The Texas Flood Deaths Could Have Been Prevented

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2025 //
10

Journalist Steve Monacelli reviews the consistent failure of Texas politicians to pay for an early flood warning system. Texas has a huge budget and a huge surplus, but public safety was not a priority for the legislature or the Governor Greg Abbott or the Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. They were willing to cut taxes and pour $1 BILLION into school vouchers, but unwilling to fund a flood warning system. Such a system was considered unnecessary and “too expensive,” although it would have saved lives.

Monacelli wrote in Barbed Wire, reposted at MSNBC:

Extreme weather events aren’t a new phenomenon in Texas. According to data from the National Centers for Environmental Information, Texas ranks first in the United States for deaths from natural disasters. The frequency of costly and deadly weather events has steadily increased since the 1980s, when an average of 1.4 disasters totaled a billion dollars in damage or more per year, to a peak of 20 events in 2024. But in recent years, even with the increasing threat of natural disasters, Texas lawmakers and officials have been largely asleep at the wheel — unable or unwilling to take better precautions that, in hindsight, seem both necessary and painfully obvious.

This most recent disaster — a catastrophic flash flood in Texas Hill Country that has taken the lives of at least 100 people, including at least 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic — began to escalate in the early hours of Friday while most were still sleeping. 

Texas lawmakers and officials have been largely asleep at the wheel.

Over the prior two days, the National Weather Service had issued a series of emergency weather alerts. So had the Texas Division of Emergency Management. On Wednesday, the Division of Emergency Management activated emergency response resources across 10 state agencies because of increased threats of flooding in West and Central Texas ahead of the holiday weekend, and it escalated those resources Thursday. 

Flood watches distributed out of the Austin-San Antonio regional National Weather Service office Wednesday named several counties, including Kerr, and a list of specific towns, including Hunt, where Camp Mystic is located. Flooding was anticipated, but per most local officials, not to the degree that ultimately occurred. Texas Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd said at a news conference that the forecast from the National Weather Service “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.” 

It wasn’t until 4:03 a.m. on Independence Day that the National Weather Service sent out an emergency alert urging residents to find higher ground and a series of subsequent and increasingly alarmed alerts from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. 

But, according to a CBS News analysis, Kerr County didn’t initiate any messages through its Integrated Public Alert Warning System used to send emergency text messages from local government agencies.

As a result, many swept up in the floods were caught by surprise — particularly in Kerr County, which doesn’t have an emergency warning siren system, despite the topic being a subject of local government discussion for some time. 

Nearly a decade ago, the county had considered a system of sirens, but that wasn’t pursued because of the high expense required and a rejected 2018 application for a $1 million grant from the Upper Guadalupe River Authority, which offered to cover only 5% of the estimated cost. As recently as 2023, the county commissioners’ court was still discussing grant options, according to meeting minutes. Lacking support from the state or a regional agency, Kerr County, with a budget in the tens of millions, decided it couldn’t afford it. 

Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official, told The New York Times in a recent interview, “Taxpayers won’t pay for it.”

A review of the extant reporting on the disaster and the unfolding recovery effort reveals a series of failures at the local and state levels. 

Local officials not only failed to put in place emergency warning systems in an area known for sudden and potentially deadly floods, but they also appeared blindsided and unprepared to address tough questions. Kelly told reporters at a news conference Friday that officials had no idea the flood was coming, even though the area has a long history of deadly floods.

“We have floods all the time,” Kelly said. “This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States, and we deal with floods on a regular basis. When it rains, we get water. We had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here. None whatsoever.”

Camp Mystic, the site of many of the confirmed deaths, was one of several summer camps in the Kerr County area that weren’t evacuated Friday. Camp Mystic restricts the use of cell phones, which prevented counselors and campers from receiving National Weather Alerts and likely hampered responses to the rising waters in an area lacking evacuation sirens. Asked why they weren’t evacuated at a news conference, Kelly said: “I can’t answer that. I don’t know.”

