January 18, 2024

Thursday, January 18, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

The Pentagon will install rooftop solar panels as Biden pushes clean energy in federal buildings.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Defense Department will install solar panels on the Pentagon, part of the Biden administration’s plan to promote clean energy and “reestablish the federal government as a sustainability leader.”

The Pentagon is one of 31 government sites that are receiving $104 million in Energy Department grants that are expected to double the amount of carbon-free electricity at federal facilities and create 27 megawatts of clean-energy capacity while leveraging more than $361 million in private investment, the Energy Department said.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, announced the projects Wednesday at the Pentagon.

The solar panels are among several improvements set for the Pentagon, which also will install a heat pump system and solar thermal panels to reduce reliance on natural gas and fuel oil combustion systems.

Brendan Owens, assistant secretary of Defense for energy, installations and environment, said the projects will improve energy resilience and reliability at the Pentagon and other military sites in the U.S. and Germany. He called energy use “central to everything we do.‘‘

Solar panels will provide “an uninterrupted power source’’ at the Pentagon in case of a cyberattack or other outage to the bulk grid, as well as reduce strain on the building’s power load, Owens said in an interview.

Because of the Pentagon’s “relatively congested air space” outside Washington, solar panels were the best option for clean energy, he said. The building is a nationally registered historic landmark, so officials will work with local officials to ensure the panels meet all requirements.

The grant program also includes energy upgrades at Naval bases in Georgia and Washington state, as well as the Naval Support Activity Mid-South in Tennessee.

In addition to the Defense Department, projects also include installation of thermally efficient windows at the Energy Department headquarters in Washington, as well as efficiency upgrades to the Commerce and Transportation departments.

Other agencies selected for projects include the Interior and Veterans Affairs departments, as well as the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management and Social Security Administration.

The program also will make the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii a net-zero emissions facility. The site run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ceased all measurements and radio transmissions in late November after a lava eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano cut the power line and buried over a mile of the access road to the observatory. Since November, access to the site has been limited to costly weekly visits by helicopter to collect limited atmospheric data, officials said.

The grant program will install solar panels and batteries at the observatory to make the facility a net-zero site for carbon emissions, bring atmospheric science instrumentation back online and significantly improve the site’s climate resiliency, officials said.

“As the observatory is considered the definitive source for documenting the increased atmospheric burden of fossil fuel emissions, this project has the unique ability to eliminate 100% of the combustion of fossil-fueled electrical power to make those critical measurements,‘’ the Energy Department said.

The funding announced Wednesday is the first of three disbursements expected from the Assisting Federal Facilities with Energy Conservation Technologies or AFFECT program included in the 2021 infrastructure law. A total of $250 million was awarded to the program, which was established in 1992 to help agencies cut energy consumption.

The projects align with Biden’s 2021 executive order that called for a 65% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from federal operations by 2030 and a net-zero building portfolio by 2045.

The projects also include installation of solar panels at the U.S. Army Garrison in Wiesbaden, Germany, as well as energy and water efficiency improvements and solar panels at the Maui Air Traffic Control Tower in Kahului, Hawaii.

In a related development Wednesday, the Interior Department announced it is updating and expanding an Obama-era plan to promote solar power on public lands in the West. The Bureau of Land Management’s 2012 Western Solar Plan identified areas in six states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah — with high solar potential and few resource conflicts. The new plan adds five states north of the current solar zone for potential solar development: Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.

The agency’s preferred alternative identifies about 22 million acres of land open for solar development, “giving maximum flexibility to reach the nation’s clean energy goals,‘’ the BLM said in a statement. (Associated Press).

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Kamala is always busy.

Touch to watch the Vice President on the View.👇

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How did so many get so crazy?

Touch to listen to Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for President and Governor of Florida. 👇

Reminder. The Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a DeSantis appointee, called for the end of the administration of mRNA coronavirus vaccines, using debunked science to falsely claim that the vaccines could contaminate patients’ DNA.

