ALBANY, N.Y. — Nonbinary New Yorkers who currently must declare themselves as male or female to receive Medicaid, food stamps, and other public assistance say in a lawsuit filed Monday that the state is discriminating against them by failing to provide an X gender option.
The lawsuit filed against state and city agencies that run benefit programs seeks the type of nonbinary gender option already allowed on New York birth certificates and promised for driver's licenses. The nonbinary plaintiffs said the “outdated” state computer system maintained by the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance compels nonbinary people to either lie under oath or to be denied benefits.
“I was forced to choose between M or F, male or female, as a gender marker, which neither really align with how I express myself or feel inside. So that was particularly traumatic, especially during such a vulnerable time," said Jules Donahue, one of three plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Legal Services of NYC.
Donahue, 30, applied for benefits in July, after the coronavirus pandemic made it hard for the New York City law student to find stable work. Donahue identified as a male for the application, “but it just doesn’t feel as authentic to me as X.”
I pity the poor, confused soul, but at least he is getting loan relief.
The lawsuit filed in state court in Manhattan names the agency commonly referred to as OTDA, along with the state health department and Governor Andrew Cuomo. The lawsuit also names the New York City Department of Social Services, though it notes city officials have urged the state to update their system. There was no immediate comment from the Cuomo administration.
They also have hushed up, you know.
A spokesperson for the city's Department of Social Services said the state controls the system and they continue to advocate for change.....
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Whatever it is, you still have top pay the nonrefundable fare:
"They set aside money for their commutes. Now they can’t get it back" by Winnie Hu New York Times, March 29, 2021
NEW YORK — Any bit of savings helped when Eileen Damore was spending more than $400 a month to travel by train and subway from her Long Island home to her job at a printing company in Manhattan.
So she enrolled in a benefit that allows commuters to deduct up to $270 a month from their paycheck for transit expenses while lowering their taxable income, but when Damore, a pricing manager, started working from home early last year because of the pandemic, the transit benefit kept being taken out of her paycheck until she remembered to stop it.
That's government for you, and I don't $ee it $topping anytime soon.
Now, she has $662.50 that she cannot use or get back.
The unused benefits have become another headache for many commuters in New York, where more people use public transit than in any other American city and where the pandemic has emptied out subways, trains, and buses.
The benefits, which aim to reward commuters for taking transit to work, could now end up costing people money instead.
Many commuters have hundreds or even thousands of dollars tied up in transit benefits — money they earned and cannot use for other purposes like bills and mortgages, and they risk losing these benefits if they are laid off or change employers, or if they simply do not go back to taking public transit.
Really got you riding a rail, don't they?
Before the pandemic, about 1 million people commuted daily to New York from surrounding suburbs, according to a 2019 city planning report. Of those commuters, about 61 percent used transit, while 38 percent drove.
“I hear from people when they’re unhappy and this is one of the biggest things they’re unhappy about,” said Gerry Bringmann, chairman of the Long Island Rail Road Commuter Council, an advocacy group for riders, who has received dozens of complaints about money locked up in transit benefits.
The issue has even fueled a black market for Long Island Rail Road passes, Bringmann said. Commuters are using transit benefits to buy passes and then selling them at a discount to recoup some of their money.
A bipartisan congressional group representing Long Island and Queens, including Representatives Kathleen M. Rice and Thomas R. Suozzi, have urged the Treasury Department and the IRS to consider options to help people who have accumulated unused commuting benefits during the pandemic.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, buses, and two commuter rails, has called on the IRS to give riders access to their unused transit funds. The authority itself has offered more ticket flexibility during the pandemic by allowing riders to use transit benefits on 10-trip tickets instead of just monthly passes.
“The current regulations are creating a difficult situation for customers whose commuting patterns have changed,” said Pat Foye, chairman of the authority.
Existing rules already provide flexibility by allowing deductions to be reduced or stopped, a Treasury official said. The Treasury and IRS did not respond to questions for this story, and some employers are giving commuters the option of applying unused transit funds to parking near their offices, which is usually not considered a transit expense, after the Treasury gave its approval, but the economic shock set off by the pandemic has caused many people to lose their jobs and, under current regulations, they forfeit whatever funds they had accumulated under the transit benefits.
“Let’s be clear, this money belongs to the commuters,” said Rice, a Democrat. “It is wrong that they cannot access it when they have either lost their job or have to work from home.”
Damore knows what it’s like to see transit benefits disappear. In 2011, she had $500 set aside for her commute when she was laid off from a Manhattan pharmaceutical company. She never saw that money again.
