Skip to content

Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Openly flouting the law

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 22, 2023

It’s the GOP way

If you hadn’t heard, cruelty is the point. Government deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed” is no longer operative for the GOP. Democracy is no barrier to America’s authoritarian right getting its way.

Aside from insurrection, it does not get more blatant than this (NBC News):

Alabama Republicans on Friday defied a U.S. Supreme Court order by passing a new congressional map that includes only one majority-Black district.

The GOP-controlled Legislature had called a special session to redraw an earlier map after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a federal court order to include two districts where Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.” But on Friday, state Republicans approved a new map with just one majority-Black seat and a second district that is approximately 40% Black.

[…]

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed the redistricting map into law Friday night. A federal court will hold a hearing on the map Aug. 14.

Oh, the GOP is not done yet:

The Justice Department has notified Texas that it plans to file a lawsuit over Gov. Greg Abbott’s floating border barrier in the Rio Grande to deter migrants from crossing illegally.

The DOJ sent a letter to Abbott on Thursday demanding that Texas remove the buoys and razor wire along the Rio Grande by Monday, July 24, or legal action will be taken.

“The State of Texas’ actions violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious risks to public safety and the environment, and may interfere with the federal government’s ability to carry out its official duties,” the letter read.

“The floating barrier at issue here is a structure that obstructs the navigable capacity of the Rio Grande … which is a navigable water of the United States within the meaning of the Rivers and Harbors Act. Texas does not have authorization from the Corps [of Engineers] to install the floating barrier and did not seek such authorization before doing so.”

House Democrats led by Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro sent a letter to President Biden on Friday decrying Abbott’s actions. A Texas kayaking and canoeing company has also sued Abbott over the river barrier claiming the buoys “represent a hateful policy that intends to create the impression that Mexicans, immigrants, and Mexican Americans … are dangerous.”

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Abbott has made fear of immigration central to his political messaging. He is now faced with the reality that Biden’s parole process for migrants at the southern border has dropped unlawful entries by almost 70% since it went into effect in early May, meaning that border agents have more time to patrol and are making it harder to enter the U.S. unlawfully. 

Abbott’s barrier seems designed to keep his messaging amped up, accompanied as it is by allegations that troops from the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety have been ordered to push migrants, including children, back into the river and to withhold water from those suffering in the heat. There are also reports that migrants have been hurt by razor wire installed along the barrier.

Abbott responded to the DOJ’s letter: “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.” 

Abbott denies allegations that his agents pushed migrants back into the river.

It is notable that, for all their talk about law and order, the Republican-dominated legislature of Alabama and the state’s Republican governor have just openly defied the U.S. Supreme Court, which is hardly an ideological enemy after Trump stacked it to swing to the far right.

The Republican governor of Texas is defying both federal law and international treaties. After rampant scandals, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court refuses to adopt an ethics system that might restore some confidence in their decisions. And, aided by his loyalists, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is threatening mob violence if he is held legally accountable for his behavior.

The rule of law is no longer a constraint on the Trumpian right, as it never was for its namesake. MAGA Republicans’ vaunted principles were all for show, as should have been obvious before Donald Trump’s rise. Their support for law enforcement held only so long as police stuck to enforcing the law punitively and prejudicially against people they considered unworthy of its protection. How dare anyone apply the law equally to them?

From the Nixon pardon to Iran-Contra to “enhanced interrogation,” Republicans have excused their own law-breaking. “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy,” David Frum predicted in January of 2018 long after the horse was out of the barn.

Behold.

Challenging the efficiency fetish

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 22, 2023

Biden quietly reverses decades of antitrust policy

The Bosses of the Senate, a cartoon by Joseph Keppler. First published in Puck 1889. Image Public Domain via Wikipedia.

A schoolteacher friend from the Boston area once dismisssed the “Taxachusetts” smear. She liked the services Massachusetts provided for her and her child. She did not mind paying for them. Imagine that.

