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Daily Archives: April 11, 2021
Nevada Mayor John Lee: Why I’m leaving the Democratic Party – Fox News
Posted: April 11, 2021 at 6:06 am
Like every Nevadan, I grew up in awe of the American experiment. As children, we looked up to the flag and were proud of what it symbolized and what it stood forfreedom, opportunity and promise.Back then, we knew both partiesdespite their political differencesshared the same values.
Like so many other Nevadans, I registered with the Democratic Party because Democrats seemed to be the party of the working class. As a dishwasher who joined the Culinary Union, thats what wasand still isimportant to me.
But like President Ronald Reagan and President Donald Trump, Ive seen firsthand how the Democrat Party has changedradically, and not for the better.Theyve embraced a socialist, extremist agenda that is not the party of JFK, or of my parents.Their ideas hurt working-class families, restrict freedom and extinguish opportunity for millions of Americansparticularly working-class minorities who deserve the chance to give their families a better life.
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As the Democratic mayor of North Las Vegas, I have the great privilege of leading our city, both in times of prosperity and through incredibly trying times, much like weve seen this past year. We Nevadans, and we Americans, are resilient. We live in the greatest country in the world, made possible thanks to the values we hold dear. Today, these values are under attack.
Here in Nevada, weve seen the full takeover of the Democratic Party by admitted socialists.Their goal is clearending the America we know and love, and replacing it with a culture of socialist conformity that erases freedom, opportunity and liberty from the American canvas.
I will not let the America I love be hijacked by an extremist left-wing mob that blacklists, bans, shouts down and cancels anyone who disagrees with them.
That is why I am switching to register as a member of the Republican Party.Though Ive been a registered Democrat on paper, I made the switch in my heart a long time ago, because on some things, theres simply no compromise.
Thats why I voted for President Trump twice. Thats why I had an A-plus rating from the NRA and their endorsement in my time in the state Senate. I refused to compromise my pro-life, pro-Second amendment values.
There used to be a place in the Democratic Party for conservative voices like mine.Today, thats no longer the case.
There used to be a place in the Democratic Party for conservative voices like mine.Today, thats no longer the case.Their party demands a senseless devotion to cancel culture, socialism and anti-American values I simply do not share.
Im not the only former Democrat who feels abandoned by the modern Democrat Party.I know there are countless others who want to make the switch, because it means the difference between hope and despair for their children and grandchildren. And I want them to join me in making that switch.
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The Republican Party that has emerged from President Trumps leadership is a working-class party of opportunity, freedom and hope.I dont just want that for my familyI want that for every Nevadan and American.
The Great Seal of America says:"Out of many, one."Our national motto is:"In God we trust."Its time to bring people together to get things done. Its time to stop shouting and start solving problems. Its time to defend the America we love so our sons and daughters can share in the blessings weve enjoyed.
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Whats in the Democrats Voting-Rights Bill – The Wall Street Journal
Posted: at 6:06 am
Democrats are pushing a sweeping voting bill that would make many changes to rules regarding voting and campaign finance. The bill is facing a tough battle in the evenly divided Senate in coming weeks, after the House version of the bill passed 220-210 with no Republican support.
Proponents say the bill is necessary to protect access to the polls, especially for minority voters. They also argue that it is crucial now because many GOP-controlled state legislatures are considering their own laws to tighten voting rules, saying they would improve election security. (You can see a guide to Georgias new rules here.) Republicans argue that the bill amounts to a partisan, federal takeover of elections that would make voting less secure.
Here is a look at what is in the roughly 800-page bill, known as the For the People Act.
Big chunks of the For the People Act lay out rules regarding voting. Bill authors say new national minimum standards are needed to ensure access to the polls, while Republicans argue that states should retain flexibility on how they run elections and that the proposal would represent a federal takeover of voting rules.
States currently have wide latitude on questions such as early voting and vote-by-mail options. Some federal restrictions on changes to election practices in Southern states, which had been a core provision of the Voting Rights Act, were nullified by the Supreme Court in 2013.
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Wilmington woman will celebrate National Siblings Day with a new half-brother and half-sister – StarNewsOnline.com
Posted: at 6:06 am
Amanda Garcia was12 years old when she learned her stepfather wasnt her biological dad. Although not knowing has been a source of curiosityand concern over the years, she hasnt decided topursue contact since.
In fact, it wasgeneral healthand ancestryinterests that led the 47-year-old Wilmington woman to take a23andMe DNAtestin October. She was surprised to learn that most of her genetic makeup relates to Europe and the British Isles. And thetest didn't reveal many insights about her health, either.
No, the big shock came with a list of newly discovered family members.
