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[guido]

The Supreme Court Approved More Drilling Under the AT | Outside Online

"The Appalachian Trail made it to Washington last week. On June 15, the Supreme Court took on a case about a contentious natural gas pipeline crossing the trail, United States Forest Service vs. Cowpasture River Association. On a 7-2 vote, they overturned a ruling from the Fourth Circuit court of Appeals and decided that, based on the Mineral Rights Act, which allows for government-sanctioned extraction on public land, the Forest Service could grant Dominion Energy the right to run the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) under the Appalachian Trail in the George Washington National Forest.

The proposed pipeline would move 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the gas-rich Marcellus Shale of West Virginia to southern North Carolina. Its planned route—600 miles of three-and-a-half-foot pipe—would cross the AT 34 times. According to the Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Building the pipeline would require clearing trees in a 125-foot right-of-way through the national forests, blasting mountain ridgelines to flatten the terrain, and digging a ditch to bury the pipeline.”

Dominion and their partner in the project, Duke Energy, said that the AT shouldn’t be a 2,200-mile barrier to progress, and that other pipelines already cross the trail more than 30 times.

Opponents point out that no pipeline has been built since the land became a national park unit in 1968, and that it’s irrational to cut through a swath of geologically fragile, slide-prone, federally protected endangered species habitat for the sake of a poorly planned pipeline. They say ratepayers will be on the hook for a boondoggle of a project that ballooned up to $8 million in cost, and that was unnecessary to begin with—natural gas supply in the area already outweighs demand."

[ides1056]

There was a similar attempt locally to run a pipeline and it failed, fortunately.

We don't deserve the earth.

[guido]

2020: Trump’s reality TV presidency is being crushed by reality - Vox

"On Wednesday, the New York Times and Siena College released their first national poll of the 2020 election season. Their survey, which is put together with particular care, was unusually accurate in both 2016 and 2018, so there was some anticipation built for its release. Even so, the numbers were shocking: Joe Biden led Donald Trump by 14 points.

The Times/Siena poll is only a slight outlier for Biden, who is ahead by 10 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average and 9.5 points in the FiveThirtyEight average. In these ranges, the Electoral College’s Republican lean means little for Trump. The Economist, which recently released its presidential forecasting model, gives Biden an 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver calculates that Pennsylvania is likeliest to be the state that swings the election and notes that Biden is leading in recent polls by an average of 8.1 points.

Hillary Clinton led the polls in 2016, too, only to watch the map turn crimson on election night. Though she never led by nearly this much, the trauma of that reversal lingers, and Democrats experience good survey data as borderline triggering. “Ignore the polls,” Biden tweeted on Wednesday. “Register to vote.”

There’s something to that attitude. Polling, at this point, should be taken as information, not as prediction. But the information it offers is real: Trump’s political position is collapsing. Biden has doubled his lead since the beginning of February, and it’s not because he’s been dominating the airwaves. It’s because Trump has betrayed the first commandment of running for reelection: First, govern well.

“Imagine you took every statement they made about Hunter Biden and made it about Covid-19, and imagine they took action on it,” says Stuart Stevens, who served as Mitt Romney’s chief campaign strategist in 2012 and is the author of the forthcoming It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. “Where would they be right now? A lot better off. And a lot of people would be alive.”"

[guido]

A Disastrous Summer in the Arctic | The New Yorker

"The remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, three thousand miles east of Moscow and six miles north of the Arctic Circle, has long held the record, with another Siberian town, for the coldest inhabited place in the world. The record was set in 1892, when the temperature dropped to ninety below zero Fahrenheit, although these days winter temperatures are noticeably milder, hovering around fifty below. Last Saturday, Verkhoyansk claimed a new record: the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic, with an observation of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit—the same temperature was recorded that day in Las Vegas. Miami has only hit a hundred degrees once since 1896. “This has been an unusually hot spring in Siberia,” Randy Cerveny, the World Meteorological Organization’s rapporteur of weather and climate extremes, said. “The coinciding lack of underlying snow in the region, combined with over-all global temperature increases, undoubtedly helped play a critical role in causing this extreme.” Siberia, in other words, is in the midst of an astonishing and historic heat wave.

