The Weather Forecast for Chicago

The National Weather Service says, and I quote:

This Afternoon: Scattered showers and thunderstorms. Mostly sunny, with a steady temperature around 78. East wind around 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 30%.

It is currently 95 degrees at O'Hare, there are a few wispy clouds that wouldn't dream of making rain, and the wind, what there is of it, is mostly from the south.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Animals

And the Trump regime's war on the environment continues:

The Trump administration moved on Monday to weaken how it applies the 45-year-old Endangered Species Act, ordering changes that critics said will speed the loss of animals and plants at a time of record global extinctions .

The action, which expands the administration’s rewrite of U.S. environmental laws, is the latest that targets protections, including for water, air and public lands. Two states — California and Massachusetts, frequent foes of President Donald Trump’s environmental rollbacks — promised lawsuits to try to block the changes in the law. So did some conservation groups.

Given that Trump's administration is filled with two-faced liars, I'm calling bullshit on this:

Pushing back against the criticism, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and other administration officials contend the changes improve efficiency of oversight while continuing to protect rare species.

“The best way to uphold the Endangered Species Act is to do everything we can to ensure it remains effective in achieving its ultimate goal — recovery of our rarest species,” he said in a statement. “An effectively administered Act ensures more resources can go where they will do the most good: on-the-ground conservation.”

Bernhardt is a former oil industry lobbyist.

This just makes me sick at my stomach. Yes, I'm a nature freak, bolstered by the understanding that it's all one system -- it's all interrelated, and if you screw up one part, you damage the whole thing. And this is the only planet we have.

I wonder when the Trump boys are going to go on their first wolf hunt.

Read the whole article -- it's pretty awful.

Via Joe.My.God.

Today's Must-Read: Behind Closed Doors

Have you noticed how the Republicans running our country want to do everything in secret? While we're all focused on Junior's e-mails (E-mails? Where have I heard that before?), this is going on:

President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations.

But the effort — a signature theme in Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts.

Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

I might point out that, contra the right-wing myth of "liberals" in government crushing our brave entrepreneurs with regulations, these rules were not formulated just to be nasty to the "job creators": they happened in response to abuses and problems that required government intervention. (For example, there's quite a bit in the article on pesticide manufacturers wanting to get rid of rules that require them to get approval from the EPA and the Interior Department before offering their products for sale, because of the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. Who needs that kind of headache? After all, what could go wrong?)

It's kind of lengthy, and in places perhaps offers more than you wanted to know, but it's worth reading, just to give you an idea of what's going on while no one's looking -- and how the government is stonewalling those who are trying to find out what's going on.

Today's Must-Read: Privatize Everything, Redux

Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo examines the charter school movement, taking off from this segment of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight:

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight back-to-school segment on charter schools Sunday was a welcome window into the world of education "reform" grifters. (I just found time to watch it last night.) Griftopia, as Matt Taibbi defined it:

There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

Sullivan details a few of the abuses and scams. I found this particularly interesting:

Aside from the happy talk about experimentation and free-market competition (you may genuflect now), the smokescreen that obscures some of the worst results of lax oversight is the notion that these schools run as non-profits. But nonprofit doesn't mean no cash flow. Oliver points out (and this is not unique) how the president of the Richard Allen charter chain in Ohio contracted oversight of its schools to a nonprofit she founded and who contracted $1 million in management and consulting firms she also founded.

Even in non-profits, someone's making money.

And of course, the real victims here are the kids, who are not getting the education we're paying for.

Privatize Everything!

John Cole highlights this story about the new preferred medium of exchange in prisons -- ramen noodles:

The study paints a bleak picture of the state of food available at the prison. Gibson-Light found that black-market food became more valuable after control over food preparation switched from one private firm to another in the early 2000s.
US justice department announces it will end use of private prisons
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“That change was part of a cost-cutting measure,” Gibson-Light said. “With that change that resulted in a reduction in the quantity of the food the inmates were receiving.”

Inmates at the prison Gibson-Light studied went from receiving three hot meals a day to two hot meals and one cold lunch during the week, and only two meals for the whole day on the weekend.

The phenomenon is described by Gibson-Light as “punitive frugality”. Spending on corrections has not kept pace with the number of inmates in prisons since 1982, the report found.

This is the logical outcome of the privatization trend I discussed a few days ago -- once things like prisons, schools, roads become subject to profit-taking, the profit-takers' first impulse is to cut costs. We all know what that means.

The little food that is available is usually of extremely poor quality. Correctional officers warned Gibson-Light not to eat it, as it might result in food poisoning. One corrections officer recalled that he once examined the food in the kitchen and found a box that contained “nasty looking full chickens” that was boldly marked several times with the words “not for human consumption”.

Cole has a couple of conclusions of his own:

1.) Instead of creating good jobs in cafeterias in prison for both civilians and give the prisoners an opportunity to learn a skill, we’re happier to heap profits on the investor class who have found prisons can be a gold mine with little oversight.