It said I had a cousin, who was actually my half uncle,and he told me I had a half-brother and half-sister,she said.I was stunned, blown away.
More and more people are uncovering such connections through direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry. Test sales started booming around 2017and now millions people have since used such tests.
23andMe said that its tests weren't necessarily designed to confirm parentage and familial relationships, but that an optional DNA Relatives tool is available for test takers. As a result, they are increasingly hearing stories of families discovering and reuniting with newfound relatives.
Garcia had been told some negative things about her father in the past, but she thoughtreaching out throughthese connectionswould be a good way to learn more about a side of her familyshe knew nothing about.
As I was talking to them, all of that fear started to melt away, Garcia said.I learned that I needed to know what happened, and about this whole other side of me.
Soon after, in early January, her half-brother was flying toWilmington fromMinnesota to meet her, and help coordinate a meeting with her father.
The three men were also able to meet Garcias husband, and her four children, aged 3 to 18.Garciaisa homeschoolingmomand admits that shes been a little too busy for the past 18 years to think too much about her past.
As aUNCW alum,she is proud that shewill soon be sending her oldest daughter, a violinist, to the university. Shes also spent a lot of time with her next oldest, a soccer player whoplays travel ball.
Truthfully, I think all of this has happened at the right time, she said. Ive had time to process and am now in a place where I can move forward.
And in recent months, shes been busymaking up for lost time-- bydelivering flowers and Valentines treats to her sister, who lives nearby,andsending herniecea big box of gifts in Minnesota to open via video.
We Facetime, we play games, Garcia said. Its been great.
Garcia is also looking forward to more.
My sister, understandably, has been worried about COVID, Garcia said.I really cant wait to spend more time with her, and for her to meet my family.
The whole process has been such a cathartic experience, that Garcia told23andMe what has happened in her life sinceshe took that test.
I feel like I have closure, she said. I finally can put together those missing pieces.This has given me a lot of peace.
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Confusion may be Democrats friend in drive to raise corporate taxes – POLITICO
Posted: at 6:06 am
That will make many lawmakers eyes glaze over.
Most members of Congress dont understand the first thing about the international corporate tax system and wont have the bandwidth to figure it out which should make Democrats proposals easier to approve.
A lot of members dont understand it and will not be interested in learning about it theyll just defer to people in the caucus they view as experts, predicts Rohit Kumar, a former top aide to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell now at the consulting firm PwC.
The complexity of the proposals, and lawmakers unfamiliarity with the international tax system, also presents a challenge to opponents of the plans, including lobbyists seeking to kill or blunt the provisions.
Lawmakers have long complained about their rivals voting for bills they have not read or dont understand. But that will perhaps never be truer with Democrats international tax changes.
The section of the code dealing with companies operating in multiple countries is notoriously baroque among tax professionals. Corporations often have ornate structures, with subsidiaries across the globe, and it can be difficult determining where they made their money, how much they owe in taxes and which government they should be paying.
This stuff is enough to make your head explode, even if youre a tax lawyer, said one tax lobbyist, speaking on condition of anonymity. It is ungodly complicated.
President Joe Biden has proposed a host of changes to the international tax system. On Monday, a trio of senators, including Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), offered their own international proposal that builds and expands on the administrations plans. Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has put out yet another package of possible changes.
Democrats could end up raising more money from those international provisions than they do from their much better-known plan to hike the corporate tax rate, especially if Congress balks at Biden's proposal to lift that rate to 28 percent from 21 percent. If lawmakers do increase the corporate rate, many expect them to settle for something in the mid-twenties which could force Democrats to lean even more into dunning businesses overseas operations to make their budget numbers work.
Many of their proposals revolve around strengthening a special tax known as GILTI Republicans created in 2017 as a way of targeting so-called intangible income, which is money companies earn from things like patents and royalties and other types of intellectual property.
Democrats also want to revamp or throw out an export incentive known as foreign-derived intangible income or FDII, sometimes called Fiddy.
And Democrats are proposing to rewrite or kill another special tax called BEAT, which was designed to go after companies that reduce their tax bills by booking lots of deductions in the U.S. while declaring they made most of their profits in foreign affiliates that are beyond the jurisdiction of the IRS. The BEAT, or base erosion and anti-abuse tax, hasnt worked out like lawmakers intended, raising a fraction of the revenue policymakers had anticipated.
On Wednesday, the administration proposed replacing it with a new tax it dubbed SHIELD that Treasury officials said would do a better job of combating offshore tax avoidance.
The proposals will require a big education campaign on Capitol Hill just to get across the basic concepts, and lawmakers in both parties have begun preparing for debate over the provisions. Every vote will potentially matter because of Democrats tiny majorities in the House and Senate.