A review of the extant reporting on the disaster and the unfolding recovery effort reveals a series of failures at the local and state levels. 

At the state level, a similar failure to prepare for the worst occurred during the last Texas legislative session. A bill aimed to establish a statewide council to create a statewide emergency response plan and administer grants for things like improved emergency alert systems died in the Senate, with detractors pointing to the $500 million price tag as one reason to oppose it. 

“This shouldn’t be about anything other than the fact that it’s a half a billion dollars,” state Rep. Tony Tinderholt said during floor debate in April.

The shortsightedness of this viewpoint can’t be understated, given the high price tag of disasters and of lost lives and the Legislature’s comparative willingness to prioritize other spending, like $2 billion for film industry incentives. (Though Tinderholt, for his part, voted against that, too.) 

The disaster has served as a wakeup call for at least one state lawmaker, Republican Rep. Wes Virdell, who represents Kerr County and voted against the aforementioned disaster preparedness bill. 

“I can tell you in hindsight, watching what it takes to deal with a disaster like this, my vote would probably be different now,” Virdell told The Texas Tribune.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who didn’t make the emergency preparedness bill one of his key legislative priorities in his capacity as the president of the Texas Senate, said in an interview on Fox News that if local governments couldn’t afford it, “then the state will step up.” And Sen. Ted Cruz told CBS News he wants to use the tragedy to drive a conversation about how to “make sure warnings of a weather event” reach people more quickly and be “proactive to get people out of the way.”

But for all this talk about proactive efforts, the facts are clear. Texas lawmakers didn’t fund emergency response systems that potentially could have saved lives, and then 27 girls and their counselors died at a summer camp. In a state with an annual budget of over $338 billion, that is a choice.

Question: who was awake at 4 am to get the emergency evacuation order? How many had cell phones to get it?

Categories Education Reform

Stephen Miller: A Life and Career Driven by Hate and Ruthless Ambition

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2025 //
10

The New York Times published a long article about the rise and power of Stephen Miller. Miller is one of Trump’s closest aides. His title is Deputy Chief of Staff but he seems to be in charge of immigration policy and many more areas. His goal is to deport every immigrant out of the U.S.

This is a gift article, so you should be able to open it and read it.

Here are a few choice selections.

About the turmoil in Los Angeles, where Trump nationalized the state Guard and sent in hundreds of Marines, which generated protests:

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy….

Mr. Miller is more obdurate when it comes to domestic policy, particularly immigration. For Mr. Trump’s second term, he has led the president to stake out a series of maximalist positions, from the ICE raids to the use of the Alien Enemies Act to raising the possibility of suspending habeas corpus for people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump seems to enjoy having Mr. Miller play the heavy on immigration. During his first term, he jokingly told people who urged him to take more moderate stances on immigration that Mr. Miller would never go for them. Last year, he reportedly quipped during a campaign meeting that if it was up to Mr. Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Mr. Miller. The humor, however, underscores something serious: On immigration, Millerism is a more consistent ideology than Trumpism.

While Mr. Miller is an ardent restrictionist, seeking to reduce all immigration to the United States, Mr. Trump has at times backed H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers; created a wait-list for a proposed special visa, called a Trump Gold Card, that wealthy immigrants could buy for $5 million apiece; and expressed regret about the impact ICE raids were having on the agriculture and hospitality industries. Indeed, the backlash to the ICE raids was so great that in early June, Mr. Trump reversed himself and declared the agriculture and hospitality sectors off-limits to that sort of strict immigration enforcement — before, after intense lobbying from Mr. Miller, he reversed himself again. Still, the hiccup was enough to hint at a broader potential rupture, especially if Mr. Miller’s immigration policies continue to prove unpopular. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, once his greatest political strength.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Trump

RFK Jr. Endorses a Packaged Meal Loaded with Additives

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2025 //
9

Amanda Seitz and Jonel Alecia of the Associated press reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, endorsed a product that violates the standards of his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees. 

