February 16, 2023

Thursday, February 16, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

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Biden judicial appointments. The beat goes on.

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Kamala is always busy.

The Vice President has left for Munich, Germany, where she will attend the annual Munich Security Conference this week.

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Why did the Ohio Train derailment happen?

Trains are becoming less safe. Why the Ohio derailment disaster could happen more often.

In 2013, a train derailment and subsequent fire in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killed 47 people and required all but three downtown buildings to be demolished for safety reasons. The following year, a derailment in Casselton, North Dakota, spilled nearly 500,000 gallons of crude oil and caused $13.5 million in damage, prompting the Obama administration to push for a new safety rule to govern the transportation of hazardous materials, avoid environmental disasters and save lives.

The effort to create a new safety rule was fought by industry lobbyists, including Norfolk Southern Corp., the Atlanta-based company whose train derailed in eastern Ohio and spilled chemicals earlier this month, leaving residents in East Palestine worried about their air, soil and water quality.

When the safety rule was issued in 2015, however, it was narrowly crafted and required only  electronically controlled brakes – which applies braking simultaneously across a train rather than railcar by railcar over a span of seconds – to be installed by 2023. It applied only to certain “high-hazard flammable trains” carrying at least 20 consecutive loaded cars filled with liquids like crude oil.

The Trump administration repealed the rule three years later, stating that its cost exceeded the benefits. 

Efforts to reduce costs including lobbying against costly regulation, increasing train lengths, reduced inspection times and major cuts to the railroad workforce have made.

Had industry lobbying interests not prevailed on the 2015 rule, the Norfolk Southern Railway train involved in the Feb. 3 derailment may have been equipped with the better braking system, shown in studies to reduce the size of a derailment pile up when emergency braking is applied.

"ECP brakes would have avoided that monster pile up behind the derailed car," said Steven Ditmeyer, a former senior official at the Federal Railroad Administration. "In fact, depending on when the crew got the (error) notice from the wayside detector, applying the ECP brakes would have stopped everything very quickly.

"So I think it would have helped."

The Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine was carrying flammable liquids, benzene and butyl acrylates, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The tank car carrying butyl acrylates was breached and the entire load was lost in the spill and subsequent fire, according to EPA documentation.

The train also had five derailed tank cars of vinyl chloride, a flammable gas not captured by the Obama-era rule despite efforts by the National Transportation Safety Board at the time to have the agency adopt a broader definition for high-hazard flammable trains that would include those carrying flammable gasses.

The derailed Norfolk Southern train in Ohio resulted in large plumes of black smoke over the rural 5,000-person community, as crews did a “controlled release” of the hazardous materials on board to avoid an explosion. Residents were forced to leave their home for days, and upon returning, complained about the smell in the air, burning in their eyes and sick animals. Environmental authorities continue to monitor the air quality and residents and business owners have banded together in a federal class-action lawsuit accusing Norfolk Southern of negligence.

In a Norfolk Southern 2015 lobbying disclosure, the company noted that it lobbied both Congress and the executive agencies working on the Department of Transportation rule, and “opposed additional speed limitations and requiring ECP brakes.”

Norfolk Southern’s vice president of government relations, Rudy Husband, told Pennsylvania lawmakers in June 2015 that while the rail industry would comply with the new rule, it has “serious concerns about the ECP brake requirements and the potential adverse impacts on the fluidity of the national freight network.”

'Very long trains' emerge amid efforts to increase profits

In the company’s 2021 annual report, Norfolk Southern Corp. told investors it had concluded its three-year plan to transform into a more “innovative and efficient railroad,” reaching record levels of productivity across its operations, including increasing average train weight by 21% and train length by 20%.

Average train lengths in 2017 were between 1.2 and 1.4 miles, according to data provided by two major railroads to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an increase of 25% since 2008. And the Association of American Railroads, an industry trade group, found that most trains have grown by roughly 2,700 feet, or 26 additional cars per train, over the last decade.