Franklin Foer examines the fetish — for fetish it is — behind making efficiency the highest good in setting business policy and practice. There is more to life than low, low prices. Not that federal policy since the Reagan era recognizes that. Or the Chicago school of economics.

The Joe Biden administration has been quietly resetting federal policy on mergers, on antitrust and economic concentration. Since the Reagan administration stopped enforcing antitrust laws, Foer explains, “the American economy has grown dangerously concentrated, dominated by a shrinking number of airlines, banks, tech companies, and pharmaceutical firms (to name just a few examples). Corporate titans have amassed outsize influence over the political process, smothered start-ups, and often treated consumers with shocking indifference.”

Readers don’t need this explained to them. They’ve lived it.

Foer goes on (The Atlantic):

Why did the Reaganites do this? They were in thrall to the idea that the highest, in fact the only, valid goal of economic policy is efficiency—defined narrowly as the maximum output for the lowest prices. And they believed that Big Business was inherently efficient. They were devastatingly successful at entrenching that view. For two generations, their version of efficiency became the driving logic of competition policy (and other areas, including trade), regardless of the party in power. Concern for how monopoly power might affect workers, small-town businesses, or even democracy itself dropped out of the analysis. The Obama administration’s 2010 guidelines, for example, exempted even more mergers from review and praised corporate deals for their “potential to generate significant efficiencies and thus enhance the merged firm’s ability and incentive to compete.”

But a small merger here and a small merger there and pretty soon you have “monopoly power over time.” It both limits consumer choice and places a heavy thumb on the legislative scale. The result is even more clout for corporate oligarchs and less for workers and consumers. Democrats’ acceding to the Reagan efficiency agenda left workers feeling betrayed.

I’ve written before that “efficiency” is like “shareholder value.” When the word starts cropping up around the office, flesh-and-blood consumable resources had better update their resumes, stock up on antacid, and learn to get by with even less sleep.

Like my teacher friend, Bidenomics understands that there is more to life than efficiency.

One of the most overlooked features of the Biden administration has been its willingness to challenge the efficiency fetish. The merger guidelines are its most frontal assault to date. In the view of Biden’s antitrust officials, Washington’s turn toward efficiency—a word that doesn’t appear in any antitrust statute—substituted the preferences of libertarian economics professors for the laws that Congress actually passed. The new guidelines seek to undo that. They don’t reject economic analysis. But their guiding theory is that corporations ought to be prevented from acquiring the kind of power that enables abuses, even if econometric models promise some sort of efficiency gain.

More-to-life guidelines issued by the Biden administration suggest that “government scrutinize how mergers might hurt workers, not just consumers.”

The weakness in steering policy by executive-branch decisions rather than through legislation is that guidelines issued by one administration may be overturned by the next. On the other hand, “bureaucratic policies also have the potential to stick, if skillfully conceived. They can manage not just to survive legal challenges, but to become enmeshed in the culture of the civil service.”

We’ll see if that happens with Biden’s changes. Another four years would help. It might almost be enough for workers to notice the difference.

Foer concludes:

Critics will also argue that the new framework is divorced from economic reality and warn that it will result in higher prices. In fact, efficiency-focused antitrust appears to have failed under its own terms: The leading analysis to date finds that mergers have been more likely to raise consumer prices than lower them. But on some level, to focus on price effects is to miss the point. Efficiency was the coldest metric for evaluating a merger. It reduced Americans into the stylized economic caricature known as the “consumer,” treating cheap goods as our highest and only aspiration. The new guidelines inject a bit of humanity back into the calculus. And they suggest that the ultimate question for government shouldn’t be whether something is efficient, but whether it’s right.

Last summer in The American Prospect, Sen. Sherrod Brown called for Democrats to champion workers again. I summarized:

Brown calls out the greed that drove American companies there to relocate first to the South, then to Mexico, then offshore in the name of “efficiency”—business-school-speak for “pay workers less.” What businesses became more efficient at was destroying people’s lives and desiccating once-thriving towns. This, especially for “people outside big coastal cities and people without college degrees or inherited wealth.”

