US Politics

BooksRigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s baseMollie Hemingway says the 2020 election ‘went terribly wrong’. In a divided America, her deeply flawed book will find readers Lloyd GreenSun 17 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 02.01 EDTThe state of the union is sulfurous. Donald Trump’s defeat did not change that.More than 80% of Trump and Biden voters think elected officials from the other party “present a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Half of Trump supporters and two-fifths for Biden think secession would be a good idea.Into the fray leaps Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway with Rigged, 488 pages on “How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections”. Hemingway’s is an immovable feast. It’s about owning the libs.“If you believe things went terribly wrong in the 2020 election, well, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone,” she writes. “But most of all, you’re not wrong.”In 2015, Hemingway branded Trump a “demagogue with no real solutions”. Now, like so many Republicans, she’s a fan. She discounts Charlottesville, where in August 2017 far-right marchers earned kind words from the president, as a “hoax”. She castigates those who denounce the events of 6 January this year, when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol.“People who call the few-hour riot at the Capitol by unarmed protesters an ‘insurrection’ are bad people who are harming the country,” she tweeted in July.The riot was an attempt to overturn the election. Five people died, a police officer among them. Rigged is catnip for Trump’s base.“They used Covid to rig an election,” Trump whines, in an interview. “There was nothing I could do.” He has been singing that song since May 2020. And then there is reality: the administration’s performative nonchalance in the face of Covid undermined Trump’s chances of reelection.That was understood by his campaign as early as spring 2020. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post, in April Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, warned that Covid could cost the boss re-election.“We have seen the enemy and it is us,” Fabrizio wrote. “It isn’t [Trump’s] policies that cause the biggest problem, it is voters’ reactions to his temperament and behavior.”Hemingway looks in other directions, pointing a finger at Democratic lawyers and voters for supposedly gaming the system amid a pandemic, berating Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for pursuing the wrong legal strategies, and ignoring comments by Bill Barr, who she interviews but who as attorney general let Trump know he had not “seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election”.It’s true that Trump might have mounted more of a fight. His campaign and the GOP had real lawyers on the payroll and Republicans were secretary of state in Arizona and Georgia. But the party had squandered the advantages of incumbency. Trump and Hemingway both go at Silicon Valley with a vengeance, reserving a special place in hell for Mark Zuckerberg.“Big tech got meaner, bigger, stronger, and they were crazed,” Trump says. As for Zuckerberg, he “should be in jail”. One suspects many Americans might agree.Hemingway criticizes the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) for funding election operations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. She contends that such private-public partnerships undermine the public’s faith in electoral integrity. For the record, courts repeatedly denied pre-election efforts to block CTCL funding. One federal judge, William C Griesbach, a George W Bush appointee, acknowledged the “receipt of private funds for public elections may give an appearance of impropriety” – but dismissed the lawsuit. Hemingway does not examine Team Trump’s own relationship with Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct company part-owned by the Mercer family, Trump benefactors, used Facebook to illegally harvest personal data. Steve Bannon, who would become Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, was a board member and officer. He denies personal culpability.There’s more that Hemingway leaves untouched. According to The Contrarian, a recent book by Max Chafkin of Bloomberg News, in a 2019 meeting between Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and Trump ally, Zuckerberg basically agreed to champion “state-sanctioned conservatism”. Zuckerberg has called the claim “pretty ridiculous”. Thiel, an original Facebook investor, still sits on the board.It doesn’t end there. A recent lawsuit commenced by the Rhode Island Retirement System against Facebook, Zuckerberg, Thiel and his company, Palantir, alleges “significant damage” caused by the data-harvesting scandal. The suit quotes the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, in alleging that Palantir employees “regularly worked in person, during normal business hours, at the offices of Cambridge Analytica in London”.Back on the page, it seems Hemingway cannot resist the siren song of race. In Justice on Trial, her last book, about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, she rubbished the legal underpinnings of Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court ruling that made state-imposed school segregation unconstitutional. Such decisions, she wrote, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.It’s a unique take, with which even Trump’s three supreme court picks would not agree. Amy Coney Barrett has called Brown a “super-precedent … unthinkable” to overrule. Kavanaugh has said the same. Neil Gorsuch concedes it was properly decided.Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreUndeterred, Hemingway now takes aim at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, resurrecting Barry Goldwater’s contention that it evinced “an unconstitutional usurpation of power by the federal government”. Hemingway also derides Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights as a blatant appeal to black voters.In 1964, Senator Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide. That was the last time a Democrat accomplished that feat – or won the “white vote”, for that matter.The news remains a battleground. Ryan Williams, president of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has made it known his mission is to save western civilization.“We believe in truth and reason,” he recently told the Atlantic. “The question is whose truth and whose reason.”Williams also said “a third of the country thinks the election was given to Biden fraudulently”. Hemingway is sure to find an audience.
