US Republican attorneys general sue to stop EPA’s carbon rule, Reuters, Clark Mindock

Republican attorneys general from 27 U.S. states and industry trade groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA on Thursday. They seek to block an EPA landmark rule requiring sweeping reductions in carbon emissions from existing coal-fired power plants and new natural gas plants.

The rule, finalized by President Joe Biden’s administration last month as part of an effort to combat climate change, was challenged in multiple lawsuits filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, including one by 25 states spearheaded by West Virginia and Indiana and another by Ohio and Kansas. Electric utility, mining and coal industry trade

The third and best source of funds would be a clawback of money looted by Cerberus, de la Torre, and MPT, based on a prosecution for fraudulent conveyance, misrepresentation to shareholders, and other possible criminal charges. As a settlement, restitution would have to be paid to the hospitals, under new ownership.

That may yet come, but it would require more aggressive action than we have seen from the state attorney general, Andrea Campbell, to date. This is surprising, because Campbell is generally respected as tough and progressive. But this week, Campbell said, in a statement on Twitter no less,

“My office is working to get answers and we intend to seek accountability for any laws that may have been violated.”

Back in February, as

“Silly” Arizona House Representative Republican Justin Wilmeth is making an argument for lower gasoline, etc. prices to Arizona. Justin traveled to California to ask for no cap on fuel prices at a California refinery (Arizona has no refinery). As if he does not have enough to do in AZ?

Not sure what makes him think, they will not raise prices anyway and without a cap. Justin’s main beef . . .

“If they were to lower production or supply, the prices would go up, and there’s not much we could do about that. That’s basic supply and demand economy . . . right there.” 

No Justin, that is called Supply (Chain) manipulation versus Demand and an on-purpose decrease in Capacity to increase profits. Oh, you will not allow us to increase prices? We will

By Prof. Heather Cox-Richardson

Letters from an American

Pres. Joe Biden, Dem Governor Tony Evers, and Microsoft are bailing out Wisconsin from trump’s “eighth wonder of the world” lie in Racine WI with Taiwan’s Foxconn. When this was occurring, Repub. Gov. Scott Walker with Repub legislators committed to a $3.3 billion subsidy and tax incentive package in support of the pirates. Racine did get upgraded upgrading roads, sewer system, electricity in support of the Foxconn plan. And a bunch of empty building with few people hired. Apparently, Microsoft sees value in the buildings and the location. Hopefully, the cheeseheads learned a lesson about trump’s promises. Some Prof. Heather . .

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Today, in Racine, Wisconsin, President Joe

By Paul Kiernan

AB: I have written about West Virginia on several occasions. If you want some history on its politics and issue, you can go here, here, here, here, here, etc. and further back. One time, Senator Joe Manchin took to the Senate floor to preach about the death of a young and pretty West Virginian. He blamed the two appointees to the FDA for being the cause of this. West Virginia has it problems with a shortage of workers and a dislike for migrants. There is little being done by the state to resolve them. There is no city within West Virginia which has a population at100,000. the largest being Charleston at ~48,000.~~~~~~~~

West Virginia’s Dilemma . . .

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that most counties in West Virginia

McDonald’s and other fast-food giants are struggling in the inflation economy. qz.com

The inflation economy has come for Fat Food. As I read this, I would look at their costs. They talk about their reductions in Labor. It looks more to me like inventory turns and their investment in it. That is itself could make them more competitive. I would have to take a deeper dive into the industry to figure it out.

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Inflation has fallen far from its 2022 peaks but remains elevated. It frustrates the Federal Reserve’s efforts and keeping interest rates high. Consumers are somewhat optimistic, Still, they are worried about inflation. Even so, the overall economy continues to grow steadily.

But big fast food chains and other food companies

Inflation Is Scrambling Americans’ Perceptions of Middle-Class Life, businessinsider.com, Jennifer Sor

Yes, we have inflation. It is a given. Inflation is scrambling the lives of middle-class Americans. Income is not keeping up with the costs of maintaining a Middle-Class Life. I have sat here in AZ watching this play out in the nation. In many cases we are fighting a supply chain shortage which is entirely controllable in the US. Similar happened in 2008. In particular with then, it was with semiconductors. The companies shut down production because they had no orders. Prices went up because of shortages.

We are seeing similar today except it is contrived or planned. Higher costs are impacting how people can live even with a higher salary.

