Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and now moi, JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man,
wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
This is the good stuff… a couple of days ago it looked like Weisselberg, Trump’s top man at his center of business operations, would be allowed to skate without cooperating. Now the Times is reporting that he will testify.
(And hopefully dude has some protection… how long has it been since Ivana fell down those stairs?)
Allen H. Weisselberg, for decades one of Donald J. Trump’s most trusted executives, has reached a deal to plead guilty on Thursday and admit to participating in a long-running tax scheme at the former president’s family business… Mr. Weisselberg will have to admit to all 15 felonies that prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office accused him of...
But Mr. Weisselberg will not implicate Mr. Trump or his family if he takes the stand in that trial, the people said, and he has refused to cooperate with prosecutors in their broader investigation into Mr. Trump, who has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Even so, his potential testimony will put the Trump Organization at a disadvantage and is likely to make Mr. Weisselberg a central witness at the October trial, where the company will face many of the same charges… Mr. Weisselberg’s testimony — an acknowledgment from one of the Trump Organization’s top executives that he committed the crimes listed in the indictment — would undercut any effort by the company’s lawyers to contend that no crime was committed.
...The executive, who entered the Trump orbit as a junior bookkeeper for Mr. Trump’s father and climbed the ranks at the Trump Organization in the decades that followed, possessed a peerless knowledge of its business practices, and prosecutors had pressured him to cooperate with their wider investigation into the former president. But the district attorney who indicted him, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., was not able to sway him, and Mr. Vance’s successor, Alvin L. Bragg, has also been unsuccessful.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer person, as my grandfather used to say...
Midterm Election 2022 — things are looking up!
There are BIG SHIFTS happening in the polling.
Generic Congressional ballot is trending toward the Democrats. The difference between May’s numbers and this week’s Fox News poll are impressive:
- Women: +7D
- White Women: +8D
- Nonwhite Women: +10D
- Suburban Women: +9D
- Men: +4D
- Dads: +28D
Meanwhile, the Kansas effect continues, with angry women registering in numbers that make a blue wave all but inevitable
And specific races are trending blue. Val Demings is leading Marco Rubio by 4:
And there’s good news out of Wisconsin as well.
Liz Chaney lost her Congressional primary to… THIS. Unfortunately, it won’t be enough to turn Wyoming’s House seat blue:
Drill, baby drill
This science just gets more and more clear — fossil fuels kill. Both short-term in individuals, and long-term for the planet.
Pennsylvania children living near fracking sites at birth are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia during early childhood than those who did not live near such facilities, a new study has found.
The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives on Wednesday, explored the connection between the development of cancer and proximity to such unconventional oil and gas development — also known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
... children with at least one fracking well within 2 kilometers of their birth residence during the perinatal window were 2.8 times more likely to develop [leukemia] than their peers who had no wells nearby.
...Setback distances are under debate across the U.S., with some communities calling for these measures to be extended to more than 1,000 feet or as far as 3,281 feet, according to the authors.
More on the Inflation Reduction Act
Dr Michael Mann and other University of Pennsylvania experts offer some pointers:
Though not referenced in the bill’s name, the provisions to address climate change are some of the legislation’s most noteworthy, totaling nearly $370 billion and representing “the most aggressive climate investment ever taken by Congress,” says climate scientist Michael Mann...
“The most critical provisions incentivize renewable energy: grants, loans, and text incentives for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles,” he says. “The provisions have the potential to greatly accelerate the clean energy transition and are a primary reason that this bill has the potential to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 40% by the end of the decade.”
Among these incentives are tax credits for consumers who purchase heat pumps, solar panels, and new and used electric vehicles. For companies, the bill includes loan guarantees for clean energy projects and payments for slashing emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas with 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide.
The IRA ups the tax credits for EVs, and reopens availability for some vehicles that had tapped out of previous rounds of credits (including most Teslas), but puts some new provisions.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law) amends the Qualified Plug-in Electric Drive Motor Vehicle Credit (IRC 30D), now known as the Clean Vehicle Credit, and adds a new requirement for final assembly in North America that takes effect on August 16, 2022. Additional provisions will go into effect on January 1, 2023. Further guidance on these provisions is forthcoming. Find more information about the credit from the Internal Revenue Service.
List of Vehicles with Final Assembly in North America
The following table provides a list of Model Year 2022 and early Model Year 2023 vehicles with final assembly in North America based on data submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and FuelEconomy.gov as of August 1, 2022. Note that for some manufacturers, the build location may vary based on the specific vehicle, trim, or the date in the Model Year when it was produced because some models are produced in multiple locations. The build location of a particular vehicle should be confirmed by referring to its Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) using the VIN decoder described below or an information label affixed to the vehicle.
And there’s a more comprehensive list here:
There are also credits for household purchases to increase efficiency and cut emissions:
And more:
“As Americans across the country suffer right now from record flooding, crippling droughts, and deadly heatwaves, we need President Biden, Congress, and elected officials at every level of office to treat this crisis like the emergency that it is,” Prakash added.
… Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, called Friday “a very good day for America,” lauding the IRA’s prescription drug relief and climate provisions in particular.
However, Weissman said that “there is an urgent need for much more aggressive and far-reaching measures to prevent climate chaos and to build on the Inflation Reduction Act’s down payment with far greater investments in and measures to advance environmental justice.”
Meanwhile, climate chaos continues apace, with Flooding in Las Vegas:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
If you’re as much of a news junkie as I am, you probably read reports about these bastards years ago:
Two former Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions.”
In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.
Ciavarella, 72, is serving a 28-year prison sentence in Kentucky. His projected release date is 2035. Conahan, 70, was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison but was released to home confinement in 2020 — with six years left on his sentence — because of the coronavirus pandemic.
And speaking of Justice… you can read more about this here in
David Nir’s diary, but it’s great seeing this on Twitter!
And finally:
What are you reading tonight? Post some more goodies in the comments!