Rigged is published in the US by Regnery
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VirginiaObama and Trump wade into key battle over Virginia’s governor seat The race is unpredictable and tight, with former governor Terry McAuliffe up against Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin Edward HelmoreSat 16 Oct 2021 15.41 EDTLast modified on Sat 16 Oct 2021 15.43 EDTJoe Biden faces a key test of public standing in a tight and closely watched campaign for governor in Virginia next month. So important has the fight now become in being seen as a bellwether for the 2022 midterm elections, that two ex-presidents are weighing in on the battle.For Biden and the Democrats winning Virginia would hold out the prospect of keeping a grip on congress next year and avoiding being seen as a lame duck administration. For Republicans, a win could pre-sage a major comeback in 2022 and a return to electoral strength of a party still dominated by Donald Trump.The stakes are so high that both Trump and Barack Obama are intervening in the race.Why Virginia holds the key to the 2022 US midterms: Politics Weekly Extra podcastRead moreLast week, Trump called in to a gathering of Virginia supporters, urging them to vote for the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, and calling him “a great gentleman”. Meanwhile, Obama will later this month arrive in the state to boost turnout among Black voters. “The stakes could not be greater,” Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe said, as he announced Obama’s campaign support on MSNBC last week.The proxies in the contest, McAuliffe, a former governor running for the job he held from 2014-18, and first-time Republican challenger Youngkin, are currently polling relatively closely at 48.5% and 46.4%, according FiveThirtyEight – making the race unpredictable and tight.The men are running to replace the state’s Democratic governor Ralph Northam who has been in the party’s political doghouse since 2019 when it was revealed his 1984 medical school yearbook page contained a photo of one person dressed as a member of the KKK and another in blackface impersonating an African American.The Virginia race comes against a backdrop of bad news for Biden, who has seen his popularity fall in the aftermath of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and legislative gridlock on the main plans of his domestic agenda and growing uncertainty of post-pandemic economic recovery. His approval rating has sunk from 55% in March to about 44% now.But so, too, does the contest present a test for Trump, who lost Virginia by 10% in 2020, but is increasingly seen to be gauging his hold on the Republican party and its voters ahead of the midterms, which could then swing his decision to run for re-election in 2024.Nor is Trump’s intervention in the race a win-win for Youngkin. The two men are not likely to campaign in person as Youngkin must simultaneously appeal to pro-Trump rural voters, but not telegraph any association so blatantly that he turns off moderate Republican voters in Virginia’s Washington-centric northern suburbs where elections in the state are often decided.Bob Holsworth, a longtime political analyst in the state, told the Washington Post that if Trump were to hold a rally in the state, it would be a “disaster” for Youngkin. “The more he shows up and he more he participates, the worse off it is for Youngkin,” he added.But Trump countered that political wisdom with some of his own: “The only guys that win are the guys that embrace the Maga movement,” Trump said in an interview with conservative talkshow host John Fredericks. Instead of overtly embracing Trump, Youngkin has campaigned with Texas senator Ted Cruz and with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. But he steered clear of an event hosted by Trump strategist Steve Bannon who may face contempt charges on Tuesday for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into the 6 January Capitol riot. Youngkin was also careful to criticize the Bannon event’s use of a flag that had reportedly been flown at the 6 January insurrection.Youngkin’s hands-off, hands-on approach is also designed to not raise the hackles of relatively unengaged democratic support for McAuliffe, who has his own endorsement issues to deal with. For his part, Virginia’s former governor comes with the baggage of close ties to the Clintons, whose popularity among independents and left-wing Democrats is far from assured. Last month, Hillary Clinton, whose first, failed presidential nomination campaign was co-chaired by McAuliffe sent out a fundraising email. That was followed by a fundraising event hosted by Bill Clinton.But other Democratic heavy-weights are traveling to Virginia to soothe Democratic anxiety and try to propel McAuliffe’s campaign toward the decisive victory they need. Georgia Democratic star Stacey Abrams and Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and first lady Jill Biden are also expected in the state’s northern suburbs, while House speaker Nancy Pelosi plans a fundraiser.But Biden himself has and will likely remain absent from Virginia. Mirroring Youngkin’s relationship to Trump, McAuliffe and his aides have expressed fears over associating with Biden. McAuliffe recently described the president as “unpopular” in Virginia.McAuliffe has also indicated that legislative impasse in Washington is damaging to Democrats in the country at large. “Democrats have got to quit talking, and they’ve got to get something done,” McAuliffe told The Washington Post. “You got elected to get things done. We have the House, Senate and White House.”Hanging over Democratic heads are the memories of losing the midterm elections in 2010, a crushing defeat for Obama that was predicted when Democrats lost a Senate seat in Massachusetts while trying to push through a controversial healthcare reform bill. TopicsVirginiaUS politicsJoe BidenRepublicansDemocratsBarack ObamaDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