Executive Summary portion of the Medicare Payment Policy Report to Congress

I have only had time to wade through the Executive Summary portion of the MedPac Report to Congress on FFS and MA Medicare plans. If the Executive Summary has any meaning, we will see some changes in how MA plans administer pricing of services to Medicare patients. The difference between MA and FFS Medicare is extraordinary which you will see in my commentary. This is nothing new. I am hoping Congress will allow MedPac to force the issue.

Key take-aways from this report:

Medicare spends approximately 22 percent more for MA enrollees than it would spend if the beneficiaries were enrolled in FFS Medicare.
Medpac projects the 22 percent will result in difference

Western “Values” … | Homeless on the High Desert

Dog named Cricket got a raw deal from an owner who could not train it, so took the easy way out. And she wants to be in the White House?

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Donna asked me about this the other day and it doesn’t seem to be going away

First, let’s establish a couple of things: I am from Way Out West, from Eureka! California to Eureka! Montana; grew up in a logging, lumber and ranching town and my first job was on a cattle ranch, fifteen years old. Second: South Dakota is not way out west. It’s barely Montana; it’s the mid-west, the middle of nowhere

I’m not sure that I’d call it a “value” and I’m sure they probably do the same in the swamplands, but I’ve had to put a couple dogs down. An old friend,

A while back, I exchanged emails with the International Energy Agency. My goal was to find out what I could present, what I could not present, and also gain permission to utilize their charts and detail. They said yes. The detail here is on EVs in general and what countries are doing the most. As you may expect, China is ahead of the curve. I would say the US is still trying to get it right.

I need to look a bit deeper into these reports as there may be additional information to present here at Angry Bear.

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The new Global EV Outlook finds the world’s electric car fleet continues to grow strongly, with sales set to reach 17 million this year. This in spite of near-term challenges in some markets. Based on today’s policy settings, the

By Megan Messerly

One more ACA rule was finalized by Biden today. Not something huge in numbers; but something which will impact a few thousand people. People who were allowed to stay in the US or under a program called.  Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA.

A coalition of states, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kansas and Mississippi argue the rule oversteps the “scope of executive power.” 5th COA agreed with them . . . no surprise there. Biden proposed a new rule for DACA recipient’s which was also declared illegal. The court allowed current recipients to remain in the US

On October 31, 2022, the DACA Rule rescinded and replaced the 2012 DACA memo. All current grants of DACA and advance

By Andrew Sprung

The latest scam in healthcare involves being enrolled in a different healthcare plan than what you initially enrolled in the beginning, The new ACA plan which will not be as good as the one you had. How easy is it for someone to do so to the enrollee? It can be done by using a person’s name, date of birth, and state. The licensed agent can access a policyholder’s coverage through the federal exchange or its direct enrollment platforms. It’s harder to do through state ACA markets, because they often require additional information.

Also clicking on a misleading ads which present the federal tax credit used to pay the health plan premium as money that can be used for other purposes constitutes consent.

Andrew Sprung has this

By Dean Baker

Commerce Department reported that GDP grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter, some-what lower than had generally been predicted. However, the headline number was held down by slow inventory accumulation, which subtracted 0.35 percentage points from growth, and a big rise in the trade deficit, which lowered growth by 0.86 percentage points.

Pulling out these factors, final sales to domestic producers grew at a strong 2.8 percent annual rate. While it is not always reasonable to pull out these factors in assessing the underlying strength of the economy when they seem like part of a trend, this does not appear to be the case here.

The pace of inventory accumulation was just $35.4 billion at an annual rate, below its

I first caught up with this article on MedPage Today, “Doc Blows Whistle on Cigna.” I also read the ProPublic report. Both are reporting on denial of claims before and after treatment and the productivity of claims reviewers. Additionally, the report discusses the use of labor (nurses, etc.) outside of the US to evaluate claims and their errors. All of these attempts are examples of what is going on to cuts costs by reducing the time to decide on important procedures and functions which require a critical analysis.

The odd part of this is the reports do not appear to be just talking about MA plans.

Doc Blows Whistle on Cigna

Cigna increased its efforts to speed up claims denial by using new software and performance measures that pressured

Dahlia Lithwick and Joseph Stern

as taken from Slate

Good read as one can see how the SCOTUS 5 or 6 are twisting the logic of Constitution first and portraying the president into something more reasonable. Military swears first to the Constitution. This is a very strange read for myself. Others may not find it so strange and such is open to discussion.