Now, Damore said, she felt like she was being penalized again because her work life had been upended by something out of her control.
“I feel the rules have to be reconsidered based on everything that changed in the pandemic,” she said.
A handful of cities including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, as well as the state of New Jersey, have mandated that certain employers offer transportation benefits to their workers. In New York City, most employers with 20 or more full-time employees are required to offer the benefits.
Francena Amparo, 43, a legal assistant who lives in the Hudson Valley, did not sign up for the transit benefit this year because she still has $1,137 left over from last year. Amparo, who used to spend $475 a month on a Metro-North train pass to commute to Manhattan, has been working from home during the pandemic.
“I’m unhappy because it’s a lot of money,” said Amparo, adding that she could use the funds to pay down her bills. “Having that large of a sum of money sitting in an account — without access to it — is troubling.”
Under federal rules, any unused funds for transit benefits cannot be returned to commuters, though the money can usually be rolled from one year to the next depending on an employer’s specific plan.
The pandemic has left many commuters uncertain about their jobs and commutes even as the nation inches toward recovery.
Paul Fitzpatrick, 59, a lawyer who lives on Long Island, has $1,060 in transit benefits. He does not know when or if he will be able to use the money since he started working from home.
“It’s very much up in the air what the company will look like once things return to the new normal,” he said. “I’m not certain I’ll go back to commuting.”
It will carry with it the $tink of garbage.
Remember the good old days when it was Live from New York?
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At least the trains are still running here:
"Acting Mayor Janey criticizes service cuts to T, launches program to provide free Charlie cards to hard-hit neighborhoods" by Travis Andersen and Danny McDonald Globe Staff, March 29, 2021
Acting Mayor Kim Janey appeared with transit advocates Monday to beseech the MBTA Fiscal Management and Control Board to restore service levels on the bus and subway systems that were reduced as ridership plummeted amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“MBTA service cuts short-change the needs of Boston’s workers and ignore the sacrifices they make each day to keep our city running,” Janey said.
Service cuts, said the mayor, makes buses and trains more crowded and undermines efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19.
“We know that social distancing helps to keep us all safe,” she said. “Cuts to transit service only deepen the inequities of our public transit system.”
Earlier this month, MBTA officials reduced service on the Orange, Green, and Red lines by about 20 percent and cut trips on the Blue Line by 5 percent. A number of bus routes were also scaled back or eliminated, although some of the busiest lines have more service now than they did a year ago.
Earlier this year, the MBTA sharply reduced ferry service and eliminated weekend commuter rail trains on several lines.
The agency has since backtracked on planned budget cuts in the face of criticism from the state’s congressional delegation over the agency’s decision to reduce service despite recently receiving more than $1 billion in federal pandemic relief.
At Monday morning’s news conference in front of state transportation offices in downtown Boston, Janey said the city is also launching a public transportation pilot program to provide free Charlie cards for the period March 29 to April 19 to workers in certain neighborhoods hit hard by the pandemic. The program would support employees in several “main streets” districts, including: Nubian Square, Jackson Square, Hyde Square, Canary Square, Mission Hill, East Boston, and Fields Corner.
“We will provide nearly 1,000 workers with free Charlie cards, pre-loaded with $60 each,” she said. “We will also provide these workers with free two-month Blue Bike passes.”
Looks like bribe money on your way to the Great Re$et.
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This is how they intend to power everything:
"Markey and progressive Democrats see infrastructure bill as a way to accomplish Green New Deal goals" by Jess Bidgood Globe Staff, March 28, 2021
WASHINGTON — In the viral ad that helped put his underdog campaign on a glide path to victory last summer, Senator Ed Markey cast himself as the Green New Dealmaker, an old hand in vintage sneakers who was agitating for sweeping progress on climate change.
“We’ve got to make sure President Biden signs the Green New Deal,” Markey said. “We can’t wait.”
Six months later, that isn’t going to happen — not exactly, but Markey and other progressives still insist they are on the cusp of the most consequential environmental legislation in a generation.
The Biden administration has indicated that it plans to use its infrastructure proposal, a package to be unveiled on Wednesday that reportedly could cost as much as $4 trillion, to supercharge the nation’s clean energy transition. The move could set the stage for a drop in emissions and represents a broader change in how Democrats tackle the issue of climate.
“It’s a way of accomplishing many of the goals of the Green New Deal,” Markey told the Globe, saying he will urge his colleagues “to go big and bold to match the urgency of the moment.”
