Mon: When You Lie Down With Dogs, You Work for Despicable Sc

There are 2 Million Federal Workers.  That's a Lot of Voters to Piss Off

House Republicans are gearing up a new round of attacks on federal workers. And while some of the specific attacks are following in Donald Trump’s footsteps, the basic goal is a longstanding Republican one: break the government, so that you can attack the government as broken.

What Republicans claiming is that they just want to be able to make sure federal workers are doing their jobs. “Fire people if they don’t do things they’re supposed to do,” Rep. Virginia Foxx said. But the real plan, beyond the simple degradation of the government into something no one can rely on, is to enable political purges. A bill from Rep. Chip Roy would strip federal workers of civil service protections, making them at-will employees who could be fired for any reason. Say, because they weren’t loyalists of whoever happened to be in power at the moment.

Trump already made moves in that direction in 2020, with an executive order effectively imposing a political loyalty test on any federal worker whose job involves policy in any way. When then-Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought started deciding who that would apply to at his agency, he determined that 88% of OMB employees’ jobs were on the line. President Joe Biden set that Trump rule aside, but it shows where Republicans are going with these attacks.

To that end, Republicans also reinstated the Holman Rule, which allows members of Congress to target specific agencies or federal employees for cuts—including pay cuts for individual workers. This rule was dropped in 1983 until Republicans reinstated it in 2017. When Democrats took control of the House in 2019, they let it lapse again. Now it’s back.

The QOP Really Wants to Destory Effective Government

It's Not Just Michigan.  The QOP is Bought and Paid For By Nutty Libertarian Rich People

Michigan Republican Party reliant on just 2 donor families, records show

Troy attorney Linda Orlans says she was drawn to the Michigan Republican Party because she believes in hard work, entrepreneurship and a tax climate supportive of small business.

Between 2007 and 2013, Orlans gave the state party eight checks totaling $80,000, records show. But she has given nothing since.

"I just think they lost their soul," said Orlans, who said the party has shifted to the "extreme right," is not focused on solving problems and increasingly espouses an anti-woman philosophy. "The more I saw, the more I was disenchanted with the direction of the party."

Orlans is not alone. A Free Press analysis of state campaign finance records found the Michigan Republican Party has seen such a drop-off in its donor base that 58% of the money it raised from individual donors since 2018 came from just two sources: Ron Weiser and the DeVos family.[

Climate Migration Has Begun.

We as Americans don’t often hear about this chaotic process of displacement and relocation, but the scale of movement is already overwhelming: more than 3 million Americans lost their homes to climate disasters last year, and a substantial number of those will never make it back to their original properties. Over the coming decades, the total number of displaced will swell by millions and tens of millions, forcing Americans from the most vulnerable parts of the country into an unpredictable, quasi-permanent exile from the places they know and love.

This migration won’t be a linear movement from point A to point B, and neither will it be a slow march away from the coastlines and the hottest places. Rather, the most vulnerable parts of the United States will enter a chaotic churn of instability as some people leave, others move around within the same town or city, and still others arrive only to leave again. In parts of California that are ravaged by wildfire, disaster victims will vie against millions of other state residents for apartments in the state’s turbulent housing market. In cities like Miami and Norfolk, where sea levels are rising, homeowners may watch their homes lose value as the market shies away from flood-prone areas. The effects will be different in every place, but almost everywhere the result will be the same: safe shelter will get scarcer and more expensive, loosening people’s grip on the stability that comes with a permanent home.

The warming of the planet is only part of the reason for this displacement. It’s true that as the Gulf of Mexico warms up and heat dries out western ecosystems, ordinary disasters become more severe. But again, that’s only part of the story. The other reason for all this climate chaos is that the US has spent much of the past century building millions of homes in the most vulnerable places, pushing into fire-prone mountain ranges and right up to the banks of rivers that were destined to flood. The developers and local officials who were responsible for all this construction were sometimes ignorant of the dangers, but other times they steamrolled ahead even while knowing the potential for ruin.

All that construction has put millions of people in harm’s way, and the public and private entities who aid in disaster recovery can’t keep up. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) lacks the resources to help the communities hit by disasters achieve a long-term recovery, and the agency spends most of its money on building things back exactly the same as they once were, which locks in the potential for future disasters to ruin the same homes and displace the same people. The Biden administration has funneled billions of dollars into new programs that could help communities armor against future disasters, but progress has been slow.

You Can't Run. You Can't Hide

Stronger storms fueled by climate change will penetrate deeper into the United States and threaten parts of the country unaccustomed to high-speed winds, according to a new analysis of the country's vulnerability to tropical cyclones.

More than 13 million properties in the U.S. that are not currently affected by tropical cyclones will be at risk of damage from hurricane-force winds in the decades ahead, according to the study.

The report on worsening winds and their projected financial impacts was released Monday by First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group based in Brooklyn, New York.

Researchers found that more intense storms brought on by climate change would expose millions more properties to wind damage in the next 30 years, particularly as tropical cyclone winds penetrate farther inland and as storms migrate poleward up the East Coast.

The report also estimated the dollar value of expected damage to residential and commercial structures from hurricanes.

This year, researchers estimated that the country could expect to see an annual loss of $18.5 billion as a result of hurricane-force winds, increasing to about $20 billion in 2053. Of that increased damage, roughly $1 billion is projected to come from increased exposure in Florida alone, the study found.

Much of the mid-Atlantic region will experience an increased risk of damaging winds, the group’s models show. States such as Kentucky, Illinois and Tennessee, for instance, could see gust speeds increase from 87 mph to 97 mph during strong hurricanes, according to the researchers.

Why Is Everyone Reporting This?

The U.S. Department of Energy said it believes that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory leak, according to an updated classified intelligence report obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

The department’s conclusion is part of an update to a 2021 report by the office of Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, according to the Journal, which first reported on the update Sunday. CNN later confirmed the Journal’s report.

The Energy Department was previously undecided on the coronavirus’ origin, and reportedly made its latest conclusion with “low confidence.” Such an assessment usually means the information gathered is not reliable enough to make a more robust judgment.

The report allegedly lays bare the spectrum of conclusions made by eight different parts of the intelligence community tasked with investigating the virus’ origin. The Energy Department’s finding aligns with that of the FBI, which claimed in 2021 with “moderate confidence” that the virus likely started due to a lab leak in Wuhan, China. Two agencies, including the CIA, are still undecided in their conclusions.

The remaining four agencies and a national intelligence panel said they believe the pandemic likely began via natural transmission from animal to human. Research released last year gave more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated at a seafood market in Wuhan and likely spilled to people from infection-susceptible wildlife being sold.

My Questions

Why is the Department of Energy looking at the origins of COVID? Does the DOE have epidemiologists on staff? Why would theu?

WTF does it mean to say something is "most likely" true with low confidence? Is this another way of saying we don't know? Why issue a low-confidence report?