DemocratsManchin hits back at Sanders criticism in fight over Biden investment planVermont senator chides Manchin over lack of support for billProgressive-centrist impasse holds up Biden’s reform agenda Edward HelmoreSat 16 Oct 2021 10.07 EDTLast modified on Sat 16 Oct 2021 10.09 EDTInternal party warfare between progressive and moderate Democrats over Joe Biden’s $3.5tn tax-and-spending package has burst dramatically into the open after Vermont senator Bernie Sanders launched a thinly veiled attack on West Virginia senator Joe Manchin in an op-ed published in the centrist Democrat’s home-state newspaper.Is Hunter Biden’s art project painting the president into an ethical corner?Read moreSanders, writing in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, described opponents of the legislation as “every Republican in Congress as well as the drug companies, the insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry and the billionaire class”.He added that opponents of the bill support a status quo “in which the very rich get richer while ordinary Americans continue to struggle to make ends meet”.Joe Biden’s proposed legislation is an ambitious package on policies such as free education, the climate crisis and healthcare provision that its proponents liken to the domestic reforms of the 1960s Great Society and the 1930s New Deal.However, it has run up against opposition from a group of centrist and conservative Democrats – often spearheaded by Manchin – who balk at its price tag and some of the programs it embraces.Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont, said polls showed “overwhelming support for this legislation”.“Yet, the political problem we face is that in a 50-50 Senate we need every Democratic senator to vote yes. We now have only 48. Two Democratic senators remain in opposition, including senator Joe Manchin,” he said.The other senator Sanders was referring to is Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.The column provoked swift pushback from Manchin. “This isn’t the first time an out-of-stater has tried to tell West Virginians what is best for them, despite having no relationship to our state,” he said a tweet.Last month, Manchin said he would not vote for the bill, called the Build Back Better plan, that he characterized again on Friday a “reckless expansion of government programs”.The exchange comes as the full spending package looks increasingly unlikely to pass in its current form, and the progressive-centrist impasse has paralyzed Biden’s domestic reform agenda and action to match his administration’s commitment to combatting climate change.Central to the dispute between Sanders and Manchin is the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), a $150bn program within the spending bill, designed to speed the conversion of US electric power generation from fossil fuels to renewable energy.Manchin’s home state is the second largest producer of coal, after Wyoming, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and Manchin has argued that utilities should not receive federal funds for an energy transition they are already making.Manchin is also chairman of the Senate energy and natural resources committee, and holds power over energy components in the bill. He has indicated he aims to reduce the $3.5tn price tag of the spending bill to $1.5tn.But simply dropping the clean energy provision from the proposed legislation would come as major embarrassment to the administration ahead of Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow next month, where Biden will be in the spotlight over matching verbal commitment to climate initiatives with legislative action.In taking the fight to West Virginia, Sanders is redoubling pressure on his party colleague.In comments to reporters last week, Sanders said: “The time is long overdue for him to tell us with specificity – not generalities, but beyond generalities, with specificity – what he wants and what he does not want, and to explain that to the people of West Virginia and America.”From ringside, the White House continues to express its commitment to a compromise solutions to get the economic package, even if it does not reach its full measure of spending.“I’m convinced we’re going to get it done. We’re not going to get $3.5tn. We’ll get less than that, but we’re going to get it,” Biden said Friday.White House Press secretary Jen Psaki described the impasse as an example of “democracy working.”“When it comes down to it, no bill is perfect,” Psaki said on a podcast. “It’s not going to be everything that Joe Biden wants, it’s not going to be everything Joe Manchin wants.”TopicsDemocratsJoe BidenUS CongressUS domestic policyUS politicsBernie SandersnewsReuse this content More

