The EPA press release attacking the AP reporters is also, in addition to the authoritarian aspect and the lying aspect, strikingly amateurish. It does not read like something you would expect to see from a federal agency staffed by grownups.

I mean really –

Good afternoon –

Yesterday, the Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker wrote an incredibly misleading story about toxic land sites that are under water.

That sounds like a couple of teenagers gossiping, not a civil servant informing the public about emergency pollution management.

Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders who are actually in the affected area.

Says the deeply political appointee in charge of a federal agency that should be all about the science but was hijacked by political fanatics.

Unfortunately, the Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker has a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story. Earlier this summer, he made-up a meeting that Administrator Pruitt had, and then deliberately discarded information that refuted his inaccurate story – ultimately prompting a nation-wide correction. Additionally, the Oklahoman took him to task for sensationalized reporting.

Where are the adults??

More authoritarian excess:

President Donald Trump’s habit of singling out reporters for attacks is being adopted by his federal agencies, with the Environmental Protection Agency excoriating an Associated Press reporter in unusually personal terms on Sunday after the reporter wrote a story that cast the agency in an unfavorable light.

“Yesterday, the Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker wrote an incredibly misleading story about toxic land sites that are under water,” the statement began. “Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. Not only is this inaccurate, but it creates panic and politicizes the hard work of first responders who are actually in the affected area.”

The audacity? That’s a frightening word for a government agency to use about a news story. It implies a violation, a trespassing over boundaries, of a kind that a strong leader might decide to suppress. In short it resembles a threat.

Also? The reporter was not in Washington, or in comfort.

The article in question, which was written by Biesecker and his AP colleague, Jason Dearen, noted that seven toxic Superfund sites around Houston had been flooded during Hurricane Harvey. The Saturday report also noted that the “EPA had not yet been able to physically visit the Houston-area sites,” which the EPA confirmed, arguing the sites were not accessible.

Dearen appears to have reported from on the ground in Texas, and he was not singled out by the EPA statement.

The statement went on to say that “state agencies worked with responsible parties to secure Superfund sites before the hurricane hit.”

It then continued the attacks on Biesecker, saying he “has a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story” and noting that a July story he wrote inaccurately characterized an interaction between EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris. Biesecker’s story, based on EPA schedules, initially said the two met for half an hour at a Houston hotel.

The meeting was canceled, the two met only for a few minutes, the AP issued a correction.

The bulk of Sunday’s EPA statement was unsigned. It did, however, include one portion attributable to associate administrator Liz Bowman.

“Once again, in an attempt to mislead Americans, the Associated Press is cherry-picking facts, as EPA is monitoring Superfund sites around Houston and we have a team of experts on the ground working with our state and local counterparts responding to Hurricane Harvey,” Bowman’s statement said. “Anything to the contrary is yellow journalism.”

The statement did not point to any specific factual inaccuracies in Saturday’s story, besides accusing Biesecker of leaving out information about the EPA’s other efforts to monitor the toxic land sites, and the AP has not offered any corrections on the piece.

Well it’s great that while Houston pickles in a stew of acids the EPA has plenty of time to issue press releases attacking journalists.

Bowman later followed up with an additional email to POLITICO.

“We understand you are very focused on our press release; we hope you will apply the same focus to the facts, which include that a national reporter from a wire service publishing [sic] inaccurate and misleading stories about the agency and it’s [sic] staff on the ground,” Bowman wrote. “We think that is more important than who drafted a press release.”

The Associated Press on Sunday evening pushed back on the EPA’s claims.

“AP’s exclusive story was the result of on-the-ground reporting at Superfund sites in and around Houston, as well as AP’s strong knowledge of these sites and EPA practices,” it said in a statement. “We object to the EPA’s attempts to discredit that reporting by suggesting it was completed solely from ‘the comforts of Washington’ and stand by the work of both journalists who jointly reported and wrote the story.”

Any bets on how soon the EPA will be tweeting about FAKE NEWS?

Houston’s always been soggy. It probably wasn’t a very good place to build an enormous city, when you get right down to it.

No city could have withstood Harvey without serious harm, but Houston made itself more vulnerable than necessary. Paving over the saw-grass prairie reduced the ground’s capacity to absorb rainfall. Flood-control reservoirs were too small. Building codes were inadequate. Roads became rivers, so while hospitals were open, it was almost impossible to reach them by car.

