‘Hot Enough For Ya?’

Heat Records Falling Like Dominos“Pay No Attention,” Say Politicos This past Sunday, July 21st, was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth—which, other than in Elon Musk’s drug-addled dreams, is the only place in the universe known to be habitable by our species. For now, anyway. That heat record stood for 24 hours. It was surpassed on Monday, the New York Times reported Wednesday. While this milestone is technically news, it may not be all that surprising. NOAA reported in June that May had been the 12th consecutive warmest month on record. Rounding out our review of broken records, while 2023 was the hottest year …

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Why Bernie Sanders Is Thanking Elon Musk

by Jake Johnson U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on July 16th took the unusual step of applauding Elon Musk—but not for reasons that the Tesla CEO and world’s richest man would likely find flattering. In the wake of reports indicating that Musk plans to inject $45 million per month into a new super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump’s bid for another four years in the White House, Sanders (I-Vt.) thanked Musk for doing “an exceptional job of demonstrating a point that we have made for years—and that is the fact we live in an oligarchic society in which billionaires dominate not only our economic life …

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Anyone Remember Covid?

Turns Out It’s Still HereAlso: It’s Still Bad For You The citizenry of the U.S. of A may be unable to agree on much of anything, but we do appear to have arrived at a consensus about Covid: “Thank God that’s over with. Let’s all go back to living our normal lives, as if all that pain, suffering, and death was just a bad dream.” To whatever extent they still acknowledge that Covid ever existed, right wingers tend to brush it off as just another typical overreaction by liberal weenies. For its part, the Biden administration seems to have stopped keeping track of cases a …

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Billionaire Grandson of Gilded Age Plutocrat Gives Trump Super PAC $50 Million

Timothy Mellon is one of at least a dozen billionaires backing Donald Trump’s bid for another four years in the White House. by Jake Johnson Billionaire businessman Timothy Mellon, 81, the grandson of Gilded Age plutocrat Andrew Mellon, made a $50 million donation to a pro-Donald Trump super PAC last month, a day after the former president was convicted by a New York jury on 34 felony counts. Mellon had previously donated $25 million to super PACs backing both Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent presidential candidate. The New York Times noted late Thursday that Mellon, a reclusive GOP …

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Courts Protect Right to Profit From Destruction

by Julia Conley A week after the European Union announced its withdrawal from the controversial Energy Charter Treaty, which has been criticized for being one of many global agreements that allow fossil fuel companies to sue governments, a coalition on June 6th released an analysis showing just how lucrative such deals have been for firms whose emissions are wreaking havoc on the planet. The Transnational Institute, the Trade Justice Movement (TJM), Power Shift, and the Institute for Policy Studies joined forces to unveil the Global ISDS Tracker, which includes data on more than 1,300 cases that have made their way to secretive tribunals set up …

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Are Workers Just Too Stupid to Understand Inflation?

by Les Leopold The pundits are at it again, fretting over the latest poll numbers showing that President Biden is losing in the key swing states, especially those like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with heavy concentrations of working-class voters. With inflation down, unemployment at record lows, wages up, and infrastructure projects popping up across the country, the pundits wonder why aren’t these workers thrilled with the economy? The not-so-subtle implication is that American workers are too dumb to realize that wages are rising faster than the higher prices they see all around them. Even Robert Reich, who I truly admire and hate to call out, …

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