Cleveland Sports Forum

Are you kidding me Seagull? I round up and you call me out? You bring absolutely nothing to the conversation here. No facts. No figures. Just cheap shots that is based on nothing but opinion. And you want to call me out for a flippant comment? Had no idea facts were so important to a liberal since they are so rarely on your side. But OK, I'll try to be more exact in future.

Like I said, he's at the same spot as Obama was at same point. Obama was 46 yesterday. (47 today)

Which is amazing considering Obama had full support of media and Trump has them bashing him all day long.

Pew research just released a study that showed only 5% of Trump coverage by main stream media was positive. 8 times less than Obama received.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/pew-t ... le/2644448

Just watched "Get Me Roger Stone" on Netflix.

What a slimeball. One of many Trump puppetmasters.

Trump stacking courts with anti-LGBTQ judges, advocates say

From a proposed ban on transgender people serving openly in the military to an amicus brief in support of a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, the Trump administration has often found itself at odds with advocates of LGBTQ rights this year. But there is one area in particular that has advocates worried, one they say will affect the country, and LGBTQ civil rights, long after President Donald Trump has left office: the record speed with which he is reshaping the federal courts. When Trump assumed the presidency in January, he inherited more than 120 federal judicial vacancies. Since then, he has made 59 nominations to fill those seats, and the Senate has confirmed 18 of them. Advocates of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer rights, however, are sounding the alarm over the past records of many of the nominees. Lambda Legal, a national LGBTQ civil rights group, has been monitoring Trump’s judicial nominees and says roughly one in three have "anti-LGBT records." The result, in the words of Sharon McGowan, the organization's director of strategy, is a “judicial crisis” for the community. “This is an area where they have the ability to make a huge impact,” McGowan told NBC News. “It’s an area where they hold all the cards.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out ... ay-n831566
Trump Is Rapidly Reshaping the Judiciary. Here’s How.

WASHINGTON —

In the weeks before Donald J. Trump took office, lawyers joining his administration gathered at a law firm near the Capitol, where Donald F. McGahn II, the soon-to-be White House counsel, filled a white board with a secret battle plan to fill the federal appeals courts with young and deeply conservative judges.

Mr. McGahn, instructed by Mr. Trump to maximize the opportunity to reshape the judiciary, mapped out potential nominees and a strategy, according to two people familiar with the effort: Start by filling vacancies on appeals courts with multiple openings and where Democratic senators up for re-election next year in states won by Mr. Trump — like Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — could be pressured not to block his nominees.

And to speed them through confirmation, avoid clogging the Senate with too many nominees for the district courts, where legal philosophy is less crucial.

Nearly a year later, that plan is coming to fruition. Mr. Trump has already appointed eight appellate judges, the most this early in a presidency since Richard M. Nixon, and on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send a ninth appellate nominee — Mr. Trump’s deputy White House counsel, Gregory Katsas — to the floor.

Republicans are systematically filling appellate seats they held open during President Barack Obama’s final two years in office with a particularly conservative group of judges with life tenure. Democrats — who in late 2013 abolished the ability of 41 lawmakers to block such nominees with a filibuster, then quickly lost control of the Senate — have scant power to stop them.

“We will set records in terms of the number of judges,” Mr. Trump said at the White House recently, adding that many more nominees were in the pipeline. Standing beside the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, he continued, “There has never been anything like what we’ve been able to do together with judges.”

Appellate judges draw less attention than Supreme Court justices like Neil M. Gorsuch, whom Mr. Trump installed in the seat that Justice Scalia’s death left vacant and that Republicans, led by Mr. McConnell, refused to let Mr. Obama fill.

Nan Aron, of the liberal Alliance for Justice, said that her group considered many of Mr. Trump’s nominees to be “extremists” — hostile to the rights of women, minority groups and workers, and unduly favorable to the wealthy.

Mr. McGahn and nearly all the lawyers working for him at the White House are longtime society participants, so relationships built on the network of like-minded conservatives saturate discussions of potential nominees from the inside, they said.

Mr. Trump has also had help from the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, in lowering impediments and keeping the confirmation assembly line moving.

