, Sir</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/further/to-tame-the-savageness-of-man-we-honor-you-sir</link><description><![CDATA[
  41. <img src="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/martin-luther-king-s-casket-borne-on-a-mule-drawn-cart-moves-through-atlanta.jpg?id=51919861&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=0%2C0%2C1264%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>Mournfully - and astoundingly for those of us who so clearly remember it - we mark the 56th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on a Memphis motel balcony in what is a dark America still riven by the same hate that killed him, and still woefully failing to fulfill his goal of racial equity. Robert Kennedy, the long-ago night of King's death: "It is perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are, and what direction we want to move in." </p><p>Civil rights "trailblazer, prophet, and champion of justice," King was struck down at just 39 by a single bullet to the neck on April 4, 1968. He had come to Memphis the day before to help striking sanitation workers rally for better wages and safer working conditions. The night of April 3, speaking extemporaneously to an overflow crowd at  the Mason Temple, he gave what became his prophetic final <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKWCxKq0i1k" target="_blank">speech</a>, urging his audience, "We've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. "We've got some difficult days ahead," he warned. "But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop...And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy  tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."</p><p>The next evening, as King stood on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel, he was fatally <a href="https://www.krmg.com/news/trending/martin-luther-k..." target="_blank">wounded</a> by a rifle fired from a rooming house across the street; he lost consciousness and was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital about an hour later. In one later book <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1H3268/" target="_blank">account, </a>when his "grieving disciples" - Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and several others - left the hospital, "back they went to Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel." It was both a grim spot to reconvene, with King's blood still staining the balcony cement, and an apt place to mourn with its remnants of his last day on earth - his attaché case, a crumpled white shirt, a half-filled Styrofoam coffee cup, his Bible. In their anguish, they brooded: What would happen to their movement, who could take King's place, how could they help stop the rioting that had swiftly broken out at the news, "the violent antithesis of everything for which King had stood."</p><p>To millions of black Americans, King represented their hopes for the commitment of white America to racial equality. To them, the next day's <em>New York Times</em> obituary<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1968/04/05/archives/martin-luther-king-jr-leader-of-millions-in-nonviolent-drive-for.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> read</a>,  King was "the prophet of their crusade for racial equality, their voice of anguish, their eloquence in humiliation, their battle cry for human dignity...He forged for them the weapons of nonviolence that withstood and blunted the ferocity of segregation." Said Stokely Carmichael, "When (America) killed Dr. King, (she) killed the one man of our race that this country’s older generation, the militants and the revolutionaries, and the masses of black people would still listen to." In the motel room that night, though, King's comrades found "consolation in a 19-inch Philco Starlite television set" where they saw former Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy <a href="https://korbel.du.edu/news-events/all-articles/april-1968-mlk-and-rfk" target="_blank">announce</a> the death to a mostly black crowd in Indianapolis. </p><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1775902071843078162">
  42. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  43.        <a href="https://twitter.com/ACLUFL/status/1775902071843078162"></a>
  44. </blockquote>
  45. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p>One account describes that 24 hours as "a tragic, extraordinary moment in American history" when two of the nation's most visible leaders, one black, one white, each offered "elegant statements of belief" - King, his final  night before, Kennedy, coincidentally campaigning as the news hit and word of the riots began to spread. In his book <em>The Promise and the Dream, </em>David Margolick <em> <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1H3268/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a></em><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1H3268/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1H3268/" target="_blank">describes</a> a "wary" relationship between two men often "shadow-boxing," "not pals" - the racial and cultural divide was too broad - but allies. Said the ever-generous John Lewis, who worked with both, "They were friends and didn’t even know they were friends." Kennedy's staff tried to dissuade him from speaking to the crowd - too politically and literally dangerous - but Kennedy was newly at home and welcome in the black community, and so stubborn he liked to echo press criticism by calling himself “Senator Ruthless."</p><p>He spoke soon  after King was declared dead; as audio starts,  you hear him ask aides, "Do they know about Martin Luther King?" Standing on the back of a flatbed truck, wrapped in his big brother’s old overcoat, he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2kWIa8wSC0" target="_blank">spoke </a>for seven minutes; he held some notes, glanced briefly at them, then ignored them. "I have bad news for you," he told the crowd in the city's worst neighborhood. "Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight." Shrieks from the crowd. Kennedy calmly went on. "(King) dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort," he said. "In this difficult time, (it) is perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are and what direction we want to move in." "For those of you who are black," he said, they may wish to move toward bitterness, hate, revenge; or they could try to understand, have compassion and move past "the injustice of such an act."</p><p>Incongruously - impossibly, in today's dumbed-down America - he summoned "my favorite poet Aeschylus," the ancient Greek often deemed the father of tragedy: "Even in our sleep, pain which we cannot forget falls drop by drop from the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." What America needed was not  division, hatred, violence, but "love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black." Silence from the crowd; he stands, unsure. Then, a  slow rise of applause. Aeschylus, again. "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world," he said. "Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and our people."</p><p>To King's grieving allies watching from the Lorraine Motel, "Bobby Kennedy’s was the only voice we identified with that night - we were grateful he was out there." In that fraught moment, said Andrew Young, "We wanted to get on television and tell people not to fight, not to burn down the cities...to get the message out 'this is not what Dr. King would have you doing,' but the press didn't want to talk to us." In the next days, violence erupted in over 125 American cities across 29 states; nearly 50,000 federal troops occupied urban areas, with 40 deaths, many arrests and injuries, vast property damage. But Indianapolis stayed calm. For many, it seemed Kennedy had "picked up (King's) torch," Young said, but they also somehow questioned "how long he would get to hold it." Two months later, after winning the California primary on June 5, Kennedy was shot and killed in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel.</p><p>This week, <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MLK?src=hashtag_click" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">marking </a>the mournful anniversary, members of the King family still sought to address RFK's decades-old, still-unrealized plea "to ask what kind of a nation we are," and then righteously act on it. "Daddy, it's been 56 years, and your presence is still dearly missed. Your words bring comfort and direction despite your absence from your earthly body," <a href="https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/1775901182894145887" target="_blank">wrote </a>daughter Bernice King. And <a href="https://twitter.com/TheKingCenter/status/177585578..." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">from </a><em>The King Center,  </em>"We honor you, sir." Relatives made a rare, painful trip back to Memphis  and the site of King's murder, now the National Civil Rights Museum, to <a href="https://www.aol.com/mlk-jr-family-reflects-assassination-181847578.html" target="_blank">decry </a>the enduring evils of racism, poverty, war and <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/04/04/king-family-memphis-anniversary-political-violence" target="_blank">political violence</a> he preached and fought against. In this very, very dark moment" in a right-leaning America, they said, "We are asking for us all to stand together, to walk together, to continue his work together to make real his dream of the beloved community." And may he rest in power. </p>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Apr 2024 04:30:22 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/further/to-tame-the-savageness-of-man-we-honor-you-sir</guid><dc:creator>Abby Zimet</dc:creator><media:content medium="image" type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/martin-luther-king-s-casket-borne-on-a-mule-drawn-cart-moves-through-atlanta.jpg?id=51919861&amp;width=980"></media:content></item><item><title>New Rule Protects Civil Servants, Keeps Federal Workforce Independent</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/new-rule-protects-civil-servants-keeps-federal-workforce-independent</link><description><![CDATA[
  46. <p>The Biden administration today issued a <a href="https://u7061146.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=u001.gqh-2BaxUzlo7XKIuSly0rC6JqFHmTar4Eu5BZUgJhvDH7J4Djz2ZVVl5-2FqUH8GCBB3G0LK9OYWc1xVnD209TW-2Fs-2Fv5cdhFhTiBUUZF5J-2FQCypKbcok2StWfD2FlGv-2FWkH3gOdozj2a7-2FwkNYB9xVO-2B5Dp7slyjtafbJHE1xNhlTZol3poiNBhtqmTxgMmBb2n-2FIWkV4B4yZO8GsNr8nw4CuI34NyRlJsFRqD-2B02HG5yx55TiRYIWtD3T7ROlI4K3k7x2ow9B9nTAwyaYVbbw4Ao09ZgWG-2FJH3zvEORo4ZHrO7dzqFhzFaj4d7CtdkiJM7lk6yUC3Jc54bjSZ5FWQu-2FA-3D-3DunG1_ciJuXYfraQrmEXzxHGEcWNeiZKy7tdzQawxB4GG8-2FLPyhKWA4iiF6MSH6OJ2-2BUNtBAHsM9WPS35FVKJVmFTjW3m2IwgUo3u6HhitOgrMHtKgCE9epr3PLoQ3Dbn013y3rj8gR983ou7XAeDwOlmMInOK46cbqd0GUpbsHD08DU9pl-2FdEjzDNGNxslkdO8VjEeZaiUPNZ8-2FYFZMAKoqktGmhuWk75AdgBbVU026PrbeIvBGl-2Fyln5sdKtbvPl-2BxykfmVOEUQE2Ct34BkRRxlo7t8Zp37bK2pkzEOceXVOaa-2F0eA1elqgvmB6bF4bSYPcs6sLPE0qDyRXN1iv8k8SSaCB0ap6tc4VE8qRbh6XJiHU-3D" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">final rule</a> that protects 2.2 million federal civil service employees from political hirings and firings. Bitsy Skerry, regulatory policy associate for Public Citizen, issued the following statement:  </p><p>“An independent federal workforce ensures that our government works for all of us, not for one party or one person. Our nation’s civil servants, the workhorses of our democracy, deserve strong protections to ensure their jobs are based on a foundation of nonpartisan merit and expertise, not partisan bias and loyalty. Civil servants across the country, not just in Washington, D.C., serve the public interest every day by delivering our mail, ensuring the food and medicine we purchase is safe, and protecting our national security. Safeguarding their jobs protects us all, and the Biden administration’s new rule does just that.” <br/></p>]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:23:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/new-rule-protects-civil-servants-keeps-federal-workforce-independent</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>EPA Announces Nonprofits to Lead National Green Bank Implementation</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/epa-announces-nonprofits-to-lead-national-green-bank-implementation</link><description><![CDATA[
