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A major asthma drugmaker has been quietly investing in coal on the side.

The pharmaceutical company that just months ago was embroiled in a price-gouging scandal over its life-saving EpiPen now finds itself at the center of another potential controversy. According to Reuters’ Michael Erman, Mylan N.V. has for the last six years been buying up refined coal in order to reduce its tax bill and boost its bottom line:

Since 2011, Mylan has bought 99 percent stakes in five companies across the U.S. that own plants which process coal to reduce smog-causing emissions. It then sells the coal at a loss to power plants to generate the real benefit for the drug company: credits that allow Mylan to lower its own tax bill.

These refined coal credits were approved by Congress in 2004 in order to incentivize companies to fund production of cleaner coal. They are available to any company that is willing to invest the capital, and are set to expire after 2021.

The story gets even sketchier. Mylan Chief Executive Heather Bresch, Erman notes, “is the daughter of U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the second largest coal-producing state in the country.” And Mylan would not explain to Erman why it adopted this particular strategy, though an anonymous source said the coal operations “have increased Mylan’s net earnings by around $40 million to $50 million in each of the past two years.” Mylan is apparently the only publicly traded pharmaceutical company to partake in this type of tax aversion strategy.

The sketchy part which Reuters did not point out is that two out of Mylan’s five specialty brand-name drugs treat pulmonary problems that are exacerbated by air pollution, a lot of which comes from coal. The company makes Perforomist, an inhaler that treats symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as well as prevents asthma attacks and exercise-induced bronchial spasm. Multiple studies have linked exacerbated COPD symptoms to air pollution, though those links are suggestive and not conclusive. Mylan is also in the asthma treatment market; the company makes EasiVent, which attaches to asthma inhalers to help the medicine more easily reach the lungs, and it recently failed to get regulatory approval for a generic version of the blockbuster asthma drug Advair. Peer-reviewed science has been linking coal combustion to more severe asthma since at least 1972.

The coal that Mylan is investing in is refined, which means it burns cleaner than normal coal (hence the tax credits for companies that fund it). But cleaner coal is still coal, the dirtiest fuel source on the planet. Continuing to promote coal, in any form, is shown to be bad for the environment and public health. It’s good business for asthma drugmakers, though.

July 05, 2017

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Trump’s approach to North Korea has only made things worse.

Three weeks before taking office, Donald Trump issued a stark warning to North Korea:

Trump has largely stuck to this tough-guy approach. He has threatened China with tariffs if it doesn’t keep its belligerent client-state in check, and has said that if China won’t stop North Korea then the United States will be forced to act unilaterally.

There was a brief pause in this policy after Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping. “After listening for ten minutes, I realized that it’s not so easy,” Trump said about China’s complicated relationship with North Korea. But since then, Trump has repeatedly responded to North Korean missile tests with saber-rattling, apparently convinced that the threat of a U.S. strike—which is clearly a bluff—would stop North Korea’s missile program in its tracks.

Then on Monday evening North Korea launched a missile capable of reaching Alaska. In response, Trump has stuck to the same flawed approach:

The problem with this strategy isn’t just that it isn’t working, it’s that it has made things worse. Trump’s belligerence has boxed North Korea in—if it were to stop testing intercontinental ballistic missiles now, it would look like it was giving in to Trump’s bluffs. Trump has almost no good options, but he is proving that it is still possible to make a bad situation even worse.

July 03, 2017

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Trump’s EPA suffers its first major loss in court.

A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is not allowed to delay an Obama-era regulation limiting methane pollution from the oil and gas industries. Pruitt announced last month that he would halt the rule for two years, meaning oil and gas companies would not have to place strict limits on emissions of methane, which is the main component of natural gas and a powerful greenhouse gas.