For example, confirmation hearings have usually featured just one appellate hopeful at a time (along with several district judge nominees). But Mr. Grassley has scheduled three hearings this year with two appellate nominees — as many as took place during all eight years of the Obama administration, according to congressional aides.

But many conservatives want to take full advantage of their window of opportunity. Mr. Leo, of the Federalist Society, said Mr. Trump had instructed his transition team to prioritize appointing conservative judges who would be “strong” and could resist “tremendous political and social pressure.”

Mr. Trump “understood that the American people cared about judges, and he for his own purposes cared very deeply about it and recognized that he could be a president who could help restore the judiciary to its proper role,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/us/p ... tives.html
How Donald Trump Is Remaking the Federal Courts in His Own Image

The president’s judicial nominees have been notably white, male, and conservative.

When Donald Trump took office, he inherited more than 100 federal judicial vacancies. It was a nearly unprecedented number, roughly twice the number that President Barack Obama inherited in 2009. Trump has moved quickly to fill these lifetime appointments with a slate of the most conservative and least diverse nominations since Reagan.

While Trump’s legislative efforts can be repealed and his executive orders undone, federal judges are rarely removed from the bench. By working to install judges with remarkable speed, Trump and his grateful conservative allies are creating a durable legacy that will last long beyond his administration. And as the minority party, Democrats in Congress have few tools to oppose him aside from a Senate tradition allowing lawmakers to block certain nominations affecting their home states.

We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump promised during a June 2016 interview on Breitbart News radio. According to data compiled by American Bridge in September, Trump has proved true to his word. Nearly half of his nominees have been drawn from the 65,000 members of the influential organization of conservative lawyers, students, a­­nd scholars, or have participated in its events or publications.

“I’m sure that some of these picks any Republican president would pick,” says Kang. “But it’s remarkable how clear they are about where this is being sourced…to ideological partisan interest groups,” he continues, pointing to the Federalist Society. “It’s so brazen.”

In May, Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society who has been deeply involved in Trump’s selection of nominees, gave a speech at an Acton Institute event, boasting of his organization’s role in transforming the judiciary, and leaving no doubt about the change he sought: “I would love to see the courts unrecognizable,” he said.

While the Federalist Society has been given an unprecedented role in judicial selection, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary has largely been dismissed. For almost 50 years dating back to the Eisenhower administration, the ABA provided administrations of both parties an independent evaluation of prospective nominees before they were formally named.

“These folks are on a mission. Their mission is not neutrality, their mission is not independence, their mission is a takeover,” warns Kristine Lucius, executive vice president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Jeff Mateer, first assistant attorney general of Texas and a Trump nominee for a judgeship in the state’s Eastern District, has defended gay conversion therapy and warned that the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage could lead to polygamy and bestiality. In a 2015 speech, he said transgender children are proof that “Satan’s plan is working.”

Thomas Farr is a nominee for a judgeship in the Eastern District of North Carolina—a court that has not, as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund points out, ever had a black judge in its entire 143 year history.* According to a biography by Alliance for Justice, Farr, who is white, “has been the go-to private attorney for North Carolina Republicans in their efforts to dilute African-American votes and implement laws aimed at making it more difficult for communities of color to vote.” Farr represented the state of North Carolina in its effort to defend an election law that the 4th Circuit later determined “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

In September, Trump nominated Gregory Katsas to fill a vacancy on the DC Court of Appeals. For the previous nine months, Katsas had served in the White House as a deputy assistant and deputy counsel to the president, advising Trump on issues including the travel ban and DACA and, according to BuzzFeed, providing “legal advice on a few discrete legal questions” regarding the special counsel’s Russia investigation. Katsas refused to answer questions about the “nature of that legal advice” in his confirmation hearing. A member of the Federalist Society who, according to the Alliance for Justice, has spoken at least 53 times at organization events, Katsas is a staunch advocate of expansive executive powers and has drawn questions about whether he could fairly adjudicate cases involving his former administration bosses.

Other Trump nominees include people who have been members of, provided legal support to, or had other noteworthy links to the National Rifle Association, the Republican National Lawyers Association, the US Chamber Litigation Center, and a variety of pro-life organizations and local Republican parties.