Democrats acknowledge the complexity of their proposals but say they are trying to give colleagues enough time to get up to speed on the issues.
It is really Byzantine and you have to reconcile this section and that section and thats why were starting early and were starting with some pretty straightforward concepts, said Wyden.
Their easier-to-digest message on the proposals boils down to one word: outsourcing.
Pointing to the fact that companies can pay lower tax rates on their overseas profits than their domestic earnings the GILTI tax rate is half the 21 percent regular corporate rate Democrats argue the provisions push companies to move their operations and jobs overseas.
Republicans in Congress gave corporations essentially a 50-percent-off coupon on their taxes if they move production overseas, said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), another tax writer.
Experts call that an oversimplification, and the evidence of companies going overseas because of the provisions, which were part of the GOP's 2017 tax overhaul, is thin. Investment and jobs in the U.S. actually increased in 2018, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.
Some say its pointless to try to lobby lawmakers on the specifics of the proposals because theyre too complicated. Better to focus on bottom-line issues like the burden it would place on employers. Republican lawmakers, for instance, are warning the provisions will encourage companies to move their headquarters abroad in order to escape the IRS, and lead to more foreign takeovers of American companies.
It will not be productive to go up there and talk about the technicalities of this stuff that would be a complete waste of time, the lobbyist said. They will have no idea what youre talking about.
At the same time, the complexities will give a very small group of lawmakers, staffers, Treasury aides and lobbyists schooled in the international tax system outsized influence in the debate over Democrats plans.
There will also probably be some lawmakers unfamiliar with the issues who will take some convincing, said Kumar in which case, the density of the proposals could prove a headache for Democrats trying to steer the proposals though the House and Senate.
There are always some members who are risk adverse and are going to be worried about voting for something thats so tremendously complicated, he said. For those members, the easiest thing to do is to vote no.
And in this environment, a no vote is potentially fatal" to the Democrats' plan.
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Are Virginia Democrats Running Progressive Challengers Out of the 2021 Primary? – The Nation
Posted: at 6:06 am
The Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, Va. (Bob Brown / Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP, Pool)
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The Democratic Partys post-Trump revival began in Virginia in 2017. Thats when a state, local and national backlash against the racist demagogue helped the party win the top three racesgovernor, lieutenant governor, and attorney generaland 15 House of Delegate seats, missing taking the majority by a tie in one district, which got settled by selecting the name of the winner, a Republican, from a ceramic bowl. Democrats then took the majority of Virginias House of Representatives delegation in 2018, and won control of the state General Assembly, both the House of Delegates and the state Senate, in 2019.
But to paraphrase the old rap song: more incumbents, more problems. Now some Virginia Democrats are in a circular firing squad, with progressive party insurgents blasting the establishment. Last week the state Board of Elections, chaired by a Democrat, disqualified three House of Delegates candidates who were challenging Democratic incumbents, for various problems with filing campaign paperwork. All three happen to be Black. The state NAACP quickly spoke out against the appearance of disparate treatment of candidates of colorwho sought to challenge incumbent legislators.
The three challengersRichmond City Council member Dr. Michael Jones, Arlington legislative aide and activist Matt Rogers, and Dumfries Town Council member Cydny Neville, from Prince William Countycome from different corners of the Commonwealth and different backgrounds. Their paperwork problems are different, tooand tedious, as such problems always are. But the state board has routinely granted candidates extensions to solve such problemsat least eight got them in 2020, including GOP congressional candidates Delegate Nick Freitas (who lost) and Bob Good (who won). State law provides for a 10-day grace period at the boards discretion.
While exercising that discretion last year, chair Bob Brink called disqualifying candidates over paperwork errors a draconian move. Doing that would run counter to my personal belief that, as much as possible, we ought to permit access to the ballot and let the voters decide, Brink told The Roanoke Times. The board is between a rock and the hard place. We dont want to be in the position of picking and choosing winners and losers. Thats the voters job. To be fair, Brink also complained that by granting the extensions the board was giving a pass to the scofflaws at the expense of the candidates who followed the rules.Related Article
But this year, the first time in ages that state Democrats are defending majorities in the General Assembly, the board suddenly made candidates paperwork troubles a capital offense, with no grace period to fix them. Im not gonna lie, Jones told me; if flawed paperwork normally doomed candidates, hed go back to his life as a Richmond pastor and City Council member and take the L. But granting extensions was their practice. They change the rules in the middle of a pandemic? The NAACP has asked the board to proceed with extensions in the same manner it has consistently done in the past, but theres no evidence the decision will be reconsidered.
