Welcome to Hell, Trumpers.
2/28/25
Red flag warning for red states is all too familiar
2/25/25
NorthWestern Energy drafts bill to shield Montana utilities from wildfire liability
Now, as utilities scramble to avoid liability for wildfires, insurance companies are bilking homeowners in the wildland urban interface and denying coverage interfering with mortgages, real estate values and property ownership. NorthWestern Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, Xcel, Black Hills Energy, Hawaiian Electric Company and Public Service of New Mexico or PNM are all responsible for massive blazes causing billions in damages.
In 2021 power lines owned by NWE caused a wildfire that destroyed most of Denton, Montana and liability lawsuits from that incident are still being litigated. Drafted in part by NWE, Kalispell Earth hater Amy Regier is lead sponsor of Montana House Bill 490 that would protect utilities from liability for wildfires they start.
Some of the state’s largest insurance companies also spoke against the bill, because it would make it harder for them to recover costs associated with fire damages. They said that could ultimately lead to homeowners paying higher premiums, or could cause companies to stop insuring homes in Montana. The state auditor’s office opposed the bill for similar reasons. [Bill would shield utility companies from wildfire liability]A wildfire sparked by a distribution line owned by Mountrail-Williams Electric Co-op killed two people in North Dakota in 2024. Power lines owned by Southern California Edison are being blamed for the Eaton Fire.
On Monday Democratic former South Dakota legislator, Nick Nemec told an interested party that a wildfire in his part of Hyde County right now would be catastrophic.
The grassland fire danger index will be in the extreme category Tuesday for much of South Dakota and Nebraska.
2/24/25
Ecoterrorist ETP launches SLAPP suit against water protectors
In 2014 Republican South Dakota then-Representative Kristi Noem enjoyed a $2500 face lift from ETP, the Texas company that gave nearly $321,000 to Republicans that cycle hoping to buy permits for an ecocidal 1,100-mile pipeline intended to move 450,000 barrels of North Dakota crude daily to Illinois. After the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed for an injunction against the US Army Corps of Engineers to stop the disastrous project in 2016, American Indian activists launched an international wave of resistance to the Texas grab on water crossings and trust lands in northern plains states.
After National Guard troops and other mercenaries brutalized many of the thousands of demonstrators camped on federal land near Cannon Ball, North Dakota over 800 people were arrested or charged between early August, 2016 and late February, 2017. Trump apparatchiks even referred to the Indigenous Americans and their compatriots as jihadists or insurgents. In August, 2017 attorneys for Greenpeace and other water protectors called on a judge to dismiss as an attack on free speech the predictable frivolous lawsuit filed by ETP in the aftermath of the civil protest.
In 2020 in a major victory for the Native American tribes and environmental groups fighting against the project a federal judge ordered the Corps to conduct a full environmental review. Then in 2024 the Biden administration and Congress affirmed tribal sovereignty and told the Corps that their Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Dakota Excess pipeline underestimated its climate impacts.
Energy Transfer, the Big Oil corporation behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, is seeking $300 million in damages from Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace International, accusing these organizations of playing a central role in organizing the Indigenous-led resistance to the pipeline back in 2016. The lawsuit is one of the largest Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) cases ever filed, and one of the biggest cases to go to court in North Dakota. Trial begins on February 24, 2025. These types of cases masquerade as ordinary civil lawsuits, but their true purpose is to retaliate against those who speak out against harms. Such meritless lawsuits are meant to silence or bankrupt opponents by dragging defendants through a long, lengthy, expensive legal process. [Greenpeace organizations go to trial on high-stakes SLAPP lawsuit that could redefine protest rights]Learn more at the North Dakota Monitor.
2/23/25
40 acres for sale near Madrid, New Mexico
2/21/25
Author: Trump intended to run the world, updated
Update, 22 February: this post has been and is being edited.
Call me old fashioned, but being Russia’s KGB agent “Krasnov” since 1987 should disqualify Trump from being President of the United States. Retroactively, immediately, and forever.