While there are almost no restrictions on whom the president can nominate as a judge, candidates for vacancies in district courts are often first identified by home state senators of the president’s own party. It’s also typical for the president to negotiate with both home state senators, regardless of their party, before selecting a nominee. Already, Trump has broken with this practice by going around existing nomination processes and selection panels in Democratic-leaning states. “This administration, unlike the Bush administration, is not consulting with home state senators,” said the Leadership Conference’s Lucius. “That’s another kind of norm, a check and balance, that is breaking down.”

The White House declined to answer Mother Jones’ questions about its nominations, but it provided a statement assailing Senate Democrats for using “petty political tactics to delay and obstruct” judicial nominations: “The President has delivered on his promise to nominate highly qualified judges, starting with Justice Gorsuch. Now, it is time to confirm the outstanding nominees because it’s what the American people deserve.”

Republicans used blue slips to block judges 18 times under Obama—but that number doesn’t convey the degree to which Republicans used the leverage they provided to obstruct the former president’s judicial nominees, said both Kang and Lucius. “The [Obama] White House tried very hard to negotiate with Republican senators to find consensus nominees, and not every Republican senator engaged in good faith,” said Kang, recounting several occasions where prenomination negotiations dragged on or caused the Obama White House to abandon nominees they viewed as compromise picks. The delays contributed to the huge number of vacancies that Trump inherited, Kang says, pointing out that Obama was able to confirm just 22 judges in the last two years of his presidency—“the fewest since President Truman.”

With Trump’s legislative agenda largely floundering, conservative activists have been cheered by his administration’s quick work in the courts, and its potential to hand right-leaning jurists the power to decide major constitutional questions long after Trump is gone.

“Trump knows that one of the most powerful things to unite his base and Republican senators who are not fans of his is to talk about this takeover of the third branch,” says Lucius.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... own-image/

100 days after Maria, Puerto Rico mayor slams Trump for feds' response

By Sara Shayanian | Dec. 29, 2017 at 9:38 AM

One hundred days after Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz lambasted President Donald Trump for the federal government's response to the natural disaster.

Cruz, who's been critical of Trump in the past few months, told ABC News Friday the president is the "disaster in-chief."

"He was disrespectful to the Puerto Rican people. He was disrespectful to the American people who were leaving their homes to come help us here," Cruz said. "Where he needed to be a commander-in-chief, he was a disaster-in-chief.

"President Trump does not embody the values of the good-hearted American people."

Even with her criticism for the president, Cruz said she's "grateful for all Americans that have stood with San Juan and Puerto Rico," but acknowledged the island wasn't fully recovered.

"Are we better from September 20? Yes," she said. "But are we there yet? Hell no."

Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico on Sept. 20 as a Category 4 storm, just days after the island was nearly hit by Hurricane Irma. More than three months after the storm, basic essentials remain scarce and about half of the island still lacks power. Although the official death count is less than 100, independent investigations estimate more than 1,000 people died.

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority says 69 percent of the electrical grid is generating power, but it is unclear how many people or businesses are receiving that power or how stable the source is.

Cruz said the utility hasn't brought back power to some crucial centers for health care and hospitals.

"The government has already talked about generation, but if it's not getting to the hospitals or businesses or homes," she said. "The power isn't going anywhere."

Trump blasted Cruz on Twitter in September, saying the leader had shown "poor leadership ability" and that Puerto Ricans wanted "everything to be done for them."

"He has failed the moral imperative that any leader of the free world should hold at the highest level," she said.

"All he needs to do is simple: do his job. I think the world has seen a commander in chief unable to command."

Speaking of Roger Stone ... There is something going on where some singer, Joy Villa, has accused Corey Lewendowski of slapping her on the ass at a recent Trump event. Well, I saw the headlines of a report this morning that apparently Roger Stone put her up to it. I didn't care enough to read the article, but if true apparently some bad blood in the old Trump campaign team.

I do know Roger Stone will be the first person to tell you he is a slimeball in politics. He may not have invented dirty pool in politics but he certainly mastered it and took it to another level. And something he's proud to talk about.

I read his book on the "JFK Assasination, The Case Against LBJ". I thought it pretty interesting. But I'm a sucker for a good conspiracy theory.