  47. <p>The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) <a href="https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-announces-20-billion-grants-mobilize-private-capital-and" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">announced today that three non-profits</a> will manage the distribution of the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), a $14 billion fund that can help leverage additional private sector capital to significantly expand clean energy projects across the country. The fund—a part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) created by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—is designed to increase access to affordable financing for critical clean energy technology and efficiency projects. The EPA also announced that five non-profits will manage $6 billion in awards under the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA). According to White House officials, 70% of the GGRF capital announced today will flow to low-income and disadvantaged communities. Vice President Kamala Harris and EPA Administrator Michael Regan will formally announce these award selections later today in North Carolina.</p><p>The NCIF builds on the success of over 40 existing state and local green bank programs that are using limited public funding to leverage greater private sector investment in clean energy. These programs have <a href="https://coalitionforgreencapital.com/preliminary-findings-american-green-bank-consortium-already-hits-a-record-7b-in-public-private-investment-in-2023/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">mobilized $21.8 billion in cumulative investments for clean energy projects</a> since 2011, including $7 billion in 2023 alone, according to the Coalition for Green Capital.</p><p><strong>Below is a statement by Steve Clemmer, the director of energy research and analysis at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).</strong></p><p>“Establishing the National Clean Investment Fund is pivotal in catalyzing the transition to an equitable, decarbonized economy. Using seed money from public funding to unlock additional private sector investment and new low-cost financing is a cornerstone in the transition to clean energy, and this program ensures the associated benefits are accessible to all. It is hopeful to see a list of non-profits that have a proven track record of financing clean energy in low-income and disadvantaged communities.</p><p>“With the lead nonprofit institutions and a consortium of partners in place, the hard work begins to ensure capital and resources are directed to the communities most in need. This is a unique opportunity to empower all communities, businesses, and families to benefit from the clean energy transition. While the NCIF is a significant step forward, UCS research shows clearly that even more ambition by all levels of government is needed to meet U.S. climate goals and advance environmental justice.”</p><p>UCS strongly advocates for the acceleration of renewable energy deployment across the country, with a particular focus on ensuring the transition to clean energy is done equitably and does not leave vulnerable, historically burdened communities behind. UCS is a member of the Equitable and Just National Climate Forum (EJNCF), which put forward <a href="https://ajustclimate.org/pressrelease.html?pId=1033" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">joint recommendations on the GGRF</a> urging the EPA to design and implement this fund to maximize investments and benefits delivered to disadvantaged and low-income communities. UCS has also worked closely with the Coalition for Green Capital and state green bank programs, as well as contributing to a <a href="https://www.regulations.gov/comment/EPA-HQ-OA-2022-0859-0345" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">joint letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)</a>’s design and implementation.</p><p>A <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/about/news/ucs-study-finds-us-can-reap-significant-economic-health-benefits-meeting-climate-goals" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">recent UCS study</a> found that for the United States to meet its climate goals—including cutting economywide heat-trapping emissions in half by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions no later than 2050—wind, solar, and other renewables would need to nearly triple from 22% of U.S. electricity generation in 2021 to 60% in 2030, and 92% in 2050. The analysis also found that the IRA’s clean energy incentives provide important momentum for the United States to make major near-term emissions reductions, but those could be at risk if fossil fuel use is expanded simultaneously. Additionally, while the IRA roughly doubles the current pace of annual emissions reductions to about 3% per year through 2030, the country will need to further accelerate its reductions to roughly 5% per year to achieve its climate targets.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:23:23 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/epa-announces-nonprofits-to-lead-national-green-bank-implementation</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Organizing Beat Back Corporate Greed in Medicare Advantage Rate Hike</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/organizing-beat-back-corporate-greed-in-medicare-advantage-rate-hike</link><description><![CDATA[
  48. <p>People’s Action today released the following statement from People’s Action Health Care for All Campaign Director Aija Nemer-Aanerud in response to <a href="https://link.mediaoutreach.meltwater.com/ls/click?upn=u001.Cxca7ZR4luLBgVe7ThjcK4OXjAuUX3bpDvEgqxtcG9NJfsD3TLW8tyun47nDBbj0LqDZqHAo2K4zaVAGcTcXF2mFaaTK1NepvJKri3AGh0XxwLNuH4T0Y65cXdnb5s2KuiGrJb-2FGcxO2MkShCVd18Sic5bZ-2FSXeDnFq95qZji3iz-2F-2B4lu-2FO-2FaXNm9TkCU-2B4k7UWN_s0lTyPdoyuzn-2FJTE9fjR8nSlryGpLl-2B7mxK4it06DfIN-2FfMDgHUrTLsHq1xjCi7DsRwuNLZHG0oMrCbh2kGg2ng2IAXslweDTidVkKMvY5uorNcfKbPmJ3bJbOIKXQbSUEg-2Bk8Ja40WmxRptGu2rConXzytNE49FQAP2EQpXpPL0UrOY-2FSy3sygfXuPsuFaV-2FewXcM4SR6B1FHEIgeYlkanXyp8FEfNZz1GPX0mXxBFtbsiP9qAW5-2BZbXJh21u9PKAY2uKumNZk-2F9UH1L-2FLMpktlv4cgVUVyvQPlMoeeWgaZenjk52SZpkzxYTCs1iCL8Gk517Aqx9QUrozSHf-2Btllnqigg4OVs8ZWfnhZthKApjkkmLaqKbguT8Vwa49Izl" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the Biden administration’s final notice of a 3.7% rate increase in 2025 for so-called “Medicare Advantage” plans</a>. The announcement represents a victory over greedy insurance corporations that overcharge the Medicare program, engage in systemic denials of care to increase profits–and had lobbied the administration for a larger rate increase. </p><p>“The private insurance industry is used to getting its way, but this year we out-organized them.</p><p>“Medicare is one of the most popular government programs because it delivers health care to people when and where they need it. Private insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare spent millions in advertising and lobbying in Washington to demand more of our public money for privatized, so-called ‘Medicare Advantage’ plans.</p><p>“We countered their lobbying by helping people share their stories with lawmakers about how Medicare Advantage plans harmed them by denying care when they needed it most. We commend the Biden administration for listening to our people and refusing to cave to the insurance lobby’s demands. </p><p>“We urge President Biden to do more to rein in abuse of the Medicare program by private corporations and reinvest public funds into expanding and strengthening traditional Medicare.”</p><p>Medicare Advantage is a privatized form of Medicare in which the federal government gives Medicare funds to private health insurers to administer Medicare plans. These corporations use much of this money to invest heavily in advertising while skimping on care. These privatized plans create opaque bureaucracies and extraordinary fees. The corporations that run these private plans profit while denying care, spending 15-25% less than traditional Medicare on their enrollees' medical services while being paid 23% more. <br/></p>]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Apr 2024 19:17:22 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/organizing-beat-back-corporate-greed-in-medicare-advantage-rate-hike</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>125+ Organizations Call for Confirmation of Adeel Mangi, Denounce Anti-Muslim Attacks on Historic and Qualified Nominee</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/125-organizations-call-for-confirmation-of-adeel-mangi-denounce-anti-muslim-attacks-on-historic-and-qualified-nominee</link><description><![CDATA[