Pruitt—a longtime ally of the fossil fuel industry and a climate-change denier—had attempted to delay the rule at the request of oil and gas industry players, who said they did not have enough time to comment on the regulations, which were finalized in May 2016. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the industry had “had ample opportunity” to weigh in on the rule, and therefore EPA’s decision to delay it was “arbitrary and capricious” under the law.

Environmental groups say the decision suggests Pruitt might have trouble with his slow-walking strategy for dismantling Barack Obama’s climate and environmental legacy. For instance, Pruitt also announced a one-year delay for states to meet the requirements of Obama’s ground-level ozone rule, which limited the amount of emissions that cause smog. “The ruling recognizes that EPA lacks the authority to simply scrap these critical protections,” David Doniger, a director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.

However, as Mother Jones’ Rebecca Leber noted, Pruitt is not out of options if this legal strategy fails. There’s much more he can do beyond delaying regulations to meet his goal of weakening America’s environmental policies.

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Banning Trump from Twitter is a really stupid idea.

The president’s latest round of controversial tweets, including one with a video showing him body-slamming a man with the logo of CNN superimposed on his face, has led to renewed calls that Trump’s twitter account be suspended. Journalist professor and all-around silly person Seth Abramson tweeted out:

As CNN reports, Twitter has rejected such calls and doesn’t believe the body-slam tweet goes against its rules: “Twitter said it considered three factors: the political context of the conversation surrounding the tweet, the various ways it could be interpreted and the lack of details in the tweet itself.”

Twitter’s response is correct and could be extended. Suspending Trump’s account is a singularly idiotic idea. The problem with Trump is not that he tweets out mean things but that he’s president of the United States. Because he’s a powerful figure, there is a manifest public interest in being able to access his thoughts and get a sense of what he considers to be important, which Twitter allows the public to do.

Trump’s tweets are of immense importance politically. They can and have been used against him by opponents and by courts reviewing his executive orders. He’s written at least one tweet that could be the basis of impeachment. If there’s an attempt to remove Trump via the 25th Amendment, his tweets could also be evidence of mental unfitness. The fake civility that will be won by banishing Trump from Twitter is a negligible value compared to the genuine importance of having the tweets as part of the public record.

The circular logic of Donald Trump’s tweets.

On Sunday, Donald Trump tweeted a video of him pummeling a man with CNN’s logo for a face, a choppy edit of an old Trump WWE appearance that was made by Redditor HanAssholeSolo, who has a lengthy archive of racist and anti-semitic posts.

It managed to be both silly and threatening, which is probably as good a description of Trump’s first six months as president as there is. It also, unsurprisingly, ate up coverage on the Sunday shows and space on Monday’s front pages. The usual questions followed: Has Trump gone too far? Why isn’t he taking the threat against journalists more seriously? Shouldn’t he be focused on health care? Or opioids? Or Syria? Or literally anything else?

But Trump, as usual, just kept tweeting. In the 24 hours after he sent the WWE tweet, he attacked the “dishonest media” for trying to prevent him from achieving his goals; he took undeserved credit for the stock market and the unemployment rate; praised the military; announced, for some reason that he would be speaking to Germany and France (and later, Italy) on Monday morning; and expressed optimism (albeit in a somewhat ominous way) about the prospect of peace in the Middle East. And then, the punchline:

Trump is unusually manic right now, but that only means that the normal cycle of his tweets is sped up. This is what Trump has been doing for years now. He’ll say something outrageous, offensive, and/or dangerous, either on Twitter or at a rally. Then the media will cover this statement as the outrageous, and/or dangerous statement that it is for hours or days. And then Trump blames the media for paying attention to his dumb statement which was designed to get media attention, instead of his administration’s (extremely sketchy) successes. But even Trump must know that this is all a game. If Trump really wanted the media to pay attention to things that weren’t his tweets, then he would stop tweeting.

Chris Christie might be privately using a state beach that he shut down but he is definitely NOT getting any sun.