U.S. Upper Midwest factory sector grows fastest in three years

Reuters Staff

(Reuters) - A gauge of factory activity in the U.S. Upper Midwest improved to the strongest level in over three years in December, led by much stronger readings on new orders and production, according a private survey released on Friday.

Marquette University and the Institute for Supply Management-Milwaukee said their seasonally adjusted index on manufacturing in the Milwaukee region rose to 65.57 this month from 59.62 in November.

The December figure was the highest since November 2014 when it was 68.9.

A reading above 50 indicates regional factory activity is expanding.

The upbeat snapshot of upper Midwest business activity coincided with a jump in a similar measure for the Chicago area.

On Thursday, MNI Indicators and ISM-Chicago said their jointly developed Chicago Purchase Management Index rose to 67.6 in December, the highest since March 2011.

The Marquette University and Milwaukee ISM survey’s component on new orders, a proxy on future activity, increased to 88.33 from 66.46 last month, while its production gauge improved to 72.65 from 57.94.

Not all the components improved in December. The survey’s employment index fell to 58.67 from 61.73, while its six-month outlook gauge slipped to 71.43 from 73.33.

Trump to Democrats: No DACA fix without border wall

President Donald Trump warned Democrats in Congress Friday that he won't approve any legislative fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program unless they OK funding for his controversial border wall. Trump said Democrats know he won't accept any solution for DACA "Dreamers" to stay in the United States until he is allowed to fulfill his campaign promise to build a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.
[ WoW ]
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2017/12 ... m_medium=3
Trump’s Wall: How Much Money Does the Government Have For It Now?
$20 million. That’s enough to cover the cost of seven miles of wall.

[ In April ] During the campaign, President Donald Trump promised to build a wall across the southern border some 1,000 miles long. The number of miles the president currently has money for: seven. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials delivered the startling news this week at a conference in San Antonio for businesses eager to win contracts for beefing up security along the border. Although estimates to build the wall soar past $20 billion, the agency has so far managed to scrape together only about $20 million, according to its top contracting official. The rest of the cash will have to come from Congress, which so far has proven reluctant to foot the bill. That amount of cash would not go very far to build a real wall — existing fence along the border costs roughly $2.8 million per mile.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trum ... for-it-now

Just wondering where the labor supply is going to come from with all this new manufacturing. Most likely robots.

With unemployment already extremely low and Trump's immigration policy limiting workers, who is filling entry level jobs?

Been to a McDonalds or Walmart lately?

Sad.

Nearly half of voters, 46 percent, believe the news media fabricate news stories about President Donald Trump and his administration, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. Just 37 percent of voters think the media do not fabricate stories, the poll shows, while the remaining 17 percent are undecided.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/ ... oll-243884

Don't ask me what the hell is wrong with the other 54%. Have to be a total idiot or total tool not to realize it by now.

You can get any answer you want from these surveys or polls depending on who's asking and how the question is worded.

So you're saying Ramussen's daily tracking poll that showed Obama with a 62% approval when he left office is a bogus poll?

I agree. No way 62% of the country was dumb enough to approve of Obama's work.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... ex_history

MLB to reach out to Miguel Sano accuser

The woman who has accused Miguel Sano of sexual assault will soon speak with MLB about the incident.

[ Still waiting for the hammer to fall on trump..........unless he's above the law. Just admitting he is innocent is proof enough that he's guilty. The guy's a chronic liar incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction. Whenever he opens his mouth you have to assume its a lie. ]

Media group: 81 reporters died, threats soared in 2017

BRUSSELS (AP) — At least 81 reporters were killed doing their jobs this year, while violence and harassment against media staff has skyrocketed, the world’s biggest journalists’ organization says. In its annual “Kill Report,” seen by The Associated Press, the International Federation of Journalists said the reporters lost their lives in targeted killings, car bomb attacks and crossfire incidents around the world. More than 250 journalists were in prison in 2017. The number of deaths as of Dec. 29 was the lowest in a decade, down from 93 in 2016. The largest number were killed in Mexico, but many also died in conflict zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
https://www.apnews.com/9162715258fe4625 ... ed-in-2017
Court upholds ban on Navalny running for Russian presidency