Anthropogenic climate change is causing the Arctic to heat up twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Climate models had predicted this phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, but they did not predict how fast the warming would occur. Although Verkhoyansk has seen hot temperatures in the past, Saturday’s 100.4-degree record follows a wildly warm year across the region. Since December, temperatures in western Siberia have been eighteen degrees above normal. Since January, the mean temperature across Siberia has been at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average. As the meteorologist Jeff Berardelli reported for CBS, the heat that has fallen on Russia in 2020 “is so remarkable that it matches what’s projected to be normal by the year 2100, if current trends in heat-trapping carbon emissions continue.” By April, owing to the heat, wildfires across the region were larger and more numerous than they were at the same time last year, when the Russian government eventually had to send military aircrafts to battle vast blazes. The scale of the current wildfires—with towering plumes of smoke visible for thousands of miles on satellite images—suggest that this summer could be worse. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, they will also be more complicated to fight.

Toward the end of May, as the sun stopped dropping below the horizon, the heat continued. In the town of Khatanga, far north of the Arctic Circle, the temperature hit seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit, or forty-six degrees above normal, topping the previous record by twenty-four degrees. The heat and fires are also hastening the dissolution of Siberian permafrost, perennially frozen ground that, when thawed, unleashes more greenhouse gases and dramatically destabilizes the land, with grave consequences. On May 29th, outside Norilsk, the northernmost city in the world, the thawing ground buckled, causing an oil-storage tank to collapse and spew more than a hundred and fifty thousand barrels, or twenty-one thousand tons, of diesel fuel into the Ambarnaya River. The spill was the largest to ever occur in the Russian Arctic.

Norilsk, which was constructed in the nineteen-thirties by prisoners of a nearby Gulag camp, Norillag, was already one of the most polluted places in the world. Most of its hundred and seventy-seven thousand residents work for Norilsk Nickel, the company that owns the collapsed oil tank. Its massive mining and metallurgy complex alone is worth two per cent of Russia’s G.D.P. The city contributes a fifth of the global nickel supply and nearly half of the world’s palladium, a metal used to make catalytic converters. Factories billow clouds of sulfur dioxide incessantly, and the resulting acid rain has turned the city and its surroundings into an industrial wasteland, with no green space or parks, just dirt and dead trees. Life expectancy in Norilsk is twenty years shorter than it is in the United States. The last time the town made the news, before the oil spill, was exactly a year ago, when an emaciated polar bear, a refugee from its melting home, was photographed rummaging through the city dump."

[guido]

American Dignity on the Fourth of July | The New Yorker

"More than three-quarters of a century after the delegates of the Second Continental Congress voted to quit the Kingdom of Great Britain and declared that “all men are created equal,” Frederick Douglass stepped up to the lectern at Corinthian Hall, in Rochester, New York, and, in an Independence Day address to the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, made manifest the darkest ironies embedded in American history and in the national self-regard. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass asked:

I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

The dissection of American reality, in all its complexity, is essential to political progress, and yet it rarely goes unpunished. One reason that the Republican right and its attendant media loathed Barack Obama is that his public rhetoric, while far more buoyant with post-civil-rights-era uplift than Douglass’s, was also an affront to reactionary pieties. Even as Obama tried to win votes, he did not paper over the duality of the American condition: its idealism and its injustices; its heroism in the fight against Fascism and its bloody misadventures before and after. His idea of a patriotic song was “America the Beautiful”—not in its sentimental ballpark versions but the way that Ray Charles sang it, as a blues, capturing the “fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top.”

Donald Trump, who, in fairness, has noted that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job,” represents an entirely different tradition. He has no interest in the wholeness of reality. He descends from the lineage of the Know-Nothings, the doomsayers and the fabulists, the nativists and the hucksters. The thematic shift from Obama to Trump has been from “lifting as we climb” to “raising the drawbridge and bolting the door.” Trump may operate a twenty-first-century Twitter machine, but he is still a frontier-era drummer peddling snake oil, juniper tar, and Dr. Tabler’s Buckeye Pile Cure for profit from the back of a dusty wagon.