— Andrea Junker (@Strandjunker) February 22, 2025
Musk, Vance and their support for the anti-American, pro-Russian German far-right From Jamie Kirchik www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/o...
— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum.bsky.social) February 22, 2025 at 10:03 AM
[image or embed]
It's an open secret that the Trump Organization is an equal opportunity money launderer for Russia, the CIA and dark state financiers for decades. The Guardian reported on it back in 2021 and it got them sideways with Elon Musk so they left Xitter.
So, there is little doubt in my mind that damning evidence linking the Trump Organization to Russia was destroyed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on 9/11 and it’s impossible the Obama administration didn’t know Donald Trump was installed through a vast white wing conspiracy with hostile foreign actors with the full knowledge of US Senators like John Thune.
Michelle Obama knows all of this, too since they are threatening her daughters and according to reports Elon Musk is using his own son as a human shield. Trump's assault on black leaders is retribution for the Obama agenda.
In 2018 KSA Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi who was investigating the Trump Organization and Jared Kushner's blood money infusions so a cynical observer might wonder how long Trump and Tulsi Gabbard have been laundering proceeds for Syria's $10 billion captagon industry.
A second ex-senior KGB spy chief said, Trump was recruited and worked as a Russian intelligence services asset for many years. And what they both said aligns with the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report that Marco Rubio supervised.
Former Chairman of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (KNB) Alnur Mussayev claims that the Soviet KGB recruited Donald Trump before the collapse of the USSR, assigning him the alias Krasnov. He claimed that the U.S. political elite is well aware of Trump’s dependence on the Kremlin but cannot openly acknowledge it due to the country’s global standing. [Inside Soviet recruitment: Kazakhstan’s former security chief claims Trump was a KGB asset]
###
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump stole the 2024 election by lying to Latinos and Black men about migrants taking their jobs; and through stochastic terrorism they threatened violence against millions of people especially of color who otherwise would have showed up at polling places to vote. And with the confirmation of Kash Patel the Federal Bureau of Investigation is on the path to become the Stasi, the repressive secret police that crushed dissent in East Germany until 1990.Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and member of the Council on Foreign Relations who covers "Putinism," calls what is happening in the US executive branch, "regime change" and is married to Poland's version of the US Secretary of State. She talked about her latest book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World on NPR's Fresh Air.
Hungary's Viktor Orbán steals elections, is a darling of the far white wing, has been a kleptocrat for decades and is likely the successor to the captagon trade.
And Hungary's a very important country for Americans to understand because Hungary is a country that elected democratically a leader, Viktor Orban, who then initially - mostly legally - slowly eliminated many of the checks and balances, many of the institutions of Hungarian democracy, making it impossible for him to lose an election. So he culled the Hungarian civil service by changing labor laws, replacing professional civil servants with members of his party. He changed the nature of the Hungarian courts over a period of time. He captured Hungarian media, both through putting pressure - financial pressure on independent media, empowering oligarchs and people around him, businessmen who are close to him to buy or take over Hungarian media and then transform their nature. And slowly over time, he also repeatedly changed the constitution, which enabled him to change the way elections are run. [Journalist describes Trump's movements as a 'regime change' towards authoritarianism]It sure looks like the Trump Organization intends to fire the scientists working for the public good so more microplastics, antibiotics and pesticides can be broadcast throughout the food web and introduced into wild spaces while the elites and shareholders enjoy the spoils of capitalism.
The fact of the matter is that America, as embodied by this administration, is no longer allies with our traditional allies. That is over. America's allies are now Putin, the AfD, Viktor Orban, and other far-right, fascist regimes.
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe.bsky.social) February 19, 2025 at 1:29 PM
2/19/25
Earth haters could appeal after federal judge rules in Gila cattle case
All waterways in the US Mountain West are endangered and that cattle have been allowed into national forests and other public ground is a crime that needs to end.