With five years on the City Council and 20 as a Richmond pastor, Jones perhaps posed the greatest political threat, challenging longtime incumbent Delegate Betsy Carr, who is white. Jones compares Virginia Democratic Party politics to the bloody HBO series Game of Thrones, and jokes hed be cast as Slayer of Monuments for his work getting Confederate statues removed in Richmond and around the state. He has also been a strong voice for criminal justice and police reform.
Two hours north of Richmond, in heavily Democratic Arlington, if my dog got the Democratic nomination, he would win, says Matt Rogers. Former chief of staff to moderate state Senator David Marsden, Rogers is well to the left of his old boss, as well as the incumbent he seeks to replace, Delegate Patrick Hope. Over the last few cycles, hes worked alongside 90for90.org, the group committed to recruiting Democrats in every Virginia legislative district (which is less popular with the Democratic establishment than you might expect).Current Issue
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Rogers backs Medicare for All and cannabis legalization, and hes long opposed the death penalty (Governor Ralph Northam recently signed legislation abolishing it). He knew he was facing headwinds in his districtMarsden made clear he would back Hope, a centrist allybut says his team has already knocked 90 percent of the doors of Democratic voters in his district. The state boards decision not to give the three Black challengers time to address paperwork complaints routinely granted to others utterly threw him. The fix was in, he says, with some bitterness. One painful irony: Two years ago, the board granted his intended opponent, incumbent Hope, a grace period to fix his own filing problems.
How does the state board explain its decision this year? Brink, himself a former Virginia delegate, sent a letter in January to the states Republican and Democratic party leaders saying that there would be no assurance of deadline extensions in 2021, and urged the parties to make sure candidates filed proper papers. In his two years as chair, we were getting repeated requests for extensions, and we felt it put us in a very unfair position, Brink told me. Jones and Rogers say they never heard about problems from party higher-ups (Neville did not respond for this piece). But some candidates did hear from the party, Im told, and were able to take that into account when preparing their paperwork. While Brink shared his letter with the House caucuses for both parties, the caucuses by definition only work with their membersand that means incumbents.
Rogers says the job of informing candidates should never have been offloaded to party leaders, anyway, since they generally work to protect incumbents. How can partisan actors be neutral arbiters here? he asks.
Not many Virginia activists, apart from the NAACP, have spoken out about the disqualifications. One exception is Valerie Slater, executive director of Richmonds RISE for Youth, who called it strange indeed that the candidates have been given the chance to cure such problems in past years. I would like to see fairness for all candidates, she told me. Virginians deserve the right to decide what candidates to support. That opportunity should not be subverted by the Board of Elections.
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That points to what has long been a tension in Virginia Democratic politics and beyond. When I was first writing about the crop of first-time candidates, most of them women, running for the House of Delegates in 2017, I heard fierce complaints that challengers werent getting the help from party leaders they had expected. But party caucuses and other establishment groups tend to be incumbent-protection organizations, focused on shoring up Democrats who were already in the House and Senate and paying less attention to challengers, especially those perceived unlikely to win. What happened in Virginia in 2017 was that progressive outside groupsso-called pop-up organizations from all over the country, fired up by Donald Trumps electionthrew money and volunteers at the candidates whose success was less assured. In the end, 11 of the 15 Democrats who flipped GOP seats were women.
But those women werent challenging Democratic incumbentsmany were sacrificial candidates running to try to plant a blue flag in a red district where no Democrat had run for eons; others were in districts where Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump, where they had a better shot (and where the party ultimately racked up most of its 2017 wins). Now that the party has control of both the Senate and the House of Delegates, protecting incumbents is an even higher priority for the House Democratic Caucus. Helping primary challengers qualify for the ballot isnt part of the job description.
This is a dynamic that plays out elsewhere. As weve seen in Congress, where progressive women of color like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Cori Bush won seats in liberal districts by primarying more centrist Democratic incumbents, for women and people of color to make gains, their best shot will tend to be in liberal districts. They can either wait for an open seat or primary an incumbent. As in Virginia, party leaders dont tend to like that approach, with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee prohibiting its candidates from hiring consultants or vendors who work with challengers in the last cycle. (The rule was changed in March.)
How democratic are we really if were just about protecting Democratic incumbents? Jones asks. Younger, progressive candidates of color, he notes, are not typically invited to the smoke-filled, whiskey-filled rooms where historically a lot of these decisions got made. Liberal Arlington, Rogers notes, hasnt sent a Black to the General Assembly since Reconstruction. The three have the option of challenging the boards move in court, but theyll have to do it fast, as officials say they will move quickly to print absentee ballots for the June 8 primaries.