A black plume rises over East Palestine, Ohio, as a result of a controlled detonation of a portion of the derailed Norfolk Southern train.

Norfolk Southern’s train in Ohio, at roughly 150 cars long, stretched nearly 1.9 miles, the company said. Preliminary indications are that a wheel bearing in the final stage of overheat failure occurred moments before the derailment and may have caused the crash, the NTSB said Tuesday. The train’s crew received an alarm from a wayside defect detector shortly before the derailment indicating a mechanical issue and then an emergency brake application was initiated, according to the NTSB.

The labor union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, has noted that very long trains can lead to interruptions in radio communications with crew members or wayside defect detectors. There are no regulatory standards for wayside detectors. The labor union also noted in a presentation last month that very long trains can impact braking performance, decrease time for thorough inspections and increase the likelihood of catastrophic derailments.

The Federal Railroad Administration does not place limits on freight train length, but the agency states in documents that “existing safety issues may be exacerbated as train length continues,” including insufficient time for human inspection of rail cars, losing communication with equipment and people, and wearing out equipment more quickly.

Longer, heavier trains make it harder to brake in an emergency

When a train using conventional air brakes tries to stop, the air pressure signal is sent sequentially at a speed slightly slower than sound from railcar to railcar, generating increasing amounts of “in-train forces” due to individual cars pushing and pulling against one another, as cars at the front of a train begin to reduce speed before cars at the back.

The longer the train, the more difficult it is to skillfully stop, and the more likely it is an emergency braking scenario goes awry.

Over the last decade, as trains have grown longer and heavier, both the total number of reported accidents and the percentage of accidents on major tracks with 150 or more railcars have both gone up, according to a January presentation by the Federal Railroad Administration. (USA Today).

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Republicans, of course, have attacked President Biden and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, but the cause was under-regulation, because Trump rescinded protective laws in 2015.

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An important correction to our legal system, if it happens.

DOJ wants to stop Republicans from choosing the judge who hears their lawsuits.

Last week, the Justice Department decided to confront one of the most pernicious and exploited glitches in America’s courts.

There are a handful of federal trial judges in Texas — Matthew Kacsmaryk, Drew Tipton, and Reed O’Connor are probably the best known among them — who have largely behaved as rubber stamps for whatever far-right cause shows up in their courtrooms. If you want a court order attempting to repeal Obamacare, or locking in Trump-era immigration policies, or attacking the right to birth control, these guys are happy to deliver.

Ordinarily, the fact that a few trial judges hold extreme views would be unfortunate, but hardly a crisis. According to the Federal Judicial Center, there are 71 federal trial judges in the state of Texas, and federal lawsuits are supposed to be randomly assigned to a local federal judge shortly after they are filed. So, if Texas’s federal courts were functioning properly, judges like Kacsmaryk or Tipton would only occasionally be assigned cases brought by litigants with a political agenda.

But the case assignments process in Texas is not functioning properly. Texas federal courts assign 100 percent of all cases filed in Amarillo to Kacsmaryk. They assign virtually all cases filed in Victoria to Tipton. That means that right-wing litigants can guarantee their lawsuit will be heard by an allied judge simply by filing their suit in one of these two cities.

So does DOJ have any chance of succeeding in its effort to limit GOP judge-shopping?

The Justice Department’s motion primarily relies on a federal law laying out where suits against federal officials may be brought. Barring circumstances that don’t exist in the Utah case, such suits should be filed in the judicial district where “the plaintiff resides.”

Texas is divided into four federal judicial districts, the Northern, Eastern, Western, and Southern Districts of Texas, and Kascmaryk sits in the Northern District. According to DOJ, however, the only plaintiff that resides anywhere in Texas is the state of Texas itself.

Meanwhile, federal law provides that “an entity with the capacity to sue and be sued . . . shall be deemed to reside . . . only in the judicial district in which it maintains its principal place of business.” DOJ argues that the state of Texas’s “principal place of business” is Austin, the state’s capital, which is located in the Western District of Texas. So this case cannot be heard in Kacsmaryk’s Northern District courtroom.

