Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON — If you listen to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, the biggest environmental problem facing the United States isn’t climate change (he doesn’t think that’s real, anyway), or lead-tainted drinking water or brain-damaging pesticides. It’s that Barack Obama didn’t clean up the more than 1,300 most contaminated and hazardous sites across the country.

A Fox News headline earlier this month declared that Pruitt was here to clean up the Obama administration’s “toxic mess.” The former Oklahoma attorney general would have the American people believe that what the Superfund program really needs isn’t funding, it’s the right attitude.

“It’s not a matter of money,” Pruitt told Fox News. “It’s a matter of leadership and attitude and management.”

Pruitt has been fixated on the EPA’s Superfund, which is responsible for cleaning up highly contaminated sites, since taking over as agency chief in February. He’s called it “absolutely essential” and has repeatedly stressed that it’s part of EPA’s core mission. During an April visit to a lead- and arsenic-laden Superfund site in East Chicago, Indiana, Pruitt said he went there “because it’s important that we restore confidence to people in this community that we’re going to get it right going forward.” And he has blamed “poor leadership” and “poor focus” on the part of the Obama administration for there being more Superfund sites today than when Obama took office.

Superfund is an important part of EPA’s work, but Pruitt’s position fails to account for the history of the program. And every decision he’s made about it so far suggests he’s not serious about making it better. While he initially vowed to protect Superfund dollars, the 2018 budget the Trump administration released this month would slash EPA’s overall funding by 31.4 percent — to its lowest level in four decades — and cut Superfund from $1.09 billion to $762 million.

The administration argues that it can do more with less — that the EPA will “identify efficiencies in administrative costs” and “optimize” its use of settlements with polluters. The budget will also provide the agency with an “opportunity” to “identify what barriers have been preventing sites from returning to communities and design solutions to overcome those barriers,” the White House wrote in its justification for slashing Superfund.

Pruitt celebrated the budget proposal, saying in a statement that it “respects the American taxpayer” and “supports EPA’s highest priorities.”

But Superfund experts say Pruitt doesn’t seem to understand the basics of the program, which is designed to deal with expensive, complicated contamination cleanups that often have no responsible party and are not being handled at the state or local level.

“A cut to the program literally means longer exposure and preventing economic recovery for communities,” former EPA official Mathy Stanislaus told HuffPost. “The response should be fact-based. Tell me how the facts support cutting funding to a program that already has a backlog of sites?” Stanislaus oversaw Superfund as part of the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management under Obama.

I don’t see how this program maintains its viability in any great way with these kinds of proposed cuts.
Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under President George W. Bush

Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, said Superfund is yet another issue on which the Trump administration’s words and actions don’t match up.

“I don’t see how this program maintains its viability in any great way with these kinds of proposed cuts,” Whitman told HuffPost during a press call last week that included former leaders of several federal agencies. “And it just doesn’t make sense when they are talking about trying to address this problem.”

Established in 1980 in response to several environmental disasters, Superfund — formally the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — is responsible for addressing areas contaminated with lead, radiation, mercury and other toxic pollutants, often left behind by industrial operations. The law authorized the federal government to force parties responsible for contamination to pay for cleanup costs and created a tax on the petroleum and chemical industries, two heavy polluters, to be pooled and used to clean up sites where a responsible party could not be found, called “orphan” sites. Areas requiring long-term remediation are put on the National Priorities List (NPL), but they often take years or even decades to clean up.

In many ways, Pruitt’s obsession with Superfund makes sense. As of 2015, 53 million Americans — 17 percent of the population — lived within three miles of a Superfund site. And the large number of toxic sites that remain on the NPL is something Pruitt has realized he can pin on past administrations for failing to address. 

“Let’s look and think what the past administration achieved,” Pruitt said during a visit to a Pennsylvania coal mine last month, noting that there are still 1,322 sites. “Some of those have been on the list for 30 to 40 years.”  

It’s true that the number of NPL sites increased during Obama’s two terms, from about 1,260 at the end of fiscal year 2008. But for Pruitt to point his finger at Obama shows the EPA administrator’s willingness to ignore the Superfund listing process and the extent of contamination in many areas, as well as the challenge he now faces as head of the agency.