…

Harvey is a humanitarian disaster. Ordinary Texans were defenseless against rising waters contaminated by sewage and dotted with floating colonies of fire ants. The confirmed death toll, 20 as of Aug. 30, is expected to rise as rescuers discover more bodies. Residents will return to damaged homes vulnerable to the spread of mold. Much of the damage, which could run to $100 billion or more by one estimate, is uninsured. “This will be the worst natural disaster in American history” in financial terms, Joel Myers, founder and president of AccuWeather, predicted in an Aug. 29 statement.

Sprawling Houston is a can-do city whose attitude is grow first, ask questions later. It’s the only major U.S. city without a zoning code saying what types of buildings can go where, so skyscrapers sometimes sprout next to split-levels. Voters have repeatedly opposed enacting a zoning law.

No to zoning law, but yes to public money after a disaster.

Houston is suffering now from the lack of an effective plan to deal with chronic flooding.

Attitude is partly to blame. Michael Talbott spent 35 years with the Harris County Flood Control District trying to protect Houston, mainly by seeking funds for widening drainage channels and bayous. But he resisted the notion that more drastic measures such as preserving green space and managing growth were required. Shortly before retiring as executive director in 2016, Talbott gave an interview to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in which he disputed the effect of global warming and said conservationists were antidevelopment. “They have an agenda … their agenda to protect the environment overrides common sense,” he said.

Wait. Protecting the environment – the one we all depend on for survival – is “an agenda” but unrestricted building with no thought for the environment that we all depend on for survival is not? How does that work exactly?

Why do people insist on portraying “the environment” as some kind of whimsical luxury dreamed up by latte-sipping Gwyneth Paltrows? Without “the environment” we have no food, no water, no breathable air, no survivable temperature, no anything. There’s no such thing as doing without “the environment,” but there is such a thing as environmental degradation so extreme that only insects can survive. If city and state and federal officials don’t have “an agenda” of preserving a livable environment then we’re all in big big trouble.

The fight in Texas is a microcosm of a national battle. The International Code Council, a Washington nonprofit made up of government officials and industry representatives, updates its model codes every three years, inviting state and local governments to adopt them. Last year the National Association of Home Builders boasted of its prowess at stopping codes for 2018 that it didn’t like. “Only 6 percent of the proposals that NAHB opposed made it through the committee hearings intact,” the association wrote on its blog. The homebuilders demonstrated their power again this year, when President Donald Trump reversed an Obama initiative restricting federally funded building projects in flood plains. “This is a huge victory for NAHB and its members,” the association blogged.

Not all homebuilders are OK with the organization’s antiregulatory bent. Ron Jones, a member of the NAHB board who builds houses in Colorado, says that while the first priority now is helping the victims, he hopes the storm will force new thinking. “There’s no sort of national leadership involved,” he says. “For them it’s just, ‘Hell, we’ll rebuild these houses as many times as you’ll pay us to do it.’ ”

Let’s not do it that way. That’s a bad way.

Hey if you’re going to write a piece attacking feminism in a major newspaper, at least get the author details right.

Serbia’s [well known] daily newspaper, Politika, has been accused of using made-up commentators to promote misogyny after publishing an anti-feminist article allegedly written by a scientist, but illustrated with the photograph of a German actor.

The commentary accused feminists of using the recent murders of two women at the hands of their ex-husbands to spread “propaganda”.

“Agressive feminists came to the fore in order to abuse the tragedies for their political agenda,” the article said, also reminding the readers that “almost all infanticides in the world are committed by women”.

The women in question were murdered at social centres where they were bringing their children to meet their fathers. In one horrifying case, the father murdered both child and mother.

The column in question was signed by “Dr Petar Velickovic”, but the accompanying photograph is that of a German actor, Andreas Kaufmann, who has since called the article “disgusting”.

Politika said oh oops sorry, Dr Velickovic sent the wrong photo, not our fault.

However, searches of the internet have yet to reveal a forensic psychiatrist under the name Petar Velickovic.

In the meantime, the Journalists’ Association of Serbia, has revealed another anti-feminist article in Politika, also attributed to a questionable scientific authority, using the photograph of a deceased person from Germany.