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s highest court on Saturday upheld a decision barring opposition leader Alexei Navalny from running for president in March. The Supreme Court turned down Navalny’s appeal against the Central Election Commission, ruling that the commission’s decision to bar him from the race fully conforms to law. In a tweet Saturday, Navalny denounced the judge who made the ruling, saying that “such judges should face trial themselves.” He also repeated his call for a voters’ strike. “We don’t acknowledge elections without competition,” he said.
https://www.apnews.com/28acc65fc3a747ab ... presidency
Russia denies report of North Korea sanctions breach

MOSCOW (AP) — The Russian Foreign Ministry on Saturday denied claims that U.N. sanctions against North Korea had been breached by Russian tankers transferring fuel to North Korean tankers at sea. The statement came in response to a Reuters report citing unidentified Western European security sources who said the transfers took place in October and November and represented a breach of sanctions.
https://www.apnews.com/8e6259f143f24a88 ... ons-breach
2017 Was a Big Year for Scrubbing Science from Government Websites.
Are the changes routine, rebranding, or censorship?

Here’s the List.
Environmental Protection Agency: EPA websites have arguably seen more radical changes than those in any other government agency. Scores of links to materials that help local officials prepare for climate change have all been scrubbed.
Department of the Interior: A once extensive overview of the Interior’s climate change priorities is now a few sentences about the types of land the agency protects. Mentions of rising sea levels, worsening wildfires, and threatened wildlife are gone.
Department of Transportation: The DOT Federal Highway Administration changed language across multiple pages relating to environmental effects of transportation; “climate change” and “greenhouse gases” were replaced with terms like “sustainability” and “emissions.”
Department of Energy: The Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy made extensive changes to pages involving the Bioenergy Technologies Office, Wind Energy Technologies Office and Vehicle Technologies Office, including decreasing emphasis on renewable fuels as a replacement for fossil fuels and increasing emphasis on economic growth.
Office of Science and Technology Policy: This White House office still has no director (a position referred to as the president’s top science adviser) and many of its positions remain unfilled.
Department of State: In January, the descriptions of the Office of Global Change and the Office of the Special Envoy for Climate Change were rewritten. The Office of Global Change’s mission statement was significantly altered with the addition of the terms “adaptation” and “sustainable landscapes” and the removal of the term “greenhouse gas.”
Federal Emergency Management Agency: Statistics on access ​to ​electricity ​and ​drinking water in Puerto Rico ​from ​the ​“Federal Response ​Updates” section ​on ​FEMA’s ​“Hurricane ​Maria” ​webpage were removed in early October. ​The statistics were later restored.
National Institutes of Health: The environmental unit of the NIH, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, changed some mentions of “climate change” to “climate.”
National Park Service: More than 90 documents describing national parks’ climate action plans, which include how different parks are responding to climate changes, have been removed from the Climate Friendly Parks website.

To be sure, some information remains untouched. The most noticeable items are federal datasets on climate change. NASA and NOAA’s websites also remain intact, possibly because Trump’s picks to head the agencies haven’t been installed yet.

But all told, the changes are hardly surprising in an administration that intends to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, has blocked the Clean Power Plan, dropped climate change as a national security threat, attempted to boost fossil fuels, and rolled back efforts to plan for climate change.

Goldman says it will be important to continue monitoring changes to agency websites in the coming year, as well as keeping an eye on new lower level appointments and any interference with scientists’ work. When planning for the future, Goldman says, “I think we should brace ourselves.”

Have you noticed other revisions to science information on government websites? Let us know.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... -the-list/
Fired, Resigned, Sidelined, Ousted. Here’s the 2017 Class of Trump Exiles.

What do the flamboyant Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci and the stolid former FBI director James Comey have in common? They are two members of an exclusive group of people who lost their official jobs during Trump’s first year as president. Some, like Sally Yates, the former Acting US Attorney General, and James Comey, were long-time government officials, just trying to do their jobs before Trump fired them. Former Press Secretary Sean Spicer took matters into his own hands and resigned, while former White House Chief-of-Staff Reince Priebus was fired after Trump elevated Anthony Scaramucci to the post of White House communications director. (“The Mooch” lasted for ten days before he was ousted.) And there are more. From January 2017 until December, hardly a month passed without a high-profile resignation, firing, or official escorted off the White House grounds. Watch the video above for an end-of-the-year round up of the battered and bruised class of 2017.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... mp-exiles/
The Administration Claims Crime Is on the Rise.
So Why Did the FBI Delete Key Crime Data?
Criminologists say they can’t properly analyze crime trends without the missing data.