Once again: the economy should serve people, not the other way around. Humans should be holding the corporate leash, not wearing the collar. But that’s not how our corporate overlords see things.

“We are supposed to be the workers’ party. Democrats must be that party again,” Brown wrote. “We must sharpen the difference between us—historically, America’s party of workers—and the party of big business.”

“Scranton Joe” is making that happen. Problem is, will anyone notice?

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on July 21, 2023

The White House cat thinks she owns the place

From NY Magazine:

When discussing life in the White House during another town hall in July 2021, [Biden] remarked, “It is very hard to get comfortable.”

While you might think the addition of a cat would make the White House feel more like a home, it seems that hasn’t solved the problem. In January 2023 the president revealed that his new cat Willow is adding to his discomfort.

“Willow may walk in here any time now. She has no limits,” Biden said. “You think I’m kidding, I’m not. Especially in the middle of the night when she climbs up and lays on top of my head.”

Of course she has no limits. She’s a cat.

So much for the re-tooling

Published by digby on July 21, 2023

Remember this?

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign is planning a reboot, top campaign officials said, with a significant shift on messaging, events and media strategy.

Expect fewer big speeches and more handshaking in diners and churches. 

There will be more of a national focus than constant Florida references. 

That was just a couple of days ago.

Today:

He an’t help himself. He’s still chasing the culture war fanatics.

It isn’t a strategy. It’s him.

A hearing for the ages

Published by digby on July 21, 2023

The US House held a “hearing” yesterday featuring “Democrat” RFK Jr. It was, as you might expect, a total shitshow.

Some highlights. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said he compared COVID policies to the Holocaust. He got very indignant, denying it:

He is a wack job. And so are his biggest fans — MAGA Republicans:

This says it all:

“Chaos is a very difficult way to govern”

Published by digby on July 21, 2023

Ya think?

Except…

Current and former leaders from the U.S. and around the world are gathering this week at a Colorado geopolitics conference to address some of the dangers facing the world such as Russia’s war on Ukraine and the unknowns surrounding AI.

But if the response of those attending the Aspen Security Forum to questions from reporters over the the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency is any indication, the topic appears to be off limits for public consumption, Politico reports.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s Trump-averse response to a question from a Politico reporter typified the mood at the forum.

“Ha! Thank you. I have enough problems at home,” Livni said walking away from the reporter.

Stephen Hadley, a former national security adviser to President George W. Bush said, “I don’t do politics.”

“I haven’t even begun to think about 2024,” said Stephen Biegun, who served as deputy secretary of State in Trump administration.

Nahal Toosi and Alexander Ward write for Politico that “Many of the people in Aspen say they’re not here to engage in partisanship but rather to seek solutions to problems that require buy-in from both U.S. political parties and global allies. And few of the discussions on stage referenced Trump, and when they did, it was usually in the context of his last administration’s policies.

But Toosi and Ward report that Trump talk is occurring privately, noting that this year’s forum is the last before 2024 race is already in full swing, and some have expressed concern that Trump would seek to undermine efforts to confront the world’s challenges that are being discussed in Aspen this week.

“Chaos is a very difficult way to govern,” a former Trump administration who granted anonymity told Politico.

And here I thought the whole world was looking forward to Trump’s triumphant return as the the leader of the free world. No???

Mitch’s wily plan

Published by digby on July 21, 2023

This comment by Mitch McConnell in the wake of January 6th keeps making the rounds:

“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen,” McConnell said moments after the Senate voted 57-43 to convict Trump for his role in fomenting the J6 Insurrection (short of the two-third majority required). “He didn’t get away with anything. Yet.”

Remember, he also said this:

“The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” McConnell said of the House’s 2021 impeachment proceedings, according to Times reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin.

What McConnell wanted was for the Democrats to “take care” of Trump and then McConnell and the rest of the Republicans could scream bloody murder about how terrible the Democrats were for doing it.

Today, the DOJ and others are dealing with thDear Leader and the Republicans are rending their garments over the “weaponization of government and further eroding their followers’ trust in government.

Just as Mitch intended…

No Labels and its tired, stale philosophy

Published by digby on July 21, 2023

Time to put it to bed

Back in April I wrote about the potential sabotage of the 2024 presidential election at the hands of the centrist group No Labels. They were signaling that they planned to run a third party “unity” ticket to satisfy the wishes of the majority of the public who are telling pollsters that it is unsatisfied with what looks to be a replay of the 2020 election. They’d already gathered a lot of money which they are not required to reveal because they claim they are not a political party (even though they are setting up affiliate groups in the states that are calling themselves parties.) They insist they are not trying to be spoilers but that raises the question of what they are doing. If you ask them, they don’t seem to have any idea.

At the time I wrote that piece it was unclear if they were serious at all. There’s a lot of money to be made in organizing groups like this and the argument is tailor made to appeal to wealthy donors who yearn for things like “entitlement reform” (especially privatization of Social Security and medicare) and what they call “common sense” solutions to difficult issues like climate change. But it’s not just about the money, that much is clear. The group has actually started holding events to sell their idea of a unity ticket and this past Monday they hosted one in New Hampshire featuring everyone’s favorite Senate Diva, Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia along with congenial bucket of warm water, former Republican Utah Governor Jon Huntsman.

They called their gathering a “Common Sense Townhall” showing that they have a great sense of humor if nothing else. The GOP is going to run Donald Trump for president, a man who was twice impeached, tried to illegally overturn the election and is now looking at his third indictment in less than a year — and he’s polling very close to Joe Biden. The idea that it’s common sense for any Democrat or moderate Republican to run a third party candidacy at a time when we are facing one of the most serious political challenges in our history is very dark comedy. There has never been a worse time to do something like this.

When asked whether he plans to be a presidential contender Manchin told NBC News:

“It’ll be next year,” Manchin said about his timeline to decide what to do, meaning speculation about it (and his West Virginia Senate seat) will linger into 2024. 

“Let’s see where everybody goes. Let’s see what happens,” said Manchin, an outspoken critic of partisanship in Washington. “Maybe they’ll come to their senses and start doing the job they were elected to do.”

That’s so him, isn’t it? What a tease.

Since Manchin is a Democrat, it’s reasonable for his fellow Democrats to worry that the consequence of his candidacy would be to siphon off votes from the other Democrat on the ticket and they are justifiably nervous about it. The very close electoral college win in 2020 was notable for the fact that there were almost no third party votes, unlike previous close elections such as 2000 and 2016 which didn’t turn out so well for them.

Republicans, on the other hand, are so unconcerned by the possibility that they are pouring money into the effort, clearly thrilled by the idea. According to Mother Jones, all those state No Label parties I mentioned are being organized by longtime GOP donors and activists. They obviously feel that No Labels can only help the ball club.

Most of the polling on this issue, from No Labels itself to a group that’s recently formed to oppose them, shows that the Republicans are right. However, this week Monmouth University polled the issue and found that it’s more of a wash and could hurt Trump more than Biden if Manchin were to run because more Republicans like him. And when Monmouth posed the idea to its respondents that the ticket could be a spoiler for Trump, only 7% of Democrats say they would vote 3rd party while 19% of Republicans would. So who knows who this gambit would hurt more in a general election? I think it’s common sense not to take a chance however, given the awful experience of 2017 to 2021.

One thing is very clear: a No Labels ticket doesn’t have a prayer of winning. So once again, you have to wonder why they are doing it? Katherine Miller in the NY Times pondered the question:

Is threatening to run a third-party candidate a leverage thing? Against whom? Do they think that the right unity ticket could reach the ephemeral threshold of belief where enough voters think they could win to make the ticket viable?