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Mollified themselves with vague promises of when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs:

They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts

Do you, does anyone, really believe trump gives a damn if he is fined $9,000? That is not a threat to him. And what jail cell, in what jail will they put this threatening president in? I know one county jail, Cook County Jail in Chicago. Let him mingle with the general population. Let him bluster with them.

This is a problem with trump. He knows nothing will happen to him. Those fines will disappear and he will walk. He will not go to jail. His towel boys will get him out. They will scream to Alito.

Some WSJ for you. Judge Fines Trump for Contempt in Hush-Money Case, Threatens Jail Time, WSJ, James Fanelli and Jacob Gerschman.

A New York judge on Tuesday fined Donald Trump $9,000 and threatened to throw him in jail for repeatedly violating a

By Steve Hutkins

Save The Post Office

USPS: For those who are wondering, DFA is “Delivering for America.” It consists of various initiatives, some of which have been initiated and some which have not. The initiatives are found in the Table of Contents on Page 1 listed as Strategies in the Delivering for America document. The failure of timely delivery of the mail in Richmond and now Atlanta utilizing RPDCs has caused concern. Both Richmond and Atlanta have experienced decreases in timely delivery.

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Tensions between the Postal Service (USPS) and the Postal Regulatory Commission are intensifying. On Friday, the Commission issued an order directing the Postal Service to file a request for an advisory opinion on Delivering for America

By Les Leopold

Chelsea Green Publishing

Interesting book I just started to touch upon. Book review by Paul Prescod. Last section touches upon why layoffs may happen . . . Stock Buybacks and Deregulation.

Across the political spectrum, it seems as if the right to decent employment has disappeared from the agenda. Wars, natural disasters, and Donald Trump’s antics grab headlines while the closing of a major factory doesn’t register a blip. Even on the Left, a fatalistic acceptance of layoffs has numbed us to the human misery caused by contemporary capitalism’s widespread job insecurity.

Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It, a new book by labor educator Les

Matteo Wong

The Atlantic

Abbreviated take at Angry Bear on what is happening at Tesla.

Presently, the media has not been to kind to Tesla and its founder Elon Musk. The latest in The Atlantic gives a run down on the past and where Musk may take Tesla in the future. It sounds and looks better than what Tesla has been experiencing.

Of late, Tesla’s cars have come to seem a bit hazardous. The self-driving features have been linked to hundreds of accidents and more than a dozen deaths. Then, earlier this month, the company recalled its entire fleet of Cybertrucks. A mechanical problem that trapped its gas pedal, as InsideEVs put it, “could potentially turn the stainless steel trapezoid into a 6,800-pound land missile.”

Along the way,

By Lloyd Alter

Carbon Upfront!

The Toronto Star leads today with a story, “Ripe for a challenge,” in which climate change reporter Kate Allen describes attempts to grow strawberries indoors in Canada “as red-ripe and juicy as if they came out of a sunny field in July.” Canadians import C$6.2 billion more fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables than our food exports, “but a pandemic, wars, and the steadily thumping drumbeat of climate change have all exposed the fragility of this system.”

Many of the companies that anticipated a cannabis boom after legalization are pivoting to berries, hoping to attract funds from an X-PRIZE style competition funded by the Weston Family Foundation, the same family that owns the Loblaws grocery chain that we

You gotta be old enough to remember what took place in the sixties and into the seventies with regard to protesting. In 1970 when I was bathing in and drinking the Camp Lejeune water, we were selected to be trained in riot control. JIC the protestors, the student protesters were a bit rambunctious in Washington D.C. All the better we were not called out. Still the same fears we are seeing today on college campuses. Similar right-wing dialogue by government officials and groups advocating for retaliation on protestors.

And today’s reactions to protests on campuses?

Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations.

This is a rehash of what was going on in Flint from 2014 onward. It is mostly what I had seen, read about, and wrote about from 2014 till 2022. Republicans were in control of the state during most of this time if not all of it. Attorneys will lay claim to 1/3rd of the payout. If the state gov had been more active in resolving the issue, I am sure the attorney fees would have been less.

Article by Gabrielle Gurley with a lot of input by a former Michigan resident.