The package is not expected to be a word-for-word embrace of the sweeping climate resolution Markey co-authored with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but it inexorably links climate with the nation’s infrastructure and economy. That is a significant departure from the standalone cap-and-trade bill he coauthored in 2009, the last time Democrats held the White House and both chambers of Congress, which couldn’t even get a vote in the Senate, but in some ways, that’s precisely the point.
“The lesson I learned was that climate needs to inform and be included in every legislative package, not separate and put into a silo,” Markey said.
The politics of climate change are rapidly shifting, spurred by rising temperatures, a steady drumbeat of disaster, and lessons learned on both sides of the political aisle. On Capitol Hill, there are already signs that weaving climate into other legislation — something Biden campaigned on that reflects activists’ calls for an integrated approach to climate — could propel the kind of major climate efforts that sputtered during the Obama administration and went dark for much of the Trump administration, which denied the existence of climate change.
“This is a huge moment of opportunity for society to step in the direction in a big way of a clean energy future,” said Daniel Esty, a professor at Yale’s schools of law and the environment.
It's the ame sc$ript no matter what the i$$ue, and this $ucks.
That’s not to say it will be easy. Republicans are signaling little interest in what they see as an infrastructure package with mission creep. If Democrats have to rely on the budget reconciliation process, moderate Democrats from fossil-fuel producing states, like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, will have significant say over the package.
“I don’t know anyone who wants to breathe dirty air or drink bad water,” Manchin said this past week, although he balked when asked about Markey’s assertion that an infrastructure package could achieve the goals of the Green New Deal. “I really haven’t heard that at all,” he said.
There has been some recent bipartisan action on climate. The COVID relief bill that passed in late December, in the waning days of the Trump presidency, included a bipartisan measure curbing harmful chemicals from air-conditioners and refrigerators and appropriating $35 billion for clean energy — a major piece of climate change legislation that congressional Republicans are quick to brag about. Environmental activists are hoping it portends a shift in Republicans’ willingness to engage on climate issues — a process that could accelerate as automakers, oil companies, and other corporations reckon with climate change’s inevitable impact on their bottom line.
“I think there’s some common ground,” said John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate’s number two Republican. “Anything to do with encouraging innovation as we make transitions away from coal, and after as we expand green energy, I mean, I think that’s kind of where most people are now — but hopefully not with too heavy a hand in terms of regulations and taxes and mandates.”
He says that after what happened in his home state?
What a tool!
This Congress, Democrats were already hopeful they could use a surface transportation bill to take a bite out of emissions and they have myriad other proposals. They see the White House’s infrastructure package as an opportunity to pass sweeping climate change legislation this year.
“The Biden administration will seek big climate elements in the infrastructure bill, to the point where it might even be called a climate infrastructure bill,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has discussed the measure with Biden’s advisers.
“I think you’re looking at big investments in upgrading the electric grid and transitioning to renewable energy sources, I think you’re looking at a deep acceleration of the transition to electric vehicles,” Whitehouse said. He also expects provisions to give buildings environmental upgrades, fund research and development, and provide financial support for industrial plants and other businesses to become more green.
It's pu$hing the Great Re$et down your throats, and it can only end in disaster.
Veterans of the 2009 climate fight say the approach is a workaround given the unpopularity in Congress of passing standalone climate regulations, which persists today.
“Despite the real problems we’re facing when it comes to climate change, the votes still aren’t there, especially in the Senate,” said Jim Manley, who was an aide to Senate majority leader Harry Reid at the time. “Do you try to do what you can, or do you try to take a broad, sweeping bill to the floor, only to see it flame out?”
Experts say the country still needs to take aggressive action to cut emissions — something that carbon-pricing, which does not appear likely to be part of the package, would do, but Tim Profeta, the director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke, suggested a major investment in clean energy could help create political will for that kind of step.
Getting rid of people would sure help in a multitude of ways (puke).
“The more our economy turns to and invests in the energy transition… the more open we will be to policies that will help it happen effectively,” he said.
The Biden administration has not released the details of its plan. A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics, but said climate is a top priority and “using infrastructure as a way to address the climate crisis is of course a piece of the puzzle.”
Biden hinted at the approach Thursday, explaining why he sees infrastructure as fundamentally tied to climate.
“The roads that used to be above the water level — didn’t have to worry about what the draining ditch was,” he said. “Now, you gotta build them three feet higher. Because it’s not going to go back to what it was.”