As a candidate, Trump told his followers that he would fulfill “every dream you ever dreamed for your country.” But he is a plutocrat. His loyalty is to the interests of the plutocracy. Trump’s vows of solidarity with the struggling working class, with the victims of globalization and deindustrialization, are a fraud. He made coal miners a symbol of his campaign, but he has always held them in contempt. To him, they are luckless schmoes who fail to possess his ineffable talents. “The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son,” Trump once told Playboy. “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination—or whatever—to leave their mine. They don’t have ‘it.’ ”"

[Todd Amunrud]

Confederate Statues Were Never Really About Preserving History | FiveThirtyEight

This article lays out the statistical placement confederate monuments and debunks them as preserving United States "hero's" as the president would like us to think. Why would someone put up so many losing symbols ;).

[Scott G.]

This article lays out the statistical placement confederate monuments and debunks them as preserving United States "hero's" as the president would like us to think. Why would someone put up so many losing symbols ;).

Why are there no statues to famous Loyalist generals of the American Rebellion ? (That is 1776 and all that)

Brigadier General Montfort Browne
Brigadier General Oliver DeLancey Sr.
Brigadier General Sir John Johnson
Brigadier General Cortland Skinner

[guido]

New York as a Biking City? It Could Happen. And It Should. - The New York Times

"If not change, then glimmers of it. Maybe.

Before the pandemic, New York City bus advocates had to plead with City Hall for more dedicated busways. Now City Hall is trumpeting a plan for five new ones. It used to take months, and cost a king’s ransom, for restaurants to get a sidewalk cafe permit. The other weekend, to help the struggling industry, the city waived the whole process for thousands of businesses.

And it has opened miles of streets to pedestrians and cyclists — albeit only temporarily, with erratic enforcement. I’m looking out my window right now at an avenue that was supposed to be closed to cars. The sawhorses are pushed aside. It’s traffic as usual.

Still."

[Doug Fattic]

New York as a Biking City? It Could Happen. And It Should. - The New York Times

This was an interesting read and the graphic illustrations showing what it is like now and what it could be without personal cars taking up tons of space were outstanding. The problem as I see it is that the same American independence that wants what is best for me and screw whatever is best for the group would make eliminating (or at least reducing) cars to open all that space in Manhattan to make it more livable nearly impossible.

[guido]

Fracking Firms Fail, Rewarding Executives and Raising Climate Fears - The New York Times

"Oil and gas companies are hurtling toward bankruptcy, raising fears that wells will be left leaking planet-warming pollutants, with cleanup cost left to taxpayers."

[guido]

How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic | The New Yorker

"The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the President’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections."

[guido]

The Troll: A fake flag burning at Gettysburg was only his latest hoax | Washington Post

Adam Rahuba, a former concert promoter, works part-time as a food-delivery driver and a DJ. At 38, he spent most of the past year staying on a friend’s couch in a small town north of Pittsburgh.

A Washington Post investigation found that Rahuba is also the anonymous figure behind a number of social media hoaxes — the most recent played out in Gettysburg on Independence Day — that have riled far-right extremists in recent years and repeatedly duped partisan media outlets.

Rahuba once claimed that activists were planning to desecrate a Confederate cemetery in Georgia, The Post found. He seeded rumors of an organized effort to report Trump supporters for supposed child abuse. And he promoted a purported grass-roots campaign to confiscate Americans’ guns.

These false claims circulated widely on social media and on Internet message boards. They were often amplified by right-wing commentators and covered as real news by media outlets such as Breitbart News and the Gateway Pundit.

The hoaxes, outlandish in their details, have spurred fringe groups of conspiracy-minded Americans to action by playing on partisan fears. They have led to highly combustible situations — attracting heavily armed militia members and far-right activists eager to protect values they think are under siege — as well as large mobilizations of police.

[guido]

Social Programs Can Sometimes Turn a Profit for Taxpayers - The New York Times

"As tax revenues shrink and emergency spending to address the pandemic increases, governments are facing tough budget decisions.

Social programs that alleviate poverty and enrich the lives of millions of people are coming under pressure. But a new study suggests that even if fiscal prudence were the only consideration, officials taking a long view should think twice before cutting social programs, because many of them ultimately turn a profit for taxpayers.

The study, by two Harvard economists, found that many programs — especially those focused on children and young adults — made money for taxpayers, when all costs and benefits were factored in.

That’s because they improved the health and education of enrollees and their families, who eventually earned more income, paid more taxes and needed less government assistance over all.