US SenateWinemaking and marathon running: what Kyrsten Sinema does instead of her jobSinema is one of two Democrat holdouts against passing Biden’s Build Back Better agenda – but hasn’t made public why. Here’s what she is public about Luke O’Neil@lukeoneil47Sat 16 Oct 2021 07.00 EDTServing in the US Senate is a pretty good gig if you can get it. You’re paid $174,000 a year, only have to show up around 200 days and you almost always snag an even better-compensated private sector gig when you retire or lose an election.For all these perks, all you have to do is occasionally give a thumbs up or down on matters of serious import. Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema seems to enjoy all of those aspects of her job besides the last one.Sinema, and her fellow conservative lawmaker Joe Manchin, remain the two Democrat holdouts against passing Joe Biden’s would-be sweeping Build Back Better agenda. The duo are effectively holding an array of social spending proposals in limbo – including the parts that would stop people dying, give under-fives a better start in life and meaningfully address climate change. Aid for real people across the country, and the planet itself, is being forestalled. Manchin has been direct in the specifics of his opposition, but Sinema has said she doesn’t want to make public what her opposition to the bill is. She’s far from a private person though – here’s how she seems to prefer spending her time besides doing what her voters ostensibly sent her to Washington to do.Making wineEarlier this year it was reported by Business Insider that Sinema has spent a couple of weeks interning at the Three Sticks winery in Sonoma, California. For her work at the facility she was paid $1,117.40. Sinema’s appreciation for wine has been well documented on her social media accounts, so it’s possible it’s just a coincidence that the owner of the winery in question is William S Price III, a cofounder of TPG Capital, one of the biggest private equity firms in the world, which has spent more than $3m lobbying politicians in the past couple of years.RunningNot that type of running. Sinema has spent the past year training for long-distance runs. An avid athlete, she has competed in the Boston Marathon before, but had to pull out of the contest this month after injuring herself in another race in Washington over the summer.TravelingThis week it was reported that Sinema has traveled to Europe for a fundraising jag. It was unclear whether she, in addition to participating in events to raise money for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was holding private fundraising events of her own. Sinema’s itinerary for the trip remains a secret but she is believed to be visiting Paris and London.FundraisingAs Democrats scrambled to find a solution to the budget impasse earlier this month, Sinema left Washington abruptly on a Friday for what she said was a medical appointment. Also on the agenda that weekend was a donor’s retreat at a luxury spa in Phoenix. That same week, Sinema held another fundraising meeting with industry groups opposed to Biden’s agenda. During the the 45-minute meeting the groups were invited to write checks for $1,000 to $5,800 to her election fund. All told, Sinema has received at least $750,000 from pharmaceutical interests and $920,000 from other industry lobbies.TeachingSinema has been teaching at Arizona State University since 2003, holding between two and three courses a semester. Among her recurring classes is one called Developing Grants and Fundraising. As the course description explains, the class is designed to teach students “how to cultivate donors” through “opportunistic fundraising.”TopicsUS SenateUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Climate crimesClimate crisisA US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him The mayor of Imperial Beach, California, says big oil wants him to drop the lawsuit demanding the industry pay for the climate crisisSupported byAbout this contentChris McGreal in Imperial BeachSat 16 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTSerge Dedina is a surfer, environmentalist and mayor of Imperial Beach, a small working-class city on the California coast.He is also, if the fossil fuel industry is to be believed, at the heart of a conspiracy to shake down big oil for hundreds of millions of dollars.Imperial Beach, CaliforniaExxonMobil and its allies have accused Dedina of colluding with other public officials across California to extort money from the fossil-fuel industry. Lawyers even searched his phone and computer for evidence he plotted with officials from Santa Cruz, a city located nearly 500 miles north of Imperial Beach.The problem is, Dedina had never heard of a Santa Cruz conspiracy. Few people had.“The only thing from Santa Cruz on my phone was videos of my kids surfing there,” Dedina said. “I love the fact that some lawyer in a really expensive suit, sitting in some horrible office trying to find evidence that we were in some kind of conspiracy with Santa Cruz, had to look at videos of my kids surfing.”That’s where the laughter stopped.The lawyers found no evidence to back up their claim. But that did not stop the industry from continuing to use its legal muscle to try to intimidate Dedina, who leads one of the poorest small cities in the region.The mayor became a target after Imperial Beach filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and more than 30 other fossil-fuel companies demanding they pay the huge costs of defending the city from rising seas caused by the climate crisis.Imperial Beach’s lawsuit alleges the oil giants committed fraud by covering up research showing that burning fossil fuels destroys the environment. The industry then lied about the evidence for climate change for decades, deliberately delaying efforts to curb carbon emissions.The city’s lawsuit was among the first of a wave of litigation filed by two dozen municipalities and states across the US that could cost the fossil-fuel industry billions of dollars in compensation for the environmental devastation and the deception.Dedina says his minority majority community of about 27,000 cannot begin to afford the tens of millions of dollars it will cost to keep at bay the waters bordering three sides of his financially strapped city. The worst of recent storms have turned Imperial Beach into an island.One assessment calculated that, without expensive mitigation measures, rising sea levels will eventually swamp some of the city’s neighbourhoods, routinely flood its two schools and overwhelm its drainage system.Imperial Beach’s annual budget is $20m. Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, was paid more than $15m last year.“We don’t have a pot to piss in in this city. So why not go after the oil companies?” he said. “The lawsuit is a pragmatic approach to making the people that caused sea level rise pay for the impacts it has on our city.”InteractiveThat’s not how Exxon, the US’s largest oil company, saw it. Its lawyers noted that Imperial Beach filed its case in July 2017, at the same time as two California counties, Marin and San Mateo. The county and city of Santa Cruz followed six months later with similar suits seeking compensation to cope with increasing wildfires and drought caused by global heating.Exxon alleged that the sudden burst of litigation, and the fact that the municipalities shared a law firm specialising in environmental cases, Sher Edling, was evidence of collusion.Exxon filed lawsuits claiming the municipalities conspired to extort money from the company by following a strategy developed during an environmental conference at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, 25 miles north of Imperial Beach, nine years ago.The meeting, organised by the Climate Accountability Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists, produced a report outlining how legal strategies used by US states against the tobacco industry in the 1990s could be applied to cases against fossil fuel companies.Dedina was also targeted by one of the US’s biggest business groups at the forefront of industry resistance to increased regulation to reduce greenhouse gases, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a rightwing thinktank, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.The manufacturing trade group was behind the efforts to obtain data from Dedina’s phone and documents in 2018. In its public disclosure request to the mayor’s office, NAM called Imperial Beach’s lawsuit “litigation based on political or ideological objections more appropriately addressed through the political process”.Exxon is attempting to use a Texas law that allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence by questioning individuals under oath even before any legal action is filed against them. The company is trying to force Dedina, two other members of Imperial Beach’s government, and officials from other jurisdictions, to submit to questioning on the grounds they were joined in a conspiracy against the oil industry.“A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change,” the oil firm claimed. “ExxonMobil finds itself directly in that conspiracy’s crosshairs.”How cities and states could finally hold fossil fuel companies accountableRead moreA Texas district judge approved the request to depose Dedina, but then a court of appeals overturned the decision last year. The state supreme court is considering whether to take up the case.The target on Dedina is part of a wider pattern of retaliation against those suing Exxon and other oil companies.In an unusual move in 2016, Exxon persuaded a Texas judge to order the attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to travel to Dallas to be deposed about her motives for investigating the company for alleged fraud for suppressing evidence on climate change. The judge also ordered that New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, be “available” in Dallas on the same day in case Exxon wanted to question him about a similar investigation.Healey accused Exxon of trying to “squash the prerogative of state attorneys general to do their jobs”. The judge reversed the deposition order a month later and Healey filed a lawsuit against the company in 2019, which is still awaiting trial.But similar tactics persuaded the US Virgin Islands attorney general to shut down his investigation of the oil giant.Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, said the attempt to question Dedina and other officials is part of a broader strategy by the oil industry to counter lawsuits with its own litigation.“These cases are frivolous and vexatious. Intimidation is the goal. Just making it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon. They think that if they make the case painful enough, Imperial Beach will quit,” he said.If the intent is to kill off the litigation against the oil industry, it’s not working. Officials from other municipalities have called Exxon’s move “repugnant”, “a sham” and “outrageous”, and have vowed to press on with their lawsuits.Dedina described the action as a “bullying tactic” by the oil industry to avoid accountability.“The only conspiracy is [that] a bunch of suits and fossil-fuel companies decided to pollute the earth and make climate change worse, and then lie about it,” he said. “They make more money than our entire city has in a year.”The city’s lawsuit claims it faces a “significant and dangerous sea-level rise” through the rest of this century that threatens its existence. Imperial Beach commissioned an analysis of its vulnerability to rising sea levels which concluded that nearly 700 homes and businesses were threatened at a cost of more than $100m. It said that flooding will hit about 40% of the city’s roads, including some that will be under water for long periods. Two elementary schools will have to be moved. The city’s beach, regarded as one of the best sites for surfing on the California coast, is being eroded by about a foot a year.Imperial Beach sits at the southern end of San Diego bay. Under one worst-case scenario, the bay could merge with the Tijuana River estuary to the south and permanently submerge much of the city’s housing and roads.The city has received some help with creating natural climate barriers. The Fish and Wildlife Service restored 400 acres of wetland next to the city as a national wildlife refuge which also acts as a barrier to flooding, and is expected to restore other wetlands together with the Port of San Diego. A grant is paying for improved equipment to warn of floods.But that still leaves the huge costs of building new schools and drainage systems, and adapting other infrastructure. Dedina said that without the oil companies stumping up, it won’t happen.