Having buyer's remor$e yet?
Climate activists acknowledge the push reflects a significant shift in how Democrats advocate around the issue. They have called for new investment and standards, while the carbon tax is actually gaining popularity among some Republicans and industry groups.
The ga$eous $pew of lies never ends.
That is not to say everyone on the left loves what they know so far about Biden’s plan.
“Quite frankly, we just did not think that was enough,” said Ellen Sciales, the press secretary for the Sunrise Movement, a group of young climate activists who helped propel Markey’s primary victory over Representative Joe Kennedy III last year. “We are looking for a $1 trillion investment per year over the next decade,” and some Democrats on Capitol Hill want more details about the administration’s plan to split the proposal into separate parts, with infrastructure and climate coming first, and then a plan addressing child care and health care issues.
Where exactly is that money coming from, the Fed printing pre$$?
WTF?
“We need all the parts done,” said Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren last week. Along with Markey, Ocasio-Cortez, and Representative Andy Levin of Michigan, Warren has proposed a $500 billion measure she hopes will be plugged into the infrastructure package that would end carbon emissions in transportation.
“We can’t have the train leave the station and critical parts of this get left on the platform,” Warren said.
Some Senate Republicans are making their opposition to the approach very clear.
The guy from Missouri is being rather Blunt about it, but he's already got one foot out the door.
Markey, who now chairs the Senate’s Clean Energy and Climate Change subcommittee, has additional plans to deal with climate change, including an environmental justice mapping effort he has cosponsored with Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, and a civilian climate corps program. If Republicans block Democratic action on climate, he said, that should give his party another reason to roll back the filibuster.
“Climate action, when it’s done right, will lift up public health and create good-paying union jobs across the country,” he said, “and I can feel it coming together in the Democratic Party.”
The tent gets bigger everyday.
I hate to rain on the parade, but....
"Unrelenting rainfall in Nashville turned roads to rapids, sweeping vehicles off the streets and drowning a motorist who was carried away, one of at least four people killed during a storm that continued to threaten the city on Sunday, the authorities said. Flash flood warnings continued into Sunday for a stretch of Middle Tennessee after just over seven inches of rain had fallen in some parts of the region. It was the second-highest two-day rainfall in Nashville’s recorded history....."
That's something more like Brazil, and I wonder what geoengineering was carried out there.
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Time to tilt at windmills:
"Biden administration plans big expansion of wind power off East Coast" by Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer New York Times, March 29, 2021
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Monday announced a plan to vastly expand the use of offshore wind power along the East Coast, aiming to tap a potentially huge new source of renewable energy that has so far struggled to gain a foothold in the United States.
The plan sets a goal of installing 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind turbines in coastal waters nationwide by 2030, generating enough clean electricity to power 10 million homes.
To help meet that target, the Biden administration said it would accelerate permitting for proposed wind projects off the Atlantic Coast — starting in waters off New York and New Jersey — and would offer $3 billion in federal loan guarantees for offshore wind projects and make new investments in upgrading the nation’s ports to support wind construction.
The moves come as President Biden prepares a roughly $3 trillion economic recovery package that will focus heavily on infrastructure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and tackle climate change, an effort he has framed as a jobs initiative. Officials made a similar case Monday, saying offshore wind deployment would create 44,000 new jobs directly in the offshore wind sector, such as building and installing turbines, as well as 33,000 new indirect jobs.
“We have an enormous opportunity in front of us to not only address the threats of climate change, but use it as a chance to create millions of good-paying union jobs,” said Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser.
OMG!
Now I've seen it all. Going to create good-paying union jobs, uh-huh.
The plannedemic has cost 10 million jobs and they are crowing about 77,000 -- a mere 0.77% of the total.
The administration designated an area of shallow water between Long Island and the New Jersey coast as a priority offshore wind area, a first step before issuing new leases to wind developers. This month, the Biden administration took a key step in approving an environmental review for the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm, off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, a project that had faced repeated delays under the Trump administration.
Vineyard Wind is one of 13 offshore wind projects along the East Coast under some form of federal review, and the Interior Department has estimated that as many as 2,000 turbines could be rotating in the Atlantic Ocean by 2030. The White House said Monday that the offshore wind plan would avoid 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
How can they even know that?
It's all agenda-pushing spew, folks.
Republicans said they were skeptical of Biden’s promise of “green jobs.” They have criticized his earlier moves to suspend new oil and gas leases and revoke permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, claiming those moves were responsible for killing jobs in their states.