Christie failed to reach a compromise with the Democratic state assembly to pass a budget before July 1, the start of the fiscal year, which means that all of the state parks are closed over the holiday weekend. But any good politician knows that crisis is another word for opportunity and Christie took advantage of the crisis in typical fashion. On Sunday, he and his family took to the deserted beach to catch some rays.

Solidifying his status as the most unpopular governor in America, The Star-Ledger published aerial photos of Christie and his family lounging on Island Beach State Park on Sunday afternoon.

Christie has access to the closed park via a very special retreat known as the “Governor’s Ocean House.” When asked about whether this was fair or not, instead of answering like a normal empathetic human being, Christie told reporters, “Run for governor, and you can have a residence there.” After the photos were taken, Christie was asked at a news conference whether or not he had gotten any sun on Sunday, which he denied. When Christie’s spokesman was later told about the aerial beach photos, he admitted the governor was at the beach but insisted that indeed Christie “did not get any sun” because “he had a baseball hat on.”

July 02, 2017

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How Donald Trump lost his mind.

The Atlantic published an article Sunday with the intentionally provocative and misleading title, “How the Left Lost Its Mind.” The story is instead a “topography of the left’s modern alternative media landscape” (emphasis mine), one that staff writer McKay Coppins hopes “provides a useful start to the kind of exploration and anthropology that’s needed.” Noting that “the denizens of the fever swamps” have taken over the Republican Party, he asks:

Could the same thing happen on the left?

It’s a prospect that deserves more serious attention and debate than it’s gotten this year. The Trump era has given rise to a vast alternative left-wing media infrastructure that operates largely out of the view of casual news consumers, but commands a massive audience and growing influence in liberal America.

This prospect has indeed gotten much attention this year. Coppins notes a New Republic blog post by Sarah Jones that pleads, “Stop promoting liberal conspiracy theories on Twitter.” But this outlet has also published several lengthier interrogations, as have Buzzfeed, Vox, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. Safe to say, the subject has received plenty of “serious attention and debate.”

Which is not to say it isn’t worthy of further exploration, and Coppins’s story is generally a useful contribution. But there are several noteworthy quibbles:

The most glaring issue with Coppins’s article, though, is beyond his control: It was published just hours before the president of the United States tweeted:

This put the problem of alternative liberal media in necessary perspective.

Like Coppins, I cannot deliver on the headline of my piece. I do not know when Donald Trump lost his mind. But there can be no doubt that, to the extent that Trump ever was sane, he lost his mind well before he became a serious White House contender. The left should militate against any creeping conspiracy-mongering among its ranks, even if the problem pales in comparison to the psychosis of practically the entire right-wing media ecosystem. But make no mistake: The right lost its mind a long time ago, and this is not just some pesky trend in one of our two major parties, but a full-blown national crisis that shows no sign of abating.

June 30, 2017

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Republicans governors are joining the Trump resistance.

Civil liberties and voting rights advocates sounded the alarm earlier this week after President Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity—which is meant to address the non-existent problem of mass voter fraud—wrote to all 50 states “requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state,” according to The Washington Post. Now a growing bipartisan group of governors is pushing back.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert‏ and Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox—both Republicans—announced on Friday that their state won’t hand over private voter data, including driver’s license and Social Security numbers, to the commission. “While my office is required to provide public records to this Commission, as we would to any other person or entity,” Cox said in a statement, “I assure the voters of Utah that we will only provide information that is otherwise available to the public.” He stressed, “There has been no evidence of mass voter fraud in Utah.”

Democratic state officials are, of course, resisting demands from Trump’s panel, widely seen as a pretext for voter suppression. (“At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression,” Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe said in his statement.) But Utah isn’t the only red state pushing back. Oklahoma officials also said they won’t release partial Social Security numbers to the federal government.