  49. <p>The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, joined by 125 national, state, and local organizations, <a href="http://email.media.civilrights.org/c/eJxczbGOrSAQgOGn0Y6TmQERC4rb-B7jMHi4OYpB3OffbLbb-s-fL8XkkbMdNeKMBN77BcZ3TAF9IsWZnWAWtoFDsupgDgF1wbFEAnLggNCBm-C10TYtm5-ZJvYbuMHBoanwS8pX-bSyv_v9qm0fP_Hd-3UP9t9A60Drnz7Q2vSuTxMdaEWazN7qc93mabua-7mu2rrJtRlOqh9z8LmX20g9c2kH91LPscX_9RwcSD2OeqamfPzaPXJgwZ_Ta3J5EZeTR1xm4eBySjr2mIU2cEQSJgC1MqNCBmvBayAO8h0AAP__aYJgrA" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote to senators today</a> expressing strong support for the confirmation of Adeel Mangi to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and condemning the baseless and bigoted attacks being waged against him. The organizations represent the breadth and depth of the civil and human rights community, including faith groups, labor unions, and organizations fighting for LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom, women’s rights, voting rights, disability rights, and immigrant, economic, and environmental justice. <br/><br/> “Mr. Mangi is fair-minded, brilliant, and has shown throughout his impressive legal career a steadfast dedication to equal justice for all, and he will be a tremendous judge on the Third Circuit,” the groups write. “His work has secured landmark victories and has made a positive impact on people’s lives, and his confirmation would bring to the appellate bench important but underrepresented civil rights experience that is greatly needed in the federal judiciary.” <br/><br/> Despite his impeccable qualifications, Mr. Mangi has faced manufactured and baseless attacks that should never be endured by any nominee. “The anti-Muslim tropes and unfounded assertions against him are the kinds of stereotyping that have long driven Islamophobia, which is on the rise. They also send a dangerous message to communities across the nation and potential future lawyers and judges that their path to the bench and desire to serve our nation will be obstructed by unfounded accusations based solely on their identity,” the groups write. <br/><br/> The letter urges senators to assess Mr. Mangi’s nomination based on his credentials rather than his religion, race, or ethnicity, and it acknowledges that racism and hate facing many communities across the nation — including hate and bias experienced by Muslim, South Asian, and Arab communities — is further stoked by the kind of dangerous attacks that have surrounded Mr. Mangi’s nomination. <br/><br/>  “Mr. Mangi is eminently qualified and will be a fair-minded judge. No one should tolerate baseless and bigoted attacks and lies that are being created by an orchestrated campaign to take down the first Muslim federal appellate judge,” the letter states. “History will remember this powerfully important moment for the future of equal justice in America.”  <br/>  Read the letter <a href="http://email.media.civilrights.org/c/eJxczbGOrSAQgOGn0Y6TmQERC4rb-B7jMHi4OYpB3OffbLbb-s-fL8XkkbMdNeKMBN77BcZ3TAF9IsWZnWAWtoFDsupgDgF1wbFEAnLggNCBm-C10TYtm5-ZJvYbuMHBoanwS8pX-bSyv_v9qm0fP_Hd-3UP9t9A60Drnz7Q2vSuTxMdaEWazN7qc93mabua-7mu2rrJtRlOqh9z8LmX20g9c2kH91LPscX_9RwcSD2OeqamfPzaPXJgwZ_Ta3J5EZeTR1xm4eBySjr2mIU2cEQSJgC1MqNCBmvBayAO8h0AAP__aYJgrA" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>. </p>]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Apr 2024 14:23:17 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/125-organizations-call-for-confirmation-of-adeel-mangi-denounce-anti-muslim-attacks-on-historic-and-qualified-nominee</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Sunrise Movement Calls Thousands of Wisconsin Voters for Ceasefire</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/sunrise-movement-calls-thousands-of-wisconsin-voters-for-ceasefire</link><description><![CDATA[
  50. <p>Sunrise Movement has continued its support for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza by calling youth voters in the lead up to the April 2nd primary in Wisconsin. This follows mobilization by Sunrise volunteers in Michigan and other states with uncommitted on the ballot. <br/> <br/> This effort for voters to vote uninstructed in Wisconsin is the latest effort by progressives to show the Biden administration that its current leadership on Gaza is out of touch with the Democratic Party’s base. <br/> <br/> “Biden’s best chance to succeed in November is by supporting an immediate and permanent ceasefire and ending unconditional military aid to the Israeli government, " said <strong>Michele Wiendling, Political Director of Sunrise Movement</strong>. “The president is hemorrhaging the support of young voters by aiding in the destruction of people’s lives and homes in Gaza. If President Biden wants to defeat Trump, he must listen to young people, people of color, and the working class who put him in office in 2020 and immediately change course.”<br/> <br/> This follows direct actions that young people have taken including at Biden’s 2024 campaign headquarters where Sunrise members demanded the president finance “<a href="https://sunrisemovement.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=03c6bd2c940b3a70bc44f0b69&id=a07c51a539&e=f84d8b0489" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">climate not genocide</a>” and interrupted fundraisers demanding more climate <a href="https://sunrisemovement.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=03c6bd2c940b3a70bc44f0b69&id=6810eaa1e4&e=f84d8b0489" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">action</a>. <br/> <br/> “Gaza is a climate voter issue. Sunrise Movement is fighting for clean air, drinkable water, and safe communities. We believe the people of Palestine deserve that too. There has been more emissions produced by US financed bombs in Gaza than the emissions of <a href="https://sunrisemovement.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=03c6bd2c940b3a70bc44f0b69&id=ab9138f2eb&e=f84d8b0489" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">20 small countries</a>. We need Biden to fight for peace so that we can collectively fight for more climate wins in the future.” said <strong>Aru Shiney-Ajay, Executive Director of Sunrise Movement.</strong></p>]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Apr 2024 12:12:45 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/sunrise-movement-calls-thousands-of-wisconsin-voters-for-ceasefire</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Beyond Any Reasonable Circumstances</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/further/beyond-any-reasonable-circumstances</link><description><![CDATA[
  51. <img src="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/some-of-the-international-aid-workers-for-world-central-kitchen-killed-in-israeli-strike.jpg?id=51891293&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=0%2C0%2C1274%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>Honestly, we were going to mark the date with a spoof report - light in the darkness! - of Israel razing multiple pavilions at the upcoming Venice Art Biennale because they mistook talk of a new hummus place for threats of a new Hamas attack. But Gaza's latest news is too gutting: Hundreds of burned, tied, crushed bodies left at al-Shifa hospital, and seven World Central Kitchen workers murdered <em>delivering food to starving people.</em> WTF. Sorry, but no room for light in this savage "genocidal machine." </p><em></em><p>Progressive art forum <em>Hyperallergic</em> brought a bleak April Fool's Day to bear on the horrors: Nearly  33,000 dead, most  women and children, over 75,000 wounded, many thousands still buried, starvation spreading. In<em> Pavilions Flattened at the Venice Biennale, </em>they <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/881325/israel-flattens-n..." target="_blank">reported</a> that international artists and curators woke to find their exhibits leveled by a paranoid Israel that misinterpreted buzz about a new hummus joint as word of a Hamas action; they noted the U.S. quickly offered to pay for rebuilding while congratulating Israeli authorities for "dealing with the threat posed by the local hummus stand, which (they) later sanctioned for its allegorical ties to terrorism as outlined in a haiku provided to them by the Israeli military." Another piece <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/881440/berlin-museum-rem..." target="_blank">reported </a>that Germany's National Gallery has removed all artwork depicting rivers or seas "to prevent creating the conditions for the probability of the possibility of inadvertently alluding to the chant ‘From the River to Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.'”</p><p>Still, it couldn't counter grim real news in the wake of Israel's retreat from al-Shifa medical complex after a brutal two-week assault in which they  <a href="https://twitter.com/idfonline/status/1774769532432707591" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">claimed</a> to have killed 200 "terrorists" and arrested over 500 people "associated with terrorist organizations." Refuting them, aid workers <a href="https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6246/In-a-week,-Israeli-army-executes-13-children-in-and-near-Al-Shifa-Hospital" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">said </a>they executed scores of civilians, including over a dozen children, <a href="https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1774541424391848057" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">killed</a> at least 21 patients, and left dozens critically wounded. A journalist <a href="https://twitter.com/HossamShabat/status/1774741588226273379" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reported </a>"hundreds of bodies" outside, many burned, tied up, or crushed by a bulldozer; many more are believed buried under the charred rubble of what was Gaza's largest hospital. Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a volunteer surgeon, <a href="https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/1774776150..." target="_blank">charged </a>Shifa's destruction is "a critical component of Israel's plan to genocidally make sure Gaza becomes an uninhabitable place"; he also mourned the murder of a friend and brilliant young surgeon, one of 345 doctors, nurses or paramedics killed by Israel: "Remember their names and remember their stories."</p><p> The same goes for seven aid workers, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/apr/02..." target="_blank">updated</a> from original reports of five,<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/isra..." target="_blank"> killed </a>by Israel while bringing food to starving people. We repeat<em>: </em><em>Bringing </em><em> food to starving people. </em>They were a Polish, Australian, dual US/Canadian worker, three British nationals and a Palestinian translator; all were killed. Volunteers for chef José Andrés' <em>World Central Kitchen</em>,  they were in a three-car, IDF-approved convoy hit in succession - by <em>three drone strikes</em>, one after the other, as they ran from car to car; they'd just left a warehouse in Deir al-Bala where they unloaded some of the 400 tons of food delivered hours earlier by  a ship from Cyprus at WCK's nearby newly built jetty. The attack was one of many strikes that have killed multiple aid workers and at least 400 hungry people seeking the food they carried. As yet, only the Australian has been named as<a href="https://twitter.com/natemook/status/1775089905833546145" target="_blank"> "effervescent</a>...shining light of comfort" Zomi Frankcom. Here she is, days before with "Chef Oli," happily showing off WCK's Deir al-Balah kitchen.</p><p><br/></p><blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C48Kn7eNKtr/?utm_source=ig_embed" data-instgrm-version="4" style="background:#FFF; border:0;