He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.

“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week. 

But an Associated Press review of Mom’s Meals menu, including the ingredients and nutrition labels, shows that the company’s offerings are the type of heat-and-eat, ultraprocessed foods that Kennedy routinely criticizes for making people sick. 

The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.

Categories Ethics, Fake, Health, Hypocrisy, Science

Dan Rather: Robert Kennedy Jr. Is a Public Menace

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2025 //
4

Dan Rather and his team at Steady writes fearlessly about the dangers posed by Trump and his unqualified Cabinet.

In this post, he discusses the scandal of appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has no medical or scientific qualifications. He is a lawyer whose head is filled with conspiracy theories. Worse, he has used his position to cancel major scientific studies and fire scientists.

Rather writes:

The last person this country needed to address the many public health issues we face was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man Donald Trump chose to helm the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy is an alarmist, a conspiracy theorist, and a disinformation disseminator who is putting American lives at risk. His convenient amnesia and lack of a medical or science background — he is a lawyer by training — has led to confusion, fear, and poorer health outcomes. He has been HHS secretary for only five months.

And this guy’s HHS leads a country that now has the lowest life expectancy and the highest maternal and infant mortality rates among Western countries while offering absurd options to help us. It’s about to get worse.

The budget reconciliation bill that Donald Trump gleefully signed into law on July 4 will drastically and dramatically impact Americans’ health. An estimated 17 million will lose health insurance. Millions more will see their premiums balloon. Hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes will close. The legislation will cause the largest reduction in food assistance ever, disproportionately impacting children. This will result in an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths a year.

Look no further than Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda as one of the main causes of the hard-right shift. MAHA has emphasized real health issues facing Americans, such as chronic disease, obesity, and poor nutrition, but has offered wrong-headed solutions.

Rather than looking for common sense or legislative options, Kennedy has weaponized his fear-based wellness campaign, preying on people’s rightful concerns about their health. He blames corruption in the food industry and gets people to focus on things like removing food dye or the “dangers” of canola oil (it’s safe), rather than address the real culprits: income inequality, lack of access to health care, environmental pollutants, and now the “big, ugly bill” and its anti-health agenda.

Beyond the bill, there are pressing public health crises affecting Americans. The surging measles outbreak that started in Texas could and should have been contained back in January. Yesterday, the CDC confirmed 1,277 cases in 38 states, a 33-year high. Many believe those numbers are low because of underreporting. Remember that in 2000, the World Health Organization declared measles eradicated in the U.S. Now our country is on track to lose that status.

Kennedy initially downplayed the outbreak, saying, “We have measles outbreaks every year.” The U.S. does have measles cases every year, usually fewer than 200, and they are typically attributed to unvaccinated people contracting the disease abroad.

The best defense against this highly contagious and preventable disease is vaccination, according to the American Medical Association (AMA). The MMR vaccine is one of the safest and most beneficial on the market. It is 97% effective and usually lasts a lifetime. Prior to 1963, when the measles vaccine was introduced, the U.S. saw 3 to 4 million cases a year.

Kennedy, a vocal vaccine skeptic, has been lukewarm at best at encouraging people to vaccinate against measles.

At a congressional hearing in May, Kennedy was asked if he would vaccinate his own children against measles. He replied “probably.” Then added, “My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant. I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.” We agree.

His skepticism about vaccines in general, and the MMR vaccine specifically, has led to a drop in immunizations and a prolonging of the current outbreak.

But it’s much more than measles. Last month, in an unprecedented move, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the nonpartisan Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Formed in 1987, the committee is made up of doctors and public health professionals who help the CDC determine best practices for vaccine usage.

Kennedy quickly replaced eight of the members with unvetted candidates. Several are avowed anti-vaccine advocates. One new member has been on the committee before. During his first tenure, he made 12 conflict-of-interest disclosures, which is curious since Kennedy said he fired the original members because they were “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.” A review of the committee’s disclosures found few conflicts, and all were communicated.