Andrew Whitely, executive director of the Virginia Democratic Party, recognizes that the disqualified challengers feel slighted, given the ease with which filing extensions were granted in prior years, and the confusion over who should have let them know they had paperwork problems. We have to make sure we dont have a replication of this again, Whitely said.
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Are Virginia Democrats Running Progressive Challengers Out of the 2021 Primary? - The Nation
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What’s behind the split in Hamden’s Democratic Party? – CT Insider
Posted: at 6:06 am
Its sure to be an interesting election year, given a split among Hamden Democrats that, according to politicos, partially mirrors the national divide between the moderate and progressive wings of the party and also stems from local issues and rivalries.
Most recently, the tensions became apparent in the Democratic Town Committees process to field candidates seeking the partys endorsement to run for mayor. Incumbent Mayor Curt Balzano Leng, a Democrat who has held the post since 2015, is not participating, nor has he indicated whether he will seek reelection or the endorsement.
The DTC asked interested persons to fill out a questionnaire and indicate whether they supported the committees platform, ratified in January.
At times openly critical of the administration, the platform itself has been a point of tension with the mayor, who called it misleading and disputed its portrayal of how Hamden operates.
Some traced the beginnings of these tensions back to 2016, when both the primary contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump brought out a more progressive wing of the Democratic Party and spurred some newcomers to become involved in politics, said Scott McLean, a professor of political science at Quinnipiac University.
In the years that followed, some up-and-comers like council members Brad Macdowall and Lauren Garrett (raised) questions to the more established, you know, members of the town committee, McLean continued.
And in 2018, membership of the DTC itself began to change, according to Chairman Sean Grace.
The following year, Garrett announced her run for mayor, and while the endorsement went to Leng, she still managed to earn 27 of the DTCs 61 votes. In the subsequent primary, Leng easily defeated her, however.
Half a year later, an election to decide who got a seat on the DTC which has 63 members, 7 per council district, according to Grace turned out differently.
Often, DTC membership is decided via a caucus, but challengers who do not win at the caucus can petition and trigger an election. In 2020, that happened in seven of Hamdens nine Legislative Council districts, with candidates running as part of a slate.
Leng himself ran for a District 6 seat and lost, as did most contenders on slates he openly supported on social media, according to election results posted on the state website.
The New Haven Independent, which reported on the DTC primary, called the winners of the 2020 election the self-proclaimed progressive wing.
Its a division that finds parallels in the Clinton/Sanders split, or the contest between representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad versus the moderate wing of the national Democratic Party.
McLean said he sees the split as partly coming down to progressives and liberals, and I think thats the story of the Democratic Party from the national to the state to the local level.
Does the progressive takeover of the DTC mean the farther-left side of the party has won out in Hamden? Not necessarily.
Michael McGarry, a DTC member and president of the Legislative Council, is a self-described progressive. He said he believes the DTC skews a little left of where the Hamden Democratic Party is and a little more left of where Hamden is in general.
James Pascarella, who previously served as Legislative Council president and as acting mayor in 2015, is a DTC member who questioned some of the decisions the committee has made.
Running on a Leng-supported slate, he managed to eke out a win in the 2020 primary, even as the remaining members of his slate lost.
I think it was just a matter of turnout, he said. A lot of people didnt pay attention. Its not really an election of the government of the town. The town committee primary, in my opinion, was not a rejection of the mayor, nor a rejection of the rest of us.
On the other hand, Grace, the DTC chairman, said the 2020 wins were hard fought.
Despite being vastly outspent, a strong reform focused message carried the day across Hamden and in some districts by a two to one margin, he wrote in an email to the Register.
Many say the split cannot be defined only in terms of progressive versus moderate.
According to Grace, the divide developed from a gradual process of self-education. As Democrats like Macdowall and Garrett closely examined Hamdens budget, he said, many concluded that the current administration was partly to blame for fiscal problems.
They also demanded more transparency and accountability, Grace said.
Abdul Osmanu, who serves as the DTCs recording secretary but is not a member, said the change in the DTC was about going up against the old guard and being unabashedly truthful.
While mayoral hopefuls have expressed support for initiatives such as making all town records easily accessible online, Leng challenged the idea that the administration has not been transparent, saying audits, annual budgets and expense and revenue reports are available online.
Some of the sticking points for those critical of how the town is run financially include a contention that past budgets have been dishonest, incorporating unrealistic line items, and criticism of fiscal practices such as capital sweeps.
Leng, on the other hand, has said the town has made real financial progress, is turning a corner and is slated to have the healthiest fund balance in years.
The DTC (tends) to be more extreme and constantly negative on financial matters and more, when a consistent and moderate approach is more effective and less harmful to peoples wallets, he said when asked for insights into the differences in the party. This reeks of politics and is reminiscent of Washington where people cant work to compromise and get things done that are meaningful in peoples lives.
He also accused the committee of being far less supportive of police, saying he was supportive of both police and police reform.
Mayor Leng acknowledges that he supports police reform just as all of us should, Grace said in a written statement responding to Lengs comments. A key component in advocating for police accountability and reform is acknowledging that our current practices fall short of what our community needs. The goals established in the DTC platform are based on scientific based research and can be found in President Obamas Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Regarding the financial issues, Grace indicated there was grounds to worry.
Our most recent audit, which revealed a fund balance deficit in the millions, confirmed that there is reason to be concerned, he said.
McGarry, the council president, said he often feels caught between Hamdens Democrat factions.
Personally, I am extraordinarily progressive, but I also take very seriously the fact that I represent everybody in Hamden, that includes Republicans, that includes the unaffiliated, and so I listen to everyone, he said. Building consensus is difficult, and it takes a lot of time.
As for the DTC itself, McGarry questioned whether it had come to be about acting against a particular person the mayor. He further contended it should be wider in scope, with room for more voices.
Instead of fighting each other, lets get to work, he said. That would be my mantra.
Grace said every Democrat in town was invited to participate in drafting a platform.
The scope of the issues addressed in our platform is about as wide and inclusive as can be, he said.
Of the divisions among Hamden Democrats, McLean, the Quinnipiac professor, warned against (getting) the idea that this is all about ideology.
Its about their personalities, too, and its about who they are and the ambitions that they have, he said. Theyre competing.
Thats certainly the case for this year, which already has multiple contenders.
Macdowall, Garrett and Peter Cyr all have announced they are seeking the partys endorsement, which will be decided at the DTC convention this summer. Meanwhile, if Leng does not get the endorsement, he still could petition to be on the ballot, either in a Democratic primary or as a third-party candidate in the general election.
Pascarella, the former council president and current DTC member, said the election will mark a referendum as to whether the majority of Hamden Democrats support the new DTC.
Itll be very interesting this September, he said.
meghan.friedmann@hearstmediact.com
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Democrats and Business Are Increasingly Allies – The New York Times
Posted: at 6:06 am
BlackRock will conduct a racial equity audit. The money-management giant agreed to examine how its policies and practices contribute to racial injustices, Bloomberg reports. Other Wall Street firms, including Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, have asked shareholders to reject investor proposals for similar audits.
Topps, known for its trading cards and Bazooka gum, is going public by merging with a SPAC in a deal that values the company at $1.3 billion. The transaction includes an investment of $250 million led by the SPAC sponsor Mudrick Capital, along with investors including GAMCO and Wells Capital. Michael Eisner, the former Disney C.E.O. who is Toppss chairman, will roll his entire stake into the new company, and stay on.
Everybody has a story about Topps, Mr. Eisner said. Thats what initially attracted him to the trading card company, which he acquired in 2007 via his investment firm, Tornante, and Madison Dearborn for $385 million. Buying Topps was a bet on a brand that elicits an emotional connection as strong as Disney, the company Mr. Eisner ran for 21 years. (And he knows the value of sports: At Disney, he helped acquire ESPN via ABC.)
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April 9, 2021, 3:29 p.m. ET
Topps has focused on a shift to digital, launching online apps for users to trade collectibles and play games. It also created Topps Now, which makes of-the-moment cards to capture a defining play or a pop culture meme. (It sold nearly 100,000 cards featuring Bernie Sanders at the presidential inauguration in his mittens.) And, yes, it has gotten into blockchain, too, via the craze for nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.
The pandemic has increased interest in memorabilia, with a Mickey Mantle card recently selling for $5.2 million. Topps probably made something like a nickel on it, 70 years ago, said Jason Mudrick, the founder of Mudrick Capital. NFT mania will allow Topps to take advantage of the secondhand market by linking collectibles to digital tokens. The executives involved in the merger stressed that an NFT boost was not part of their projections, nor a driver of the deal. Topps is focused on digital investments and growth beyond sports, like its partnerships with Marvel and Star Wars. The company generated record sales of $567 million in 2020, a 23 percent jump over the previous year.
Michael Brandstaedter, the C.E.O. of Topps, said he expected baseball memorabilia to continue to be lifted by trends like players coming up from the minor leagues more quickly even after the pandemic bump fades.
Can it keep up the momentum? Among the industries attracting SPAC investors, Mr. Mudrick said that collectibles both digital and physical were the surest bet. Our core business is value investing, he said, and we just couldnt wrap our heads around electric vehicles, drones and the other sectors that are hot for SPACs.