“People ask, how did you go against the world’s largest fossil fuel companies? Isn’t that scary? No. What’s scary is coastal flooding and the idea that whole cities would be under water,” said the mayor.“Honestly, bring it on. I can’t wait to make our case. I can’t wait to take the fight to them because we have nothing to lose.”This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate storyTopicsClimate crisisClimate crimesCaliforniaUS politicsExxonMobilOil and gas companiesFossil fuelsfeaturesReuse this content More

Hunter BidenIs Hunter Biden’s art project painting the president into an ethical corner? The sale of artwork by Joe Biden’s son – a novice artist – could generate up to half a million dollars. Critics say it is an open door to influence-peddlingDavid Smith in Washington@smithinamericaSat 16 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 16 Oct 2021 03.01 EDTIt was another starry night in Hollywood. In a white-walled room at the Milk Studios art gallery, where a lone violinist played before a projected animation, musician Moby, artist Shepard Fairey and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti reportedly mingled with about 200 guests.On display were artworks that combine canvas, yupo paper, wood and metal with oil, acrylic, ink and the written word. Organizers hope they will sell for up to half a million dollars – unusually high for an emerging artist. But then, this artist also happens to be son of the president of the United States.Republicans will try to create an ‘ethics’ trap for Democrats. Don’t fall for it | David LittRead moreHunter Biden’s potentially lucrative new career – he is represented by the Georges Bergès Gallery in New York, which credits him with “powerful and impactful paintings ranging from photogenic to mixed media to the abstract” – is presenting ethical headaches for a White House that has promised to lead by example.Experts have raised alarms that individuals might buy the artworks – expected to fetch between $75,000 and $500,000 – to try to curry favor and gain influence with Joe Biden. They also accuse Hunter of trading on his father’s name and position in a manner that, while not illegal, flouts ethical norms.“I find it deeply troubling,” said Walter Shaub, who was director of the Office of Government Ethics under President Barack Obama. “Merely following the incredibly weak ethics rules that we have doesn’t win you any points and the legalistic approach blinds you to obvious commonsense problems. And here we have an obvious problem.“We’ve got a family member clearly trading on his father’s name. The man has never sold a piece of art before, has never even juried into a community centre art show, but suddenly he’s selling art at fantastical prices. There is simply no way anybody paid $75,000 for anything other than his name.”Biden has always been a fierce defender of Hunter, 51, who has been dogged by controversies for years and whose tax affairs are currently under investigation by the justice department. Donald Trump’s attempts to weaponise Hunter’s problems for political gain in the 2020 presidential election fell flat.Earlier this year Hunter published a memoir in which he detailed his struggle with alcoholism and drug abuse and denied wrongdoing in joining the board of Burisma, a gas company in Ukraine, where he earned more than $50,000 a month from 2014 to 2019. Again, he did not inflict political damage on his father as some feared.But his latest pursuit, painting, could prove more complicated. Hunter said in a New York Times interview last year that he took it up as a hobby during his recovery from addiction and found solace in art when he was at the centre of Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial.In July he told the Nota Bene: This Week in the Art World podcast that art prices are “completely subjective”, insisting: “Look, man, I never set my prices – what my art was going to cost, what it costs or how much it would be priced at. I would be amazed, you know, if my art had sold at, um, you know, for $10.”The sale of his work, however. appears to be cutting through as a media narrative in a way that lurid rightwing conspiracy theories never did. Just as President Jimmy Carter’s younger brother marketed and sold “Billy Beer” in 1977, Hunter faces accusations that he is cashing in.Shaub, now a senior fellow at the Project on Government Oversight watchdog, commented: “You hear people trying to justify it by saying, ‘Well, of course, he’s famous, he’s the president’s son,’ but that’s the exact problem because he may not be in public office and there may be no laws that apply to him but he is a citizen whose father happens to be the leader of the country and so he has a patriotic duty to not run around trying to capitalise on that relationship.