Ten days before Christmas, Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a rare press conference to discuss one of his top priorities in his first year at the Justice Department. “We’ve seen a deadly increase in violent crime,” he said. “The overall violent crime rate is up by nearly 7 percent, a reversal of a downward trend. Robberies are up. Assaults are up. Rape is up by nearly 11 percent. And murder is up by more than 20 percent.” The administration’s focus on crime made it all the more surprising that the FBI’s annual Crime in the United States report, the gold standard of crime statistics, lacked a significant amount of data that experts have relied upon for years to assess crime trends. Until this year, the report contained 81 main tables that allowed researchers to track everything from the rate of violent crime to the racial breakdown of arrests. But when the 2016 report came out in September, there were only 29 tables. The information needed to understand and verify the crime stats cited by the attorney general, as well as the work of local law enforcement around the country, was suddenly harder to obtain. Wray downplayed the issue at an FBI oversight hearing on December 7. He echoed the bureau’s official position that the data was unnecessary because it was “largely just alternative views of data that was still in the report. Mother Jones asked the department whether the data will continue to be included going forward but did not. The FBI’s own press release from the fall indicates that the future of this data and whether it will remain easily searchable is uncertain. receive a response.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... rime-data/
Trump Loses “Most Admired Man” Title to Predecessor
Obama tops the list for the tenth year in a row.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have topped Gallup’s list for the most admired man and woman living anywhere in the world—the tenth consecutive year for the former president and the 16th such recognition for the former secretary of state. According to Gallup, which released its 2017 findings Wednesday, Obama is the first former president to win the title since President Dwight Eisenhower did in 1968. Obama edged out President Donald Trump 17 to 14 percent, marking the second year in a row Obama beat Trump for the distinction. Clinton narrowly topped Michelle Obama 9 to 7 percent.
Trump Dismisses Last of His HIV/AIDS Advisory Council

The Trump administration has fired the remaining members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, also known as PACHA. Council members received a letter this week saying that their appointments to the panel were terminated, “effective immediately,” according to a report in The Washington Post. PACHA was established in 1995, during the Clinton administration, to advise the White House on HIV strategies and policies. Six of the members of the council, upset by White House actions on health policy, resigned in June. Scott Schoettes, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, a LGBT rights organization, was one of them. He wrote in Newsweek at the time that U.S. President Donald Trump “simply does not care” about people living with HIV. Schoettes said the Trump administration “pushes legislation that will harm people living with HIV and halt or reverse important gains made in the fight against this disease.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-dismiss ... 85438.html
UN Agencies: Yemen Humanitarian Crisis Worst in World

“We have passed the grim milestone of 1,000 days of war in Yemen,” begins a joint statement from the World Health Program, the World Food Program and UNICEF, appealing for humanitarian access and an end to the conflict. “The conflict in Yemen has created the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, a crisis which has engulfed the entire country,” the groups said. About 75 percent of Yemen’s population is in need of humanitarian assistance, the statement said, including 11.3 million children who cannot survive without it. At least 60 percent of Yemenis don't have enough to eat, and 16 million people do not have safe water and proper sanitation. Many more lack can't get basic health services.
https://www.voanews.com/a/un-agencies-y ... 85462.html
Assisted Breeding Program Helps Australia's Ailing Great Barrier Reef

SYDNEY —
There’s new hope for ailing parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef - assisted reproductive technology. Researchers have been capturing coral spawn and rearing millions of larvae in large tanks. The reef is arguably Australia's greatest natural treasure. It stretches more than 2,300 kilometers down north-eastern Australia, and faces many threats, including climate change and pollution. Harrison says the trial on the Great Barrier Reef is going well. In the past two years, two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef has been devastated by severe coral bleaching caused by warmer ocean temperatures, according to Australian scientists. The Australian government is contributing more than $310,000 to help advance Harrison's reproductive research.
https://www.voanews.com/a/australia-gre ... 85539.html
Failed Space Launches Haunt Russia; Kremlin Eyes Probe

