#election fallout

2.5 million ballots were not counted in the election in Texas!

People stay informed * knowledge is power

I love all you all, please take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.

Under Republican and Democratic presidents from Nixon through Obama, killing migratory birds, even inadvertently, was a crime, with fines for violations ranging from $250 to $100 million. The power to prosecute created a deterrent that protected birds and enabled government to hold companies to account for environmental disasters.

But in part due to President Donald Trump’s interior secretary nominee, David Bernhardt, whose confirmation awaits a Senate vote, the wildlife cop is no longer on the beat. Bernhardt pushed a December 2017 legal opinion that declared the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act applies only when companies kill birds on purpose.

Emails obtained by Reveal provide evidence of how the revision is affecting law enforcement in the U.S. For example, after a pipeline burst in Idaho last April, spilling diesel into a pond and wetland, two coolers full of dead birds were dropped off at the Fish and Wildlife office in Boise. In an email about what to do with the dead birds, a Fish and Wildlife agent wrote that “we are no longer involved’’ when birds are killed in oil spills.

Agents had a similar reaction when a tugboat spilled oil into Great Harbor in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, killing dozens of birds.

“As this spill involves the incidental take of birds protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, there is currently no enforcement action planned,” according to an email from a Fish and Wildlife agent.

An email about a timber harvest in Michigan said Fish and Wildlife no longer prohibits loggers from cutting down trees with nests in them, even if it destroys live eggs or chicks. (In this case, however, Michigan’s state agency stepped in, and saved the great blue heron nests and chicks.)

Millions of birds die every year due to waste pits for mines and oil fields, electric power lines, wind turbines, communications towers and commercial fishing. The threat of prosecutions and fines was a powerful tool to encourage industries to figure out ways to avoid killing birds. Oil companies put nets over waste pits. Electric companies separated wires so eagles and other raptors wouldn’t get electrocuted. Fishing crews put weights on the long lines so birds wouldn’t get drowned when they dove for the bait. Many birds were saved.

Scientists caution that weakening the Migratory Bird Treaty Act imperils many types of birds that are endangered or declining in numbers, and it also eliminates an important source of wetlands restoration funding: penalties paid by violators.

Oh hey look, I was right.

Previous breakdowns have been based on exit polling, which is flawed. This recent Pew Research Center study on the demographic breakdown of the electorate is much more robust.

And from it we learn:

More eligible voters did not vote at all than people voted for either Trump or Clinton (something we already knew) 

More than half of people who make under $30,000/year did not vote

White people making more than $30,000/year skewed Republican, and were more likely to vote.

Whites making less than $30,000/year and nonwhites at all income levels skewed Democrat, and were less likely to vote

Two thirds of all non-voters were under age 50

In fact, only 1 in 8 voters in the 2016 election were under 30

Half of non-voters were poc

This of course means that half of non-voters were white, but also that whites were 74% of the people who voted in 2016

Basically, those exit poll numbers showing that most white people across gender/age/income status voted for Trump? That “53% of white women voted for Trump” figure? That happened because a lot of liberal white people didn’t vote at all. 

One of their conduits, identified in the indictment only as “Organization 1,” was WikiLeaks, the global anti-secrecy group led by Julian Assange, according to people familiar with the case. The indictment describes WikiLeaks communicating with Guccifer 2.0 to obtain material.

On July 6, 2016, according to the indictment, WikiLeaks wrote, “if you have anything Hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after,” referring to Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). WikiLeaks explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”

The indictment also notes an interesting development on July 27, 2016 — the day then-candidate Trump gave a press conference declaring his hope that missing Clinton emails would be found and made public, saying: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

The indictment says “on or about” that same day, “the conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton campaign.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry rejected the indictment’s allegations as lacking evidence and described the charges as a clear effort to derail the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki.