Новости за 26.10.2020

Fossil fuel interests have long argued that environmental rules kill jobs. Not having such rules, though, kills people. And that’s particularly clear when it comes to the coal industry.

Roy Cooper will be the next governor of North Carolina.

That’s exactly the kind of declarative boast that would never come from the careful Cooper. Yet, as of the fourth week of October, the Democratic chief executive of the Tar Heel State has all but cemented a second four-year stay in the governor’s mansion.

The latest polling has Cooper thumping his opponent, far-right Republican and current Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest, by a commanding 9.5 points, a lead that has remained steady for the past six months. Читать дальше...

The natural geography of Pennsylvania is not extraordinary. Its major cities are situated near rivers, and it has mountains and miles of punishing greenness. As a shape, Pennsylvania is a rectangle, one of only three of the original 13 colonies to be constructed so rationally—no ragged coastline, no islands. But its political geography is fraught, craggy with sharp oppositions. In 2020, to identify as American is easier, conceptually, than to say, “I am a Pennsylvanian.”

There are two things to understand about the “herd immunity” strategy the White House has reportedly “embraced” in the past month. The first is that the term, which originally referred to the protection a community gets from high vaccination rates, in this case is being used as shorthand for letting the coronavirus rampage through the nation until those who haven’t died have developed antibodies. The second is that health experts hate it.

When former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned in July 2018 amid a flurry of ethics scandals, he had already weathered months of inquiries into inappropriate use of the office for personal gain. He had spent over $100,000 of taxpayer money on first-class flights to Italy and Morocco. He had installed a $43,000 private phone booth in EPA headquarters. He ordered the locks in EPA headquarters to be replaced with biometric locks, even though he couldn’t explain to a member of Congress what biometric locks are. Читать дальше...

Like a phoenix, the deficit hawk will be back soon enough, as soon as it is politically convenient.