Swamp Watch News

[_canpakes]

One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice is losing nutrients because of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize media coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.

“You get the sense that things have changed, that this is not a place for you to be exploring things that don't agree with someone's political views,” Ziska said in a wide-ranging interview. “That's so sad. I can't even begin to tell you how sad that is.”

The departure comes soon after several other government officials resigned from their posts over accusations that the administration is censoring climate science — reports that have raised alarm about scientific integrity in the federal government.

Last week, an intelligence analyst at the State Department said he left his post after administration officials blocked his testimony to Congress about the wide-ranging national security implications of climate change. A National Park Service employee also stepped forward, alleging she lost her job after refusing to scrub mentions of human-caused climate change from a peer-reviewed paper that was set to publish.

A POLITICO investigation revealed last month that USDA has routinely buried its own climate-related science and other work on climate change that continues. POLITICO also recently reported USDA suppressed the release of its own plan for studying and responding to climate change.
The USDA has repeatedly denied having any policy to discourage dissemination of science or the use of any climate-change-related terms.

In response to Ziska’s resignation, the department said in a statement that objections to promoting his rice study were based on scientific disagreement involving career officials, not politics.
“This was a joint decision by ARS national program leaders — all career scientists — not to send out a press release on this paper,” the statement said.

Ziska, in describing his decision to leave, painted a picture of a department in constant fear of the president and Secretary Sonny Perdue’s open skepticism about broadly accepted climate science, leading officials to go to extremes to obscure their work to avoid political blowback. The result, he said, is a vastly diminished ability for taxpayer-funded scientists to provide farmers and policymakers with important information about complex threats to the global food supply.

Ziska, or “Lew” as he’s known to his colleagues, has researched plants at USDA across five administrations, Republican and Democratic, contributing significantly to the country’s understanding of how rising carbon dioxide levels and changing temperatures affect everything from crops to noxious weeds and even plants grown to make illicit drugs.

Over the years, Ziska has published studies finding that climate change could exacerbate allergy seasons, render herbicides important for fighting weeds less effective, and fuel a decline in the nutritional quality of pollen important for bees. He and his colleagues have been investigating which strains of wheat and rice will be best suited for future climate conditions.

[_canpakes]

President Schmuck likes to stiff folks ...

Ahead of a Wednesday visit to El Paso, President Donald Trump still owes the city more than $500,000 for his expenses related to his February rally.

Trump is scheduled to visit El Paso in the wake of the Aug. 3 shooting that left at least 22 people dead. The Federal Aviation Administration advised pilots of a presidential visit later this week to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, where a second shooting occurred less than 24 hours after the attack in Texas.

But months after his rally, Trump's reelection campaign still owes El Paso thousands of dollars, according to the Center for Public Integrity. The center reports that the total with late fees is now $569,204, according to a July 18 invoice to the Trump campaign.

"It's ridiculous and unconscionable. The city of El Paso is an economically challenged community," El Paso County Commissioner Dave Stout said of the Trump camp's failure to pay.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politic ... 0000-event

[_canpakes]

‘Illegal workers’ : Not allowed, except at Trump properties.

OSSINING, N.Y. — For nearly two decades, the Trump Organization has relied on a roving crew of Latin American employees to build fountains and waterfalls, sidewalks and rock walls at the company’s winery and its golf courses from New York to Florida.

Other employees at Trump clubs were so impressed by the laborers — who did strenuous work with heavy stone — that they nicknamed them “Los Picapiedras,” Spanish for “the Flintstones.”

For years, their ranks have included workers who entered the United States illegally, according to two former members of the crew. Another employee, still with the company, said that remains true today.

President Trump “doesn’t want undocumented people in the country,” said one worker, Jorge Castro, a 55-year-old immigrant from Ecuador without legal status who left the company in April after nine years. “But at his properties, he still has them.”

Castro said he worked on seven Trump properties, most recently Trump’s golf club in Northern Virginia. He provided The Washington Post with several years of his pay stubs from Trump’s construction company, Mobile Payroll Construction LLC, as well as photos of him and his colleagues on Trump courses and text messages he exchanged with his boss, including one in January dispatching him to “Bedminster,” Trump’s New Jersey golf course.

Another immigrant who worked for the Trump construction crew, Edmundo Morocho, said he was told by a Trump supervisor to buy fake identity documents on a New York street corner. He said he once hid in the woods of a Trump golf course to avoid being seen by visiting labor union officials.

The hiring practices of the little-known Trump business unit are the latest example of the chasm between the president’s derisive rhetoric about immigrants and his company’s long-standing reliance on workers who cross the border illegally.

And it raises questions about how fully the Trump Organization has followed through on its pledge to more carefully scrutinize the legal status of its workers — even as the Trump administration launched a massive raid of undocumented immigrants, arresting about 680 people in Mississippi this week.

In January, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons and a top Trump Organization executive, told The Post that the company was “making a broad effort to identify any employee who has given false and fraudulent documents to unlawfully gain employment,” saying any such individuals would be immediately fired.

He also said the company was instituting E-Verify, a voluntary federal program that allows employers to check the immigration status of new hires, “on all of our properties as soon as possible.” And the company began auditing the legal status of its existing employees at its golf courses, firing at least 18.

But nothing changed on the Trump construction crew, according to current and former employees.

A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization said Mobile Payroll Construction is enrolled in E-Verify for any new hires. The company is still not listed in the public E-Verify database, which was last updated July 1.

The company did not directly respond to requests for comment about the legal status of the Mobile Construction workers.

[_Kevin Graham]

All of the best people of course...

Trump’s Kentucky Campaign Chair Pleads Guilty to Child Sex Trafficking

One of President Trump’s loudest supporters will likely spend the rest of his life in jail after the conclusion of his child sex trafficking case.

71-year-old Timothy Nolan — a former Campbell County District Judge who was chair of the Trump campaign in Kentucky according to court documents — entered guilty pleas on all 21 counts against him in court on Friday. A press release issued by the office of Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear listed a multitude of charges, including human trafficking of adults, human trafficking of minors, and unlawful transaction with minors.

[_canpakes]

As Donald Trump the president tees off Thursday morning for another round on his golf vacation, Donald Trump the goatherd continues to enjoy a tax break likely worth $88,000 annually from the “farm” exemption his tiny flock helps him keep.

According to his golf course’s latest filing with Bedminster Township to justify its “farmland assessment” tax break, Trump maintains eight goats and farms hay on 113.2 acres. Another 70.6 acres of adjacent woods are also set aside as agricultural, so that a total of 183.8 of the golf resort’s 514 acres are taxed at a much lower rate ― just over $6 an acre, rather than $462.

A HuffPost analysis of the taxes paid by the various tracts that make up Trump National Golf Club Bedminster shows that Trump is paying $88,067 less in property taxes in 2019 than he would have had those acres been taxed at the average rate of the land in the remainder of the golf resort.

“Looks like Trump is fleecing taxpayers yet again,” said Robert Weissman, president of the liberal watchdog group Public Citizen. “What’s now become very clear is that a very substantial portion of the Trump fortune is due to tax evasion, including his evasion of taxes on his daddy’s wealth.”

[_moksha]

Trump has made repeated claims that he was chosen as the Michigan Man of the Year, an award that doesn't exist.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2019/08/17/ridiculist-trump-michigan-man-of-the-year-ac360-vpx.cnn

There is a chance that Trump will be chosen as the Pathological Liar of the Decade.

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Trump is threatening to declare that the Anti-Fascists are a terrorist organization in an attempt to energize his base of Neo-Nazis.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-antifa-terrorist-portland-protests

[_canpakes]

Federal Election Commission effectively shuts down after key resignation

Following the resignation of vice chairman Matthew Petersen on Monday, the Federal Election Commission will be forced to virtually shut down due to a rule requiring a minimum of 4 commissioners to make high-level decisions, per the Center for Public Integrity (CPI).

Why it matters: The FEC is responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws. As the 2020 elections continue to ramp up, the commission's power to keep candidates accountable could be hindered by its inability to issue fines, make rules, conduct and approve audits, and vote on the outcome of investigations.

The big picture: The commission's quorum has been at the minimum threshold for about a year and a half following the resignation of commissioners Ann Ravel in 2017 and Lee Goodman in 2018.

So far, President Trump has only nominated 1 person to fill the vacancies on what is meant to be a 6-person commission. The Senate has not yet granted the nominee, Texas attorney Trey Trainor, a confirmation hearing.

The last time the commission faced a shutdown of this type was in 2008.