“Here we go again with the promise of ‘green jobs,’ ” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, which supports the use of fossil fuels. “If the government wants to create jobs, they would do it faster and more efficiently if they just got out of the energy business altogether.”
Offshore wind has been booming for more than a decade in Europe, where thousands of turbines dot the coasts, but the technology has been slower to take off in the United States, which has just two tiny wind farms operating, near Rhode Island and Virginia. One of the earliest offshore wind proposals, Cape Wind, famously died after objections from wealthy Cape Cod residents who considered it an eyesore blighting their coastal views.
For once, I agree with the richer.
That is now changing, but many of the biggest states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic — including Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Virginia — have committed to buying more than 25,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2035, according to the American Clean Power Association.
These Eastern states have set aggressive goals to get more electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar to help address climate change, but they don’t get nearly as much sunshine as states like California, and it’s often difficult to find space for wind turbines onshore. That makes offshore wind attractive: While the technology is still more expensive, costs have been falling in Europe, and offshore winds along the East Coast are strongest in the afternoon and evening, when electricity demand is at its highest.
“There’s almost no way these Eastern states can meet their climate goals without a lot of offshore wind,” said Rafael McDonald, an electricity and renewable analyst at IHS Markit, a financial services company. “That’s a big reason we’re seeing this surge of interest.”
All in service to the Great Re$et, and if the government really cared they could have outfitted every home with solar rather than spend trillions on Wall Street -- same as they could have paid off everyone's mortgage for pennies on the dollar but didn't.
Monday’s announcement will allow auctions to be held for developers to bid on the right to apply for federal permits to construct wind projects in the area between New Jersey and Long Island. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will publish a proposed sale notice and, after a formal comment period, will plan on lease sales in late 2021 or early 2022, the White House said.
Separately, the ocean management bureau said it would prepare an environmental review of a 1,100-megawatt offshore wind farm proposed to be developed about 15 miles off the coast of Atlantic City, N.J., which has a goal of developing 7,500 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035.
Much of the Biden plan involves harnessing the federal government to help states meet existing targets like those of New York and New Jersey. The Transportation Department, for example, announced $230 million in funding for port authorities for the construction of storage areas and other projects to support wind development. The biggest pot of money, $3 billion, is being made available is through the Department of Energy’s loan program to partner with offshore wind and transmission developers.
Although the newest offshore wind proposals are typically positioned far enough away from the coastline to allay fears of spoiled views, they have still garnered opposition from commercial fishermen operating in the region. Federal waters in the Atlantic are home to a variety of economically important fisheries, including sea scallops, squid and surf clams, many of which overlap with areas of future offshore wind development.
Fishing groups have repeatedly raised concerns that their boats and trawlers will be forced to steer well clear of the hulking turbines, the largest of which now have rotor diameters the length of two football fields. That could limit the amount of seafood they can ultimately catch, potentially depriving coastal fishing communities of millions of dollars in revenue.
Great.
Add famine to the complaints.
“Our fisheries are already more strictly regulated than anywhere else in the world, so it’s not just as simple as saying fishermen can just change their gear and go fish somewhere else,” said Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, which represents commercial fishing. “Fishermen understand the need to act on climate change, but they don’t want to be left completely behind.”
As part of the Vineyard Wind project, Massachusetts agreed to set aside $21 million to compensate fishermen for losses, though it remains unclear how the money will be spent. In its announcement Monday, the Biden administration announced $1 million in new grants to study the effects on fishing and coastal communities. Hawkins said, however, that the sum was “paltry” compared to the scale of development planned for the Atlantic.
It doesn't replace a way of life, either.
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Better be a big wind:
"Biden’s lesson from past green stimulus failures: Go even bigger" by Coral Davenport New York Times, March 29, 2021
WASHINGTON — In September 2009, Joe Biden, then the vice president, traveled to a defunct General Motors plant near his hometown of Wilmington, Del., to announce a $528.7 million government loan for Fisker Automotive to make hybrid and electric vehicles.
The funding for Fisker, a small luxury automaker, came out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion economic stimulus plan secured by President Obama to lift the nation out of the Great Recession, in part by creating “green jobs” with $90 billion for wind and solar energy, a “smart” power grid, weatherized homes, and the electric vehicle industry.
Fisker went bankrupt in 2013 before producing a single car. Biden also announced a $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, a California solar panel company that then went bankrupt, leaving taxpayers on the hook. An advanced battery maker called A123 Systems, which Obama extolled as part of the vanguard of a new US electric car industry, received a $249 million stimulus grant, then filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012.
