To the dismay of a large swath of Senate Democrats, they may only manage to extend the enhanced child tax credit another year in the reconciliation bill. Many are still fighting that possibility in favor of a longer run.
Meanwhile, quietly, they’re pushing to install a safety net in case those efforts fail.
Continue reading “Senate Democrats Aim To Protect Child Tax Credit In Case Of 2022 GOP Takeover”John Eastman, the Trump legal adviser behind the infamous memo (which had two similar drafts) detailing various strategies for then-Vice President Mike Pence to thwart the 2020 election certification, is insisting that he totally didn’t think those options were legit and were, in fact, totally bonkers, and Eastman does not believe in ideas that are bonkers, thank you very much!
Continue reading “Eastman Insists He Def Doesn’t Believe Memo’s ‘Crazy’ Plots To Steal Election Were Real”My colleague Nicole Lafond already discussed this in the post immediately below this one. But it’s so bizarre I simply have to discuss it as well. As Nicole noted, Kevin McCarthy and Trump toady Jim Banks want what I guess we could call backsies on the whole Jan 6th committee thing.
Republicans had plenty of opportunities to get a commission or committee in which they not only had complete control over who served on the Republican side but veto power over any significant action the body took. They refused that and after stonewalling for months ended up with one that gave the final say on membership to Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi accepted some McCarthy nominations but put her foot down in the case of two reps who are such consistent supporters of the Big Lie and the insurrection that it was absurd to place them on the committee investigating either. Now Banks is sending letters to executive departments claiming that he is in fact that rightful ranking member (i.e., top Republican) on the committee.
Continue reading “Trumper Privilege”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
After months of largely avoiding calls to reform the filibuster while GOP senators were gleefully weaponizing it to obstruct his agenda, the President said during a TV town hall event last night that he’s had enough: It’s time to “fundamentally alter the filibuster.”
The President laid out the specifics of the reconciliation package that his fellow Democrats are (possibly) close to finding a deal on after weeks of negotiations with holdouts Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV).
This had to hurt: Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (R) promised to pay a bounty from his campaign coffers to anyone who reported election fraud that leads to a conviction. The first recipient is the scion of a family of Democratic operatives who turned in a Republican in Pennsylvania for voting twice.
During a special session in the Tennessee legislature earlier this week, state Sen. Frank Niceley (R) shared a memory of him telling his grandson that it was “too early to tell” if the South had really lost the Civil War because it never ended and the South is winning right now, actually.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Thursday appointed a new secretary of state who will supervise the state’s election process: an attorney who had worked on one of Trump’s many fruitless lawsuits attempting to undo the 2020 election.
Two top prosecutors from Washington, D.C. have joined the Justice Department’s sprawling child sex trafficking investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), according to the New York Times.
With other state Democrats running in the other direction, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Thursday boosted India Walton, the self-identified democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination for mayor of Buffalo.
Entrepreneur and socialite Paris Hilton’s been visiting the Capitol over the past several days to help Democrats work on a bill to protect kids from abusive “troubled teen” facilities, including the one Hilton herself was sent to when she was 16 years old.
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So, the Senate will not be reaching a decision on the reconciliation framework by tomorrow. Many of the senators are likely already home, with no votes scheduled until Monday.
But things continue to progress. There are still skirmishes playing out on various fronts: the child tax credit, climate provisions, Medicare expansion, payfors. And despite them, the package still appears to be moving forward.
Let’s go back in time for a minute. Back when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was putting together a panel of House members to participate in the Jan. 6 select committee to probe the insurrection, she rejected two of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) panelist picks (the Jims) — Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jim Banks (R-IN).
The decision was rooted in her correct understanding that both of the Jims would use the committee’s probe of the Capitol attack as a platform for spewing the Big Lie and other Trumpy nonsense and conspiracy theories, thus likely derailing the serious work of the committee. Both Jims not only voted to overturn the election results on Jan. 6, but they also both signed onto a request out of Texas asking the Supreme Court to invalidate election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In retaliation for Pelosi’s move against the Jims, McCarthy pulled all of his Republican picks from the panel, leaving only Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) as GOP members (who joined out of their own volition). Both have been highly critical of Trump for some time and have, at least thus far, taken their assignments very seriously, signing off on all of the committee’s subpoenas and publicly supporting each layer of the committee’s investigation. Cheney is the committee’s vice-chair.
But one of the Jims, Jim Banks, is apparently now trying to play dress up — pretending to be a member of the panel probing the insurrection.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: GOPer Tries To Cosplay As Jan 6 Committee Member”Senate Democrats have been cheerfully saying that they could see a deal on a reconciliation framework coming as soon as Friday. According to our sources, that’s tomorrow. There are still some major sticking points, though progress has happened in leaps and bounds the past couple days.
In a 229-202 vote, the House moved to hold Steve Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress.