Additionally, DOJ points to a statute permitting cases to be transferred to a different district “for the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice.” Among other things, DOJ argues that “‘the interest[s] of justice’ alone favor transfer” because “the public’s interest in the fair administration of justice would be harmed if a filing with strong indicia of judge shopping were left unchecked.”

Of these two arguments, the latter is far and away the more potent. While the former argument might succeed in moving this one case out of Kacsmaryk’s courtroom, future litigants can likely get around this argument by simply adding a plaintiff to the case who lives in the Northern District of Texas. They may even be able to manufacture such a plaintiff by creating a shell corporation that is nominally headquartered in Amarillo.

The latter argument, by contrast, suggests that judge-shopping is inherently suspect under federal law, and could potentially allow DOJ to attack any effort to shop lawsuits challenging federal policies to partisan judges like Kacsmaryk or Tipton.

But is either argument likely to prevail in a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees who, in the past, have been quite content to sit on their hands and let even the most egregious decisions by the most partisan Republican judges remain in effect for months at a time?

The short answer is “maybe.” (Vox).
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More on Youngkin, #RedMeatGovernor of Virginia disguised as a lamb..

Trump, now DeSantis, have “issued a challenge” to the Red Meat Republicans. How outrageous can you be? Youngkin throws his hand into the ring of crazies.

Youngkin opposes effort to shield menstrual data from law enforcement.

RICHMOND — The administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) helped defeat a bill this week to put menstrual data stored on period-tracking apps beyond the reach of law enforcement, blocking what supporters pitched as a basic privacy measure.


Millions of women use mobile apps to track their cycles, a practice that has occasionally raised data-security worries because the apps are not bound by HIPAA, the federal health privacy law. New concerns arose after the Supreme Court gave states the right to ban abortion in June, with some abortion rights groups warning that the information could be used to prosecute women or doctors who violate a state’s restrictions on the procedure.


[With Roe overturned, period-tracking apps raise new worries]
S.B. 852, proposed by Sen. Barbara A. Favola (D-Arlington), would have prohibited search warrants from being issued for menstrual data stored on computers or other electronic devices. The measure sailed out of the Democratic-led Senate last week on a 31-9 vote, with every Democrat and half of the chamber’s 18 Republicans in support.

But a Republican-led House subcommittee voted along party lines Monday to “table” the bill — essentially killing it — after Maggie Cleary, Youngkin’s deputy secretary of public safety and homeland security, detailed the administration’s concerns that the measure could restrict subpoena powers.


“While the administration understands the importance of individuals’ privacy, we do oppose this bill,” she began. “This bill would be the very first of its kind that I’m aware of — in Virginia or anywhere — that would set a limit on what search warrants can do. … Currently any health information or any app information is available via search warrant. And we believe that should continue be the case.”


If approved, Cleary said, the bill would “ultimately open the door to put further limits on search warrants down the road, and that would be incredibly problematic.”
Abortion rights advocates on Tuesday cast the administration’s response as a harbinger of plans to prosecute people who receive abortions — an accusation Republicans batted down.


“The Youngkin Administration’s opposition to this commonsense privacy protection measure shows his real intentions — to ban abortion and criminalize patients and medical providers,” Tarina D. Keene, executive director of the abortion rights group REPRO Rising Virginia, wrote in an email. (Washington Post).
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Do the other 50% of “normal” Republicans 👇 know what any GOP victory supports besides low taxes?

More than half of Republicans support Christian Nationalism.

Voters mark their ballots for the mid-term election Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022 at Lawrenceville Road United Methodist Church in Tucker, Ga.

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Long seen as a fringe viewpoint, Christian nationalism now has a foothold in American politics, particularly in the Republican Party — according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute.

Researchers found that more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation, either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21%) or sympathizing with those views (33%).

Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the nonpartisan PRRI, has been surveying the religious world for many years now. Recently, Jones said his group decided to start asking specifically about Christian nationalism.

"It became clear to us that this term 'Christian nationalism' was being used really across the political spectrum," he said. "So not just on the right but on the left and that it was being written about more by the media."

I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists."Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) August 2022

Christian nationalism is a worldview that claims the U.S. is a Christian nation and that the country's laws should therefore be rooted in Christian values. This point of view has long been most prominent in white evangelical spaces but lately it's been getting lip service in Republican ones, too.

During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said party leaders need to be more responsive to the base of the party, which she claimed is made up of Christian nationalists.

"We need to be the party of nationalism," she said. "I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists."

Jones said until now it's been difficult to tell how prominent Christian nationalism is within the Republican Party. (NPR).

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In case you need another reason to fight Trump….

Trump Plans to Bring Back Firing Squads, Group Executions if He Retakes White House.

“WHAT DO YOU think of firing squads?”

That’s the question Donald Trump repeatedly asked some close associates in the run-up to the 2024 presidential campaign, three people familiar with the situation tell Rolling Stone.

It’s not an idle inquiry: The former president, if re-elected, is still committed to expanding the use of the federal death penalty and bringing back banned methods of execution, the sources say. He has even, one of the sources recounts, mused about televising footage of executions, including showing condemned prisoners in the final moments of their lives.

Specifically, Trump has talked about bringing back death by firing squad, by hanging, and, according to two of the sources, possibly even by guillotine. He has also, sources say, discussed group executions. Trump has floated these ideas while discussing planned campaign rhetoric and policy desires, as well as his disdain for President Biden’s approach to crime.

In at least one instance late last year, according to the third source, who has direct knowledge of the matter, Trump privately mused about the possibility of creating a flashy, government-backed video-ad campaign that would accompany a federal revival of these execution methods. In Trump’s vision, these videos would include footage from these new executions, if not from the exact moments of death. “The [former] president believes this would help put the fear of God into violent criminals,” this source says. “He wanted to do some of these [things] when he was in office, but for whatever reasons didn’t have the chance.” (Rolling Stone).

Trump lies and insults continue, first at “Meatball Ron,” now at GOP Presidential opponent, Nikki Haley.

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Battles against white supremacy, in different forms.

Black leaders rally in Tallahassee against Florida’s denial of race studies course.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Black leaders on Wednesday ramped up their ongoing criticism of Gov. Ron DeSantis over Florida’s opposition to a new College Board Advanced Placement course in African American studies, claiming that the Republican governor is spurring a cultural battle to aid his expected presidential bid.

Civil rights activist Al Sharpton led a rally with several hundred people, including Black lawmakers and clergy, from a local church to the Capitol to protest the DeSantis administration’s objections to the course and recent moves, such as expanding a state program to transport migrants from the southern border to other states. DeSantis, meanwhile, has shown no signs of backing away from the College Board controversy and now wants to explore ways for Florida to avoid doing business with the nonprofit altogether.

For them to write Black history and decide Black history is a national standard that we cannot allow to happen,” Sharpton told reporters Tuesday after the rally.

Sharpton called DeSantis a “baby Trump” and claimed his messaging will bring together voters in opposition, citing the 2020 election when President Biden defeated former President Donald Trump.

“After Disney one day, after Blacks the next day,” Sharpton said Wednesday. “Just like a baby — give him a pacifier and let some grown folk run the state of Florida.” (Politico).

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White supremacist gets life in prison for Buffalo massacre.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket was sentenced to life in prison without parole Wednesday after relatives of his victims confronted him with pain and rage caused by his racist attack.

Anger briefly turned physical at Payton Gendron’s sentencing when a victim’s family member rushed at him from the audience. The man was quickly restrained; prosecutors later said he wouldn’t be charged. The proceeding then resumed with an emotional outpouring from people who lost loved ones or were themselves wounded in the attack.