Kennedy’s distrust of vaccines has international implications. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) is recognized as one of the most successful public-private health alliances ever. GAVI was founded in 2000 by the United States, Great Britain, and the Gates Foundation with the goal of increasing vaccine access around the world. It has been credited with significantly reducing infant and child mortality globally. GAVI delivered 2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses.

Kennedy has halted America’s financial contribution to GAVI, which accounts for 12% of its funding, because of (his) concerns about vaccine safety and what he calls a “disregard for scientific evidence.” That is rich coming from a non-scientist who disregards anything that does not align with his narrow and unfounded beliefs.

Though a Democrat for most of his life, Kennedy has fully embraced the MAGA strategy of lying with impunity. The list of his lies is long. Here are some highlights:

  • HHS released a long-awaited MAHA Report in mid-May. The report called for an aggressive assault on chronic disease. But there were two problems. One, several studies cited by the report do not exist; they were simply made up. And others were misrepresented. Oh, and the Trump administration had pulled funding for any of Kennedy’s initiatives.
  • During an appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” Kennedy mentioned a 1999 CDC study on the correlation (not causation) between the hepatitis B vaccine and autism risk, citing a “1,135% elevated risk of autism” among vaccinated children. The “1,135%” figure has been bouncing around the anti-vax community for years, but it was never actually published in a study. It also ignores the years of research debunking any connection between vaccines and autism. No wonder parents are scared and confused.
  • Kennedy has claimed that half the population of China has diabetes. Again, a seemingly crazy notion made up out of whole cloth. And it was. According to The Lancet, the actual prevalence is just over 12%.
  • Kennedy said COVID-19 was a bioweapon developed by China.

While the reckless whims of Donald Trump represent a clear and present danger to every American’s mental health, the dangerous actions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. risk their physical health. It is a sad day when the person in charge of this nation’s health could also be described as a public menace.

Categories Extremism, Fake, Health, Ignorance, Science, Trump

Michael Tomasky: What Will ICE Do with Its Enormous New Budget ?

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2025 //
10

From Day 1 of the Trump administration, the strategy of the Trumpers was to “flood the zone.” That is, to roll out so many new policies that the public could not keep track, and the media couldn’t deal with them all. Trump’s staff had the blueprint in Project 2025, and they were prepared with dozens of executive orders. That, plus the depredations of Elon Musk’s DOGE kids made it seem as if we had suddenly been swarmed by an invasion from outer space of aliens intent on destroying our government.

Now that Congress has passed Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill, we are in the same situation. The near 1000-page bill has so many policy reversals that no one knows all of its contents. The goal seems to be to wipe out anything that Biden or Obama accomplished.

Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, insists that we pay attention to the dramatic increase in funding for ICE. Will we have labor camps spread across the country where detainees can be hired out to farmers to perform the labor they used to be paid for?

Tomasky writes:

One aspect of the Republicans’ big, ugly bill that didn’t get enough attention until Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elevated it over the last few days is the massive amounts of money it directs to the apprehension and detention of immigrants. On Thursday, right after the bill passed the House, AOC posted on Bluesky:

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion – making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social)July 3, 2025 at 2:58 PM

The next day—the Fourth of July, as fate would have it, when President Trump signed the bill into law—historian Timothy Snyder posted a columnon Substack under the blunt headline “Concentration Camp Labor.” If AOC’s post and Snyder’s headline sound hyperbolic to you, consider what’s actually in this new law.

It includes $170 billion for immigration enforcement: about $50 billion to build a wall on the Southern border; $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and $45 billion for detention camps.

A little perspective: ICE’s existing annual budget has been around $8 billion, so $30 billion is nearly quadruple. As AOC noted, it will make ICE into a huge police force that will indeed be larger than the FBI ($11.3 billion), the Bureau of Prisons ($9 billion), and the Drug Enforcement Administration ($3.3 billion) combined.