Whether it’s American Prairie’s bison grazing on Bureau of Land Management ground in Montana or the US Department of Agriculture killing cattle on the Gila National Forest or shooting wolves from helicopters or running over them with snowmobiles or bailing out ranchers after wildfires socialized grazing just isn’t enough to keep some Republicans happy.
After the 2022 Black Fire erased 325,000 acres of the forage base for elk and other cervids on the Gila removing rampaging cattle became an imperative to protect wilderness so contractors with the US Department of Agriculture's Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service or APHIS shot some 84 invasive beeves in 2022 and 2023. Managers with the GNF knew there were still critters infesting public lands so officials took comments on another round of lethal removals but decided not to pursue those plans after the Forest Service found just twenty.
In 2023 the Center for Biological Diversity sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service because of that agency's failure to better protect the Gila River from erosion caused by livestock and wild cattle.
Earlier this year US District Court Judge for the District of New Mexico James O. Browning ruled that feral cattle on the Gila are not domestic livestock in a 241 page response to a lawsuit brought by the NM Cattle Growers' Association and other petitioners who graze livestock on public lands for pennies per head. The Cattle Growers’ Association is not known for accuracy or precision and an appeal of the decision had not been announced at post time.
The Forest Service contended in their response to the suit that the feral cattle in the Gila — descendants of a herd abandoned in the 1970s on the Redstone grazing allotment at the northern edge of the Silver City Ranger District — have not been raised or kept by humans for generations, so therefore do not qualify as livestock. The cattle, the Forest Service argued in the response, are destructive to the riparian areas of the Gila Wilderness and also pose a danger to hikers and others who go to the forest for recreation. [Cattle Growers skeptical of ruling in feral cow case]
Gila National Forest officials received more than 5,000 public comments that supported removing feral cattle from the wilderness — which is critical habitat for several endangered and threatened species, including Mexican spotted owls, yellow-billed cuckoos and more.
— Center for Biological Diversity (@biologicaldiversity.org) January 30, 2025 at 10:55 AM
2/16/25
Polluting pork industry GOP Nebraska governor calls for nitrate study
Republicans in red states are howling because the federal government is buying land to protect it from desertification so groundwater depletion and the absence of public land is draining the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer six and a half times faster than its recharge rate and nearly all the groundwater sampled from it is contaminated with uranium and nitrates from industrial agriculture.
In 2008 after Nebraska's 1978 median nitrate level doubled lab tests showed a few municipal wells were exceeding the US Environmental Protection Agency limit for uranium when samples jumped as high as 57 parts per billion. In 2011 one irrigation well just four miles from a municipal water source tested 322 parts per billion of uranium or more than 10 times the legal limit for drinking water set by EPA.
In a 2015 study researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln reported that 78 percent of groundwater samples from the Ogallala Formation found with unsafe concentrations of uranium were also contaminated with nitrates from farming. Researchers learned that nitrates at levels near the 10-parts-per-million legal limit release uranium into the state’s groundwater, which provides drinking water for 85 percent of Nebraskans.
Towns in Nebraska are stepping up sampling municipal supplies where nitrate levels are still rising but the owners of private wells are not. Jim Pillen, the state's Republican governor is a major contributor to nitrate impairment but he wants a study that will pin the blame on farmers. Suggesting that irony is not completely dead, wells in the Republican River basin are the most severely threatened by nitrate poisoning.
Bacteria in human bodies can turn nitrate, a colorless, tasteless and odorless chemical, into nitrite and then convert it to nitrosamine, a known probable carcinogen. Out of nearly 29,000 private well owners the state reached out to, only 3,478 samples were sent back. The state study happened because it’s a step toward Pillen’s goal of reducing overapplication of nitrogen fertilizers, said Laura Strimple, the governor’s spokesperson, in an email statement. [Many Nebraskans still under threat of high nitrate in drinking water, report finds]After public outcry scuttled its eminent domain scam federally subsidized Sioux Falls, South Dakota chemical company POET, that enables nitrate pollution to grow corn for ethanol, has entered an agreement to transport waste carbon dioxide through Nebraska in an existing natural gas pipeline to a sequestration site in Wyoming according to a press release.
