From the Republicans Just Making Shit Up Files: The Texas Tribune reports:
The “1-mile rule”: Texas’ unwritten, arbitrary policy protectsbig polluters from citizen complaintsIt’s not found anywhere in state law or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s rules, but for years the agency has denied citizens the ability to challenge air pollution permits because they live more than a mile away
On a rugged stretch of the Gulf Coast in Texas, environmental groups called foul in 2020 when an oil company sought pollution permits to expand its export terminal beside Lavaca Bay.
Led by a coalition of local shrimpers and oystermen, the groups produced an analysis alleging that the company, Max Midstream, underrepresented expected emissions in order to avoid a more rigorous permitting process and stricter pollution control requirements.
In its response, Max Midstream did not respond to those allegations. Instead, it cited what it characterized as the “quintessential one-mile test” by Texas’ environmental regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, to claim that the groups and citizens involved had no right to bring forth a challenge because they lived more than 1 mile from the Seahawk Oil Terminal.
“The well-established Commission precedent has been repeated again and again,” the lawyers wrote. “Based on the quintessential one-mile test relied upon by the Commission for decades, none of the Hearing Requests can be granted.”
The TCEQ agreed, rejecting all hearing requests and issued the permit as initially proposed.
But the agency says the 1-mile test cited by the company’s lawyers doesn’t exist.
“The Commission has never adopted a one-mile policy,” said TCEQ spokesperson Laura Lopez. “Instead, the Commission applies all factors set out in statute and rules.”
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality? Wrong name. It's really the Texas Commission on Degrading Environmental Quality and Lying About It. The radicalized corrupt Republican Party, it's America's fun-filled pro-pollution, pro-global warming, pro-deceit, pro-lies, anti-environment party.
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More evidence of a cover-up about the origin of COVID: This 14 minute video comes from an Australian point of view. The Australian scientist who dismissed the possibility that the COVID virus was man-made and leaked from the lab in Wuhan says comments between scientists in the recently released documents (i) are being taken out of context and new information was coming in, (ii) there is no proof of a man-made origin, and (iii) allegations of a man-made origin is a crackpot conspiracy theory, not a valid science theory. The reporter in the video points out that there is no proof of a natural origin, but that is taken as a scientifically valid possibility. Also, the allegation of taking comments out of context strikes me as clearly false.
Evidence available now make it crystal clear that (i) the leading scientists knew the man-made and lab leak hypothesis was valid, and (ii) they clearly wanted to suppress that possibility in the March 2020 proximal origin paper. We have been and still are being lied to by those anti-lab leak theory scientists. Those are the true conspiracy theory crackpots here. That is true even if it turns out that we can eventually prove that the COVID virus arose naturally. Scientists could neither prove nor disprove either of the two possibilities at that time in 2020. That remains true to this day in 2023.
Fauci, Collins, Anderson and all the other crackpot anti-lab leak theory scientists should be ashamed and fired. But, odds of that happening in the next 2 years are low, maybe about 0.1%.
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Phenix has now experienced over 30 straight days of temp at or over 110ᵒ F. At the Phoenix zoo:
But it's not global warming. It's a Chinese hoax. It's Hunter Biden's laptop. Joe Biden should be impeached. Benghazi!! Etc.
Phoenix billboard, July 18th
Bleached, dying corals on Looe Key
The NYT writes: Phoenix just logged its hottest month on record — and the hottest month ever observed in a U.S. city. Phoenix’s average temperature for July was a blistering 102.7 degrees, taking into account average daytime highs of 114.7 degrees and overnight lows of 90.8. Phoenix had 17 days that hit 115 degrees or greater. The previous record was 7 days set in August of 2020.
Those darned Chinese hoaxes. They're probably in cahoots with the darned Democrats, darn it.
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A major Christian nationalist (CN) breakthrough: A NYT opinion discusses an impending blow to secular democracy, secular education and church-state separation. This new threat attacks all three with what could be a lethal blow in the long run. The opinion is by Rachel Laser, president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State:
Something deeply un-American is underway in the state of Oklahoma.
In June, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the nation’s first religious public charter school. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa were given permission to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in August 2024.
That’s right, a religious public school, funded by the state’s taxpayers. Proponents hope this model will spread to the dozens of other states that allow charter schools. Seven percent of public school students in the country attended charter schools as of the fall of 2021, and that number continues to grow. That’s why Christian nationalist groups see charter schools as fertile ground for their full-on assault on the separation of church and state in public education.In just the past year, significant progress has been made in infusing Christianity into public schools. Texas, for example, now allows public schools to replace certified school counselors with religious chaplains and came close to requiring every classroom to display the Ten Commandments. New laws in Idaho and Kentucky could allow teachers and other public school employees to pray in front of — and even with — students. Missouri and Louisiana authorized public schools to teach Bible classes. West Virginia nearly passed a bill that would allow public schools to teach intelligent design creationism. Accompanying these laws are increasingly successful efforts to ban books and lessons about race, sexual orientation, gender identity and even menstruation in public schools.
The establishment of a school that claims to be simultaneously public and religious — what has been a legal oxymoron in the United States since its founding — violates one of the foundational principles of American constitutional tradition: the separation of church and state. It also threatens religious freedom and undermines public education.
The United States Supreme Court has emboldened Christian nationalists by holding twice in the past three years that if a state funds private secular schools, it must also fund private religious schools. But charter schools are taxpayer-financed public schools — not private schools.
That is why the organization I head, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, together with the A.C.L.U., the Education Law Center and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filed a lawsuit on Monday in state district court in Oklahoma to prevent the school from operating as a charter school.
To be clear, the CN wealth and power movement wants to get rid of all secular public education and replace it with radical Christian fundamentalist "education." That is core CN dogma. This move in Oklahoma is a critical step necessary in that transformation of secular America into Christian Sharia America run by a wealthy White male Christian Taliban.
No, none of that is not hyperbole. It is fact. The open question is whether the authoritarian CN movement can mostly or completely accomplish the secular democracy to Christian fundamentalist theocracy goal. We can only hope that this critically important lawsuit succeeds. If the Republican CN Supreme Court upholds the forced use of tax dollars to pay for religious education, this cancer will spread nation wide. It could kill secular democracy, but it will kill church-state separation.
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Meanwhile, rank and file Republicans are getting their act together and thinking deeply about things as they prepare their lemming run for edge of the cliff in 2024:
That is a glimpse of the reality that some or most of the radical right rank and file sees and believes is real and rational.
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