No Labels won’t say yet who’s funding it or who its candidates will be or which party will take the presidential slot. There will be a convention, in April in Dallas, with delegates, but who are the delegates going to be? One of the Maine voters who accidentally switched their party registration to No Labels? The group rarely, if ever, seems to mention circumstances in which setting up the logistically challenging mechanisms for a backup candidate would make sense: for instance, if Mr. Biden withdrew late from the presidential race. If Mr. Biden weren’t president, he might even be the hypothetical candidate that Joe Lieberman, a No Labels co-chair — also present in New Hampshire — would be calling for.

Joe Biden would indeed be the guy his former Senate colleague from Connecticut,Joe Lieberman, should look at as the perfect candidate. After all, he’s managed to get several big bipartisan bills passed in the most narrowly divided congress in ages, he talks constantly about the friends he has on the other side of the aisle and makes it clear that he believes he is the president of all the people, not just those who voted for him. Does Joe Lieberman think that Manchin could do better?

Russell Berman in The Atlantic interviewed Lieberman and asked him these questions and Lieberman couldn’t really come up with any concrete reason why now is the time to throw a monkey wrench into the electoral system with all that’s at stake. He insists that he won’t back any effort that could put Trump back in the White House but obviously, a third party effort is designed for that very possibility.

So what’s motivating this effort and Lieberman in particular? I think it’s what’s been motivating him ever since 2006 when progressives, tired of his endless centrist posturing, beat him in the primary at which point he became and Independent and never looked back. He caucused with he Democrats for the rest of his career but made it his mission to stab the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the back whenever possible, most famously when he single-handedly killed the Public Option in the Affordable Care Act after supporting it for years.

Berman writes that Lieberman can’t really come up with any real reason for opposing Biden except that “‘he’s been pulled off his normal track too often’ by pressure from the left” and points out that this is a common complaint from Republicans and Joe Manchin.

But this isn’t about policy. What these “centrists” really want is for Joe Biden to “own the libs” because in their minds that is the only way you can truly demonstrate your commitment to bringing people together and achieving unity. Biden, to his credit, rejected that stale, failed tactic and the party is more unified than it has been in decades. Let’s hope they stay that way. If they do, Joe Lieberman and his buddies don’t stand a chance.

Selling the brownie

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 21, 2023

Nationwide and locally

Yes, again.

We’ve covered before how Democrats must get better at selling “the brownie,” and at painting “the beautiful tomorrow,” rather than just reciting economic data and touting policies. Even accomplishing the latter is a problem since the media, especially conservative-owned media, does not want to cover that boring stuff.

But this week’s viral Joe Biden’s ad is ” a master class in digital communications,” Dan Pfeiffer believes. On top of leaving an entire omelet on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s face.

Better than that, it delivers what a good digital ad should: virality and a solid message. That’s something Hillary Clinton did not accomplish with this viral tweet:

Virality, engagement, even fun, but no message.

Pfeiffer writes:

Informing the voters about his economic achievements is one of President Biden’s most important strategic objectives; and one of his biggest challenges. The press doesn’t want to cover the past. Stories about the economy do not drive web traffic. The many events the White House and other Democrats have done (touting the CHIPS Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) don’t lead the news or drive conversation online. The video with Marjorie Taylor Greene is the platonic ideal of a piece of political content. It is viral AND communicates a persuasive message at scale.

There is, of course, an element of lightning in a bottle with this video. It is impossible to do something like this all the time. However, Team Biden’s video is still worth studying because it exemplifies success for every person who works in communications.

Communicating a narrative cannot be left to the top of the ticket, and certainly not to policy wonks. And great as it is, Biden’s ad did not really communicate what his policies deliver for people, just offered a tidy recitation of what they are. (Thanks, Marge!)

The larger problem Democrats face nationwide is getting beyond “deliverism” to engendering a feeling that people’s lives have improved and will improve under Democratic control. People can’t eat policies or bar charts. It’s one reason Biden’s numbers are sagging despite good economic reports. Voters don’t feel the impacts yet.