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Interior Department reverses offshore wind legal opinion – WorkBoat
Posted: at 6:05 am
The Interior Department formally reversed a Trump-era legal opinion on offshore wind energy, in another step toward the Biden administrations goal of dramatically expanding the industry in U.S. waters.
An April 9 memo by Robert Anderson, the departments principle deputy solicitor, critiques and reverses findings written in December by Daniel Jorjani, who was the departments top lawyer when then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt moved to shut down the approval process for the Vineyard Wind offshore project.
Andersons advice now is that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland must strike a rational balance of wind energy and fishing.
In that earlier 16-page document, Jorjani held that if Bernhardt determines that either fishing or vessel transit constitute reasonable usesof the exclusive economic zone, the high seas and the territorial sea, the Secretary has a duty to prevent interference with that use.
Moreover, Jorjani wrote, the Interior secretary should determine what is unreasonable interference from offshore wind turbines based on the perspective of the fishing user. That was a victory for commercial fishing advocates who had gone directly to Bernhardt with their concerns.
In the new memo five pages dense with analysis of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and related court decisions Anderson wrote that the OCSLA requires the Interior secretary to consider a dozen specific goals of the law when making decisions.
That goals provision of the law commands the Secretary to act in a manner that provides for many separate and potentially competing considerations, Anderson wrote. Enumerating some of those goals, Anderson says the Interior secretary must strike a balance.
Thus, the Secretarys obligations to provide for the protection of the environment, the prevention of waste, the protection of national security interests of the United States, and the fair return to the United States may weigh in favor of Secretarial actions to maximize low-emission and renewable electrical generation from offshore wind facilities, but, in some circumstances, the siting and operation of those facilities may not optimally provide for other reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone.
The Trump administration memo focused on one OCSLA provision for prevention of interference with reasonable uses to avoid any conflict with fisheries, when a full reading of the law shows only that the Secretary rationally balance the subsections various goals, Anderson notes.
The Opinion, including its extra-statutory policy advice, is therefore in error, the memo concludes. Pursuant to delegated authority, I hereby withdraw the Opinion and advise the Secretary that, for purposes of subsection 8(p)(4) of OCSLA, her actions must strike a rational balance between the subsections enumerated goals.
The new memo comes as a final decision from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for permitting Vineyard Wind is expected. The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, a coalition of fishing groups and communities, submitted a letter to BOEM pleading for mitigation measures to be included.
Offshore wind development poses direct conflicts with fishing and the current permitting process provides no meaningful opportunity to include the needs of sustainable seafood harvesting and production in strategies to mitigate climate change, the group said. Recent interagency announcements to fast-track offshore wind energy production have provided no commitments to address this transgression of the federal governments public trust duties.
RODA reacted glumly to news of the Interior Department memo on its Facebook posting Friday: Today the administration continued its frenzy to seep away common sense, equity and its public trust responsibilities by revoking a prior legal memo suggesting offshore wind projects should not unreasonably interfere with our centuries-old sustainable fisheries.
Meanwhile, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority otherwise an enthusiastic promoter of offshore wind development signaled it may not support BOEM proposals for additional development areas closer to Long Island. The agency has begun its public scoping process to assess the potential for wind leases on almost 800,000 additional acres in the New York Bight.
In an interview published April 9 by Newsday, Doreen Harris, the recently appointed CEO of NYSERDA, said the federal agencys proposed Fairway North and Fairway South wind energy areas named for nearby shipping lanes into New York Harbor would be sub-optimal.
The potential for wind turbines in those areas to be visible from the wealthy Hamptons beach resort region is one factor, she told the newspaper.
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Norway’s huge oil-backed wealth fund invests in an offshore wind farm – CNBC
Posted: at 6:05 am
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Norway's sovereign wealth fund has agreed to pay around 1.375 billion euros ($1.63 billion) for a 50% stake in one of the world's biggest offshore wind farms, Orsted's 752 megawatt (MW) Borssele 1 & 2 facility.
Managed by Norges Bank Investment Management, the fund whose wealth stems from Norway's vast North Sea oil and gas reserves is the world's largest and worth more than $1.3 trillion. In an announcement Wednesday, NBIM described the deal as its "first investment in renewable energy infrastructure."
The transaction is set to complete in the second or third quarter of 2021. Under the terms of the deal, Orsted will retain its position as co-owner of the wind farm and handle operations and maintenance.
"We are excited to have made our first unlisted investment in renewable energy infrastructure, and we look forward to working alongside rsted on delivering green energy to Dutch households," Mie Holstad, who is chief real assets officer at Norges Bank Investment Management, said in a statement.
