A key part of the administration's proposal centers on whether agencies must consider the cumulative environmental effects of things like pipelines, which have attracted protests by climate activists across the country.
Under the new limits, federal agencies would only need to consider effects that are "reasonably foreseeable" and have a "close causal relationship" to the project. That could mean simply the impact of building thepipeline.
In 2019, however, the Democratic-controlled Legislature approved a huge chunk of these perennial proposals. That forced Cuomo to come up with an unprecedented amount of new material for his 2020 State of the State address on Wednesday.
The end result was still a very Cuomonian speech: New York, he said, needs to pass monumental pieces of progressive legislation. Particularly those that don’t make the budget soar.
I am pretty sure the same could be said about Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the Republicans, but then again, they weren't so concerned about letting the budget soar, especially back in the day. But then again, things kind of ended badly for New York with the rent strike putting the Urban Development Corporation and all of New York State at the edge by mid-1970s.
Peng Kuan Chin pulled out his phone, eager to show the future of online manipulation.
Unseen servers began crawling the web for Chinese articles and posts. The system quickly reorganized the words and sentences into new text. His screen displayed a rapidly increasing tally of the articles generated by his product, which he dubs the “Content Farm Automatic Collection System." ADVERTISEMENT
With the articles in hand, a set of websites that Peng controlled published them, and his thousands of fake social media accounts spread them across the internet, instantly sending manipulated content into news feeds, messaging app inboxes, and search results.
"I developed this for manipulating public opinion,” Peng told the Reporter, an investigative news site in Taipei, which partnered with BuzzFeed News for this article. He added that automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”
More than a year after his death, a cache of computer files saved on the hard drives of Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting strategist, is becoming public.
Republican state lawmakers in North Carolina fought in court to keep copies of these maps, spreadsheets and other documents from entering the public record. But some files have already come to light in recent months through court filings and news reports.
They have been cited as evidence of gerrymandering that got political maps thrown out in North Carolina, and they have raised questions about Hofeller's role in the Trump administration's failed push for a census citizenship question.
Now more of the files are available online through a website called The Hofeller Files, where Hofeller's daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, published a link to her copy of the files on Sunday after first announcing her plans in a tweet last month.
Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.
Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.
I am thinking maybe I should gas up my truck ⛽ tonight when I go out and wash it and buy groceries. 🏪 While the experts see gas prices actually trending lower, we know the president hasn’t been on his best behavior in the Middle East lately. That’s what you get when you elect a professional con artist to the White House.