monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The oil industry is trying to crush the booming electric car movement.

Groups backed by industry giants like Exxon Mobil and the Koch empire are waging a state-by-state, multimillion-dollar battle to squelch utility companies’ plans to build charging stations across the country.

...The counterattack involves an array of trade associations and industry-funded political groups representing every segment of the petroleum sector.

In the Midwest, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a trade group for gasoline makers, has filed comments against charging plans in Kansas and Missouri, and has opposed Colorado’s new zero-emission vehicle mandate as part of a “Freedom to Drive” coalition of auto dealers and oil groups. Average consumers, they say, should not have to pay for incentives or charging stations that mainly benefit people wealthy enough to afford cars like Teslas...

A document Hillary Clinton helped write nearly a half century ago has returned from the dead to threaten the man she couldn’t vanquish in 2016.

The bizarre, only-in-D.C. twist centers on a congressional report penned by a bipartisan team of young attorneys that included Hillary before she was a Clinton and written in the throes of Watergate. Then, unlike now, not a single lawmaker had been alive the last time Congress impeached a president. They had little understanding of how to try and remove Richard Nixon from the White House. So they tapped Clinton and a team of ambitious staffers to dive into the history of impeachment, stretching back to the 14th century in England: How has impeachment been used? What were the justifications? Can we apply it to Nixon?

The resulting document became a centerpiece of the congressional push to drive the Republican president from office. But then Nixon resigned. The memo was buried.

That was just the report’s first life.

In an ironic twist, the document was resurrected in the late 1990s. Republicans gleefully used it to bolster their unsuccessful bid to oust Clinton’s now-husband, President Bill Clinton. Then it faded from public conscience — again.

Until now, that is...

Immigrants help us find treatments for rare diseases. We owe them for that.

“I was born a seemingly normal and healthy baby,” my patient Maria Isabel Bueso Barrera told Congress on Wednesday morning. Her deteriorating health baffled her doctors in Guatemala, who sent her to the United States, where she received a terrifying diagnosis: the exceedingly rare Maroteaux-Lamy syndrome. “My life expectancy was very short,” she explained. “Doctors said I may not live to my teens.” And before that could come blindness, hearing loss, heart attacks and a host of other maladies.

Now, Bueso faces a new threat to her health: irrational changes in U.S. immigration policy.

And it's those who bang on and on about Jesus who are by far the worst and most inhumane.

Still more remarkable, the Jones group reported, was a spherule found in the dust that was not mentioned in USGS’s “Particle Atlas,” and which was obtained only through an FOIA request, namely, “a molybdenum-rich spherule,” which had been observed and studied by the USGS team. This information is remarkable, because molybdenum (Mo) is “known for its extremely high melting point”: 2,623°C (4,753°F). [30] The presence of this molybdenum-rich spherules in the WTC dust was not mentioned by NIST, although it could have learned about it from the article by the Jones group or directly from the USGS.

http://www.consensus911.org/point-tt-6/

The following just breaks my heart. It is just so telling of the inhumanity of the administration's policies on immigration as a whole and it's consequences.

9:52 a.m. September 11, 2001: Firefighters Reach 78th Floor of South Tower; Find Two Isolated Fires

Ronald Bucca. [Source: Public domain]
Two firefighters climbing up the South Tower, Orio Palmer and Ronald Bucca, have reached its 78th floor, the lower end of the impact zone where Flight 175 hit. [NEW YORK TIMES, 8/4/2002]

They are just two floors below the level where, minutes later, its collapse initiates. [FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, 5/1/2002, PP. 2-34]

Over radio, Palmer tells firefighter Joseph Leavey, “We’ve got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines.” [DWYER AND FLYNN, 2005, PP. 206]

The fact that they reached so high up the tower only comes to light almost a year later, when a tape of radio communications from 9/11 is made public (see August 4, 2002). The New York Times will report “[N]owhere on the tape is there any indication that firefighters had the slightest indication that the tower had become unstable or that it could fall.” [NEW YORK TIMES, 11/9/2002]

Jesus freaks have nothing on those that deny the reality that WTCs 1, 2 & 7 were blown up.

None of this will surprise though it may well lead to murderous urges such as I experience thinking about these people.