Learn how Flatwater Free Press reporter Yanqi Xu uncovered extensive nitrate pollution in Nebraska, including from the governor’s hog farms. healthjournalism.org/blog/2024/01...
— Association of Health Care Journalists (@healthjournalism.org) January 30, 2024 at 8:37 AM
[image or embed]
2/10/25
Metal tariffs could restart landfill mining
Brohm was an Australian company recruited by a now-dead Republican governor who gutted environmental protection in South Dakota. In the pre-cellphone days Brohm and this former Twin City Fruit marketing associate shared a radio telephone party line where managers plotting an environmental disaster at the Gilt Edge site unwittingly leaked the news to anyone listening.
Disadvantaged populations have been subject to mining-driven environmental racism for hundreds if not thousands of years and in 2014 Nobel Prize winner, Professor Paul Krugman warned Americans that Earth hating Republicans want to make America one big strip mine.
Currently, the US is 100% reliant on foreign sources of the gallium that's used for integrated circuits and light emitting diodes or LEDs. According to the US Geological Survey the nation imports most of its bauxite and alumina so instead of ripping up ground in America recycling aluminum is mostly working but there is so much metal buried in landfills that if we mined those we'd import even less. Electronic waste containing copper, gold and platinum is valued at nearly $100 billion but only 4% is repurposed while new mines are currently being permitted in Montana and Arizona.
Today, visitors and skiers at Terry Peak in the occupied Black Hills are increasingly concerned by the encroachment of a massive tailings pile and ever-widening mining scars from decades of scorched earth. But the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming are hardly the only public lands plundered by foreign companies under cover of the General Mining Law of 1872 that was enacted to settle Civil War debt and rob Indigenous peoples of their homes and human rights.
Until it closed in 1939 the Tererro Mine in the headwaters of the Pecos River took gold, lead and other metals then left piles of toxic waste rock in their place. After major flooding in 1991 when sulfuric acid, aluminum and zinc swept into the river miner Freeport-McMoRan was held responsible for the deaths of some 100,000 Rio Grande cutthroat trout and for the subsequent decades of acid mine drainage.
Learn more from the World Economic Forum.
Last time Trump levied similar steel tariffs, it led to an increase of~ 1,000 jobs in steel production -- but 75,000 *fewer* manufacturing jobs in downstream firms where steel or aluminum are an input into production. econofact.org/steel-tariff...
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) February 9, 2025 at 4:15 PM
[image or embed]
2/9/25
SD county named for a war criminal whining about maintaining FS roads
A state park, a peak, a county and a town in the Black Hills are named after a murdererous war criminal.
At the courthouse in a South Dakota county named for a war criminal Patrick Pipkin and members of a religious splinter group bought a 140 acre compound for a fraction of its value in 2021 that was built in 2005 by now-jailed polygamist Warren Jeffs.
The United States Forest Service paid Custer County $166,978.15 to maintain its roads in the county that the public travels on, also known as Schedule A roads in county highway department parlance. At the Jan. 22 meeting of the Custer County Commission, county highway superintendent Jess Doyle presented an update to the commission that showed in 2024 the county spent nearly $1.7 million in county taxpayer money maintaining those same roads, showing that while the Forest Service does give the county some money—and free gravel—the cost of maintaining its roads still far exceeds what the county receives to do so. Also discussed at the meeting was the National Wilderness Preservation System, in which there is potentially nearly 7,000 acres of county land that the government is eyeing as potential designated Wilderness area. The lands are already part of the Black Hills National Forest. [War Criminal County Chronicle]
Now imagine if the county commission was landlocked within a tribal preserve where access is limited by that government instead of enjoying the fruits that the National Forest System provides to the towns in the Black Hills.
