Crooked Media - What A Day: Glasgow big or go home

World leaders from more than 120 countries have gathered in Glasgow, Scotland for the hugely important COP26 climate summit, where President Biden will seek to rebuild confidence in America’s climate leadership—as long as that’s cool with Joe Manchin.
 

• The COP26 summit kicked off on Sunday and will last for two weeks, with the goal of getting countries on track to actually meet the promises they made under the 2015 Paris agreement, and prevent the planet from catastrophically heating up more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Monday’s opening speeches were filled with dire warnings and pleas for action, with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres telling leaders, “Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”
   
• Guterres warned that countries’ existing goals for cutting emissions were insufficient even if met, and said that leaders may need to reconvene annually to update their climate targets, rather than every five years, as set out in the Paris agreement. It’s unclear that the world’s biggest polluters would be on board: China, currently the world’s largest annual emitter, skipped the COP26 conference and declined to make any new significant pledges. 
   
• It didn’t help the conference’s outlook that the G20 countries rolled up with some squishy resolutions from their preceding summit. The leaders vaguely agreed to seek carbon neutrality “by or around mid-century” and to stop financing coal power plants overseas, but didn’t set a timetable for phasing out coal domestically. Even so, COP26 has already brought some hopeful glimmers of progress: India, now the third-largest emitter, made a surprising pledge to significantly expand its renewable energy sources and hit net-zero emissions by 2070.

Biden promised that the U.S. would lead the world’s climate action “by the power of our example,” but that example still hangs in the balance.
 

• Addressing the full conference on Monday, Biden stressed that climate change was already taking a terrible toll and called for a decade of transformative action: “This is the challenge of our collective lifetimes, an existential threat to human existence as we know it and every day we delay the cost of inaction increases.” At a side event, Biden apologized to world leaders for disgraced former president Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement, which “put us sort of behind the eight ball.”
   
• Biden’s message would have more oomph behind it if Democrats had already passed the historic clean energy investment in the Build Back Better Act, but we could see some votes later this week. House Democratic leaders have said they hope to hold votes on both infrastructure bills on Tuesday, and while Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) refused to endorse the reconciliation bill in a Monday press conference, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) indicated that House progressives were still prepared to vote for both bills and then trust Biden to drag Manchin over the finish line. 

The COP26 conference could be a turning point in the global fight against climate change, or it could conceivably be the event we all look back on as the moment when world leaders passively doomed all of humanity. The faster Democrats can haul ass on passing Biden’s agenda, the better his chances of tipping it towards the former.

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A majority of Supreme Court justices seemed likely on Monday to rule that abortion providers can sue to block the Texas abortion ban, after Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett expressed skepticism about the law’s bounty-hunter-based enforcement structure. At one point, Kavanaugh brought up an argument from the Firearms Policy Coalition that S.B. 8, if allowed to stand, “will undoubtedly serve as a model for deterring and suppressing the exercise of numerous constitutional rights,” like, say, Second Amendment rights.

All four justices who agreed with the abortion providers the first time they challenged the ban seemed inclined to rule against Texas once again, with Justice Elena Kagan sarcastically cutting right to the chase: “Some geniuses came up with a way to evade...the principle that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights.” While it looks likely that the Court will allow a challenge to move forward, it won’t mean immediate relief for Texans—the law would remain in effect while the lawsuit winds through the courts.

• The official global coronavirus death toll has surpassed five million, and that number is, as always, an undercount. 
   
• The University of Florida has absurdly barred three professors from testifying in a major lawsuit to overturn the state’s new voter-suppression law. The voting rights organizations in the case have sought answers about whether Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) was involved in the decision, and the university’s accreditor plans to open an investigation.
   
• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday that Democrats should be open to raising the debt ceiling through reconciliation, an option that Democratic leaders have ruled out.
   
• Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said she’ll vote to break a filibuster on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. One GOP vote down, only 9 non-existent GOP votes to go!
   
• Laurie Parnell, the estranged wife of Trump-backed Pennsylvania Senate candidate Sean Parnell, said under oath that he had strangled her, berated her, hit their children, and pressured her to get an abortion.
   
• White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has tested positive for coronavirus. Psaki said in a statement that she’s experiencing only mild symptoms, thanks to the vaccine.
   
• New data from the California recall election, combined with recent polling, suggests that young voters are growing frustrated with Democratic leaders, a warning sign for the midterms. 
   
• Intelligence agencies said they don’t expect to be able to determine the origins of COVID-19, barring a surprise breakthrough or a confession from a sick pangolin. 
   
• Southwest Airlines has opened an investigation into a pilot who signed off from a flight with the phrase “Let’s go, Brandon,” which has become adorable right-wing code for “fuck Joe Biden.”
   
• A bat won New Zealand’s Bird of the Year contest, with a little help from Hugo Chavez and Dominion Voting Systems.

As the January 6 committee prepares to subpoena conservative lawyer and coup-memo author John Eastman, his own comments continue to undercut his claim that he was just obediently writing up a crazy legal strategy he didn’t believe in. Eastman emailed a top aide to then-Vice President Mike Pence while the attack on the Capitol was unfolding and blamed Pence’s refusal to carry out the coup for the mob that was, at that moment, trying to hang him: “The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened.” The aide, Greg Jacob, included the email in a January draft op-ed denouncing Donald Trump’s outside lawyers, which he bravely decided not to publish. Meanwhile, a federal court filing has revealed more details about the documents that Trump’s desperately trying to hide from House investigators, which include more than 750 pages of phone logs, daily presidential diaries, handwritten notes, and speech drafts related to the election.

If you have investments, odds are high that your money has been winding up in places you would never put it on purpose. Places like Mitch McConnell’s campaign coffers. Here’s the problem: A lot of Americans own S&P 500 index funds—these are funds made up of the 500 largest U.S. publicly traded companies available, and they collectively contain over $1.5 trillion dollars of Americans’ retirement money.

Unfortunately, when you buy an S&P 500 index fund, you’re buying stock in the following companies:
 

• AT&T, which is already back supporting the election objectors in Congress, as well as the GOP sponsors of Texas’s abortion ban and voter-suppression law. It’s also a top donor to Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.

• ExxonMobil, which has misled the public about the dangers of climate change and spent huge amounts on Facebook ads to get Donald Trump reelected in 2020.

• Halliburton, one of the nation’s biggest defense contractors, which has funneled millions to the GOP.

• Lockheed Martin, which is one the largest weapons manufacturers in the world and one of Lindsey Graham’s top contributors.

The list goes on. But before you stuff all of your savings in your mattress and call it a day, you should know about DEMZ. 

DEMZ is the first investment product that allows you to get similar performance and exposure you would expect from the S&P 500,  without all the Mitch McConnell. It only includes companies who have made over 75% of their political contributions to Democratic causes and candidates. Since launching in November of 2020, DEMZ has outperformed the S&P 500 by 7 percent.

You can finally put your money where your vote is, even on Wall Street. Look for the DEMZ ticker wherever you invest, or visit DEMZ.fund to learn more. 

Eighty percent of U.S. adults have now received at least one vaccine dose, and 70 percent of adults are fully vaccinated.

Vaccine doses for kids are already on their way to pediatricians. 

The Senate has confirmed Beth Robinson to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, making her the first openly gay woman to serve as a federal appellate judge.

The Norway women’s beach handball team has won its battle against sexist uniform requirements that forced them to play in bikinis.

Mariah Carey Season has arrived.