That's why it was known as stimuloot!
Now, 12 years later, President Biden is preparing the details of a new and vastly larger economic stimulus plan that again would use government spending to unite the goals of fighting climate change and restoring the economy. While clean-energy spending was just a fraction of the Obama stimulus, Biden wants to make it the centerpiece of his proposal for trillions of dollars, not billions, of government grants, loans, and tax incentives to spark renewable power, energy efficiency, and electric car production, but the failures of the Obama stimulus, and Biden’s role in them — he oversaw recovery act spending — could haunt the plan as it makes its way through Congress. The risk to taxpayers could be orders of magnitude more this time around, and Republicans for years have proved adept at citing Solyndra to criticize federal intervention in industrial planning.
Biden’s advisers, many of whom worked on the Obama stimulus, say the situation is very different. The market demand for electric vehicles is much higher, and the cost of the cars is much lower than in 2009. Solar power is more economically competitive. Wind is entrenched and expanding rapidly.
Really?
Then why did the previous New York Times report tell me they were struggling to gain a foothold?
WTF is with the lying $pew?
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will oversee the same clean-energy loan program that backed Fisker and Solyndra. Granholm knows the program well: As governor of Michigan during the Obama years, she helped her state secure money from it to help auto battery manufacturers — including some that failed.
“You have to step up to the plate and take a swing in order to hit the ball, and sometimes you swing and you miss,” she said of those failures, “but if you never swing, you will never hit the ball, and you’ll never get a run. So the overall benefits of the Obama-era clean energy investments were overwhelmingly a net positive.”
That is such a non-sequitur it is beneath comment.
What is she doing, drinking again?
Still, she said her team was studying the lessons of 2009: “When you invest in innovation sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but you learn from the losses more often than you do from the wins, just like any human, right?” She said that the clean energy loan program will be “retooled” and “invigorated” for its second round.
Makes you sick, doesn't it, and what if they fuck it up beyond repair?
What then?
Other advisers to Obama concede they fell short, especially on electric cars. The recovery act was supposed to put 1 million plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015 but mustered fewer than 200,000. Even today, fewer than 1 percent of vehicles on the road are electric.
“There was high ambition, but getting some of those projects off the drawing board and onto the ground was an area where it certainly proved to be a challenge,” said Heather Zichal, who served as Obama’s top clean energy and climate change adviser in his first term.
Republicans are already weaponizing the losses of the Obama green stimulus in their political attacks against the Biden plan. “When President Biden was vice president, the Obama administration promised thousands of green energy jobs,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy Committee. “These jobs never materialized. Millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted on green energy companies that went belly up. Now, the ‘Solyndra Syndrome’ has returned.”
At least they told the truth about the looting.
Most economists say that, on balance, the Obama green-stimulus spending did lift the economy, and had a long-lasting effect. Clean-energy spending created nearly 1 million jobs from 2013 to 2017, according to a 2020 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It also made money for taxpayers: Despite the losses from companies like Fisker, the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program ultimately made $2 billion more in returns than it paid out.
This STINKS!
Wind power more than tripled in the past decade and now generates nearly 8 percent of the nation’s electricity. Solar power, which generated less than 1 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2010, now generates about 2 percent and is growing fast. Economists generally agree the Obama stimulus, which pumped about $40 billion in loans and tax incentives to those industries, deserves partial credit.
The recovery act “was a success at creating jobs, but it did not meet emissions-cutting goals,” said David Popp, a professor, of public administration at Syracuse University and the lead author of the National Bureau of Economics study on the green stimulus money, “and this new stimulus, on its own, will not be enough to reduce emissions. “Unless they can pair it with a policy that forces people to reduce emissions, a big spending bill doesn’t have a big impact,” Popp said, but, he added, “spending money is politically easier than passing policies to cut emissions.” If that “sets up the energy economy in a way that it’s eventually cheaper to reduce emissions, it could create more political support for doing that down the road” by making legislation or regulations less painful, he said.
If, could, maybe..... sigh!
Biden has a long way to go on that front. Wind and solar power remain more expensive than fossil fuels in most parts of the country. While federal aid gave a jolt to electric vehicle manufacturing, including a successful loan guarantee to Tesla, those cars still have higher price tags than the ones with old-fashioned internal combustion engines.
That is why Democrats say that one of the biggest lessons from the Obama stimulus is to go bigger — much bigger.
