Crooked Media - What A Day: Bleakness in Seattle

President Biden’s climate proposals have taken on even more urgency as western states bake into a flammable hellscape, and the Democrats trying to hurry them through Congress are facing not only a scientific deadline, but a fast-approaching political one.
 

• The Pacific Northwest heat dome has very likely caused dozens of sudden deaths across the border in Vancouver, and has sent hundreds of people to the hospital since Friday. An Oregon farmworker died while working in 104-degree heat on Saturday. The record-breaking heat has buckled roads, melted power cables in Portland, OR, and worsened the drought that’s already touched off a nightmarish wildfire season. And the reason we’re seeing these extreme heat waves more frequently? You guessed it, God is mad at Lil Nas X climate change.
   
• On Wednesday, Biden met with the governors of western states to discuss immediate measures to mitigate heat-related disasters this summer, including a temporary raise for federal firefighters to $15 an hour. (He’ll need Congress’s approval to make the raise permanent.) The Biden administration has also emphasized the limited climate provisions in the bipartisan infrastructure deal, like funding to modernize the power grid and deploy a fleet of electric buses.
   
• But the most ambitious climate proposals—including a clean energy standard—will need to pass in the separate reconciliation package that Republicans are doing their best to kill. One bit of good news on that front: On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reiterated her promise that the House won’t pass the bipartisan bill until the Senate has passed the broader reconciliation package, in spite of pressure from Republicans to throw away that leverage after Biden walked back his veto threat. 

There are a few reasons why Democrats can’t afford to let climate change legislation slip to the back burner.
 

• One of them is, you know, (gestures widely, flinging sweat in all directions). Extreme weather at home is just the tip of the (rapidly disappearing) iceberg: Temperatures in parts of the Middle East have topped 125 degrees in the past month, and two cities in the region have already seen brief periods of heat that surpass what the human body can survive, much earlier than climate models predicted. U.S. climate legislation alone can’t keep global temperatures down, but without it, the Biden administration won’t have much standing to urge the rest of the world to act fast.
   
• Democrats may only have this one shot. A new analysis from TargetSmart found that turning out young voters in near-2018 levels will be critical to maintaining Democratic majorities in 2022, and recent polling has found that two-thirds of young Biden voters will be less motivated to vote for Democrats if they fail to pass bold climate measures. The great news is, 70 percent of all young voters say they do not give much of a shit whether that climate action is bipartisan, so Democrats can go ahead and save the world on a party-line vote without losing sleep.

Democrats will need young voters mobilized in the midterms, and all the more so if they aren’t able to pass redistricting reforms before the gerrymandering ensues. They should be looking at climate action not just as a core piece of Biden’s agenda, but as a prerequisite for accomplishing anything else.

On this week’s  Keep It, actor, dancer and choreographer Nicco Annan stops by to talk being a guest judge on Legendary and the importance of LGBTQ+ representation. Nicco has been on all of our favorite shows–from P-Valley to Shameless– so you won’t want to miss this one! New episodes of Keep It drop every Wednesday. Listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s the worst sentence anyone will email you all day: Bill Cosby, who was accused of rape and sexual assault by 60 women, has been released from prison after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his conviction. The court ruled that because a previous prosecutor offered Cosby a non-prosecution deal (with no written documentation) to encourage him to testify in a civil case, that prosecutor’s successors had violated Cosby’s due process rights by bringing criminal charges. The prosecutor who made that deal was none other than Bruce Castor, who was catapulted to infamy as Donald Trump’s defense attorney during impeachment #2. Cosby had served three years of a three- to 10 year prison sentence, and has at no time admitted his guilt or expressed remorse. A number of his accusers say they're stunned and devastated by the announcement.

• The House has voted to create a January 6 select committee. Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinziger (R-IL) were the only Republicans to vote in favor.
   
• Republicans are busy with their own high-stakes probe, you see: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has tapped Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) to investigate Tucker Carlson’s claims that the NSA has been spying on his texts and emails to get his show canceled, claims so credible and investigation-worthy that not a single other Fox show has picked up the story.
   
• The CDC will leave it up to states and local officials to set guidance for mask-wearing in the Delta variant era. Director Rochelle Walensky reiterated the CDC’s guidance that fully vaccinated Americans are protected from the variants currently circulating in the U.S.  
   
• The New York City Board of Elections has released a new preliminary vote tally that (still) suggests the mayoral race has tightened, after the BOE accidentally included 135,000 test vote records in the data it released on Tuesday, necessitating a Notes App apology and triggering calls for reform.
   
• Undeterred by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (Q-GA) grand historical awakening at the Holocaust Museum, a Washington state lawmaker has become the latest elected Republican to compare coronavirus measures to the Holocaust, and wore a yellow Star of David as a helpful visual aid.
   
• Congressional police reform negotiators may not be as close to a deal as they suggested last week, as law-enforcement representatives feud over qualified immunity and the criminal standard for charging police.
   
• A federal judge has sentenced Allison Mack to three years in prison for her role in the NXIVM cult.
   
• Here’s Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) proving their masculinity with their very best approximation of push-ups, for the Cursed Content Archives.
   
• Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has died at age 88. He is survived by his own horrific war.

Weeks after then-President Donald Trump selected Sonny Perdue to be agriculture secretary, one of the biggest agriculture corporations in the country sold him a grain plant for a fraction of its estimated value. Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) had been asking $4 million for the plant, but sold it to Perdue’s company for just $250,000, which in a certain light, looks almost like a move to bribe a cabinet official for special favors. As former federal prosecutor Julie O’Sullivan put it, “This stinks to high heaven. It deserves a prosecutor’s attention.” Even if Perdue isn’t charged with a crime, Democrats might consider making more of a stink about the blatant corruption of the Trump administration before its leader tries to “drain the swamp” his way back into office in 2024.

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A grand jury in Manhattan has returned criminal indictments against the Trump Organization and its CFO Allen Weisselberg. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to charge them with tax-related crimes on Thursday.

Pro bono lawyers have successfully found the parents of 23 more migrant children who were separated by the Trump administration. 

A federal judge has temporarily blocked an Indiana law that would have forced health-care providers to recite false information about “reversing” a medication-induced abortion.

The State Department announced that Americans will soon be able to choose a third gender option when applying for a passport.