What is ICE going to do with all that money? One thing, obviously, is that it will try to hire enough people to hit MAGA apparatchik Stephen Miller’s target of rounding up 3,000 people a day. That’s a target it apparently still hasn’t even hit. On June 5, NBC News reported that ICE hit a then-record of 2,200 detentions that day. That included hundreds of people who showed up at regional ICE offices to check in as required by the release program they were enrolled in—a program under which these people were deemed not to be threats to public safety and whose movements were already monitored by ankle bracelets or geo-locator apps.

In other words, ICE has already been detaining thousands of people who, yes, entered the United States illegally, but ever since just lived, worked, and even paid taxes. Some may have gotten into some trouble with the law, but they’re wearing monitors and showing up for their appointments. Others have had no scrapes with the law at all. And now ICE is going to have the resources to detain thousands more such people.

And no—the American public emphatically does not support this. A late June Quinnipiac poll found that 64 percent of respondents said undocumented people should be given a path to citizenship, and only 31 percent said they should be deported. And that 64 percent is up from 55 percent last December, meaning that people have watched six months of Trump’s immigration policies in action and turned even more strongly against deporting everyone.

So that’s what ICE is going to do with its $30 billion. Now think about $45 billion for detention camps. Alligator Alcatraz is expected to cost $450 million a year. Right now, a reported 5,000 detainees are being held there. The Trump administration says the new $45 billion will pay for 100,000 beds. So that’s 20 more Alligator Alcatrazes out around the country. But it’s probably even going to be worse than that, because the state of Florida, not the federal government, is footing the bill for that center. If the Trump administration can convince other states to do the same, or pay part of the freight, we’re looking at essentially a string of concentration camps across the United States. Besides, there’s something odd about that $450 million a year price tag. (Here’s an interesting Daily Kos community post asking some good questions about that astronomical cost. The math doesn’t add up.)

Forty-five billion will build a lot of stuff. As a point of comparison: In 2023, the United States budgeted $12.8 billion to build new affordable housing. We’re about to spend nearly four times on detention centers what we spend on housing.

Open the link to finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Trump

IRS Rules That Churches May Endorse Political Candidates

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
26

Trump and the Republican Party have long advocated for changes in federal law to allow churches to engage in political activities. The Johnson Amendment, enacted in 1954, limited the ability of churches and other religious institutions from issuing endorsements from the pulpit. Trump’s base includes evangelical churches that wanted this ban lifted. Trump didn’t have to change the law. He just had to appoint the Director of the Internal Revenue Service.

The New York Times reported:

The I.R.S. said on Monday that churches and other houses of worship can endorse political candidates to their congregations, carving out an exemption in a decades-old ban on political activity by tax-exempt nonprofits.

The agency made that statement in a court filing intended to settle a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an association of Christian broadcasters.

The plaintiffs that sued the Internal Revenue Service had previously asked a federal court in Texas to create an even broader exemption — to rule that all nonprofits, religious and secular, were free to endorse candidates to their members. That would have erased a bedrock idea of American nonprofit law: that tax-exempt groups cannot be used as tools of any campaign.

Instead, the I.R.S. agreed to a narrower carveout — one that experts in nonprofit law said might sharply increase politicking in churches, even though it mainly seemed to formalize what already seemed to be the agency’s unspoken policy.

The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

“Thus, communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted,” the agency said, in a motion filed jointly with the plaintiffs.

The ban on campaigning by nonprofits is named after former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who introduced it as a senator in 1954. President Trump has repeatedly called for its repeal.

Categories Ethics, Politics, Religion, Republicans, Trump

Trump’s Energy Department Hires Climate Change Deniers

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
0

Is the climate changing? Most scientists who study the environment believe that it is. They agree that human-caused pollution degrades the climate and that the health of the planet requires less reliance on fossil fuels. The Biden Administration passed landmark legislation to encourage the transition from oil and gas to electricity. Trump has rolled back whatever he could of Biden’s contribution to green energy. No more tax credits for electric vehicles or solar panels. Every program that promotes green energy has been dismantled.