Milovan B Vucic, the alleged psychoanalyst from Los Angeles, wrote a comment entitled “Injustices of Feminist Judiciary“, published on May 5.

“This practice by Politika is reminiscent of Slobodan Milosevic’s reign, when the newspaper published made-up letters of support to the regime,” the Journalists’ Association said in a press release.

Tamara Skrozza, from Serbia’s Press Council, said the views expressed in both articles constitute hate speech towards women and feminists, and should not be present in the media.

“It is truly terrible if Politika deliberately promotes discriminatory, chauvinist opinions,” Skrozza told BIRN.

Stewart reports an item that’s not available in English yet:

[A] brief report on how Israeli/German satirical artist Shahak Shapira (whose work we’ve featured in the past) was involved in the takeover of 31 secret AfD Facebook groups.

Working with “Die Partei”, this was the culmination of an 11-month infiltration operation. After the infiltrators (using fake profiles) had gained the trust of the admins over many months, and had received admin privileges themselves, they staged a simultaneous coup, got rid of the “real” admins, exposed the groups’ content, including hate speech and fake news, to public view and posted a video by Shapira explaining to those members who were real the precise inner workings of the bot-driven political scam into which they’d been suckered. His bottom line was that if the AfD can’t run 31 secret Facebook groups without being overthrown, then they are also incapable of running a country (so vote for “Die Partei” instead).

Those with knowledge of German who want more can read this, which includes a link to Shapira’s video.

 

Alt National Park Service on Facebook is reporting Trump’s destruction of the National Park Service as it happens.

Yesterday:

An unfolding crisis at a flooded chemical plant outside Houston on Thursday led to the prompt announcement of an investigation by a federal body that Trump would eliminate. The administration’s proposed budget would wind down funding(-100%) for the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, a small, independent federal agency tasked with investigating chemical accidents. The board, which has a budget of $11 million and 40 staff, played a major part in investigating the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and has conducted more than 130 investigations since its began operations in 1998. It originated as part of a set of 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act.

Also yesterday, a few hours earlier:

ATTN: Fossil fuel officials take key spots on new Interior royalties committee. The new Interior Department committee designed to assess federal royalty policies for energy development on public land. Officials for ConocoPhillips Co., Anadarko Petroleum Corp., and Cloud Peak Energy will serve as primary members of the panel. The new royalties committee, which will hold its first meeting on Oct. 4, is set to advise the Interior Department on the industry impact of policy and regulatory changes related to energy production royalty rates on federal and tribal land.

The pattern is evident.

The AP reports that many Superfund sites in Houston are flooded, thus at risk of spreading contamination. It also reports that while its reporters have been able to take a look at the sites, the EPA has not.

The Associated Press surveyed seven Superfund sites in and around Houston during the flooding. All had been inundated with water, in some cases many feet deep.

On Saturday, hours after the AP published its first report, the EPA said it had reviewed aerial imagery confirming that 13 of the 41 Superfund sites in Texas were flooded by Harvey and were “experiencing possible damage” due to the storm.

The statement confirmed the AP’s reporting that the EPA had not yet been able to physically visit the Houston-area sites, saying the sites had “not been accessible by response personnel.” EPA staff had checked on two Superfund sites in Corpus Christi on Thursday and found no significant damage.

AP journalists used a boat to document the condition of one flooded Houston-area Superfund site, but accessed others with a vehicle or on foot. The EPA did not immediately respond to questions about why its personnel had not yet been able to do so.

Because Trump and Pruitt have already depopulated the agency so thoroughly that there’s no one there to do so?

“Teams are in place to investigate possible damage to these sites as soon flood waters recede, and personnel are able to safely access the sites,” the EPA statement said.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, speaking with reporters at a news conference on Saturday after the AP report was published, said he wants the EPA “in town to address the situation.”

Turner said he didn’t know about the potential environmental concerns soon enough to discuss them with President Donald Trump.

Well I’m not sure discussing them with Trump would have done any good. He wants to destroy the EPA.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has called cleaning up Superfund sites a priority, even as he has taken steps to roll back or delay rules aimed at preventing air and water pollution. Trump’s proposed 2018 budget seeks to cut money for the Superfund program by 30 percent, though congressional Republicans are likely to approve a less severe reduction.