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  68. </blockquote><script async="" defer="" src="//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js"></script><p>After the IDF strike, the bodies of five dead were brought to a makeshift morgue at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. A Palestinian Red Crescent paramedic who helped transport them said the bodies were not fully blown apart due to the WCK protective gear they wore; hospital staff displayed the bloodied foreign passports of three. Warning: <a href="https://twitter.com/islamicnews_de/status/17749118..." target="_blank">Here </a>is graphic video of the scene. On the WCK site, Andrés' <a href="https://twitter.com/chefjoseandres/status/17749472..." target="_blank">wrote </a>he was "heartbroken" by the loss of "our sisters and brothers," "angels" he'd worked with around the world: "Humanitarian aid workers and civilians should NEVER be a target. EVER...They are not faceless, they are not nameless." He added Israel must "stop this indiscriminate killing (and) stop using food as a weapon. No more innocent lives lost." WCK has paused deliveries, and Gazan media denounced "another Israeli massacre." Australian <em></em> P.M. Anthony Albanese <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/2/australias-pm-demands-full-accountability-over-death-of-gaza-aid-worker" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">called </a>the death of Frankcom "completely unacceptable" in what he deemed  "beyond any reasonable circumstances."</p><p>An Israeli spokesman said the IDF will conduct "a thorough review (of) this tragic incident" and it makes "extensive efforts to enable the safe delivery of humanitarian aid." Israel has said many things. On the same day last week,  the U. N. both passed a resolution demanding a ceasefire and released a draft report, <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session55/advance-versions/a-hrc-55-73-auv.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Anatomy of a Genocide</em></a>, finding "reasonable grounds to believe" Israel is committing genocide in Gaza with "an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group...transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable." Israel <a href="https://www.barrons.com/news/un-expert-accuses-israel-of-several-acts-of-genocide-in-gaza-ba3ae5a4" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">said </a>the report was "an obscene inversion of reality." They also <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147916" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">said</a>, as at least 27 Gazan children die of starvation and hundreds of thousands more face it, they will no longer allow UNRWA food convoys into northern Gaza. Now they're murdering others  bearing food.  You wanna talk obscene? By any "reasonable circumstances" -  a shard of humanity, probity,  justness, mercy -  Israel is it.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Apr 2024 06:52:05 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/further/beyond-any-reasonable-circumstances</guid><dc:creator>Abby Zimet</dc:creator><media:content medium="image" type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/some-of-the-international-aid-workers-for-world-central-kitchen-killed-in-israeli-strike.jpg?id=51891293&amp;width=980"></media:content></item><item><title>Biden Administration Finalizes Long-Term Truck Pollution Standards</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/biden-administration-finalizes-long-term-truck-pollution-standards</link><description><![CDATA[
  69. <p>Today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) <a href="https://www.epa.gov/regulations-emissions-vehicles-and-engines/final-rule-greenhouse-gas-emissions-standards-heavy-duty" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">finalized federal standards</a> to strengthen the nation’s emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles.</p><p>The federal truck standards will cover model years 2027-2032 and reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that trucks and buses emit, cleaning up pollution from large vehicles on the roads like transit buses, school buses, delivery trucks, and garbage trucks. </p><p>In addition to contributing to the climate crisis, these vehicles are a major threat to public health for millions of Americans and especially dangerous for marginalized communities across the nation that often live next to major freight corridors due to the history of red-lining. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are harmed by diesel pollution every year. Although trucks <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/bio/patricio-portillo/epa-its-time-act-we-need-clean-trucks-now" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">make up less than 10 percent of vehicles on the road</a>, they emit the majority of hazardous air pollutants from vehicles, including 63 percent of smog-forming NOx pollution.</p><p><a href="https://www.chalmers.se/en/current/news/e2-heavy-electric-trucks-cheaper-than-diesel-goods-trucks/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Research shows</a> that pollution-free, electric heavy-duty trucks are cheaper to own and operate over the lifetime of the vehicle compared to a polluting version, saving fleets money. There are already about <a href="https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/news/california-approves-groundbreaking-regulation-accelerates-deployment-heavy-duty-zevs-protect" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">150 existing medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission truck models</a> that are commercially available in the U.S. today.</p><p><em><strong>In response to the final rule, Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous released the following statement:</strong></em></p><p>“Today’s EPA announcement highlights the significant health, economic, and climate benefits that cleaner trucks deliver. From California to New York, communities across the country are suffering under the constant traffic of dirty freight.</p><p>“Despite the truck and oil industries’ relentless lobbying to weaken and delay these life-saving standards, the Biden Administration’s new emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks and buses are an important step to address this harmful pollution. In combination with the recently announced federal charging investments in trucking and the clean transportation investments in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, these standards will help to move the needle on electrifying our biggest, dirtiest vehicles.</p><p>“We’re pleased to see the Biden Administration’s continued progress to address public health and climate, but even more is needed to address heavy-duty vehicle pollution. The Sierra Club will continue its advocacy pushing truck manufacturers to quickly ramp up the pace towards zero-emission trucks and we urge the Administration to keep the momentum up and grant California’s waivers quickly.”</p>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 Mar 2024 16:14:43 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/biden-administration-finalizes-long-term-truck-pollution-standards</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>A Guy Named Me: The More You See It, The More Incredible It Is</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/further/a-guy-named-me-don-t-look-away</link><description><![CDATA[
  70. <img src="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/trump-supporters-rally-in-california-after-he-was-arraigned-on-fraud-charges.jpg?id=51837137&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=960%2C0%2C320%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>So the sick kingpin of "Red America's fever dreams" is still here - jabbering, menacing, unraveling, "weak and desperate" and hazardous to our health. Lately, he's busy going to court, misspelling "Biden," likening  himself to Jesus, paying Nazi tribute to "the J6 hostages," claiming migrants aren't people, and in an ungodly new grift - "Happy Holy Week!" - hawking God-Bless-the-USA Bibles to "make America pray again." By all means pray. But advice from the wreckage: "Don't look away."</p><p>As if the staggering transgressions now coming due - rape,  lies, defamation, theft, decades of fraud, a deadly insurrection to overthrow the democracy he was ostensibly leading - aren't enough to showcase his overweening shamelessness, even at feckin' <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/03/youve-given-me-fame-and-fortune-and-everything-that-goes-with-it" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">golf</a>, new revelations still churn up from the ugly past. The first public testimony about the tattered final days of his so-called presidency <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/26/white-hou..." target="_blank">reveal</a> a White House that had "let down all guardrails," grasping at frenzied, bonkers conspiracy theories - “smart thermostats" manipulated voting machines! - as he struggled to cling to power. And his campaign's baffling decision to go with the apocalyptic strategy of asking, "ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?" - thus recalling a once-in-a-century pandemic that cost a million American lives, many unnecessarily - has <a href="https://digbysblog.net/2024/03/26/four-years-ago-t..." target="_blank">given </a>Biden the chance to attack his "predecessor's" grievous crimes against science, reason and competence. "Remember when he said, 'inject bleach’?” Biden said at a recent fundraiser. "Think I’m making this up?”</p><p>The tottering party he's wrangled into submission, meanwhile, has "stepped on rake after rake" in the effort by James Comer and House Republicans to impeach Biden, or find <em>any trace </em>of his supposed corruption. After many thousands of pages of (fruitless) records and testimony, the hearings have become so renowned  for their  "<a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/4554133-the-cosmic-ineptitude-of-house-republicans-biden-impeachment-inquiry/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">cosmic ineptitude"</a> the White House <a href="https://twitter.com/IanSams46/status/1770577655798091802" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">responded </a>to the latest with a succinct "LOL," face-palm emoji and, "Call it a day, pal"; one Democrat suggested it dug up more evidence to impeach Trump a third time than anything on Biden. Some sordid <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1770522604513755483" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">witnesses </a>spoke from prison; the most astounding testimony came from former Giuliani crony Lev Parnas, of Zelensky-phone-call-fame, who asserted, "I have never wavered from saying there was no evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine - because there truly <em>was none</em>." He added everyone who said there was knew there wasn't, and that the bogus info was "spread by the Kremlin." In nearly a year of traveling the globe in search of evidence, "I found precisely zero proof of the Bidens’ criminality."</p><p>A do-nothing, right-tilting GOP has floundered in most other endeavors. Running short on funds being rapidly shoveled into her father-in-law's legal messes, the party led by personal trainer and Nepotism Chair Lara Trump just ditched its already paltry efforts to recruit minority, largely Latino voters, evidently sticking with the persuasive tagline," Make the RNC White and Rich Again." Its new entrants are high-end, Jewish Space-Laser freaks like Hitler-quoting, Christian nationalist Mark Robinson, North Carolina's GOP  <a href="https://digbysblog.net/2024/03/05/choking-on-my-own-blood/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">nominee </a>for governor, and to run that state's schools, or nascent "socialism centers," QAnon's anti-Satan Michele Morrow, who once <a href="https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1768635518630203708" target="_blank">urged</a> "Death to all traitors" with an<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200514183159/https://twitter.com/_stand_firm/status/1260752149052624896" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> image </a>of Obama in the electric chair. And as their 91-felony-laden leader implausibly preps to return to power, his former cranks, crooks and "best people" - Stone, Miller, Manafort, Lewandowski - are scurrying out from their caves and cells to join him. Two hold-outs: Pence and Dick Cheney, who says "there has <strong></strong>never been (a) greater threat to our republic," except maybe him.