Remanding lands in the public domain to the tribal communities from whom they were seized can’t happen soon enough. But as much as this interested party would like to see a Forest and Land Management Service within the Interior Department a Trump administration consolidation will cause catastrophic damage to both the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.
2/8/25
Colorado rethinking semiautomatic rifle ban as Trump seizes power
Colorado is considering the ban of some semiautomatic firearms but now that American democracy is facing a constitutional crisis Governor Jared Polis says he's skeptical about restricting those weapons after Donald Trump began his Fujimori-style autogolpe and civil war is looming.
One Democratic cosponsor, Sen. Marc Snyder of Manitou Springs, now says he won’t vote for the measure, citing doubts over its reach and concerns from his constituents. The governor said in deciding whether to sign or veto the bill he wants “to make sure it doesn’t interfere with legal, law-abiding gun owners in our state for hunting, for home defense or sport.” [Colorado Senate debate on bill banning manufacture, sale of semiautomatic guns delayed amid negotiations with Jared Polis]Trump's "Coup Klux Klan" has been assaulting Colorado neighborhoods threatening local control, angering American citizens who know it's only a civil violation to be in the country without authorization and as of Friday no one has been charged but communities are bracing for violent blowback.
“If they don’t trust law enforcement, they probably won’t go to them and tell them, hey there is a dangerous thing happening in my neighborhood,” said Laura Lunn, an immigration attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, who works out of the GEO detention center, which houses immigrants. “When you blur the lines between these different agencies, you are causing distrust within the community of both agencies.” [Immigration raids in Colorado, both highly visible and cloaked in secrecy, rattle advocates and local authorities]Trump is escalating militant tactics that mirror Ruby Ridge and Waco but his actions are deeply reminiscent of the 1992 autocoup perpetrated by Alberto Fujimori who dismissed the legislative and judicial branches of the Peruvian government and claimed their powers for himself. Like Fujimori Trump is a career criminal and convicted felon whose offspring are reactionary toadies.
Jared Polis is a patriot who supports the Second Amendment, the US Department of Education and the expansion of passenger rail.
Trump Claims He Can Overrule Constitution With Executive Order Because Of Little-Known ‘No One Will Stop Me’ Loophole
— The Onion (@theonion.com) February 8, 2025 at 9:56 AM
[image or embed]
2/6/25
Migrants not showing up for work, momentum building for general strike
The California Farm Bureau says fears in the Central Valley have led to migrant farmworkers not showing up for work, which has virtually halted the area's citrus harvest. https://t.co/A2giCQaert
— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) January 27, 2025
General strike.
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 5:38 AM
[image or embed]
— Wilson Cruz (@wilsoncruz.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 11:17 AM
2/4/25
RCFD: grass fires nearly doubled in 2024; governor wants fireworks anyway
This week the Rapid City Fire Department announced it responded to more than 250 fire calls in 2024, reported a 92% increase in blazes where flashy one hour fuels were involved and is concerned 2025 will be worse.
The late Bill Gabbert worked as a wildland firefighter in California for twenty years before retiring in the Black Hills where he wrote as an expert on wildland fire. Using metrics that measure the probability of ignition or PI he took a firm stand on the risk of wildfire starts after a return of pyrotechnics to Mount Rushmore National Memorial where he was Fire Management Officer for four years.
Recall that during President Barack Obama's first term fireworks were banned at Six Grandfathers because of repeated wildfire starts during red flag conditions and residual chemicals leaching into groundwater supplies. Former Superintendent Cheryle Schreier fled the Park Service and retired after criticism for her outspoken opinion on the rockets at Rushmore in the occupied Black Hills saying she spoke out for the right reasons.
Now the Trump Organization is threatening the French and Battle Creek watersheds again. So, in post-truth South Dakota the new governor has invited a convicted felon who is leading a treasonous autogolpe to soil the land of Black Elk after North Dakota's former governor suspends disbelief for Independence Day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)