Between the lines: Per CPI, there is a long-standing tradition for the president to nominate commissioners in bipartisan pairs, supporting a rule that no more than 3 commissioners may represent one political party. Trainor's delayed hearing could be a reflection of Trump's failure to offer both parties a nominee.

[_canpakes]

From Business Insider -

This year's G7 summit in France yielded little progress on many of the most pressing issues facing the global community. But there was one country that came away with significant gains: Russia.

Russia was expelled from the G8 after it annexed Crimea five years ago. Since then, Russia has done little to make up for its actions; in fact, it's stepped up its aggression against Ukraine, the US, the UK, and other countries.

So it stunned world leaders when President Donald Trump went to bat for Russia during the G7 summit and aggressively lobbied for Moscow's readmittance to the group without conditions.

Trump repeatedly refused to hold Russia accountable, blamed former President Barack Obama for Russia's violation of international law, expressed sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and even castigated other G7 members for not giving the country a seat at the table.

Russian state media celebrated Trump's full-throated defense of Putin, and one Republican lawmaker told Insider the president's actions were "embarrassing" and made him look "like Putin's puppet."

[_canpakes]

08/30/2019 07:34 AM EDT
National Farmers Union Head Scorches Trump: He's Offended 'Pretty Much Every Ally' On Earth

China is a now a "lost market" for agriculture, said Roger Johnson as he sounded the alarm on U.S. farmers' dire situation in Trump's failing trade war.

The president of the National Farmers Union has leveled an astonishingly frank broadside against President Donald Trump, who rural voters largely supported in the 2016 election.

Trade group leader Roger Johnson said in a radio interview Thursday that it will take “decades” to reverse damage caused by Trump. China, he added, is now a “lost market” for American farmers because of Trump’s trade war.

Trump has “offended the leaders of pretty much every ally we have on Earth,” and America’s reputation in markets around the world has taken a long-lasting hit, Johnson said in an interview on KFGO radio in Fargo, North Dakota. “It’s going to take much different behavior from future presidents in order to repair this damage,” he said.

Johnson, whose organization represents some 200,000 family farms, ranches and fishing enterprises in 33 states, agreed that China needs to be “held to account” for trade relationships and behavior. But he said that Trump would have been wiser to approach the world’s second-largest economy with a team of allies.

“I would ... argue that it would be far more effective if we did it with the rest of world, instead of first ticking off the rest of the world and then trying to do it all by ourself,” he said.

As for how Trump is dealing with China, Johnson added: “I don’t think you can expect to make the fundamental changes that are being asked of China while every other day you’re offending them, you’re forcing them to lose face. No country’s going to make changes when they’re embarrassed along the way. That’s just not how you do things.”

He said “a lot of folks believe that China needs to be held accountable,” but it’s the way it’s being done that’s troubling. “You’re increasingly going to find people who sort of say, ‘This was just a mistake. This isn’t the way you solve a real problem. It’s just making things worse.’”

He called many of Trump’s policy decisions “very harmful to agriculture; all the trade disruption has been enormously damaging.”

Johnson said the U.S. will suffer “reputational damage ... for literally decades.” He also noted that “trade actions that this president have taken have done damage to lots of other parts of the economy” as well.

Johnson slammed the decision by the Environmental Protection Agency — reportedly ordered by Trump — to grant waivers to 31 petroleum refineries effectively exempting them from having to use more corn-based ethanol in their products. It was yet another blow to struggling corn farmers in deference to what Johnson called the “wealthiest oil companies on the face of the planet.”

KFGO interviewer Joel Heitkamp noted: “You can see how mad ag producers are when they see that big oil got the exemptions ... it’s like the light finally got turned on and some of these guys woke up.”

Farmers “are in a lot of financial stress right now; net farm income is half of what it was six years ago,” said Johnson.

“This is really tough,” he warned. “We’re in a really, really difficult spot right now.”

[_canpakes]

Just another day of incompetent Presidential buffoonery ...

In a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge told CNN.

A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.

The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel.

The disclosure to the Russians by the President, though not about the Russian spy specifically, prompted intelligence officials to renew earlier discussions about the potential risk of exposure, according to the source directly involved in the matter.

At the time, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo told other senior Trump administration officials that too much information was coming out regarding the covert source, known as an asset. An extraction, or "exfiltration" as such an operation is referred to by intelligence officials, is an extraordinary remedy when US intelligence believes an asset is in immediate danger.