</p><p>Lately he's mostly in court or playing golf or seething online, but he <em>has</em> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGJwCUHVgc0" target="_blank">held</a> two recent "rallies," in Ohio then  Georgia. They were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/14..." target="_blank">not pretty</a>. As he sputtered and gabbled and lied through increasingly brutish, unintelligible speeches - "We have becrumb a nation," "our president Barack Hussein Obama," "Joe Biden's dissss...ervice speech" - the awful spectacle makes it "almost impossible to believe he exists," <a href="https://twitter.com/acitrano" target="_blank">writes </a>Anthony Citrano. "It's as if we took everything that was bad about America, scraped it up off the floor, wrapped it up in an old hot dog skin, and taught it to make noises with its face." Nancy Pelosi is more<a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-trump-telling-completely-170118316.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> succinct</a>: "You wouldn’t allow him in your house, much less the White House." It's not even word salad; it's word mush. He can't <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1769107735054880829" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">pronounce </a>"bite" or "largest." He <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1768084611798626519" target="_blank">says,</a> "They released Hillary Clinton who used bleach bit and Bill took it out in his socks." If he's not elected "it's gonna be a bloodbath." Migrants are "animals...saying 'I'm going to use your kitchen'...They're not people." On his call with Zelensky, Dems "were taped and they got caught." Nope. A complete fabrication. </p><p>Because "the next bottomless pit is always just around the corner," he's now also channeling Goebbels et al, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/j6-choir-trump-national-anthem-capitol-riot-79618f1f2a689c308dfdc34d54d327ea" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">opening</a> rallies by honoring "the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages" with a booming rendition of "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2023/trump-j6-prison-choir/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Justice For All</a>," a mutilated national anthem that celebrates the thugs who committed violence in his name. In this, <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/trump..." target="_blank">writes </a>Will Bunch, Trump alarmingly replicates "<a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-horst-wessel-song" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">The Horst Wessel Song</a>," the tribute to a young <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Horst-Wessel" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">brownshirt </a>and martyr killed in 1923's Munich beer hall <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/adolf-hitler-coup-prison-beer-hall-putsch-180983207/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> putsch</a> that became a Nazi Party anthem saluting those who "offer (themselves) up as a sacrifice" for the greater fascist good. Leni Riefenstahl'<em>s</em> <a href="https://museums.nuernberg.de/documentation-center/nazi-party-rallies/triumph-of-the-will" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Triumph of the Will</em></a>, which glorifies Hitler's massive Nuremberg rally, opens with the Wessel song as a swastika-adorned plane swoops in carrying the beloved Führer. The propaganda value of that not-so-long-ago song and rally, enshrining and ritualizing victimhood, <a href="writes:" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">makes</a> a through, scary line to the Jan. 6 Chorus and Trump's repulsive embrace of it. The message of both: Violent insurrection is patriotism, so  stand by.</p><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1767279721774244167">
  71. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  72.        <a href="https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1767279721774244167"></a>
  73. </blockquote>
  74. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/i-listened-to-trumps-rambling-unhinged-vituperative-georgia-rally-and-so-should-you" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a>In Georgia, more of the same: J6 Chous, frenzied  lies, much slurring, goat milk ads, America a drug-infested, crime-ridden abyss where "they're weaponizing law enforcement (against) Joe Biden's top and only political appointment (sic) - a guy named me." The wind blew down the teleprompters, so it was mostly gibberish: "Our great member of center of stage, and then I got angry because I said, no, I want to be in the center, those guys don't come close, so we had to have a different number, it didn't have to be 10, it had to be 9 or 11, it had to be something...Pundits say the attacks on me will be violent, they say, uhhh, they say...Biden said it, he said, you know what their whole plan is? It was just released the other day, their whole plan is to go after Trump in every way possible...And another 6 million dollars that they got for hostages from us...and 10 billion dollars for electricity to Iraq...and all comploymants (sic) of... an incompetent...Cognitively impaired? Heh, you'll know when I'm cognitively impaired....You'll be the first ones to know....."</p><p><em>The New Yorker</em>'s Susan Glasser wrote a piece <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/i-listened-to-trumps-rambling-unhinged-vituperative-georgia-rally-and-so-should-you" target="_blank">titled,</a> "I Listened to Trump's Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally, and So Should You." She argues too many of us ignore the "insane <a href="https://twitter.com/MikeSington/status/1767279721774244167" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">oration</a>" and "flamboyant new set of untruths" from a candidate "whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality." Contrasting Biden's SOTU critiques of Trump's "offenses to American democracy," she noted Trump's nearly 5 dozen Biden <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/14/trump-crazy-new-claims-fact-checked/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">references</a> were epithets - stupid, weak, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/us/politics/trump-biden-georgia-rally.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">stutter</a> - of "a puerile bully" with too many grievances and enemies to count attacking a guy alternately portrayed as "a drooling incompetent (and) a corrupt criminal mastermind" whose hellish reign has given us "rampaging migrants" and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin." Our "simple, apocalyptic choice": Doomsday with Biden, or "liberation from these tyrants and villains" with him. Bonkers bullshit, all. See it for yourself, however queasily, she advises: "Watch his speeches. Share it widely. Don’t look away."</p><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1772703096545710583">
  75. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  76.        <a href="https://twitter.com/BidenHQ/status/1772703096545710583"></a>
  77. </blockquote>
  78. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p>This week, he was again <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/nyregion/trump-.." target="_blank">in court</a>, still <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-melts-down-new-york-fraud-bond-deadline-1234993724/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> ranting </a>and whining - "I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG! HOAX! WITCH HUNT!" - even as he got a WTF break when his $464 million bond for fraud got trimmed to $175 million. He <a href="https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1772267373090799821" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">babbled b</a>riefly to the press: "You can't have an election in the middle of a political season...We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already... We''ll bring crime back to law and order." Online: "The cheese is sliding off his cracker at an ever-increasing rate." It was so bad Biden <a href="https://twitter.com/Jemsinger/status/1772333099096965299" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">responded </a>to the wheezy gobbledegook:"Trump is weak and desperate, both as a man and a candidate." Facing off against the shell of an crazed and loathsome con man, Biden has reportedly long been "<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/biden-trump-stop-steal-election-2024-1234993149/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">preparing</a> for every insane scenario that anyone could think of" in the upcoming election - crafting a legal and political "superstructure," partnering with a vast network of attorneys to conduct "doomsday-style" war games," drafting emergency pleadings and legal motions for swing states and otherwise exploring "a range of authoritarian possibilities."</p><p>For now, Trump keeps<a href="https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-truth-social-s..." target="_blank"> grifting.</a> In  "some truly bizarre stock market shenanigans," he managed to <a href="https://apnews.com/article/trump-media-truth-social-nasdaq-stock-106d7c423174ca1d7cc3cc9a3f3897a0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">merge </a> his "dorky little fake Twitter clone"<em> Truth Social</em> with a "gloriously sketchy" Digital World Acquisition Corp and list a new-born DJT  stock on <em><em>Nasdaq</em></em> - <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/25/politics/fact-check-trump-nyse-truth-social-story/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">with </a>a "mind-bogglingly nonsensical" story of why it's not <em>New York Stock Exchange</em> - for over $6 billion, despit<em>e</em> <em>Truth Social's  </em>"microscopic" <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-social-media-company-valued-5-billion-merger-2024-3" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="">revenue</a> of $3.5 million while losing $49 million. The <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href="https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/who-is-fueling-the-surge-in-shares-of-the-trump-spac-fcfb6f92?st=iifspykt4c82w8y" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reported </a>the  stock has soared <em>not </em>thanks to  institutions trading it - they're not - but to MAGA cultists who argue  "This is a Truth Movement" and "are absolutely hellbent on handing Donald Trump all their money." Just as logically do they <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-suggests-hes-jesu..." target="_blank">liken </a>to Jesus a thrice-married, multi-philandering crook, rapist and slum landlord charged with decades of fraud: one fan <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/112156804755767402" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote,</a> "It's ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you...We love you." Maybe that's what sent him scurrying, also this very week, to hawk his obscene <a href="https://godblesstheusabible.com/?sld=trump" target="_blank">God Bless the USA Bible </a>to "make America pray again."<br/><em></em> </p><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-suggests-hes-jesus-hearing-164507905.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"></a><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1772658279908253974">