And bankrupt the nation while doing it.
The short-term tax credits for renewable energy and advanced battery plants “weren’t big enough. They weren’t long enough,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will play a key role in shaping Biden’s bill in Congress. “If you were somebody who was very much committed in the area of clean manufacturing and energy, you didn’t have an idea of what was coming next,” he said.
Well, we do now thanks to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum.
Related:
"A new technology industry group led by the former head of US public policy at Google is looking to remind Democrats that technology companies are on their side when it comes to progressive priorities like voting rights, fighting climate change, and reducing income inequality. Adam Kovacevich, who most recently led government relations for electric scooter company Lime, launched the Chamber of Progress on Monday to promote “a progressive high-tech society, economy, workforce, and consumer climate,” according to a statement. The organization joins a crowded field of advocacy and industry groups as tech companies are coming under increased scrutiny for their privacy policies, market share, labor practices, and role in spreading misinformation. With Democrats controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, Kovacevich said it’s important to highlight how technology has expanded access to information and opportunity. The group is backed by 13 companies, including Kovacevich’s former employers as well as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, DoorDash, Instacart, Uber, Zillow, Grubhub, and others."
But they were completely unbiased and didn't interfere in the election or censor dissenting views!
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Oh, yeah, one more thing.....
"The Battle for the GOP: Josh Hawley became a pariah in Washington after the insurrection. Does it matter?" by Liz Goodwin Globe Staff, March 29, 2021
WASHINGTON — Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri — a 41-year-old Republican who exudes the energy of a youth pastor — doesn’t at first glance look like a man who’s on the outs.
He confidently strides the halls of the Capitol in his tailored suits, briefly taking questions from reporters in between hits on Fox News and heated questioning of President Biden’s nominees from his seat on the Judiciary Committee, but ever since Jan. 6, when Hawley was captured in a news photo raising his fist in solidarity with protesters who later stormed the Capitol, the first-term senator has become a magnet of blistering criticism.
A total freeze out from nearly half the Senate might raise the danger of being seen as unable to deliver for the voters back home, but in a world in which hundreds of Trump supporters mobilized to ransack the US Capitol, becoming a pariah inside its marble walls isn’t necessarily a political liability with the GOP grass-roots.
Hawley’s chilly reception in D.C. may effectively stop him from moving his own legislation for now, but it appears to have increased speaking requests from local GOP groups in Missouri, turbocharged his fund-raising, and upped his overall standing in a national party that still revolves around Trump. Those are all key metrics for someone who is widely believed to be a 2024 presidential hopeful — perhaps more so than a long list of bills signed into law.
That's about as far from New York as you can get, and he doesn't look like a pariah at all.
Gregg Keller, a GOP strategist and paid adviser to Hawley’s 2018 Senate run, said he believes criticism from the left or in the media just adds to the senator’s growing national profile among Republicans who are increasingly angry at both.
“Those kind of articles, those kind of efforts only help Josh burnish his bona fides with Republican primary voters,” Keller said.
Still, Hawley — whose brand of nationalistic, anti-Wall Street populism occasionally overlaps with the more pluralistic populism of his liberal colleagues — appears sensitive about the lack of Democratic co-sponsors. When asked about it by a Globe reporter as he was leaving the Capitol last week, he said he didn’t know whether it was true that none had signed onto his bills. “We’ll get you our list, we’ve got a bunch of bills, lots of people,” Hawley said, before closing his car door in the face of a follow-up question. His office later cited 13 bills that Hawley has signed onto as a cosponsor since January that include Democrats. None was his own legislation.
His response was a lot more polite and cordial than what they get from me.
Democrats and Republicans point to different polls to argue Hawley’s standing has been hurt or helped in his state by becoming one of the faces of Trump’s attempts to stay in office.
A Morning Consult poll taken days after Jan. 6 in Missouri showed Hawley’s approval ratings slid 9 percentage points with Republicans in the aftermath of the riot, though he still remained more popular than his GOP colleague Senator Roy Blunt, who did not object to the election.
What more is there to really say regarding this slop?
The whole hatchet job article is a complete contradiction in their alleged thesis.
An anti-Trump group paid to post billboards around Missouri calling on Hawley to resign, with the words “you lied about the election” next to an image of his face. Other anti-Hawley political action groups sprouted up, vowing to take him down in the next election, and several corporate PACS announced they would no longer donate to him. His political mentor, former senator John Danforth, called supporting him “the biggest mistake of my life.”