Continue reading “House Holds Bannon In Criminal Contempt Over Jan. 6 Subpoena Refusal”A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the sudden forward lurch of the reconciliation negotiations that has Democrats feeling optimistic about reaching a deal potentially by the end of the week.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
Two powerful storm systems known as atmospheric rivers are heading for northern California and Oregon, a region in the midst of an historic drought.
While the storms will bring much-needed water to a parched region and should significantly lower the wildfire risk, they also bring dangerous new flood and mudslide risks, particularly in areas recovering from wildfires.
Wildfires strip away vegetation and leave the soil less able to absorb water. A downpour on these vulnerable landscapes can quickly erode the ground as fast-moving water carries debris and mud with it.
The National Weather Service has warned of ash and debris flows from Oct. 21-26 in several burned areas, including the site of the nearly 1-million-acre Dixie Fire in the Sierra Nevada.
I study cascading hazards like this, in which consecutive events lead to human disasters. Studies show climate change is raising the risk of multiple compound disasters, and it’s clear that communities and government agencies aren’t prepared.
California has experienced this kind of cascading disaster before.
In early 2017, following years of drought, the region had a wet winter that fueled dense growth of vegetation and shrubs. An unusually warm and dry spring and summer followed, and it dried out the vegetation, turning it into fuel ready to burn. That fall, extreme Santa Ana and Diablo winds – known for their sustained low humidity – created the perfect conditions for wildfires.
The Thomas Fire began near Santa Barbara in December 2017 and burned over 280,000 acres. The following January, extreme rainfall hit the region, including the burn scar left by the fire, and caused the deadliest mudslide-debris flow event in California’s history. More than 400 homes were destroyed in about two hours, and 23 people died.
These kinds of cascading events aren’t unique to California. Australia’s Millennium Drought (1997-2009) also ended with devastating floods that inundated urban areas and breached levees. A study linked some of the levee and dike failures to earlier drought conditions, such as cracks forming because of exposure to heat and dryness.
When multiple hazards, such as droughts, heat waves, wildfires and extreme rainfall, interact, human disasters often result.
The individual drivers might not be very extreme on their own, but combined they can become lethal. These types of events are broadly referred to as compound events – for example, a drought and heat wave hitting at the same time. Their combined impact can be harder to forecast. A cascading event involves compound events in succession, like wildfires followed by downpours and mudslides. https://www.youtube.com/embed/2cgkcFsLEho?wmode=transparent&start=0 Video shows how quickly a mudslide overtakes a town.
While the drivers and physical mechanisms behind compound and cascading events are not fully understood, they are often linked to large-scale circulation patterns like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Meanwhile, lack of preparedness and high degrees of vulnerability at the local level can also increase the impacts of multiple connected events.
With compound and cascading events likely to become more common in a warming world, being able to prepare for and manage multiple hazards will be increasingly essential.
Several research studies have shown that compound events with both drought and heat waves have become more severe and frequent in recent years. One study attributed the increase in the risk of these dry-warm events in California to human-caused global warming and projected that the increased risk of dry-warm conditions will continue in the future.
An important physical process responsible for increases in compound drought and heat is land-atmosphere interactions. Evaporation from soil cools down the land surface, similar to how the human body cools down by sweating. During droughts, the lack of moisture limits soil evaporation, which increases the surface temperature and eventually the air temperature in the area. Data shows temperatures during droughts are rising in many parts of the United States, including the Southwest – a pattern that is expected to continue in the future.
Numerous studies have also shown that droughts and heat waves increase the likelihood of wildfires. And wildfires can trigger other cascading hazards, turning otherwise unexceptional events into human disasters.
At the same time, extreme rainfall events are expected to intensify in a warming climate. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to wetter storms. This means there will likely be more burned acres exposed to potentially extreme rainfall events in a warmer world.
Cascading hazards are not limited to rain over burned areas. Soot and ash deposits on snowpack can increase snowmelt, change the timing of runoff and cause snow-driven flooding. Fires are not only increasing in size and severity, they are also occurring at higher elevations and well above the snow line.
It’s also important to recognize that human activities and local infrastructure can also affect extreme events. Urbanization and deforestation, for example, can intensify flooding and worsen mud or debris flow events and their impacts.
Despite the high risk when extreme rainfall and droughts interact, most research in this area focuses on only one or the other. Different government agencies oversee flood and drought monitoring, warning and management, even though both are extremes of the same hydrological cycle.
Recent studies and disasters show a strong need to integrate management and risk reduction strategies of droughts and flood. Focusing on one hazard by one agency can potentially have unintended consequences for another hazard. For example, maximizing reservoir storage when expecting a drought can increase the flood risk.
As a society, we cannot prevent cascading hazards from happening. But we can become better prepared for plausible cascading hazards in a changing climate.
Amir AghaKouchak is a professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