The study, by Nathaniel Hendren, an economics professor, and Ben Sprung-Keyser, a graduate student, was published in the August edition of The Quarterly Journal of Economics and analyzed 101 government programs begun since the 1960s. Like standard cost-benefit analyses, it quantified the benefit for each one, like higher take-home pay and lower out-of-pocket medical spending, as well as the government’s direct costs.

The researchers took an extra step, though, and accounted for the “fiscal externalities”: the indirect ways that a program affected the government’s budget. These effects arose because the programs changed the choices that participants made. For this part of their research, Mr. Hendren and Mr. Sprung-Keyser drew on previous studies that quantified many of these ripple effects.

Consider one program: health insurance for pregnant women. In the mid-1980s, the federal government allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility to more low-income pregnant women. Some, but not all, states took up the offer. Increased Medicaid coverage enabled women to receive prenatal care and better obstetric care, and to save on personal medical spending.

For the federal government, the most straightforward fiscal impact of this expanded coverage was increased spending on health insurance. The indirect fiscal effects were more complex, and could easily be overlooked, but they have been enormous.

First, newly eligible women had fewer uninsured medical costs. The federal government picks up part of the tab for the uninsured because it reimburses hospitals for “uncompensated care,” or unpaid bills. Thus, this saved the government some money. On the other hand, some of the women stopped working, probably because they no longer needed employer-provided private health insurance, and this cost the government money.

But the biggest indirect effects were not apparent until children born to the Medicaid-covered women became adults. As shown in a study by Sarah Miller at the University of Michigan and Laura Wherry at the University of California, Los Angeles, those second-generation beneficiaries were healthier in adulthood, with fewer hospitalizations. The government saved money because it would have paid for part of those hospital bills. The now-adult beneficiaries had more education and earned more money than people in similar situations whose mothers did not get Medicaid benefits. That meant higher tax revenue.

It’s not surprising that the children of women who had better health care grew up to be healthier adults and higher earners. It just required a few decades before researchers could measure how big those effects were."

[guido]

Queen Knights Captain Tom, in a Rare Public Appearance - The New York Times

LONDON — When Queen Elizabeth II tapped Sir Tom Moore on both shoulders with a sword at Windsor Castle on Friday, she confirmed the noble status of a 100-year-old man whose achievements during the pandemic had already propelled him into the ranks of Britain’s most exalted citizens.

Yet the ceremony was remarkable in a couple of other ways. It brought together two of the greatest living links to Britain’s World War II history — the queen who worked as a young driver and truck mechanic during the war, and a decorated Army officer who fought in the infamous Burma campaign and has found celebrity as the charitable fund-raiser known as Captain Tom.

It also brought the queen out of seclusion for her first face-to-face meeting with a member of the public since March 19, when she hastily left Buckingham Palace as the coronavirus bore down on London. Conferring a knighthood on Mr. Moore, who raised $40 million for Britain’s National Health Service by walking 100 laps of his garden, was evidently worth the risk of stepping out.

“Tom, with his remarkable achievement, was important to honor,” said Dickie Arbiter, who served as the queen’s press secretary from 1988 to 2000. Equally important, he said, was her decision to show up in person to bestow the honor. “She’s always said she’s ‘got to be seen to be believed,’” he noted.

Whether Britons will ever see their revered monarch in person again has become a wistful theme in the British tabloids in recent weeks, one made even more piquant by the once-in-a-century pandemic, which has showcased her ability to take to the airwaves and rally the nation during difficult times.

But the queen’s age — she recently turned 94 — and her resulting vulnerability to the virus have raised doubts that she will ever be able to return to her life of diplomatic receptions, garden parties and hospital dedications. Her regular weekly meetings with Prime Minister Boris Johnson have been conducted by phone since the outbreak began.

“Queen heartbreak,” said a typical headline in the Daily Express. “Will we ever see the queen in public again?”

[guido]

Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen Give Republicans in Congress a Lesson on Coronavirus Economics | The New Yorker

"It was no real surprise to see Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, the past two chairs of the Federal Reserve, testifying to Congress on Friday about the economic-policy response to the coronavirus pandemic. Although neither of them has appeared before a congressional committee since leaving the Fed, they have both emerged in recent months as vocal supporters of using monetary and fiscal policy aggressively to support the stricken economy. Last month, they signed a public letter from more than a hundred and fifty economists that called on Congress to pass another big spending bill to extend and broaden the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which was enacted in March.