The New York Times reported that the Department of Energy has added three scientists to its roster who are known for their criticism of mainstream climate science. The Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, an entrepreneur who was CEO of Liberty Energy.

The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.

The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.

In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly…

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the Energy Department had hired the three scientists.

“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.,” Dr. Mann wrote in an email.

Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of “actual government science experts” and replaced them with “a small number of reliable foot soldiers.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said it would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding, which cleared the way for the government to regulate the planet-warming gases emitted by cars, power plants and other industrial sources.

Categories Biden, Environment, Extremism, Science, Trump

A Message to MAGA

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
25

It is sickening to realize that the US, our beloved country, is now aligned with Russia and Putin. It is sickening to realize that when the UN took a vote to condemn Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. voted “no,” allied with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. It is sickening to realize that the U.S. is now in cahoots with the enemies of freedom and democracy.

It is sickening to see the Justice Department turned into a weapon for Trump’s personal revenge. It is sickening to see Trump’s vicious assault on higher education and academic freedom. It is sickening to watch the arrest and detention of immigrants by masked men without ID without a semblance of due process. It is sickening to see the massacre of civilians in Gaza. It is sickening to see the Trump family scoop up billlions in real estate deals, crytocurrency and other ventures. It is sickening to see the Republican Party pass a budget that cancels the health insurance of millions of low-income Americans to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans.

One man is responsible: Trump. He worries about Putin’s feelings, not about Russian bombs hitting Ukrainian schools, playgrounds, hospitals, homes, and its energy supply. He plays with tariffs as a way to humiliate other countries, carelessly wiping out the life savings of people who trusted him. Was it by accident that he excluded Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Cuba from his tariff threats? Trump jokes about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of demanding an end to the war. The cruel budget that takes from the poor and gives to the rich was his budget. It is his massive ego that has turned the Department of Justice into his personal revenge and retribution machine.

I wish he could watch Charlie Chaplin in this speech from his film The Great Dictator. It is only three minutes. Please watch. These thoughts are needed today more than at any time since 1945.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, International, Trump

Anand: A Biblical Flood, a Girl’s Death, and a Great-Grandfather’s Legacy

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
7

Anand Giridharadas is a remarkable thinker and writer. In this post, he ties together the legacy of a very wealthy man who funded the fight against climate change and the terrible fate of his great-granddaughter Janie, who died in the flood in the Hill Cihntry of Texas.

He wrote:

In April 2013, Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas, made a statement that transcended the traditional obscurity of House Subcommittee on Energy and Power proceedings to trigger national headlines. “Republican Congressman Cites Biblical Great Flood To Say Climate Change Isn’t Man-Made,” declared BuzzFeed.

In a hearing about the Keystone pipline, Representative Barton, whom The New Yorker once described as one of “Washington’s most vociferous — and, arguably, most dangerous — climate change deniers,” played the denier’s game of delinking human activity from weather events: “I would point out that if you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

Three months later, Barton received a campaign contribution from William Herbert Hunt, an oil baron in Dallas. It was neither the beginning nor the end of their alliance. According to the Open Secrets database, Hunt had already donated to Barton about ten times since 2005. And Hunt would go on to donate to Barton another half dozen times, as well as to the Texas Freedom Fund, a political action committee linked to Barton. Though most of Hunt’s donations were to Barton, he also donated to other climate deniers and foes of environmental protection, such as Christi Craddick, David McKinley, Dan Sullivan, and Dan Patrick, who once said former President Barack Obama “thinks he can change the weather…because he thinks he’s God.”

I have not been able to get the Hunt family out of my heart after I learned from The New York Times over the weekend that one of William Herbert Hunt’s great-grandchildren, Janie Hunt, all of 9, was among the dozens tragically killed in those Texas floods that were biblical in proportion, if not in explanation. Remarkably, Janie was one of seven cousins who attended the camp, and the only one to die.