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Whatever Bill Ackman wants, Bill Ackman gets… or so Ackman thinks.

Dean Phillips, who has to grovel to find any supporters for his candidacy against President Biden, is willing to sell his campaign for a million dollar donation.

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New Polling Shows Americans Fleeing From Trump If He Is Convicted.

New polling from Reuters/Ipsos demonstrates that Donald Trump's chances of winning in November drop dramatically if he is convicted, and are even worse if he is serving time in prison.

The poll, which currently has President Biden leading Donald Trump by 2 points in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, surveyed 3,815 registered voters, asking them whether they would vote for Trump in the event of a criminal conviction. The results could not be worse for Trump.

When asked whether they would vote for Trump if he were serving time in prison, these numbers look even worse for the former president. Only 18% of respondents stated they would vote for Trump, with 61% stating they would not. Importantly, among Republicans, only 38% of those polled would affirmatively vote for him, while 35% would not.

Polling like this makes clear that in the event of a conviction or if Trump is set to serve prison time, the 2024 election could be a landslide of epic proportions if Trump chooses to remain on the ballot. (Medias Touch).

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Trump update.

Maine Judge Suspends Decision to Exclude Trump From Primary Ballot.

The judge sent the matter back to Maine’s secretary of state, ordering her to modify, withdraw or confirm her ruling after the Supreme Court rules on a similar case out of Colorado.

A Maine judge ordered the state’s top election official on Wednesday to wait for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling before putting into effect her decision to exclude former President Donald J. Trump from Maine’s Republican primary ballot.

Judge Michaela Murphy.

Justice Michaela Murphy of Maine Superior Court said in the ruling that the official, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, had been forced under Maine law to issue her decision quickly, without the benefit of the high court’s input.

The Supreme Court has agreed to review, at Mr. Trump’s request, an earlier decision by a Colorado court to exclude him from the ballot, and is expected to hear arguments in the case on Feb. 8. Ms. Bellows had cited the Colorado court’s reasoning in her decision.

“The secretary confronted an uncertain legal landscape when she issued her ruling,” Justice Murphy wrote in a 17-page decision, and “should be afforded the opportunity to assess the effect and application” to her ruling of whatever the high court decides.

She added: “Put simply, the United States Supreme Court’s acceptance of the Colorado case changes everything about the order in which these issues should be decided, and by which court.”

The Maine court ordered Ms. Bellows to issue a new decision no later than 30 days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Colorado case, “modifying, withdrawing or confirming” her earlier decision to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot.

Maine is unusual in requiring that its secretary of state rule on ballot eligibility questions before the courts take them up. Several Maine voters who objected to Mr. Trump’s candidacy had petitioned Ms. Bellows to keep him off the ballot.

They argued in legal briefs and at a hearing last month that the former president was no longer eligible to hold public office, because he engaged in insurrection by encouraging the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A section of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution — enacted originally to exclude former Confederate officials from serving in the federal government — disqualifies government officials who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office.

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

In her decision on Dec. 28, Ms. Bellows, a Democrat elected to her post by state legislators, sided with the voters — a group of three former elected officials who filed one challenge, and an individual resident who filed another based on the same argument. She found Mr. Trump to be ineligible for the presidency, and thus the Maine ballot, because he had used “a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters” in a bid to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election.

Her finding made Maine the second state to block Mr. Trump, after Colorado’s highest court reached the same conclusion.

The fates of other ballot challenges in states around the country may also hinge on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision. Formal challenges have been filed in at least 35 states; though the primary season is already underway, more than half of those states still have unresolved cases.

The Republican primaries in Maine and Colorado are both scheduled for March 5, also known as Super Tuesday because many states hold primaries that day. The deadline for Maine to mail ballots to voters overseas is Saturday.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump appealed Ms. Bellows’s decision to the Maine Superior Court a few days after it was issued, arguing that she had “no legal authority to consider the federal constitutional issues presented by the challengers.” They described her decision as “the product of a process infected by bias.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump called the court’s directive “a correct action" in a statement on Wednesday.