Like Trump, Pruitt has expressed skepticism about the predictions of climate scientists that warmer air and seas will produce stronger, more drenching storms.

And they’ll go right on doing that.

Under the Obama administration, the EPA conducted a nationwide assessment of the increased threat to Superfund sites posed by climate change, including rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes. Of the more than 1,600 sites reviewed as part of the 2012 study, 521 were determined to be in 1-in-100 year and 1-in-500 year flood zones. Nearly 50 sites in coastal areas could also be vulnerable to rising sea levels.

The threats to human health and wildlife from rising waters that inundate Superfund sites vary widely depending on the specific contaminants and the concentrations involved. The EPA report specifically noted the risk that floodwaters might carry away and spread toxic materials over a wider area.

Yes but Trump and Pruitt don’t live in places like that so they don’t care.

Taslima on the floods in India and Bangladesh:

Flood in Bangladesh, India, Nepal. Hundreds died. Millions suffering. pic.twitter.com/MlsWEdgCvo

— taslima nasreen (@taslimanasreen) August 19, 2017

Flood in Bangladesh. pic.twitter.com/ouwkINnMNG

— taslima nasreen (@taslimanasreen) August 17, 2017

Good news bad news. David Clarke has resigned his job as Milwaukee County sheriff…”to pursue other opportunities.” That probably means he’s going to be Trump’s new whatever – expert on human rights perhaps? Good for Milwaukee, bad for all of us.

“After almost 40 years serving the great people of Milwaukee County, I have chosen to retire to pursue other opportunities,” Clarke said. “I will have news about my next steps in the very near future” — in fact, he tweeted Friday that the announcement will come next week.

…

Earlier this year, jailers under his watch drew the attentions of prosecutors, who launched an investigation after an inmate died of dehydration. A jury recommended prosecutors file charges against more than half a dozen of Clarke’s employees for allegedly turning off water to the dead man’s cell.

Clarke, who was not charged himself, accepted the move as “part of the process” and denied any wrongdoing, noting he “cannot control someone who comes in in bad medical health that is a heroin user or has all of these other ailments and they happen to die inside that facility downtown.”

Later this year, CNN reported that Clarke plagiarized parts of his 2013 master’s thesis, failing “to properly attribute his sources at least 47 times.”

Incidents such as these — together with statements from the sheriff such as one declaring that blacks are “uneducated, they’re lazy, and they’re morally bankrupt” — have done little to curry favor with local politicians and national advocates.

That’s a stupid gloss. The issue isn’t “currying favor,” it’s being a decent human and public servant. I wish journalists would stop making it about public relations or “divisiveness” and focus on what’s important.

Speaking of floods…

As the world’s media trains its sights on the tragic events in Texas and Louisiana, another water-driven catastrophe is unfolding in villages like Beraberi throughout Bangladesh and parts of Nepal and India.

There, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) estimates that at least 1,200 have died and more than 41 million people have been affected by monsoon rains and severe flooding as of June this year. The rains are now moving northwest towards Pakistan, where more devastation is expected.

At its peak on August 11, the equivalent to almost a week’s worth of average rainfall during the summer monsoon season was dumped across parts of Bangladesh in the space of a few hours, according to the country’s Meteorological Department, forcing villagers in low-lying northern areas to grab what few possessions they could carry and flee their homes in search of higher ground.

And still the rains keep coming. In Bangladesh alone, floods have so far claimed the lives of 142 people, and [affected] over 8.5 million.

In Beraberi, one of numerous island villages know as “chars” dotted along the Jamuna River, entire homes have been washed away, and crops and food supplies — including livestock — all but wiped out. When aid workers carrying relief parcels from the IFRC arrived by helicopter earlier this week, villagers described the rains as the “worst in living memory.”

It’s played hell with the rice crop.

This is just a taste of what global warming is going to do to Bangladesh. And that’s not even all.

The sheer number of displaced people would be a monumental challenge for any government, but in Bangladesh, where as many as 27,000 Rohingya refugees have this week arrived across the border from Myanmar — joining an estimated 85,000 currently housed in camps — the situation becomes additionally perilous.

Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries on the planet.