MOSCOW —
Russia's latest space launch failures have prompted authorities to take a closer look into the nation's struggling space industry, the Kremlin said Thursday. A Russian weather satellite and nearly 20 micro-satellites from other nations were lost following a failed launch from Russia's new cosmodrome in the Far East on November 28. And in another blow to the Russian space industry, communications with a Russian-built communications satellite for Angola, the African nation's first space vehicle, were lost following its launch on Tuesday. Asked about the failures, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Thursday that authorities warrant a thorough analysis of the situation in the space industry. Amid the failures, Russian officials have engaged in a round of finger-pointing.
https://www.voanews.com/a/russian-exper ... 82580.html
Arctic development left Russian environment damaged
Regional minister of ecology says the environmental damage has been "significant."

The development of parts of the Arctic north of Russia has left its environment at risk from scrap materials and oil residue, a regional leader said. Sakhamin Afanasyev, the minister of ecology for the Sakha republic, the largest in Russia, said companies working in the extreme climate have spent about $138 million this year on protecting the environment. Most of that was spent on treatment, waste management and emission abatement strategies. "Over the time of the north's development, the environmental damage has been significant," the minister was quoted by Russian news agency Tass as saying. "The biggest damage comes from scrap metal and from oil residues."
Study shows streams are reliable indicators of a region's environmental health

New research shows streams are stable and reliable indicators of a region's ecological and environmental health. However, scientists found methods for stream monitoring must be improved and standardized in order for researchers to tap into the water's value as an indicator. An environmental or ecological indicator is a species, population or landscape feature that offers scientists a general predictive measure of the health of plants, animals and natural systems within an ecosystem or region. The latest research -- detailed this week in the journal Ecology Letters -- shows streams can be used to measure the impact of farming practices, land-use changes and other human impacts on a region's environmental health.
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2017/1 ... m_medium=2

Supreme Court to take up Ohio’s purges of inactive voters

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Joseph Helle was expecting a different sort of reception when he returned home from Army tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and showed up to vote in his small Ohio town near Lake Erie. His name was missing from the voting rolls in 2011, even though Helle had registered to vote before leaving home at 18 and hadn’t changed his address during his military service. Helle, now the mayor of Oak Harbor, Ohio, is among thousands of state residents with tales of being removed from Ohio’s rolls because they didn’t vote in some elections. Democrats have accused Republicans of trying to suppress votes from minorities and poorer people who tend to vote for Democrats. Adding to the mix, the Trump administration reversed the position taken by the Obama administration and is now backing Ohio’s method for purging voters. Helle, 31, describes himself as a “red-state Democrat” and did not vote for President Donald Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. “I’m not one of these people that flaunts their military service, by any means, but to be told I couldn’t do one of the fundamental rights I went off and served this country for was just appalling,” Helle said, recounting his reaction after being dropped from voter registration rolls.

The main argument on behalf of voters whose registrations were canceled is that federal voting law specifically prohibits states from using voter inactivity to trigger purges. The state “purges registered voters who are still eligible to vote,” former and current Ohio elections officials said in a brief supporting the voters. At the Supreme Court, voting cases often split the court’s liberal and conservative justices. Civil rights groups contend that a decision for Ohio would have widespread implications because there is a “nationwide push to make it more difficult and costly to vote,” as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund told the court. A dozen mainly Democratic states also want the Supreme Court to declare that Ohio’s system violates federal law.

So the state asks people who haven’t voted in two years to confirm their eligibility. If they do, or if they show up to vote over the next four years, voters remain registered. If they do nothing, their names eventually fall off the list of registered voters.
https://www.apnews.com/2f75962d520c4199 ... ive-voters
These 16 Major Environmental Protections Were Cut in 2017
The Trump administration had a very busy year attacking nature.
[ Had to pay for that tax cut bill ]

President Donald Trump has spent the past year steadily undoing Obama-era environmental protections, especially rules designed to fight climate change. By law, agencies must go through a lengthy process to rescind or rewrite many rules, but executive orders and other policies are easier to erase. Some of the rollbacks have major implications for the West and public lands.