Now, I know how the internet works. I know people pounce on news items like this to make heartless, cruel comments. The object of this essay is very different from that.

I am a father, and I know what I’d do to protect my children’s lives. The answer is anything. I hope I live one day to become a great-grandfather. William Herbert Hunt, according to this Dallas Morning News obituary, passed in April 2024, at 95, a life long enough that he got to enjoy more than 72 years of married life, see his children and grandchildren grow and thrive, and even get to see 35 great-grandchildren of his line.

I have to imagine that Hunt, like me, would have done anything, absolutely anything, for his family. I even have to imagine that, if, by impossible magic, you could go back in time and a little birdie could whisper that one day a catastrophic flood, made more probable by climate change, made worse by fossil fuels, would claim one of his great-grandchildren at summer camp, Hunt might have reconsidered fundamental things.

I have to believe that, because I refuse to believe that being an oilman makes you any less human. When the equation is made that simple, anyone would do the right thing. Anyone would do what it takes to save their own flesh and blood. But when it becomes more abstracted — when one’s activities indirectly cause X, which indirectly causes Y, which sometimes makes Z happen more often than usual — the mind loses its clarity. When no individual happening can be definitively linked to climate change, the deniability, the not-knowing, grows easier still. Suddenly a human being can go from doing anything to save their kin to doing nothing to save everyone’s. A person who, I have to imagine, would have given his own life for his great-granddaughter’s donates to those who have fought for a world that makes deaths like hers more likely.

Source: OpenSecrets.org

I am not writing to accuse one man. On the contrary, this story of a great-grandfather and his great-granddaughter is a story of a whole country and its descendants. As always, some will say the death of children should not be politicized. I hear that. But, also, what is politics for if it’s not a debate about stopping the death of children?

I have sat with this story since I read the Times paragraph above. It has given me a pit in my stomach. I guess what one does with that is write. There is no glib I-told-you-so here. This is about what kind of great-grandparent all of us want to be, collectively. Do we want to put our heads down, do our work, justify it however we can justify it, donate to people who defend our interests, ignore the gathering evidence that we are on a path that will kill many of us and, at some point, take down the livable world?

Or do we want to be the kind of great-grandparent who right now is acting to save great-grandchildren who aren’t even born yet, but who one day, beside some river, surrounded by inner tubes and kayaks and Crocs and flip-flops and cabins and bunk beds and singalongs and brightly colored blankets — the kind of elder who defends those lives and their right to glorious summers even before we know their names?

What does it take to be that kind of great-grandparent now? It takes fighting back against the war on science that makes it harder for climate scientists and weather forecasters to do their jobs. It takes pushing back against extractive industries and their political protectors who would sell our future for a song, and who have made it unsafe for young girls to enjoy a Christian camp. It takes a campaign of media and organizing to educate people about the fact that a cabal of wealthy, well-connected corporate overlords is profiting at the expense of a future of carefree summers.

I am still sitting with the pit in my stomach. My heart goes out to the Hunt family, to those six surviving cousins who must be feeling so many awful things that children should never have to. They are feeling things many others have already had to feel, and that more and more of us are going to be feeling if we continue down this road.

On Instagram, an adult cousin of Janie, Tavia Hunt, who is the wife of Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs football team, shared the family’s pain and raised the old Jobian question of how to sustain faith in the wake of such inexplicable tragedy.

I am not a religious person, but my heart goes out to her, too. And, whether or not you believe in the god she cites above, it is also, of course, people who let things happen in this world we live in. It is also we who allow things to happen to us. And part of me wonders if, even hopes that, there might be an awakening from a story that connects cause to effect, upstream to downstream, more clearly than usual in a crisis that has long suffered from nebulousness. Perhaps this family, out of this horror, can help rouse the rest of us to become the great-grandparents our descendants deserve.

