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wi65

I’ll kick off the comments with a few toons as it were;

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Benny

U.S. Senator Manchin to unveil energy permitting measure on Wednesday

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Joe Manchin will unveil his full energy permitting bill on Wednesday to speed fossil fuel projects and offer incentives for renewable energy electricity transmission, legislation that faces an uphill battle.

“The text will be out tomorrow,” Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, told a press conference on Tuesday, noting it will give senators plenty of time to review the legislation he wants to attach to a temporary federal funding bill to prevent government shutdowns before the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1.

Benny

Latest DeSantis migrant flight was to land in Biden’s home state, Delaware. It never left Texas.

I

t looked like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was hungry for a repeat performance of political theater .

Early Tuesday morning, a chartered jet was scheduled to fly out of San Antonio’s Kelly Field — just like the two planes that flew 48 Venezuelan asylum seekers from Kelly to Martha’s Vineyard last week with stops in the Florida Panhandle.

Like those earlier flights, Tuesday’s was scheduled to land briefly at Bob Sikes Airport in Crestview, Fla., according to FlightRadar24 , a global flight-tracking service. But its final destination wasn’t the Vineyard, a favorite vacation spot for the super-rich.

Instead, the flight was to make a stop in President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware. After touching down there, it was scheduled to continue on to Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan.

But Tuesday’s departure didn’t materialize — at least not from Kelly Field, on the city’s Southwest Side. It’s unclear why. Airfield employees declined to comment.

With his delivery of Venezuelans to Martha’s Vineyard last week, DeSantis was borrowing a page from the playbook of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has bused thousands of migrants to New York, Chicago and Washington D.C. in recent months to call attention to what he calls Biden’s failed immigration policies.

DeSantis defended his tactics on Sean Hannity’s Fox News talk show on Monday night, saying the immigrants had been rescued from destitution on the streets of San Antonio.

“They all signed consent forms to go, and then the vendor that is doing this for Florida provided them with a packet that included a map of Martha’s Vineyard. It had the numbers for different services on Martha’s Vineyard, and it had numbers for the overall agencies in Massachusetts that handled things involving immigration and refugees,” said the Republican governor, who’s widely expected to seek the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. “So it was clearly voluntary, and the other nonsense you’re hearing is just not true.”

“And why wouldn’t they want to go given where they were?” he added. “They were in really, really bad shape. They got to be cleaned up, treated well.”

But the point of DeSantis’ action was political.

“What we’ve been able to show is that the border is a disaster,” he told Hannity.

The Venezuelans flown to Martha’s Vineyard were recruited from the area around San Antonio’s Migrant Resource Center.

The city opened the center in July in response to a wave of asylum seekers crossing the Texas-Mexico border. The facility helps immigrants with travel connections, transportation to nearby shelters, overnight accommodations and referrals to social services. Locally based Catholic Charities took over management of the center on Monday.

Benny

Benny

Benny

jcitybone

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/manchin-rails-revenge-politics-permit-plan-90219406

Sen. Joe Manchin on Tuesday railed against what he called “revenge politics,” as liberals in the House and Senate team up with Republicans to oppose his plan to speed permits for natural gas pipelines and other energy projects.

Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, secured a commitment from President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders to include the permitting package in a stopgap government-funding bill in return for his support of a landmark law to curb climate change.

But in the weeks since Biden signed so-called Inflation Reduction Act last month, Democrats and environmental groups have lined up to oppose the permitting plan, calling it bad for the country and the climate. Climate hawks such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, along with dozens of House members, say the permitting plan should be excluded from the must-pass spending bill.

Many Republicans agree. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate energy panel, called the permitting deal a “political payoff” to Manchin, whose vote on the climate bill was crucial to the law’s passage.

Manchin’s actions on the climate — including secret negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — “engendered a lot of bad blood” among Republicans, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters. “There’s not a lot of sympathy on our side to provide Sen. Manchin a reward.”

At a news conference Tuesday, Manchin expressed bewilderment at such sentiment, saying he’s “never seen” such an example of “revenge politics,” with Sanders and the “extreme liberal left siding up with Republican leadership” to oppose his plan.

“It’s revenge towards one person — me,” Manchin said.

“I’m hearing that the Republican leadership is upset,” he added. “They’re not going to give a victory to Joe Manchin. Well, Joe Manchin is not looking for a victory.”