Located 23 kilometers off the Dutch coast, Borssele 1 & 2 uses 94 wind turbines from Siemens Gamesa. According to Orsted, it is the world's second-largest operational offshore wind farm and "supplies renewable energy equivalent to the annual power consumption of one million Dutch households."
Europe is a major player in offshore wind power and home to a number of large-scale facilities.
The world's first offshore wind farm, in waters near the Danish island of Lolland, was commissioned in 1991.
In 2020, the sector attracted over 26 billion euros of investment, a record amount, according to recent figures from industry body WindEurope.
The U.S. offshore wind sector, by contrast, is still small but could be set for a significant expansion in the coming years under new plans announced by the Biden administration at the end of March.
Norway's fund has what NBIM describes as "a small stake" in over 9,000 companies globally, with its investment strategy based on guidelines set out by the country's ministry of finance.
"The fund must not be invested in companies that produce certain types of weapons, base its operations on coal, or produce tobacco," NBIM says.
"The fund must also not be invested in companies that through their conduct contribute to violations of fundamental ethical norms," it adds.
As of March 3, 2021, companies excluded from what NBIM describes as "the fund's investment universe" include: German utility RWE; tobacco giant Philip Morris International; and BAE Systems.
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How an offshore wind boom in the US could boost ocean research – The Verge
Posted: at 6:05 am
The US wants to use offshore wind farms to collect valuable data on climate change and ocean health. Renewable energy giant rsted recently signed a memorandum of agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), agreeing to help the agency gather data in US waters leased to the company. NOAA says the agreement paves the way for similar data-sharing agreements with other developers.
The Biden administration plans to dramatically expand the countrys offshore wind capacity. The US currently only has 42 megawatts of capacity from two relatively small projects on the East Coast. If the Biden administration makes good on its commitment to offshore wind development, thatll grow this decade to 30,000 megawatts coming from wind farms across both East and West coasts.
That growth should help the US slash its greenhouse gas emissions and avert a deeper climate crisis. The new agreement puts forward a smaller but still significant benefit for research; each new wind farm could also boost the agencys ability to track the effects of climate change that are already here.
Having more data sharing and more sampling from the wind developers is going to help us, wherever there are wind development projects, to understand that bigger picture, says Carl Gouldman, director of the NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System program office. Conducting research at sea gets costly, so partnerships like the one with rsted can help fill in gaps in NOAAs ocean observations.
The memorandum outlines broad areas of research with which rsted will help NOAA. rsted agreed to share data on air and water quality, marine life, meteorology, as well as coastal and ocean currents and waves. It will also collect data to better map the sea and study its physical properties.
They havent hashed out many specifics yet, but one area Gouldman is excited about is weather data. Weather forecasting could get better, for example, thanks to LIDAR data rsted collects. LIDAR, or Light Detecting and Ranging, can map an environment by shooting out laser pulses. The technology helps self-driving cars see, but in this case LIDAR is used to take a profile of wind speed in the atmosphere.
Were thrilled to hear that theyre going to be willing to share that data, Gouldman says. A couple of years back we heard things like, well, the companies wont want to share that because its proprietary data that theyre going to want to hold for themselves.
rsted collects additional data using buoys and vessels that conduct surveys for future wind farm projects, a spokesperson for the company said in an email. It also has a glider that gathers oceanographic data used for storm forecasting.
The first wind farm in the US at Block Island, operated by rsted, is ideally located for studying the effects of climate change at sea and even onshore. Its just 13 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, which is heating up more rapidly than much of the rest of the United States. Scientists are still trying to understand why the Northeast is the fastest warming region in the continental US. One culprit could be warmer water in the Atlantic ocean, which can raise temperatures inland.
After announcing plans last month to expand offshore wind development and data collection, Secretary of Commerce and former Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo said in a statement, These actions illustrate the Departments commitment to innovative partnerships to advance the best science and data that will ensure the development of offshore wind is transparent and inclusive of all stakeholders.
Separately from its agreement with rsted, NOAA is also studying the potential impact that offshore wind development could have on marine life. Its using an autonomous underwater glider to study Atlantic cod and other species found off the Southern New England coast, for example. The agency provides data and analyses to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which issues leases to companies for offshore wind development.
NOAA also agreed to share some of its own data with rsted. It has 10 to 15 years of data on current velocities on the East Coast, which it says would help developers understand how ocean conditions might affect wind farm construction. Ironically, new wind farms might interfere with the high-frequency radar stations used to gather that data. So NOAA is looking into whether it can add sensors to wind turbine stations to bolster that effort, too.
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