“Just passing good laws and sitting back and waiting for the acclaim is not nearly enough to win electoral victories next time around,” Mike Lux writes this week. “We need good progressive policies, but we also need deeper organizing, better storytelling, more innovative ways of getting the story out, and a long-term vision of a better society for working families.”

That’s where barrier to entry is a problem:

Our Factory Towns work showed that one of the biggest problems Democrats and progressives face in telling their story is the lack of pathways available for getting information out to people. Working-class voters don’t trust national media sources, which they describe as deeply biased and totally profit-driven “corporate media.” Meanwhile, local newspapers are laying off reporters or closing down altogether. And three far-right-wing media companies—Sinclair, Gray Media, and Nexstar—now own 50 percent of local TV stations. The online right-wing disinformation machine is a powerful barrier as well. Democrats and progressives desperately need to invest in media and in innovative organizing and messaging techniques targeted to working-class voters.

One of the most important things we have to do is the kind of organizing that builds community. Working-class voters, especially those living outside metro areas, feel abandoned, isolated, and forgotten. More than half of them, according to one poll we ran, report that they or a close family member have experienced job loss, retirement savings loss, or an addiction or other mental health problem. Their communities are fraying, and in the era of Trump every political conversation seems angry. They want to have places, whether in-person events or online communities, where they can rebuild the ties that bind, where they can rediscover that sense of the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. We can’t just be talking politics and policy with folks: We need to be talking with them about their lives and well-being.

A friend wrote this week about a nacent effort to reach more rural communities where corporate media don’t have the reach they do in more urban areas. If it gets off the ground, that’s one way to break the stranglehold right-wing talk has in small towns.

It’s needed. Because policies don’t arrive fully formed. Telling people about them is one thing. Feeling their impact is another. Good story telling can help accomplish both, by drawing attention to impacts voters may eventually feel but not notice.

Lux concludes:

Over the long run, a decade of fully flowered Bidenomics—where we build on the good things that were passed in 2021-22 and add important components like child care, affordable housing, a higher minimum wage, and a permanent expanded child tax credit—gives us an opportunity to change the dynamics. If we combine these policies with deep organizing, good storytelling, and innovative ways of delivering the story, we will have real potential to break loose big chunks of working-class voters. Democrats could start to consistently compete again in states like Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and more of the South, as well as winning in more of rural America.

Our country in recent years has been on the verge of breaking. Trump accelerated that danger but did not start it. The cracks in our democracy were driven in part by ever-increasing right-wing extremism, but also by the reality that too many leading Democrats over the past 40 years bought into the myth of trickle-down and catered to wealthy donors from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

But this is not an impossible dream. We can build a more beautiful and prosperous country based on the ideas that people should have dignity and agency at work, that small businesses and consumers can thrive if they are protected from the rapaciousness of monopolistic corporations, and that the economy’s goal should be for everyone to have the freedom to build the lives they want to have. An America where progressive policy wins make a better life possible for most people will restore our democracy for the long term, and make the Democratic Party the party of working people again.

EF3 around with climate and find out

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 21, 2023

Is Hollywood out of ragtag bands of world-savers?

We have seen a spate of unusual weather across the country lately, you may have noticed. The video from Rocky Mount, NC on Wednesday looked like a scene from Twister.

Nothing to see here. Again.

North Carolina sees fewer tornadoes than the Midwest. Still, about 31 hit the state in an average year, according to the National Weather Service. Hurricanes and tropical storms generate many of those along the coastal plain. Neither spawned the EF3 that hit Rocky Mount and a Pfizer plant on Wednesday:

An important Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in North Carolina was severely damaged on Wednesday after a powerful tornado ripped through the area, threatening production lines that normally provide huge amounts of medicine to U.S. hospitals. Meanwhile, torrential rain flooded parts of Kentucky and communities from California to South Florida endured scorching heat that at times reached record-high temperatures.