Categories Accountability, Environment, Texas

Alligator Alcatraz: Depravity in the Everglades

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
9

The editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel in Florida expressed shock and disgust at the creation of the detention camp for immigrants now called Alligator Alley. The existence of this hell-hole offended their sense of decency but they were offended even more by the casual glee that Trump, DeSantis, Noem and others expressed about the inhumanity of the detention center. Inmates will die of the scorching heat and humidity. That’s predictable. And these swells in their air-conditioned offices will laugh.

The editorial board wrote:

Unable to resist the political clickbait, President Donald Trump muscled Gov. Ron DeSantis and
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier out of the limelight Tuesday, to celebrate the opening
of a Florida first.

It is an armed camp where thousands of immigrants targeted as undesirables will be confined, possibly without hearings, under the brutal conditions of a swamp in the Everglades in a place most Floridians have never heard of, called Ochopee.

It wasn’t the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz” that brought the president to the camp.

It’s not Florida’s fast-tracking of construction that’s entrancing right-wing media, breathing new life into DeSantis’s national political dreams, and boosting Uthmeier’s reelection profile.

It is the savagery.

The headline-grabbing power of “Alligator Alcatraz” lies entirely in the imagery of brown people getting out of line and being ripped bloody by alligators or suffocated by snakes.

Strip out the celebration of suffering and grotesque inhumanity and it’s just a row of tents in the middle of nowhere.

No respect for the land

This is one more scar on land environmentalists are waging a decades-long battle to save.

It’s just one more insult to the Miccosukee Tribe, which called it home long before Uthmeier embraced it as a stepping-stone to his election campaign.The imagined torment of immigrants at this camp is not a glitch. It’s the main selling point.

This distinguishes it from World War II’s horrific internment of families and orphans of Japanese descent in tar-paper shacks, because they were of the wrong ethnicity at the wrong time. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt called them concentration camps.

But FDR didn’t hawk T-shirts emblazoned with images suggesting gruesome deaths or show AI-generated images of alligators in ICE hats. The Republican Party of Florida did. So did the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The World War II White House did not mark the opening of an internment camp by breathlessly reporting a ravenous cannibal detainee said to be eating himself while in federal custody on a deportation flight. DHS did.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and internment cheerleaders want you to believe that comparisons to other inhumane camps is hysterical hyperbole, as if the cynical marketing of Alligator Alcatraz is not.

The heat and humidity

In a particularly vivid example of his trademark cluelessness, DeSantis rebuffed criticism of inhumane conditions by pointing out the new camp’s showers.

Of course it is inhumane. Of course Trump, DeSantis, Noem and Uthmeier will deny bathing in the specter of savagery, even as Trump’s GOP raised money off it, while sidestepping their role in likely deaths that will have much less soundbite potential.

As Floridians know so well, heat is among the deadliest of weather events. High humidity prevents the body from cooling. Combined, the two are lethal.

The detention camp will place thousands of immigrants in wire cages in a humidity-intense swamp that is all but inaccessible to hospital ambulances, and where the summertime heat index can soar above 100 degrees.

Evacuating in advance of severe storms presents its own dangers, especially as it does not take a hurricane to flood a swamp or the two-lane road running next to it.

On Tuesday, when a typical summer shower dumped less than two inches of rain during the opening tour, water seeped through the edges of buildings, walls shook and water spread across electrical cables, Spectrum News video showed.

On Wednesday, forecasters upped the odds of a major windstorm moving across Florida.

Trump has bigger plans

Environmentalists are suing to stop construction, but Trump has even bigger plans for detention.

It’s wishful thinking to believe South Florida’s immigrant communities within driving distance of Alligator Alcatraz will be exempted, regardless of citizenship status.Trump made clear during Tuesday’s tour that naturalized U.S. citizens — who live in virtually every community in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties — may be next to face detention and deportation.

“I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters. “So maybe that will be the next job.”

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

Categories Cruelty, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Immigration, Trump
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