“You don’t hear anything good about Josh Hawley in Missouri,” said Michael Butler, the chair of the state’s Democratic Party. “I haven’t heard anything good about Josh Hawley since Jan. 6,” but a Missouri Scout poll touted by his campaign found 46 percent of Missouri voters approved of Hawley in late January, with his overall rating six percentage points above water, which is comparable to where he was polling before January. As the weeks wore on, local Republican parties around the country began voting to censure Republicans who supported impeaching Trump, and whatever energy there was in GOP establishment circles for punishing those who pushed electoral fraud claims petered out amid the fury of the grass-roots.
“I think Senator Josh Hawley’s gone from a liked conservative to being a rock star with Missouri Republicans in the last couple of months,” argued Missouri Republican strategist James Harris.
But he is a pariah nonetheless!
Harris said he heard some grumbling from “country club Republicans” about the image of Hawley raising his fist outside the Capitol, but to the state’s self-described “Trump Republicans” who are still angry about the election, that photo had an entirely different meaning.
Nationally, Hawley appears to have boosted his profile even as he gets the cold shoulder from his liberal colleagues. Hawley has raised over $2 million since January, which includes funds from roughly 25,000 new donors, according to a source close to his campaign. That’s almost as much as he raised in all of 2020, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. The Morning Consult poll also found his favorability rating rose 5 percentage points among Republican voters nationally after the insurrection.
OMG, he's only a pariah amongst the stinking elite of the Globe and he is raising more money!
Who wrote this piece of shit?
Hawley is still relatively unknown: 6 in 10 GOP voters nationally say they haven’t heard of him, compared to just 27 percent who said the same of Cruz, but his high-profile election objections and the events of Jan. 6 appear to be changing that.
Trump named Hawley along with a few others in a recent interview as someone who represents the future of the Republican Party and would be a potential 2024 nominee for president if Trump doesn’t run, and Hawley received a standing ovation at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida last month when he mentioned his vote to object to the election — though he finished dismally in the group’s 2024 straw poll, which was dominated by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
I don't think it will matter who runs for president in 2024.
The country will be long gone by then, so move to Florida if you can.
While Hawley has denied he wants to run for president, his boosters see him as well positioned to carry Trump’s populist torch without Trump’s baggage. Educated at Stanford and Yale Law School, Hawley was Missouri’s attorney general before he was elected to the Senate. He makes a slightly more nuanced argument about the influence of China, trade deals, and what he portrays as the evils of the left than Trump does.
“Josh Hawley speaks very articulately about the same things [Trump] has talked about as concerns,” Harris said.
If the incumbent Trump couldn't win election after a landslide, how will any Republican ever win again?
He gave a defiant speech at the CPAC gathering about attempts to “cancel” him, referencing Simon & Schuster pulling his book deal in January. (A different publisher signed him shortly after.) “We’re not going to back down to the woke mob,” Hawley said.
He portrays the left as “radical liberals” who are in alliance with corporations and calls for breaking up big tech companies — a position that puts him on the same page as Senator Elizabeth Warren and some other progressive Democrats. That’s led to some collaborations across the aisle in the past.
Rather disingenuous of the Democrats after Google reminded them they are with them, isn't it?
Late last year, he partnered with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to push for larger checks to be included in the December COVID relief bill, with Sanders praising him for his efforts on the Senate floor, but after the insurrection, when Hawley floated the idea of requiring companies with more than $1 billion in revenue to pay a $15 minimum wage, Sanders and others on the left ignored it entirely. A spokesperson for Sanders did not answer the Globe’s request for comment on whether he would work with Hawley in the future.
Democrats back home smell blood in the water, even if Hawley’s allies brush off concerns about his standing in the increasingly red state.
“He has placed himself in a position where he is a pariah, where no one wants to be associated with him,” said Rosetta Okohson, a Democratic strategist in Missouri.....
She obviously didn't read this Boston Globe article!
Related:
After he stabbed Trump in the back?
He will only win if the election is about transgenders, and Georgia will once again decide the result:
"A group of civil rights and advocacy organizations including the Georgia NAACP have filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging Georgia’s new Republican-backed election law, which includes new restrictions on mail voting and gives the state Legislature more control over the administration of elections. The lawsuit, filed Sunday against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other members of the State Election Board, asks a judge to find that the law violates the US Constitution and the Voting Rights Act and to block state officials from enforcing it. The suit was filed a day before a Democratic lawmaker returned to the state Capitol after being arrested while protesting the law....."