Replying Tuesday on Twitter, Sanders was defiant.

“Defeating the Big Oil side deal is not about revenge,″ he said. “It’s about whether we will stand with 650 environmental and civil rights organizations who understand that the future of the planet is with renewable energy and energy efficiency not approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline,″ a nearly-completed natural gas pipeline from northern West Virginia to southern Virginia. Manchin’s plan would expedite the pipeline and steer legal challenges to a different federal court.

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jcitybone

https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/09-21-2022/progs-look-for-separation/

Senate progressives are looking to separate the stopgap funding bill from Sen. Joe Manchin’s permitting legislation, a move that could complicate Democratic leaders’ plans of rolling the two together, according to multiple sources familiar with the effort.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is organizing a letter from a handful of liberal senators asking for the two votes to be held separately. That would allow critics of permitting reform to vote against it without voting to shut down the government.

Supporters include Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has been vocal in opposing permitting reform. These senators join a group of House progressives that made a similar plea earlier this month.

The senators wrote in the letter to Schumer that when it comes to permitting reform and the environment they “believe such important issues should be examined through detailed committee consideration and a robust floor debate separate from the urgent need to see that the government stays open.”

Notable: They are not explicitly threatening to vote against a funding/permitting combo. But the senators clearly have concerns with the permitting effort: “We have heard extensive concerns from the environmental justice community regarding the proposed permitting reforms and are writing to convey the importance of those concerns, and to let you know that we share them.”

Energy permitting reform was a key cog of the deal to pass the party-line Inflation Reduction Act this summer, though Senate rules precluded adding it to that budget reconciliation bill. Manchin says the text of permitting reform is due Wednesday.

Meanwhile the deadline for funding the government is approaching rapidly on Sept. 30. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday he intends to add permitting reform to the spending bill and “get it done.”

In the Senate, permitting reform will need 60 votes to pass — not at all guaranteed, particularly if permitting reform is not combined with the continuing resolution. Manchin remarked on Tuesday at the brewing bipartisan coalition of “strange bedfellows” aimed at stopping his legislation.

Benny
Benny

Duckworth must have a bee in her bonnet-either a lot of her donors are also concerned about climate change, or her potential voters may not favor the Manchin bill. I haven’t decided if I will vote for her because she’s too close to the DoD, and she will win anyway.

Benny
Benny

+540

Benny
Benny

wi65

South Korean president overheard insulting U.S. Congress as ‘idiots’

Usual pay wall https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/yoon-biden-congress-idiots/

He’s not wrong:

Exhibit A: MTG

Exhibit B: Boebert

Exhibit C: Gaetz

Exhibit D: Johnson
And on and on…..

so Im not offended as an American.

Paul ADK

I am. We sat back and watched as public education was defunded and derailed in this country, since Reagan.

wi65

The crooks at the Fed are hell bent on creating a recession any by god their going to get it…

Fed in ‘Full Recession-Creating Mode’ Comes Under Fire for Another Interest Rate Hike

“Raising interest rates puts the burden of fighting inflation on low-wage workers,” notes former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “For once, let’s take aim at an actual driver of inflation: corporate profits.”

JESSICA CORBETT

September 21, 2022
Progressive economists and other critics on Wednesday called out the U.S. Federal Reserve for officially announcing its widely expected third 75-basis-point interest rate hike this year.

“Corporate profits must be the target, not workers.”
While addressing the decision during an afternoon press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell also said that “we anticipate that ongoing increases will be appropriate” to meet the central bank’s goal of returning inflation to 2%.

With each rate hike—and other central banks following suit—warnings of a global recession have mounted, and opponents of the Fed’s approach have stressed that low-income workers and other marginalized people are bound to bear the brunt of the negative impacts.

“It’s a central bank in full recession-creating mode,” Crooked Media editor in chief Brian Beutler said Wednesday after the Federal Reserve rose its rate up to a range of 3%-3.25%.

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U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a vocal critic of previous hikes, was among those who focused on the expected effects for those who can least afford another rate increase.

“Chair Powell just announced another extreme interest rate hike while forecasting higher unemployment,” she said Wednesday. “I’ve been warning that Chair Powell’s Fed would throw millions of Americans out of work—and I fear he’s already on the path to doing so.”