Pfizer confirmed the large manufacturing complex was damaged by a twister that touched down shortly after midday near Rocky Mount, but said in an email that it had no reports of serious injuries. A later company statement said all employees were safely evacuated and accounted for.

[…]

The plant produces anesthesia and other drugs as well as nearly 25% of all sterile injectable medications used in U.S. hospitals, Pfizer said on its website. Erin Fox, senior pharmacy director at University of Utah Health, said the damage “will likely lead to long-term shortages while Pfizer works to either move production to other sites or rebuilds.”

WRAL reports that it was “the second-ever EF-3 tornado to hit North Carolina in the month of July.” Sixteen people were injured and dozens of buildings damaged. No, the tornado did not destroy stocks of Covid vaccines.

Vermont has noticed odd weather as well. Megan Mayhew Bergman writes at The Atlantic that Lamoille County, was supposed to be all but immune “from the combined effects of climate change, including sea-level rise, wildfires, crop damage, and economic impact. But that was before the floods.”

Bergman writes:

July’s flood is just the latest in a string of extreme weather events in Vermont this year. After a historically warm January, a late-May frost may have destroyed more than half of the state’s commercial apple crop. By summer, smoke from Canadian wildfires choked the once-clean air. Then, during the week of July 10, heavy rains flooded the state capital, Montpelier, and washed out homes and businesses across the state. It was the worst flooding since Hurricane Irene, a “100-year” storm that struck only 12 years ago.

Vermont is no longer the haven many believed it to be. And if this tiny, bucolic state isn’t safe, far from the ocean in one of the coolest parts of the country, it’s hard to imagine a place that is.

No place is safe, not even “climate havens” like mine:

Academics have long had an interest in identifying “climate havens”—regions that may be less likely to suffer extreme heat, sea-level rise, and inland flooding as the global temperature continues to climb, and that may have the capacity to accommodate climate refugees. Vermont towns are often on these lists. One, compiled by the Tulane University real-estate professor Jesse Keenan just last year, included Burlington, Vermont, along with cities such as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Asheville, North Carolina. And yet, 100-year storms could hit Pittsburgh as frequently as every two decades, according to a recent analysis by the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation; in the coming decades, Asheville is predicted to be prone to drought, extreme heat, and extreme precipitation. If conditions look this bad in the so-called havens, we’re in for a much-needed awakening.

Allegedly “woke” world governments are still un-woke when it comes to climate, including ours, despite President Biden’s efforts.

Kentucky saw record rainfall this week.

If it’s not rain and tornadoes, it’s heat (CNN):

At least 18 people have died from the heat across the Phoenix, Arizona area as of July 15, and another 69 heat-associated fatalities are under investigation, public health data shows. 

The Maricopa County Department of Public Health reported a spike of nearly 30 deaths between July 9 and 15 that are suspected to be heat-related. 

Temperatures during this same stretch of time have exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit as a heat dome bears down on the region. 

The Guardian: reports a heat wave across Europe:

Hailstorms have hit northern Italy as near-record temperatures begin to ebb, but forecasters have warned of a fourth heatwave hitting southern Europe next week, with temperatures of up to 48C.

More than 110 people had sustained injuries after the north-eastern Italian region of Veneto was hit on Thursday by extreme weather, including large hailstones, said the governor, Luca Zaia, who declared a regional state of emergency for the areas affected.

And no, it’s not your imagination (New York Times):

Last month was the planet’s warmest June since global temperature record-keeping began in 1850, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its monthly climate update on Thursday. The agency also predicts unusually hot temperatures will occur in most of the United States, almost everywhere except the northern Great Plains, during August.

The first two weeks of July were also likely the Earth’s warmest on human record, for any time of year, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Digby tweeted on Tuesday, “Is it just me or do these news reports about heat records and flooding *all over the world* look like a science fiction movie — and we’re all acting like it’s no big deal?”

Can someone find a saucy female scientist, a cocky former astronaut, and a stereotypical computer nerd to step up and fix this in the third reel? Please?

And it’s only July.