The American Prospect

Veolia North America (VNA) offers no insights into its role as an advisor to Flint Michigan. This even after agreeing to a $25million in preserving the health of Flint, Michigan’s to avoid a second high-profile jury trial over its role as an adviser to Flint.

According to The Hill the New FAFSA forms were supposed to be easier and shorter. Shorter yes, nut not so easy. There is a list of 2024-24 FAFSA issues which are confounding parents and students attempting to complete the FAFSA so as to be eligible for student aid. FAFSA forms were changed in 2023 and were supposed to be available in October 2023. Availability was delayed till December 2023. When finally released there were complications with the forms being taken down and applicants and parents being unable to fix errors.

The new forms may be shorter and better for students and parents but the difficulties encountered are causing both to worry. The one saving grace in Arizona being Governor Hobbs setting aside funds to assist in filling out FAFSA

By Lora Kelly

The Atlantic

A plan to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid process, better known as FAFSA has been a few years in the making. In 2020, as part of a spending bill, Congress ordered the Department of Education to create a shorter version of the FAFSA form. The new application would reduce the maximum number of questions from 108 to 36.

Rose Horowitch writes, the goal was to make things easier for applicants, increase the number of students who could receive federal aid, and resulting in “a rare win for bipartisan and common sense governance.” In recent months, the new FAFSA rollout has met roadblocks and delays at almost every turn. The form was to launch in October. It didn’t open up until the very end of

A high court decision in favor of Idaho puts at risk the federal government’s ability to set national environmental, labor and consumer protection standards.

by Merrill Goozner

Angry Bear can not add to Merrill’s remarks on Idaho’s stance banning abortion in almost all circumstances and their claims to preempt the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. Until it is them who are endangered will we find the rules (which they are) will change. Sad . . .

GoozNews

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this morning in the federal government’s suit against Idaho’s “Defense of Life Act,” which bans abortion in almost all circumstances and claims to preempt the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.

By Andrea Hsu

National Public Radio

The Starbucks case is more a battle over which approach Appeals courts should use when they consider requests for injunctions like this one over labor violations. The Supreme Court appears to be weighing in on their decisions. The impact of the Supreme Court decision will weigh heavily on unions and labor.

Five Appeals court use a two-prong test:

– Is there “reasonable cause” to believe an unfair labor practice has occurred, and

– Determine whether granting an injunction would be “just and proper.”

This to determine whether there is a foundation for the complaints by the seven Starbucks baristas.

Four other Appeals Courts use a four-prong test;

– Is the unfair labor practice case is likely

It is getting serious now. Kroger is willing to sell off more stores in order to consolidate with Albertsons. The one thing we keep on seeing is the manipulation of supply chain due to circumstance to achieve manufacturing shortfall, and influence, to maximize profits. Much of what we have and are experiencing was avoidable. The tools exist to give better perspectives of what is going on from start to finish of product. As you read through my telling of what I see, you will get near the end and run into a link to a Vox article. It supports what I am saying and have seen over the decades.

A quarter of a century ago, Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation called attention to the acceleration of corporate, quasi-monopolistic control of America’s food

Https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/04/11/homeowners-face-a-25trn-bill-from-climate-change

By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early

Washington Monthly

Trump has mocked veterans and privatized their health care. Biden honors them but hasn’t challenged Trump’s privatization policies. Currently, they are moving more and more veterans to commercial healthcare. This rather than restoring VA healthcare to a better place for veterans to be and at a lower cost. Think of Medicare Advantage.

From mocking John McCain’s military service to disparaging American soldiers who died abroad as “losers” and “suckers,” Donald Trump has shown plenty of disrespect to veterans over the years. By contrast, Joe Biden consistently valorizes military service, including that of his beloved late son, Beau. So, it’s natural for Democrats to hope that maybe this time

By Tom Dinger

The Bell

A commentary by an acquaintance of mine and from years ago. I believe there is only one person who might recognize the author. He was well liked amongst his fellow writers.

Americans Doubting the Big Bang Is a Healthy Thing

A new Associated Press-GfK poll asked approximately one thousand U.S. adults to rate their confidence in science and medicine.  The results showed surprising skepticism in various scientific concepts that many/most scientists consider established fact.  People were most likely to accept practical matters, such as smoking causing cancer or antibiotics causing more resistant bacteria.  More theoretical concepts, such as global warming, dating the age of the Earth, or the Big Bang creation of