Janelle Jones, chief economist at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), similarly said that “today the Fed decided to risk mass joblessness in its fight against inflation. Raising interest rates, and pushing the economy toward a recession, will result in millions of workers being unemployed or taking pay cuts.”

“And we know who those workers will be,” she continued. “The workers most likely to face an economic crisis are workers of color, women, and low-wage workers. The same groups who already face worse economic outcomes in the labor market.”

In addition to also emphasizing that “raising interest rates puts the burden of fighting inflation on low-wage workers,” former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich suggested that “for once, let’s take aim at an actual driver of inflation: corporate profits.”

Specifically, Reich—now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley—advocated for a windfall profits tax, price controls, higher taxes on corporations and the rich, and reining in monopoly power.

Noting another tweet from Reich with those same messages, Groundwork Collaborative argued Wednesday that he is “exactly right” that the Fed’s recent moves largely burden lower-wage people and “corporate profits must be the target, not workers.”

“You can’t fix the economy by hurting people—but that’s exactly what the Fed chose today,” Groundwork Collaborative added. “Throwing millions out of work won’t address the root causes of inflation and we implore policymakers to remember that #WeAreTheEconomy—not Wall Street and wealthy corporations.”

Reich and Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative, are among the experts scheduled to testify Thursday morning before a panel of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

The Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy hearing—titled, “Power and Profiteering: How Certain Industries Hiked Prices, Fleeced Consumers, and Drove Inflation”—is set to highlight that while input costs have begun to fall, some companies and sectors “are keeping prices higher anyway, prolonging inflationary pressures that have harmed American consumers.”

The real life game of monopoly rolls on for the rich and powerful…

Benny
Benny

Create layoffs, rehires at lower rates. That way they have very little money to spend and “inflation” goes down.

wi65

Ron Johnson mocked for slip saying he ‘condones’ white supremacism
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ron-johnson-fox-news-white-supremcy-b2171520.html?amp

He’s sure he meant to say condemned but when the 2 functioning brain cells in his head collided by acident like a minuscule matter anti matter collision the truth came out.

wi65

A Kremlin ally died falling down the stairs, report says — the latest in a series of unexplained deaths among prominent Russians

https://www.yahoo.com/news/kremlin-ally-died-falling-down-102720242.html

The is the 10th Russian oligarch that bit the dust, A Putin purge is underway.

wi65

Kinda funny;
Pranksters called the son of one of Putin’s closest allies and told him he is being enlisted in the army — but he refused.

Putin announced plans for a partial mobilization that immediately drafts 300,000 reservists.

Pranksters called up the son of a top Kremlin official and said he had been enlisted in the army.

Dmitry Peskov’s son said he did not intend to go and will resolve the issue “on a different level.”

Pranksters called the son of a senior Kremlin official and told him that he was being enlisted in the army and must fight in Ukraine, and he responded by trying to get out of being drafted.

The hosts of the Russian YouTube channel Popular Politics called the 32-year-old son of Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.

The pranksters, who pretended to be recruitment officers, told the 32-year-old Nikolay Peskov that he has been drafted into the army and needed to attend a medical examination the following day.

“Obviously not!” the younger Peskov told the pranksters, according to a video shared by independent Russian news website The Insider. “You must understand it is not right for me to be there. I have to resolve this on a different level.”

“If I have to defend my motherland I will step up, no problem but you need to understand the political implications and nuances of my situation,” he added.

The call comes after Putin announced a partial military mobilization as part of the next phase of his ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Russian officials said that meant 300,000 people being drafted immediately.

His announcement sparked panic among Russians as some attempted to flee the country and others took to the streets to protest.

Surely he can find a Russian Dr. that will diagnose “Bone spurs” that works in the USA..
Scant details of at least a couple thousand arrested mostly women and the men were sent to “Training Camps” IE the old russian front routine from WWII. I wonder if thiers a Russian version of “Fortunate Son”…

Benny
Benny

This appeared in my FB feed today.

https://fb.watch/fIPcBElRH4/

Bernie’s favorite labor songs.

Benny
Benny

This is inexcusable.

A truly wild moment yesterday from the House Financial Services Committee, where they laugh about the revolving door from Congress to the banks. pic.twitter.com/LnHDlj6ZJu

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) September 22, 2022