  79. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  80.        <a href="https://twitter.com/TrumpDailyPosts/status/1772658279908253974"></a>
  81. </blockquote>
  82. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p>Which he does, of course, so often and so devoutly. Who can forget the time in June 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd, when Trump boldly <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/donald-trump-church-photo-op-evangelicals" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">marched </a>out of the White House, across a LaFayette Square beset by more godly police beating the crap out of peaceful protesters for racial justice, and posed for the cameras outside historic St John’s Church, lifting into the righteous air a sacred Bible, upside down. A reporter asked, "Is that your Bible?” He responded, "It's a Bible." Lordy and hallelujah. Never mind that, in Trump's teeny hands, the Bible is a PR tool to help him lie and cheat. That hateful, racist cult members with no use for Jesus'  woke "welcoming the stranger" rubbish<a href="attendees" target="_blank"> welcome,</a> instead, his mocking of poor, brown, homeless or stuttering people. That self-described evangelicals rarely <a href="https://relevantmagazine.com/faith/church/new-data-suggests-over-40-percent-of-self-identified-evangelicals-attend-church-once-a-year-or-less/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">go to </a>church but go on TV, like MAGA preacher Lance Wallnau, to <a href="https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1770873525835829639" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">compare </a>"leftists" to the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg: "I don't think it's people anymore - you're dealing with demons. So just remember this, Christian: You're gonna listen to demons talking through people."</p><p>Happily, it's just plain, God-fearing, migrant-hating, money-grubbing people like Trump and his "very good friend" Lee Greenwood who have now recycled a 9/11 commemorative Bible from 2021 into a cheesy, profane, nationalist screed, dubbed the <em><a href="https://leegreenwood.com/product/god-bless-the-usa-bible/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">God Bless the USA Bible</a>,</em> for a quick 60 bucks a shot. "Happy Holy Week!" Trump wrote Tuesday while urging people to buy his latest hustle "for your heart, for your soul." Citing yet another "very sad thing going on in our country," he claimed "Christians are under siege (but) we're gonna get it turned around" by peddling these crappy Bibles with a wildly inappropriate American flag on its cover and, inside, the equally jingoist "Founding Father (sic) documents" - the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance<em> and </em> chorus to Greenwood's tinny, mawkish "patriotic anthem," <em>God Bless The USA. </em>"Easy-to-read, large print and (suspiciously) <a href="https://kingjamesbibledictionary.com/BibleFacts" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">slim </a>design<em>, </em>this Bible invites you to explore God’s Word anywhere, any time (in) an easy reading experience," says the website. "The perfect gift! Order now!"</p><blockquote class="rm-embed twitter-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1772721673550086249">
  83. <div style="margin:1em 0"></div> —  (@)
  84.        <a href="https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1772721673550086249"></a>
  85. </blockquote>
  86. <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><p>For any skeptics - cynics, really - among you, the website also clarifies that money from purchases of God's and Lee Greenwood's word will not go to Trump's presidential campaign, or presumably his current, 91-count, very expensive legal issues, though it "uses  Donald J. Trump's name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC," which was <a href="https://search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/corporationsearch/SearchResultDetail?inquirytype=EntityName&directionType=Initial&searchNameOrder=CICVENTURES%20M210000044030&aggregateId=forl-m21000004403-3a3d1546-28ce-4220-adee-cbeb943dd850&searchTerm=CIC%20VENTURES%20LLC&listNameOrder=CICVENTURES%20M210000044030" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">established</a> by a former Trump aide and a Trump-linked lawyer in Palm Beach, and its address is Trump International Golf Club, and it also made Trump digital training cards and those preposterous fake gold sneakers, but otherwise, nope, no money will go to Trump. The website's FAQs also generously addresses another sticky issue: "What if my Bible has sticky pages?" "No worries," it says. "This is very common with new Bibles that have gold gilding around the edges of the paper. For your convenience, we have provided links to a <em>Youtube </em>video that does a wonderful job of explaining how to break your new Bible in." And don't forget: It's "the perfect gift for family members, friends, special occassions (sic) and much more!"</p><p>Sadly, the new Bible has been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os4Hb3fD_B0&t=467s" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">criticized </a>in some misanthropic liberal circles as "utterly craven and debased." This response is confounding, given what is clearly Trump's long, deep, devout engagement with and  knowledge of scriptural teachings as seen in  multiple videos and speeches. To wit: "There are so many things, so many things you can learn from the Bible," he has said. "Actually, it's an incredible book. There are so many things you can learn from it." While he says "the Bible is the most special thing," he remains  understandably reluctant to name favorite verses: "I wouldn't want to get into it, because that's very personal, the Bible means a lot to me." However, he will name a favorite author - Tom Wolfe - though there's some confusion whether he has or hasn't read <em>Bonfire of the Vanities</em>. Still, he definitely knows "an eye for an eye," and having to choose between the Old or New Testament he'd pick, "Probably...equal." "I just think the whole Bible is an incredible..." he says. "The Bible, the more you see it, the more incredible it is." Can we get an Amen?</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;"><em>"But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the Lord, like the splendor of the meadows, shall vanish. Into smoke they shall vanish away." </em>- <a href="https://biblehub.com/nkjv/psalms/37.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Psalm 37:20</a>, New King James Version<br/> </p>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 Mar 2024 13:45:43 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/further/a-guy-named-me-don-t-look-away</guid><dc:creator>Abby Zimet</dc:creator><media:content medium="image" type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/trump-supporters-rally-in-california-after-he-was-arraigned-on-fraud-charges.jpg?id=51837137&amp;width=980"></media:content></item><item><title>Biden Administration Finalizes Weak Endangered Species Rules</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/biden-administration-finalizes-weak-endangered-species-rules</link><description><![CDATA[
  87. <p>The Department of the Interior and Department of Commerce today finalized their proposed <a href="https://www.fws.gov/project/endangered-species-act-regulation-revisions" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">revisions</a> to three sets of regulations that implement the Endangered Species Act’s listing and consultation procedures.</p><p>Of the 31 harmful changes made in 2019 to the Act’s regulations, only seven are fully addressed and corrected in today’s final rules. Those include restoring the precautionary “blanket-rule” for threatened species. Today’s finalized rules restored the long-standing prohibition on consideration of economic impacts when deciding whether to list species as threatened or endangered. The rules also remove barriers to designating as critical habitat unoccupied areas that are vital to the recovery of the nation’s wildlife and plants.</p><p>The new final rules fail to undo changes made in 2019 to the consultation process that ignore cumulative impacts to listed species and in general make it far easier for industries to receive approval for projects that destroy the habitat of countless species nationwide.</p><p>“This was a massive missed opportunity to address the worsening extinction crisis,” said Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We needed bold solutions to guide conservation as the climate crisis drives more and more animals and plants to extinction. Instead we’re mostly still stuck with the disastrous anti-wildlife changes made by the previous administration.”</p><p>The final rules retain a number of harmful provisions governing the responsibility of federal agencies to avoid jeopardizing protected species or harming their critical habitat.</p><p>In particular, one rule requires federal actions to affect species’ critical habitat “as a whole” before real habitat protections are put in place. This is particularly harmful for wide-ranging animals like the northern spotted owl, polar bear or gulf sturgeon that have large critical habitat designations but are still at risk of extinction.</p><p>The rules also let federal agencies off the hook for past harms to endangered species from things like dam or highway construction by deeming these projects part of the “environmental baseline.”</p><p>In 2022 the Center filed a <a href="https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/esa/pdfs/Petition-to-Strengthen-the-ESA-Implementing-Regss.pdf?_gl=1*ezwjb3*_gcl_aw*R0NMLjE3MTAxNzU5MTkuQ2p3S0NBancxN3F2QmhCckVpd0ExclU5dzhUQkJNeDM1aEVzaVFyTUxTU0ktb2ZmcFB5MExqLW00dGJ4SFp6SFJtMzY1eEE2U2ZxenZSb0NNMVVRQXZEX0J3RQ..*_gcl_au*MTQ2OTk3ODY3Ny4xNzA4OTgxNjA1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">legal petition</a> urging the wildlife agencies to enact ambitious new regulatory safeguards that strengthen all aspects of the law. The Biden administration has yet to respond to the petition.</p>]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:21:41 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/biden-administration-finalizes-weak-endangered-species-rules</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Defenders Statement on Biden Administration’s Final Endangered Species Act Regulations</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/defenders-statement-on-biden-administrations-final-endangered-species-act-regulations</link><description><![CDATA[