There is no time to lose. About this time next week, the supplementary unemployment benefits of six hundred dollars a week that were introduced as part of the CARES Act will start to expire. If Congress doesn’t extend the benefits, this will have a hugely negative impact on the roughly thirty-three million Americans who are out of work and claiming benefits from local or federal programs. Many of these people, who lost their jobs through no fault of their own, will be plunged into poverty, and the damage won’t end there. As they cut back on spending because their income has been slashed, the effects will ripple through the rest of the economy, causing further job losses. Exactly how many more jobs will go is difficult to say in advance, but Harvard’s Jason Furman, who headed the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the second term of the Obama Administration, recently estimated that over the course of the next year it could be around two million.

Appearing at the hearing of a coronavirus subcommittee that was set up by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Bernanke and Yellen didn’t get into that level of detail. Drawing on some basic economics and their experiences dealing with a previous crisis—the Great Recession and its aftermath—they did persuasively explain why Congress should act urgently on three fronts: extending the supplementary unemployment payments; providing additional financial support to state and local governments; and developing a comprehensive plan to make available adequate testing, medical equipment, and contact tracing. The two former policymakers, who are both highly regarded academic economists, also pushed back against recent suggestions from the White House that the new spending should be limited to a trillion dollars. Yellen said it was hard to tell precisely how much financial support might be needed, so it would be unwise to impose a spending cap. Bernanke said, “Whatever it takes is probably what we need to be thinking now.”

Bernanke also pointed to recent signs of stalling in the economic rebound that we’ve seen over the past couple of months, as many states saw case numbers rise. But some Republican members of the subcommittee seemed less interested in debating what measures were needed to boost the economy than in scoring political points. “What’s more important: reopening schools or protesting?” Representative Jim Jordan, of Ohio, asked Bernanke. The former Fed chairman, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, in 2005, replied that both were important, but he wisely refused to be drawn into the debate about whether to reopen schools.

A number of the Republicans on the committee expressed frustration at the fact that, because of the enhanced unemployment benefits, some jobless Americans are currently receiving more income than they were when they were employed. Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer, of Missouri, said this was a disincentive for people to take jobs. Bernanke agreed that this could be an issue; he also pointed out that it could be dealt with by restructuring the benefits or giving extra tax credits to people who return to work. In a joint statement they submitted to the subcommittee, Bernanke and Yellen said that the supplementary unemployment payments should be maintained until the jobless rate fell to a more normal level.

Yellen, whom President Barack Obama nominated to succeed Bernanke, in 2013, stressed the need to provide federal support for states and municipalities that have seen their tax revenues fall drastically at the same time that their spending needs, on things like health care and relief programs, have risen sharply. Because many states have a limited capacity to borrow money and run deficits, they are coming under pressure to slash spending and cut payrolls. “If there isn’t substantial support there, we are going to see massive layoffs in state and local governments,” Yellen warned.

Like Bernanke, Yellen tried to avoid being drawn into partisan conflicts. But that didn’t prevent her from expressing skepticism about the notion that promoting a vigorous economic recovery and taking strenuous measures to contain the virus are in conflict. “There’s not much of a trade-off,” she said. Then she pointed to countries in Europe and elsewhere that took decisive measures to contain the virus, and which are now in a strong position to reopen their economies. With a nod to the increasingly alarming situation in many parts of this country, she added, “It is very expensive to have to shut down again.”

The two former Fed chairs also addressed concerns about the red ink that the federal government is running up in responding to the pandemic. (In June, the budget deficit hit a monthly record of $864 billion.) “We do not believe that concerns about the deficit and debt should prevent the Congress from responding robustly to this emergency,” Yellen said. “The top priorities at this time should be protecting our citizens from the pandemic and pursuing a stronger and equitable economic recovery.” Bernanke pointed out that, thanks to record-low interest rates and strong demand for Treasury bonds from domestic and international investors, the U.S. government is in the fortunate position of being able to finance large deficits cheaply. “It’s an opportunity to take advantage of our ability to borrow, to do something to help our economy recover,” he said. We’ll find out soon if the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress take this sound advice."