“President Trump is confident that we will ultimately prevail with a fair ruling on the issues in front of the Supreme Court,” Steven Cheung, the spokesman, said. “We will not stop fighting the remaining bogus, bad faith 14th Amendment ballot challenges.”

Ethan Strimling, a former Portland mayor who sought Mr. Trump’s removal from Maine’s ballot, said his group of challengers was “happy with the court’s decision to leave the secretary’s ruling intact” instead of reversing it.

A poll by the University of New Hampshire found Maine residents to be sharply divided over Ms. Bellows’s decision, with 85 percent of Democrats expressing support and 95 percent of Republicans opposed. Independent voters were divided about evenly, with 47 percent in favor and 49 percent opposed.

Nicholas F. Jacobs, an assistant professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, called the court’s action “a prudent decision,” given voter concern about partisanship in the election process.

“At a time when the security and validity of American elections are coming under greater suspicion, it is admirable to see an institution take a step back and think about the damage they could do,” he said. “That’s good for all Mainers, even if they wanted the court to reach a certain decision today.”

Justice Murphy was first appointed to the Maine court by Gov. John E. Baldacci, a Democrat, and then reappointed by his successor, Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican.

Her move to delay a decision on Mr. Trump’s ballot eligibility “minimizes any potentially destabilizing effect of inconsistent decisions,” Justice Murphy wrote, “and will promote greater predictability in the weeks ahead.” (New York Times).

Judge threatens to boot Trump from court during E. Jean Carroll defamation trial.

Trump at the E. Jean Carroll trial. No explanation of why his hands are so damaged.

The federal judge presiding over former President Trump's defamation trialinvolving author E. Jean Carroll threatened to remove the former president from the courtroom Wednesday for his disruptive remarks during the proceedings, multiple outlets reported.

Why it matters: The trial is set to determine how much Trump — who has already been found liable for defaming Carroll — must pay in damages to her.

State of play: The reprimand came after Carroll's lawyer Shawn Crowley made a second complaint about Trump making comments to his lawyers that the jury could hear, per ABC News.

• Crowley said Trump could be heard making comments like, "It is a witch hunt" and "It really is a con job," CNN reported.

• "Mr. Trump has the right to be present here. That right can be forfeited and it can be forfeited if he is disruptive, which is what has been reported to me," Judge Lewis Kaplan said, per ABC News.

• Kaplan added that he hoped he wouldn't have to exclude Trump from the trial. "I understand you are probably very eager for me to do that," Kaplan added.

• Trump reportedly responded by throwing his hands up, saying, "I would love it, I would love it," per ABC News.

• "I know you would, because you can't control yourself in this circumstance," Kaplan shot back.

What they're saying: Trump took to Truth Social Wednesday afternoon to postthat he felt an "obligation to be at every moment of this ridiculous trial."

• "I want to be at this Witch Hunt 100% of the time and watch what is going on," he added.

The big picture: Trump appeared at the trial voluntarily and has denied wrongdoing in the case.

• Kaplan ruled in September that Trump was liable for defamatory remarks he made against Carroll when he denied her rape accusations in 2019.

• This is the second civil trial Trump has faced over a defamation claim from Carroll.

• Last year, a jury held Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.

Zoom out: Trump has tried repeatedly to delay or dismiss Carroll's original lawsuit.

• Last month, a federal appeals court rejected Trump's bid to delay the trial while the Supreme Court weighed his claim to presidential immunity.

• Trump also filed a counter-lawsuit against Carroll last year, claiming she defamed him. Kaplan threw that lawsuit out in August 2023. (Axios).

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Why Trump must never again get near the White House. Watch this ad by the Lincoln Project. Then share it near and far. Democracy depends on you!

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Michelle Obama had a birthday yesterday.

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