  88. <p>The Biden administration today released final Endangered Species Act regulations that restore several core components of the bedrock conservation law that the previous administration sought to undercut. Defenders of Wildlife, which pursued legal challenges to the 2019 regulations, expressed both appreciation and concern with the newly released regulations. </p><p>“While the regulations restore some essential wildlife protections, we were hopeful for far more than the marginal win the Biden administration delivered today. Our nation’s threatened and endangered species are under constant attack and the Endangered Species Act is the only thing standing between them and extinction,” <strong>said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. </strong>“We appreciate the administration’s work on this matter, but at the end of the day much work remains to be done to ensure the Endangered Species Act can fulfill its critical lifesaving mission.”</p><p>Among the positive changes in the final regulations are the reinstatement of automatic ESA protections for threatened species managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service known as the “blanket 4(d) rule” and the removal of regulations that injected economic considerations when determining whether a species should be listed under the ESA. The ESA requires listing decisions be made using the best available science and specifically prohibits consideration of related economic costs.</p><p>Of concern in the regulations, among other things, is retained 2019 language that allows the piecemeal destruction of critical habitat for threatened and endangered species; invites federal agencies to rely on speculative and unverified mitigation measures when analyzing agency actions that could jeopardize listed species or destroy or adversely modify critical habitat; and, invites federal agencies to ignore existing degraded conditions that have caused serious harm to listed species or critical habitat when considering the modification or relicensing of activities and existing facilities. </p>]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:19:13 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/defenders-statement-on-biden-administrations-final-endangered-species-act-regulations</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>Groundwork’s Lindsay Owens on Corporate Profits Data: “Inflation has more room to fall if corporations stop their excessive profiteering”</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/groundworks-lindsay-owens-on-corporate-profits-data-inflation-has-more-room-to-fall-if-corporations-stop-their-excessive-profiteering</link><description><![CDATA[
  89. <p>Today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released new data showing that domestic nonfinancial corporate profits increased $136.5 billion in Q4, compared with an increase of $90.8 billion in Q3. <strong>Groundwork’s Executive Director Lindsay Owens</strong> reacted with the following statement: </p><blockquote> “Even as supply chains have normalized and input costs have fallen, corporations are still padding their profits on the backs of families. Falling inflation has been a welcome sight, but it has more room to fall if corporations stop their excessive profiteering.” <br/> </blockquote> <p><strong></strong>Email <a href="mailto:press@groundworkcollaborative.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>press@groundworkcollaborative.org</u></a> to speak with one of Groundwork’s experts about the role of corporate profits in rising prices.<strong></strong></p>]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2024 15:41:19 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/groundworks-lindsay-owens-on-corporate-profits-data-inflation-has-more-room-to-fall-if-corporations-stop-their-excessive-profiteering</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>No Place For Bad Actors, Thanks</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/further/no-place-for-bad-actors-thanks</link><description><![CDATA[
  90. <img src="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/former-rnc-chair-ronna-mcdaniel-speaks-at-2020-gop-convention.jpg?id=51847006&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=616%2C0%2C650%2C0"/><br/><br/><p>Well that was blessedly quick. Less than a week after NBC said it would pay fascist bootlicker and election liar Ronna McDaniel to bootlick and lie on air - and a day after its employees loudly protested the move - NBC, citing their "legitimate concerns," said oops never mind and dropped McDaniel. Along with her colleagues, Rachel Maddow had cogently argued against giving a platform to a low-life hack who is "part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government."</p><p>The righteous revolt by journalists at <em>NBC</em> and <em>MSNBC </em>was swift after the network announced McDaniel's $300,000 hire Friday, two weeks after she was forced out as RNC chair to make room for Trump's even more servile daughter-in-law Lara Trump.  At the time, <em>NBC</em> said it wanted to include news contributors representing a "diverse set of viewpoints and experiences," a dumpster-fire of an explanation blasted by enraged reporters who noted that McDaniel aiding and abetting a propaganda campaign intended to overthrow or at least undermine electoral democracy - including telling GOP canvassers in Michigan to not <a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2024/03/24/ronna-mcdaniel-defends-pressuring-wayne-county-canvassers-2020-election-certification-donald-trump/73084667007/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em></em>certify </a>2020 election results - is so far above and beyond a "diverse viewpoint" that Trump and multiple co-conspirators have been criminally indicted for it. </p><p>Reporters <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/msnbc-hosts-criticize-nbc-news-hiring-ronna-mcdaniel-rcna145039" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">railed </a>through Monday against McDaniel poisoning what Nicolle Wallace called "our sacred airwaves," from <em>M</em><em>orning Joe</em>'s Mika Brzezinski decrying someone "who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier" to late-night Lawrence O’Donnell advising his network, "Don’t hire anyone close to the crimes." Jen Psaki <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/rachel-maddow-implor..." target="_blank">rejected </a>right-wing comparisons with her own move from politics to reporting. "That kind of experience (only) has value if it's paired with honesty and good faith," she said, especially in this fraught moment. "Our democracy is in danger because of the lies that people like Ronna McDaniel have pushed on this country...This isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats. This isn't about red versus blue. This is about truth versus lies."</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
  91. <span class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a82f3cb0a2d9b0db5adf3b0e19df5bf0" style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="auto" lazy-loadable="true" scrolling="no" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CqassXP6HAU?rel=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" width="100%"></iframe></span>
  92. <small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Maddow joins colleagues in objecting to McDaniel for legitimizing Trump, attacking democracy</small>
  93. <small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">
  94. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqassXP6HAU" target="_blank">www.youtube.com</a>
  95. </small>
  96. </p><p>Rachel Maddow <a href="full%20maddow" target="_blank">devoted </a>most of her time on air to joining the backlash, expressing solidarity with her colleagues' "loud and principled objections" to giving a voice to the willing accomplice of an aspiring strongman. En route, she highlighted our “long history of forgettable men" intent on convincing the country we need a "new system of government." “We have had a lot of these guys, but our generation’s version of this guy has gotten a lot farther than all the rest of them," she <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-new..." target="_blank">said.</a> "And why is that? (Trump) would have been as forgotten as the rest of them had he not been able to attach himself to an institution like the Republican Party, and had the leader of that party (decide) she would not just abide him, she would help. She would help with the worst of it." </p><p>Which was, in essence, "priming your people" not to accept the next election results. "In the news business, yes, we are covering an election," she <a href="full%20maddow" target="_blank">said</a>. "We’re also covering bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of a democracy to end democracy. The chief threat among them now is not the rioters and kooks, but the slick political professionals who are turning their considerable talents to laundering violently revolutionary claims (that) America’s election results aren’t real, and they shouldn’t be respected.” The "inexplicable" hire of McDaniel to report on election news, she suggested, was akin to hiring a mobster at a D.A.'s office or a pickpocket as a TSA airport screener. She ended with a civil, simple plea to the network: "I hope they will reverse their decision."</p><p>And so they did. Tuesday evening, <em>Puck News</em> <a href="https://twitter.com/DylanByers/status/1772672463790547271" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reported</a><em> NBC</em> had dropped McDaniel in her second, well-deserved job humiliation - ever classy, even Trump mocked her - in two weeks. <em>NBC</em> <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/nbc-news-cuts-ties-ronna-mcdaniel-rcna145155" target="_blank">said </a>chairman Cesar Conde sent staff an email reversing the hire and apologizing to those "who felt we let them down." McDaniel is reportedly, unsurprisingly <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/03/26/nbc-news-ronna-mcdaniel-commentator?utm_campaign=editorial&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="">"exploring </a>her legal options." Still, argues historian Timothy Snyder, a fat check - she may get paid in full, giving her $500 a second for one interview - will be a small price to pay. In  what is "not a normal political situation where you can give a little and get a little," he says,<a href="https://twitter.com/PoliticusSarah/status/1772367578788212946" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> appeasement</a> is a lousy option: "If you practise giving things away, if you say, 'Ok, we're gonna practice appeasing a dictator so when  the dictator comes we'll be better at it' - is that what you should be doing?"</p>]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2024 04:24:05 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/further/no-place-for-bad-actors-thanks</guid><dc:creator>Abby Zimet</dc:creator><media:content medium="image" type="image/jpeg" url="https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/former-rnc-chair-ronna-mcdaniel-speaks-at-2020-gop-convention.jpg?id=51847006&amp;width=980"></media:content></item><item><title>Community, Environmental, and Animal Welfare Organizations Press EPA to Strengthen Water Pollution Control Standards for Slaughterhouses and Animal Rendering Facilities</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/community-environmental-and-animal-welfare-organizations-press-epa-to-strengthen-water-pollution-control-standards-for-slaughterhouses-and-animal-rendering-facilities</link><description><![CDATA[