“Sure, he’s not a criminal if he fails to comply with that duty, but he’s not a patriot either. He’s not a man who cares about a country that has just been through a four-year ethical nightmare. He sees an opportunity for profiteering and says, ‘Well, you know, it’s legal. I’m just going to do it. Who cares what that does to my country?’”The conflict-of-interest concerns cast a shadow over efforts by the president – who likes to vow “my word as a Biden” – to show the world that America has turned the corner after the constant allegations that Trump’s business and family benefited from his office, including the appointment of his daughter and son-in-law to senior White House positions.Biden issued a memorandum establishing fighting corruption as a core national security interest. His administration responded to the Pandora Papers by promising to push for greater transparency in financial systems.It sought to pre-empt questions over Hunter’s art by striking an agreement, first reported by the Washington Post in July, under which the gallery owner, Georges Bergès, would set the prices of the art and not reveal who bid on or bought it, as well as rejecting offers that seemed extortionate.But there is no mechanism to monitor the agreement. Critics say Hunter’s presence at the recent gallery event in Hollywood undercut claims that neither he nor the White House would know the identity of buyers. And Garcetti, who also attended, is Biden’s nominee to be the next US ambassador to India and a former national co-chair of his 2020 presidential campaign.The issue was given short shrift this week by Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.She told a reporter at the daily briefing: “It still is the purview of the gallerist. We still do not know and will not know who purchases any paintings. And the president remains proud of his son.” When the reporter tried to follow up, Psaki interjected sharply: “Did you have another question on something else?”Shaub condemned her manner as “surly” and described the agreement to keep buyers anonymous as “an insult to our intelligence”. He explained: “Anybody who spends tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy art because it was created by the president’s son is going to be very open and vocal about the fact that they bought it. It’s going to be the showpiece at cocktail parties and so that information will eventually come out. This is a farce.”Some commentators have argued that transparency would work better than secrecy, allowing the public to know whether a buyer such as a political lobbyist had paid a suspiciously high price. When the Guardian called the Georges Bergès Gallery, it was told to send an email and did so, but did not receive a reply. When the Guardian called the Milk Studios, which hosted Hunter’s show, a man twice answered and twice hung up.Ethics expert Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University School of Law, joined criticism of the arrangement. “It’s really unfortunate that Hunter Biden has chosen to attempt to make money in a way that is vulnerable to influence peddling.“Now, he’s an adult and the ethics standards that bind elected officials and civil servants don’t apply to him directly. On the other hand, not all forms of compensated work have this kind of vulnerability but this kind of work does because it’s so difficult to know exactly what the value of a painting is.”The previous White House set a historically low bar, Clark added. “The Trump administration gave the impression that they were attempting to be unethical, like that was the goal, like they were seeking some kind of championship bid in unethical if not criminal conduct. It’s nothing like that. But it still could be a disappointment when the Biden administration doesn’t live up to what it might do in terms of transparency, for example.”Indeed, the sheer breadth and depth of Trump scandals that captivated the media for four years might have partially shielded Biden and Hunter from sustained scrutiny. A recent book on the Biden family by the Politico journalist Ben Schreckinger presents evidence that some emails allegedly leaked from Hunter’s laptop regarding business deals were genuine and not, as widely assumed, planted by Russian intelligence.Shaub suggested that many people are blinded to the ethical problem of the artwork for two reasons. “One is just the hyper-partisanship that has evolved in our country and so people who voted for Biden run around saying, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as Trump.’“Of course it’s not even close to as bad as Trump but ‘better than Trump’ should never, ever, ever become the standard in this country because that’s saying, ‘I’m better than the absolute worst that prior to 2016 you couldn’t have even conceived of.’”He continued: “The second thing that’s blinding people is that there was a lot of unfair smearing of Hunter Biden by very well-funded political actors who were completely disingenuous in their ridiculous accusations. I guess that worked well with their base but it really clouded the issue because the truth is Hunter Biden is not the villain these political actors make him out to be.“But he’s also not the upstanding citizen that the White House wants you to believe. This is a man whose entire life has been is based off of making money on his father’s political career and that is not something we should embrace in this country and celebrate and tolerate. So two things can be true at the same time.”US allies around the world have been looking at the US for evidence that the country has stabilized in the aftermath of Trump’s presidency, Shaub said. “Yeah, we have a new administration that isn’t rampantly thumbing its nose at the rule of law, but it is going right up to the line and saying, if it’s legal, we’re going to do it and we’re not going to focus on reforms, we’re not going to focus on setting a squeaky clean tone, we’re going to go back to the way things were before Trump.”TopicsHunter BidenJoe BidenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Biden administrationBiden’s clean electricity program could be dropped from spending bill – reportMajor part of the Biden administration’s climate agenda will ‘likely’ be cut from the massive budget bill pending in Congress, New York Times reports Sam Levin in Los Angeles@SamTLevinFri 15 Oct 2021 21.