The bipartisan backlash on voter fraud coincides with a series of GOP governors joining Democrats in opposing Senate Republicans’ health care bill. As The Hill reported on Thursday, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu joined Nevada’s Brian Sandoval, Ohio’s John Kasich, and Arizona’s Doug Ducey in voicing concern over the legislation’s cuts to Medicaid. Trump is desperate for a “win” in his beleaguered young presidency, but headed into the July 4 weekend, his own party increasingly is declaring independence from him.

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There may be evidence of direction collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

Donald Trump and those closest to him have repeatedly insisted that there was no such collusion during the 2016 election. It could easily be argued that direct collusion was unnecessary—Trump publicly encouraged Russian hacks and gleefully disseminated information that came from them, making active collusion unnecessary. But it’s no surprise that Trump and his team have taken the allegation so seriously. Evidence that members of the campaign were in contact with a foreign government that was intent on influencing the election would be borderline treasonous.

On Thursday evening, The Wall Street Journal published a story that could be the first step in establishing that there was some collusion between Russian intelligence and members of the Trump campaign. According to the Journal, Peter Smith, a longtime Republican operative, attempted to acquire the 33,000 “missing” emails from Hillary Clinton’s email server and reached out to hackers in an effort to get them. Smith, who died in May, implied that he was working with Michael Flynn, and “assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers, and a Russian-speaking investigator” to locate the emails.

“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Smith said. The Journal also reports that U.S. intelligence intercepted conversations between Russian hackers who were discussing how to get Clinton’s emails and then send them to Flynn via an intermediary, possibly Smith.

There are lots of unanswered questions in this story, the biggest being why Russia would choose Smith, seemingly a nonentity, as an intermediary in its attempt to influence the U.S. election. But this story puts cracks in two important narratives. The first is that Smith suggests he knew that some of the hackers were working with the Russian government, which contradicts one possible defense: that Trump campaign officials were interacting with cutouts and weren’t aware of their connection to Moscow.

The second, which is much more important, is that if Smith is telling the truth and that he and Flynn were working directly with hackers they suspected of working with the Russian government, then that blows up Trump’s claim that there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. A Trump campaign official tried to preemptively spin this, telling the Journal that any coordination with Flynn “would have been in his capacity as a private individual.” But that only shows how weak Trump’s defense is if this story is true.

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Desperate to shore up his base, Trump is preparing for a global trade war.

As Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to flounder amid the ongoing Russia scandal and the president’s own out-of-control Twitter habit, the White House is going back to his base. Axios is reporting that one option being considered is making good on Trump’s protectionist rhetoric by imposing 20 percent tariffs on steel and other goods.

Trump’s own cabinet is against this move, with only a few exceptions. At a recent meeting, 19 of 22 assembled officials were against the policy, but Trump, who was among the minority, can override the rest. The push for protectionism is driven by a small inner circle that includes Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, trade policy director Peter Navarro, and nationalist ideologues Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

According to Axios, aside from this core group, “Everyone else in the room, more than 75 percent of those present, were adamantly opposed, arguing it was bad economics and bad global politics. At one point, Trump was told his almost entire cabinet thought this was a bad idea. But everyone left the room believing the country is headed toward a major trade confrontation.” If this trade war comes, it’ll be because Trump is desperate to hold on to the minority support he still has left.

Is Trump using the National Enquirer to blackmail Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough?

This morning, Brzezinski and Scarborough made a startling allegation in a Washington Post op-ed. “This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked,” they wrote. “We ignored their desperate pleas.”

They elaborated on their MSNBC show, Morning Joe, by alleging that the Enquirer repeatedly called Brzezinski’s close friends and her teenage daughters about a story the tabloid magazine falsely claimed to have received from Brzezinski’s ex-husband. Then Scarborough had conversations with the White House where, in Brzezinski’s words, he was told “this could go away.”

The story is all too plausible. Trump is very close to the publisher of the Enquirer, which has become a pro-Trump propaganda sheet. Last year, the actress Salma Hayek alleged that Trump planted hostile stories against her in the Enquirer when she turned him down for a date.