MONUMENTS
Trump slashed two national monuments in southern Utah (Bears Ears & Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument) and is considering changes to other monuments in the West. The two together are just 15 percent of the footprint protected by President Barack Obama in 2016

ARCTIC REFUGE
At the Trump administration’s urging, Congress in December opened parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. This was an enormous loss for the Gwich’in, a Native Alaskan people, and environmental groups, which had successfully protected the refuge from drilling for decades.

CLEAN WATER RULE
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to rescind the 2015 Clean Water Rule. This rule—particularly important in the arid West—mandates, for example, protecting tributaries that connect to navigable waterways and adjoining wetlands, even if they flow only part of the year. If it’s revoked, those tributaries could be filled in, ditched or diverted for construction or farming without federal review.

FOSSIL FUEL ROYALTIES RULE
In August, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke repealed a 2016 Obama rule designed to ensure that taxpayers get a fair return on oil, gas and coal. The rule was meant to eliminate a loophole that allows companies to sell to affiliated companies that then export and re-sell the minerals at higher prices, reducing royalties.

BLM METHANE RULE
In 2016, this Bureau of Land Management implemented a rule limiting how much methane can be released from some 96,000 oil and gas wells on federal and tribal lands. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ACT REVIEWS
In an Aug. 31 secretarial order, the Department of Interior “streamlined” agencies’ processes for analyzing the environmental impacts of major actions. Now, age

FEDERAL COAL
Obama wanted the federal coal-mining program to better reflect its costs to taxpayers and the planet. This March, Zinke cancelled both moratorium and review. Given declining demand for coal, though, there’s been no rush for new leases. One exception: Cloud Peak Energy is seeking to expand operations in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.

NATIONAL PARKS MANAGEMENT
The National Park Service in August rescinded a sweeping December 2016 policy instructing managers to use an adaptive approach to decision-making, taking into account uncertainties such as climate change impacts, and erring on the side of caution to protect natural and cultural resources;
Also in August, the agency ended a six-year policy that allowed parks to ban the sale of disposable water bottles to decrease waste and greenhouse gas pollution.

POWER PLANTS
The EPA has taken steps to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era regulation intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 32 percent by 2030 compared to 2005. The Supreme Court had already stayed the rule, pending court review. The Trump administration asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals not to rule in the case and in August the court agreed to suspend its review.
Trump’s EPA also is reconsidering an earlier Obama administration rule that required that all new power plants meet greenhouse gas standards.
[ KEEP STACKING THOSE COURTS DUDE ]

PIPELINES
Trump revoked Obama administration policies that had blocked or postponed construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

CLEANER CARS
The EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are considering backtracking from Obama’s plans to boost fuel efficiency for cars and light trucks to the equivalent of 54.5 miles per gallon by model year 2025. The outcome is important in the West because California has led the rest of the country in pressing for cleaner cars, both to improve its air quality and achieve its climate change goals.

OFFSHORE DRILLING
Obama withdrew large sections of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from drilling to protect marine habitats. In an April executive order, Trump reversed the withdrawals and ordered annual lease sales in those areas.

BLOWOUT PREVENTION RULE
In April, Trump ordered a reconsideration of a 2016 rule designed to prevent the kind of engineering failures that led to the catastrophic 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

SOCIAL COST OF CARBON
Trump abolished policies crafted by the Obama administration to consider the cost of climate change to future generations when considering the costs and benefits of proposed regulations and when analyzing the environmental impacts of government actions under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The Trump administration’s approach has started to run afoul of the courts. A federal judge in August blocked a major expansion of a coal mine in Montana and ordered the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement to redo its environmental analysis.

FLOODS AND INFRASTRUCTURE

As part of his strategy to prepare the United States for the greater risks of climate change, Obama signed an executive order in 2015 requiring that the federal government consider sea level rise and storm surge when designing infrastructure and building in flood-prone areas. just days before Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, Trump signed an executive order revoking Obama’s order. [Trump defended his decision as an incentive for investments in infrastructure. ]

When I was in the Marines, I never missed a vote. My time eligible, I was 1/2 way thru boot camp. I was taken from my unit to see the CO. I voted, he certified by his signature and returned to my county for tally. I was overseas for a vote and others I couldn't make it home. My mother hasn't gone to a polling site for probably 10yrs at least. The county sends her an absentee ballot, fills it out and mails it back.