  97. <p>Forty-five community, environmental, and animal welfare organizations—together representing tens of millions of people across the United States—filed <u></u>public comments<u></u> yesterday with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, pressing for strong protections against water pollution from slaughterhouses and animal rendering facilities. The EPA published a proposal to strengthen existing protections in January 2024, following lawsuits from several of the commenting organizations. Yesterday’s comments emphasized that the EPA must improve its proposal to address environmental injustice and reduce harm to people and the environment. </p><p><strong>Food & Water Watch Attorney Dani Replogle </strong><strong>said</strong>: “EPA’s preference for weak slaughterhouse regulations privileges the health of a polluting industry over that of frontline communities and our nation’s waters. To adopt anything less than the most stringent clean water protections in the agency’s final rule would be a missed opportunity and a big mistake.”</p><p>“For decades, slaughterhouses and meat processing plants have benefited from lax water pollution standards, and we are pleased that the EPA is finally taking action to strengthen these standards for some of the largest plants,” <strong>said</strong> <strong>Sarah Kula, Attorney for the Environmental Integrity Project</strong>. “But EPA’s proposal falls far short of what the Clean Water Act requires and exempts thousands of polluting plants that put downstream communities and our waterways in harm’s way. EPA must require that these plants install modern water pollution controls and clean up their act.”</p><p>Nearly 10 billion animals are killed each year in slaughterhouses across the United States—that is, over 18,825 animals every minute. Slaughterhouse byproducts such as fat, bone, and feathers frequently are sent to rendering facilities for conversion into tallow, animal meal, and other products. Both slaughterhouses and rendering facilities require a near-constant flow of water, and every year, these facilities discharge hundreds of millions of pounds of water pollution into rivers and streams. According to EPA, slaughterhouses and rendering facilities, which together comprise the Meat and Poultry Products (“MPP”) industrial point source category, are the largest industrial source of phosphorus pollution and the second largest industrial source of nitrogen pollution.</p><p>“EPA knows that pollution from slaughterhouses and rendering facilities disproportionately harms under-resourced communities, low-income communities, and communities of color,” <strong>said Earthjustice attorney Alexis Andiman</strong>. “Yet EPA’s proposal expressly ignores environmental justice and, instead, champions weak standards that, it claims, are necessary to thwart disruptions to the nation’s meat supply—despite clear evidence that stronger regulations will have virtually no impact on meat producers or consumers. The Agency’s priorities are backwards. We need the EPA to protect people and the environment, not corporations.”</p><p>Pollution from MPP facilities has devastating consequences for human health and the environment, and it disproportionately harms people living in vulnerable and under-resourced communities. Nonetheless, EPA has failed to revise its regulations governing water pollution from the MPP industry for <em>at least</em> 20 years. Some MPP facilities are still subject to outdated and under-protective standards promulgated in the mid-1970s. EPA’s existing regulations fail to impose any restrictions on discharges of phosphorus, and the Agency has <em>never </em>published national standards applicable to the vast majority of MPP facilities, which discharge wastewater indirectly through publicly owned treatment works (“POTWs”), even though EPA has known for decades that—without adequate pretreatment—pollutants in MPP wastewater pass through many POTWs into our nation’s rivers and streams.</p><p>The EPA’s proposal set out three options to strengthen existing standards. The comments made clear that the EPA’s preferred option, which offers the weakest protections for people and the environment, is inconsistent with federal law—not least because it is motivated by a desire to avoid disruptions to the country’s meat supply, even though claims of past disruptions have been resoundingly debunked. Instead, the commenting organizations pressed the EPA to select and strengthen the most protective of the regulatory options presented, which would prevent over 320 million pounds of pollution, reduce nitrogen and phosphorus pollution by 85%, and help to protect over 22 million people.</p><p>“We call on the EPA to rise above Big Ag’s push to weaken this plan to reduce harms from the millions of gallons of pollution slaughterhouses and animal rendering plants are spewing into our waterways,” <strong>said</strong> <strong>Hannah Connor, deputy director of environmental health at the Center for Biological Diversity</strong>. “This proposal would put very reasonable updates in place that will give critically imperiled fish and mussels the protections they need to survive.” </p>]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Mar 2024 19:23:04 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/community-environmental-and-animal-welfare-organizations-press-epa-to-strengthen-water-pollution-control-standards-for-slaughterhouses-and-animal-rendering-facilities</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>No Lethal AI Weapons, 14 Groups Tell the Pentagon</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/no-lethal-ai-weapons-14-groups-tell-the-pentagon</link><description><![CDATA[
  98. <p>The U.S. military should clarify that it will not develop or deploy lethal weapons powered by artificial intelligence (AI), 14 groups said in a <a href="https://www.citizen.org/article/14-civil-society-groups-call-on-the-pentagon-to-clarify-replicator-program-intent/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">letter</a> sent today to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. The letter was co-signed by Public Citizen, the Future of Life Institute, Demand Progress, and Win Without War, among others. </p><p>The groups’ letter focuses on the Pentagon’s Replicator program, which proposes to rely heavily on drones to combat Chinese missile strength in a theoretical conflict over Taiwan or at China’s eastern coast. The just-passed appropriations bill includes $200 million in funding for Replicator, with an additional $300 million expected to be devoted to the program.</p><p>According to the groups, the Pentagon has not been sufficiently clear about whether the program involves the development and deployment of autonomous weapons. “This is no place for strategic ambiguity. Autonomous weapons are inherently dehumanizing and unethical, no matter whether a human is ‘ultimately’ responsible for the use of force or not,” the letter reads.</p><p>“The United States should state plainly that it will not create or deploy killer robots and should work to advance global treaty negotiations to ban such weapons,” said <strong>Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen</strong>. “At minimum, the United States should commit that the Replicator Initiative will not involve the use of autonomous weapons. Ambiguity about the Replicator program essentially ensures a catastrophic arms race over autonomous weapons. That’s a race in which all of humanity is the loser.”</p>]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Mar 2024 17:22:01 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/no-lethal-ai-weapons-14-groups-tell-the-pentagon</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item><item><title>UN Special Rapporteur report on Gaza provides crucial evidence that must spur international action to prevent genocide</title><link>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/un-special-rapporteur-report-on-gaza-provides-crucial-evidence-that-must-spur-international-action-to-prevent-genocide</link><description><![CDATA[
  99. <p>Amnesty International welcomes the new report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, which concludes there are “reasonable grounds to believe the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met”. As the UN Human Rights Council holds a meeting today to discuss the report’s findings, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard said:</p><p>“This is a crucial body of work that must serve as a vital call to action to states. They must uphold their obligations under the Genocide Convention and take concrete measures to protect Palestinians in Gaza today.</p><p>“The time to act to prevent genocide is now. Third states must apply political pressure on the warring parties to implement <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/03/un-resolution-must-pave-way-for-enduring-ceasefire-to-alleviate-mass-suffering-in-gaza/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the UN Security Council resolution adopted yesterday</a> demanding an immediate ceasefire, use their influence to insist that Israel abides by the resolution, including by stopping the shelling and lifting restrictions on humanitarian aid. They must impose a comprehensive arms embargo against all parties to the conflict. They must also pressure Hamas and other armed groups to free all civilian hostages. </p><p>“The report comes two months after the <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/01/israel-must-comply-with-key-icj-ruling-ordering-it-do-all-in-its-power-to-prevent-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its ruling warning of a plausible risk of genocide</a>. In that time, the situation in Gaza has grown exponentially worse, with thousands more Palestinians killed and Israel continuing to refuse to comply with the ICJ ruling to ensure provision of sufficient humanitarian aid to Palestinians as human-made famine edges closer each day and more people starve to death.</p> <blockquote>The time to act to prevent genocide is now. Third states must apply political pressure on the warring parties to implement the UN Security Council resolution adopted yesterday… They must impose a comprehensive arms embargo against all parties to the conflict. They must also pressure Hamas and other armed groups to free all civilian hostages.<br/> <cite>Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard</cite></blockquote> <p>“We echo calls made in the UN Special Rapporteur’s report to ensure that UNRWA is fully funded, and also able to operate across all of Gaza – including in northern Gaza where Israeli authorities are denying entry to UNRWA trucks.</p><p>“Helping to prevent genocide also means supporting accountability efforts including the ongoing investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and exercising universal jurisdiction to bring those suspected of crimes under international law to justice. All states and in particular allies of Israel must press Israel to allow the UN Commission of Inquiry and the Special Rapporteur and other independent human rights monitors access to Gaza. </p><p>“An enduring ceasefire remains the best way to enforce the ICJ’s provisional measures to prevent genocide and further crimes and civilian suffering. In recent days momentum has gathered around calls to halt the fighting, with the European Council demanding a ceasefire last week and a UN Security Council yesterday adopting a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire for the remaining two weeks of Ramadan. States must now focus their efforts on making these calls a reality.”</p>]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Mar 2024 17:20:35 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/un-special-rapporteur-report-on-gaza-provides-crucial-evidence-that-must-spur-international-action-to-prevent-genocide</guid><dc:creator>Newswire Editor</dc:creator></item></channel></rss>

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