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 15 Oct 2021 21.01 EDTA central component to the Biden administration’s climate agenda could be dropped from the massive budget bill that is pending in Congress due to opposition from Senator Joe Manchin, according to a report in the New York Times on Friday.The White House will “likely” cut from its spending bill a program to replace coal- and gas-fired power plants in the US with wind, solar and nuclear energy, the Times reported, citing congressional staffers and lobbyists familiar with the matter.The Biden administration has previously said that its clean energy plans would swiftly cut planet-heating emissions, and estimates have suggested that it could save hundreds of thousands of lives from deadly air pollution. In August, Biden also set a goal for half of all new vehicle sales in the US to be electric by 2030, and tightened pollution standards for trucks and cars.The climate disaster is here – this is what the future looks likeRead moreThe $150bn program that is in danger of being terminated would incentivize utilities to increase the amount of clean energy that they use and would issue penalties to those that do not switch to renewable energy.The Times reported that Manchin, the centrist Democrat from West Virginia who has been aggressively resisting pieces of Biden’s agenda, has told the administration that he strongly opposes the clean electricity program. The White House is now rewriting a version of the legislation that excludes that climate provision, the paper said. The administration is reportedly trying to come up with other alternative policies that could further cut emissions.Manchin, as the Times noted, has personal financial ties to the coal industry.If Manchin’s opposition does ultimately kill Biden’s clean electricity program, it would be a huge setback for the administration’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis. “He plans to gut Biden’s climate plan, and with it the chances for swift global progress,” tweeted Bill McKibben, the prominent environmentalist.The Times noted that Democrats could attempt to move forward with a clean electricity program as its own bill, but that the window of opportunity is closing.A spokesman for the White House declined to comment to the Times.Sam Runyon, a Manchin spokeswoman, did not directly comment on the report, but told the Guardian in an email, “Senator Manchin has clearly expressed his concerns about using tax payer dollars to pay private companies to do things they’re already doing. He continues to support efforts to combat climate change while protecting American energy independence and ensuring our energy reliability.”In July, a consortium of researchers reported that, out of a range of the Biden administration’s policy proposals to tackle the climate crisis, a clean energy standard would offer the largest net benefits to the US.Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema have repeatedly clashed with the Biden administration and progressive Democrats, threatening to derail the president’s ambitious economic package.TopicsBiden administrationUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

Bill ClintonBill Clinton to remain in hospital as he recovers from urological infectionFormer president to remain in California hospital at least another night, his spokesperson said Friday ReutersFri 15 Oct 2021 20.48 EDTThe former US president Bill Clinton’s health is improving but he will remain in a California hospital for at least another night to receive antibiotics intravenously for a urological infection that spread to his bloodstream, his spokesperson said on Friday.The 75-year-old Clinton, who served as president from 1993 to 2001, entered the University of California, Irvine, medical center on Tuesday evening after suffering from fatigue. He spoke with Joe Biden on Friday.Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Ureña said that Clinton’s white blood count has decreased, indicating his health is improving.“All health indicators are trending in the right direction, including his white blood count which was decreased significantly,” Ureña said on Twitter. “In order to receive further IV antibiotics, he will remain in the hospital overnight.”Since his admission to the intensive care unit at the hospital, Clinton has received fluids along with antibiotics, his doctors said.His wife, a former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, was at the hospital on Thursday and Friday, and the two read books and talked about politics, Ureña told Reuters.It remained unclear when Clinton would be released.Biden said Clinton would likely go home soon, though it was not clear whether he would be released on Saturday or later.“He is getting out shortly. … Whether that’s tomorrow or the next day, I don’t know,” Biden told reporters in Connecticut. “He’s doing fine. He really is.”On Thursday, Ureña said Clinton was “up and about, joking and charming the hospital staff”.Clinton has dealt with heart problems in the past, including a 2004 quadruple bypass surgery and a 2010 procedure to open a blocked artery.The Democrat served two terms in the White House, overseeing strong economic growth while engaging in bruising political battles with congressional Republicans.TopicsBill ClintonUS politicsCaliforniaDemocratsReuse this content More