2.) Because most people, when told this, will shrug and basically say “fuck them, they’re prisoners.” These same people will then bitch about repeat offenders who, after being treated like an animal for ten years are released and commit another crime, because we didn’t spend any time or money educating them, dealing with their mental illnesses, teach them a trade, and generally just shit on them for a decade. So now they are worse than what they were when they went in.

There's a connection there with certain political and religious points of view, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Another Solar System

with planets in the habitable zone -- Kepler 62.

The Kepler Space Telescope has been in orbit looking for planets around other stars since 2009, and it's started to find some startlingly interesting solar systems out there.

Today, the Kepler team announced the discovery of star system Kepler 62, a group of five planets circling a red star, two of which may be capable of supporting life. That doubles the number of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone that Kepler has confirmed in the cosmos. And they're the smallest, and therefore closest to Earth size, that astronomers have detected. The system is 1,200 light years away.

It occurs to me that even having to ask the question of whether there are other planets in the universe that can support life reveals a tremendously self-absorbed world view. Offhand, I can't think of any reason to suppose that there aren't. It's sort of exciting to have it confirmed, but really, what did anyone expect? I know, I'm dealing with meta-text here -- the assumptions underlying the story. I also realize that not everyone thinks that way, but too many do, particularly in this country. If you go to the comments at the article, someone else also brought that up.

Question of the day: What happened to Kepler-62a?

Via Anel Viz at Nick's Place.

(Footnote: Sorry about the size of the image. Blogger seems to have decided on a one-size-fits-all policy for jpegs, and I can't figure out a way to resize it. Even if I change the size on the file, it still crams it into that itty bitty format.)

It's About Time

Someone was asking the bank regulators some hard questions:

When she was campaigning to become the next U.S. senator to represent Massachusetts, Democrat Elizabeth Warren pledged that she would take her tough talk about enforcing Wall Street regulations to Washington and put them into action.

On Thursday, as Senator Warren got the opportunity to question regulators at her first Senate Banking Committee hearing, she bluntly asked "When did you last take... a large financial institution, a Wall Street bank, to trial?"

Here she is in action. Something tells me the regulators weren't ready for this.

I am so glad Elizabeth Warren is in the Senate. We need more like her.

Change You Can Believe In

OK, maybe not. From NBC News:

A landmark Environmental Protection Agency report concluding that children exposed to toxic substances can develop learning disabilities, asthma and other health problems has been sidetracked indefinitely amid fierce opposition from the chemical industry.

America’s Children and the Environment, Third Edition, is a sobering analysis of the way in which pollutants build up in children’s developing bodies and the damage they can inflict.

The report is unpublished, but was posted on EPA’s website in draft form in March 2011, marked “Do not Quote or Cite.” The report, which is fiercely contested by the chemical industry, was referred to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where it still languishes.

This is maybe not such a surprise:

Some present and former EPA staffers, who asked not to be named for fear of losing their jobs, blamed the sidetracking of the report on heightened political pressure during the campaign season. The OMB has been slow to approve environmental regulations and other EPA reports throughout the Obama Administration — as it was under George W. Bush according to reports by the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit consortium of scholars, doing research on health, safety and environmental issues, which generally advocate for stronger regulation and better enforcement of existing law.

Just like Dubya. Who would have guessed?

Via AmericaBlog. Interesting comment there on one of the probable players, linking to this article at ThinkProgress (from 2009, no less):

How would progressives respond if President Bush nominated as “regulatory czar” a person who:

– Once called for changing the Clean Air Act to require a balancing of costs and benefits in setting national clean air standards – a fundamental weakening long sought by big polluters who believe it would help them resist cleanup;

– Urged the federal government to devalue senior citizens in calculating the benefits of federal regulations because “A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.” This is a concept dubbed the “senior death discount,” and that environmentalists forced EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman to renounce in 2003;

– Argued that it “might be better” to help future generations deal with global warming by “including approaches that make posterity richer and better able to adapt” than by “reducing emissions.”

– Even raised questions about the value of cleaning up Love Canal, reducing arsenic in drinking water and using child restraints in automobiles?

Progressives would’ve screamed, of course. But what will they do now that President-elect Obama appears poised to nominate Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein to head the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)? For it’s actually Sunstein who has articulated the views noted above regarding clean air and the other issues involving costs, benefits and risk.

If you had any doubt that the Obama administration is firmly in the pocket of corporate America, wake up. The global warming bit is particularly rich: the government has been doing exactly the opposite on "making posterity richer" (although it's not all Obama's fault -- but enough of it is). You sort of have to ask: Whose posterity?

I think progressives need to start screaming again. As if anyone in Washington is listening.

The Banking Fiasco

If you want a good commentary/analysis of what's happened in the banking industry since we bailed their asses out, here's one by dday at Hullaballoo.

Read it and weep.