“There can be no mercy for you, no understanding, no second chances,” Judge Susan Eagan said as she sentenced him. She called his rampage “a reckoning” for a nation “founded and built, in part, on white supremacy.”

Gendron, 19, is due in a federal court Thursday for a status update in a separate case that could carry a death sentence if prosecutors seek it. His attorney said in December that Gendron is prepared to plead guilty in federal court to avoid execution. New York state does not have the death penalty. (Politico).
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For those of us with electric or hybrid cars, this is big news.

Biden-Harris is bringing America into the future, and fighting climate change. They made this happen.

Tesla will open charging network to other EVs.

Tesla has agreed to make part of its extensive charging network available to drivers of other brands, the White House said Wednesday.

Driving the news: The company will make at least 7,500 chargers nationwide available by the end of next year, per a White House summary.

• At least 3,500 new and existing open-access chargers will be on highway corridors to "expand freedom of travel for all EVs."

• Others will be at spots like "hotels and restaurants in urban and rural locations."

Why it matters: The move by the country's dominant EV player will help expandwhat remains limited national access to public charging.

• Drivers' confidence they can find charging is important for speeding up the transition to EVs, which remain a small but growing share of sales.

The intrigue: Tesla's agreement follows "intense lobbying from the Biden administration," the Washington Post reports.

• "The upgrades will allow Tesla to qualify for federal dollars" under the administration’s plans to help the country have a national network of 500,000 chargers by 2030, per Politico.

Zoom in: The chargers Tesla will open up to other brands include supercharger stations near highways and other locations such as hotels and restaurants.

• The company will more than double its network of superchargers, which are manufactured in Buffalo, New York.

Catch up fast: The news came in a wider set of White House announcements about efforts to boost charging.

• They include final Transportation Department standards for chargers built using billions of federal dollars made available under the bipartisan infrastructure law.

Go deeper: The electric car revolution hinges on equitable, affordable charging (Axios).

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We missed a birthday yesterday.

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Colorful Pasta.

Sometimes people are imaginative, amazing and delightful.

Fiona Afshar making rainbow-bright pasta at her home in Malibu, Calif. (If you click on the title of this article -blue below👇, you can watch the video of this colorful pasta rolling out).

Left: Jennifer Tran used ingredients such as turmeric, beetroot and spinach to color her lasagna noodles. Right: Afshar’s paccheri

Artisanal Noodles in Acid-Trip Colors.

David Rivillo’s rainbow ravioli is equal parts art and science. The 45-year-old Venezuelan, who’s now based in Porto Alegre, Brazil, started making colorful patterned pasta in 2019 in homage to his favorite artist, Carlos Cruz-Diez, a Venezuelan known for his chromatic relief murals who died that year at the age of 95. Putting his Ph.D. in chemistry to good use, Rivillo experimented with natural dyes (such as spirulina and paprika) to find those that would maintain their hue even when dried or cooked and posted his work on Instagram. Now, Rivillo, who recently left his job as a nanotechnology researcher to pursue the project full time, sells his creations (from $40 for 2.1 ounces, plus shipping). And he isn’t the only noodle maker playing with psychedelic designs. The Sydney, Australia-based artist Jennifer Tran, 39, makes candy-striped rigatoni and checkerboard tortellini, as well as floral-print pasta sheets that look more like textiles than food. And in California, Fiona Afshar, 57, takes visual inspiration from her local farmers’ market and from her Malibu garden, adorning paccheri with yellow and purple blooms and ravioli with tiny images of lemons and limes. Employing highly pigmented ingredients like beet powder, activated charcoal and harissa, she sells multivariety gift boxes (from $95) through her website. The only problem with these Technicolor carbs? They’re almost too pretty to eat. Says Rivillo of his pasta: “People take a long time to get the courage to cook it.” @david_rivillo; @_papetal_; fionaspasta.com. — Ella Riley-Adams (New York Times).

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This was nice too.