[guido]

America Is a Country Besieged by Its Own President | The New Yorker

"This week marked the fifty-first anniversary of the moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin. I am just about old enough to remember how, in Leeds, the city in northern England where I grew up, people gathered around their radios and television sets to witness the historic event. My paternal grandmother, a fiery Irish woman, refused to believe it was real: the entire thing had been staged in a desert somewhere, she insisted.

That was a minority position. To most of the world, the landing symbolized American leadership and power. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that most of the people I grew up with loved the United States, or even openly admired it. Barely disguised resentment at the manner in which this country had eclipsed the British Empire was combined with a widespread contention that America was a shallow place beset by crass commercialism, high crime rates, and gaping racial rifts. But beneath the British condescension, there was also a respect for America: its technological know-how, its organizational efficiency, its democratic traditions, and its sheer heft. When my dad was away, working in Scotland, he saw the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy sail up the Firth of Forth. The vast aircraft carrier was almost a quarter of a mile long, he reported back to us in wonderment.

A half century later, the rest of the world is looking on in horror as this country lurches from one disaster to another. Trapped in a leadership vacuum created by the narcissistic reality-TV star who occupies the Oval Office, the United States seems powerless to arrest the spread of a pandemic that most industrialized countries contained months ago. As the cumulative number of infections surpasses four million, an economic rebound that began when many states prematurely reopened their economies appears to be stalling. And, with an election just three and a half months away, that same President, in a desperate effort to save his political skin, seems intent on creating violent clashes in some of America’s biggest conurbations."

[guido]

Is It Time to Defund the Department of Homeland Security? | The New Yorker

"In early June, after the killing of George Floyd, when tens of thousands of mostly peaceful demonstrators assembled in cities across the country to protest police brutality, the Department of Homeland Security sent hundreds of its agents to patrol the crowds. They cleared space for a Presidential photo op in front of St. John’s Church, in Washington, D.C., by forcibly removing demonstrators, and in New York City they reportedly made at least one arrest at gunpoint. The legal rationale for their being on the scene was a statute from 2002 that gave them broad authority to protect federal property and personnel. This mandate sounded just vague enough to escape mainstream notice at the time, when police officers were being filmed tear-gassing and beating protesters. But a pressing question remains, which the D.H.S. leadership can’t easily answer: What are agents from Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing in the streets of U.S. cities nowhere near the border, policing citizens who have broken no laws?

Earlier this month, D.H.S. went further, sending SWAT teams from C.B.P. to Portland, Oregon, to quell ongoing protests in front of a federal building downtown. “We do not want you here,” the state’s Democratic governor, Kate Brown, said that she told D.H.S. officials when she learned of their plans. “It provokes confrontation to have federal troops on the streets.” Chad Wolf, the acting head of the department, ignored her, and held what a former official described to me as a “pep rally” with agents before deploying more of them to the city. In a statement, Wolf said, “The city of Portland has been under siege for forty-seven straight days by a violent mob, while local political leaders refuse to restore order.” He added, a few days later, as opposition to the D.H.S. presence grew, “we will not retreat.”

By mid-July, federal authorities had made about forty arrests in Portland, and there were news reports and video footage of agents beating protesters, including a fifty-three-year-old Navy veteran, who was left with a shattered hand. In a widely circulated video, two agents dressed in military camouflage were shown pulling a protester into an unmarked gray minivan. “The nightly disturbances in Portland were not national news until now,” a former D.H.S. official told me. “Department leadership is putting officers in a very difficult position by not explaining what they’re doing and why. If this mission was supposed to be about assisting Federal Protective Services”—the agency in charge of guarding federal property—“then what are they doing pulling people into minivans rented from the Portland airport? How does protecting federal property become pepper spraying and batoning people?”

D.H.S. is a relatively young federal department, founded in 2003 to unify a broad array of agencies tasked with handling immigration and border enforcement in the name of national security, following the attacks of 9/11. Before the Trump era, the department’s secretaries had been conscious of its newfound standing in the federal bureaucracy. As a former senior official once told me, “you can’t let the place become a political football,” because its resources are vast, its power is broad, and its responsibilities involve protecting the country from imminent threats. In the past four years, however, career officials have been forced out en masse, as the department’s enforcement agenda has fallen into the direct service of President Trump’s reëlection efforts. Wolf is only in charge now because his immediate predecessors were fired or driven to resign, and his top deputies are all political appointees. “There’s no longer any check on bad ideas,” the former official told me. There were signs that the Administration would stage dramatic action involving the department in the months before the election, the former official added, saying, “We just thought it would be about immigration and sanctuary cities. It’s the political use of law enforcement in an election year.”"

[guido]

At the Olympics in Bombed-Out London, She Forever Changed Women’s Sports - The New York Times

"When the Dutch track star Fanny Blankers-Koen appeared at the 1948 London Olympics, soon to become the first woman to win four gold medals at a single Games, she was not the only welcomed and urgent arrival from the Netherlands.

A hundred tons of fruit and vegetables were also sent from the Low Countries to help feed Dutch and other athletes in a still-battered city during the first Summer Olympics held after World War II. Finland provided timber for the basketball court. Switzerland donated gymnastics equipment. Canada felled two Douglas firs to make diving boards.

The Austerity Olympics, they were nicknamed. They represented a renewal of the world’s biggest sporting event following the wartime cancellation of the Winter and Summer Games of 1940 and 1944 — a disruption deadlier and longer than a yearlong postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“It was a liberation of spirit to be there in London,” the great Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek, who won four cumulative gold medals at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, later said of the moment. “After those dark days of the war, the bombing, the killing and the starvation, the revival of the Olympics was as if the sun had come out.”

Still, much of London remained devastated by the Blitz. Some critics saw the Olympics as an obscene waste in a nearly bankrupt Britain. But the government lent its support to signal postwar rejuvenation and to secure the desperate lifeline of hard currency from foreign tourists.

There was no money to build arenas or housing. Running events were held on a greyhound track covered with tons of cinders from fireplaces. Athletes were housed in military camps, college dormitories and schools. Many competitors made their own uniforms.

Food rationing was still in effect, and while Olympians received more rations than the average person — the same amount as dockworkers and coal miners — some British athletes supplemented their diets with the protein of whale meat.

This spirit of improvisation, rebirth and remarkable change was most notably embodied by the star of the Games, Blankers-Koen, whose success undermined stereotypes about women competing vigorously in sports and inspired track and field’s world governing body to name her its greatest female athlete of the 20th century.

“Almost single-handedly she transformed women’s athletics from a sideshow into a central feature of future Olympics,” Janie Hampton wrote in “The Austerity Olympics,” a history of the 1948 London Games."

[htwoopup]

There are any number of OT threads this could go in but, to me, this is a well written and important piece so belongs here.

John Lewis had written an op-ed piece that he requested The NY Times to publish on the day of his funeral.

If you have not read it, it is here:

Opinion | John Lewis: Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation - The New York Times

IMHO, it is a classic.

[guido]

Obama’s rousing speech at the John Lewis Memorial trolls Trump: Who’s the impostor now? | Greg Sargent -- Washington Post

"Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in no small part on the idea that his predecessor was an impostor. He adopted the racist “birther” theory about Barack Obama with the carefully cultivated aim of connecting with disaffected GOP constituencies, then stuck with it through his hijacking of the party in 2016 en route to winning the presidency.

That core idea — that the first Black president couldn’t possibly have been a real American, that electing Trump would in effect set things right by erasing from history the Obama presidency, which should have never happened — is particularly galling, but also worth remembering, in light of the stark contrast we just witnessed unfolding between these two men.

It is perversely fitting that President Trump issued his clearest statement of corrupt intent yet toward our elections on the same day that Obama delivered a eulogy for John Lewis, who was revered for his willingness to sacrifice his life to realize the full promise of American democracy for African Americans, and for all Americans.

Trump tweeted his usual lies about vote-by-mail, falsely claiming it will produce a “FRAUDULENT” result, and asked whether we should “delay the election until people can properly, securely and safely vote.”

Trump cannot postpone the election, and many Republicans rejected the idea. But in floating it, Trump again tried to dissuade states from scaling up safe voting options in pandemic conditions and sought to cast in advance any outcome in which he does not prevail as fundamentally illegitimate.

Trump also reminded us again that he intends to do all he possibly can — including manipulating the levers of government and even the machinery of our justice system — to corrupt the election and maintain his grip on power, regardless of the preferences of the American electorate.

In his eulogy for Lewis only a few hours later, Obama didn’t mention Trump. But Trump’s intentions towards this fall’s elections — and our democracy — were everywhere."