The number of sites proposed for and listed on the NPL simply reflects that those areas have been found to pose a risk to human or environmental health, and it “has nothing to do with ‘management,’” Stanislaus told HuffPost.

Superfund’s problems have almost everything to do with resources, which have all but vanished over the last two decades. In 1995, Congress allowed the so-called “polluter pays” tax — which generated billions of dollars to fund orphan cleanups — to expire. The trust fund dried up several years later, with cleanup costs now falling largely on taxpayers via federal budget allocations. As money for cleanups has shriveled, fewer sites have been remediated.

From 1999 to 2013, federal appropriations to Superfund declined from about $2 billion to $1.1 billion per year, according to a 2010 Government Accountability Office report. In 1999, the program completed 85 site cleanups, compared with just eight in 2014.

Over the years, several Democratic legislators have pushed for reinstating the Superfund tax, a move supported by the Obama administration, but the efforts failed.

Whitman fears the program won’t be able to function with additional cuts to staff and enforcement. She said enforcement is “critical” to get polluters to pay up.

But Pruitt, a longtime ally of the fossil fuel industry who sued the agency he now runs more than a dozen times as Oklahoma’s attorney general, insists Superfund will become self-sustaining under his watch. “The great thing about this is we have private funding. There are people out there responsible for these sites to clean up,” he told Fox News. “The moneys are there to do so.”

Stanislaus said there are some sites that provide the economic incentive for private interests to invest in redevelopment. “But to say that there’s this hidden pot of gold out there that can be brought to bear on a site, I don’t know what fantasy island that comes from, frankly.”

Nor does it seem likely that the Trump administration, which is stacked with industry lobbyists and fossil fuel allies, is going to be cracking down on polluters and forcing them to pay for cleanups. Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said in a statement that “there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that polluters will be forced to pay for cleaning up their toxic messes that endanger Americans’ health” under Trump and Pruitt’s watch.

Those appointed to help Pruitt in his Superfund efforts so far have been less than inspiring choices. This month, Trump nominated Susan Bodine, chief counsel for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, whom The Intercept described as a “lobbyist for Superfund polluters,” to serve as assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. And Pruitt has chosen Albert Kelly, a longtime banker with no apparent experience in environmental policy, to lead a new Superfund task force.

The task force, which was announced last week, will provide recommendations to the agency on how to “streamline and improve the Superfund program” within 30 days. In a statement accompanying his announcement, Pruitt said he is “confident that, with a renewed sense of urgency, leadership and fresh ideas, the Superfund program can reach its full potential of returning formerly contaminated sites to communities for their beneficial use.”

Wilma Subra, a Louisiana-based chemist and Superfund expert, told HuffPost that it’s not clear what Pruitt means when he says he will reprioritize Superfund cleanups or if he will change the general understanding of what it takes for a site to be considered clean and thus eligible to be removed from the list. Until that’s more clear, Subra said, Pruitt’s claims are just a “talking point.”

“Is it going to be a little small slice of [Superfund] he’s going to prioritize, and the rest is going to sit there and languish?” she asked.

Stanislaus shares her concern that Pruitt may shortcut cleanups in order to cut costs. Doing so, Stanislaus said, would be “shortsighted” and come with health and economic consequences. Likewise, research has shown that investing in a Superfund site can increase property values and fuel job growth. Not to mention the positive effects that cleanup efforts have on human health.

Andrew Rosenburg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Pruitt’s Superfund talk is “smoke and mirrors.”

“To simply wave your hands and say ‘We’re going to clean it up’ at the same time as you’re reducing the resources, both people and money available to do it, is frankly nonsense,” Rosenburg told HuffPost.

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Elgato has revealed a brand new device that will certainly go down well with those of us who live in a place that has a tropical climate, calling it the Eve Degree temperature and humidity monitor. What makes this particular device so interesting? Well, it is not only a run-of-the-mill temperature and humidity monitor, but it is a model that sports a breathtaking design as well as an impressive feature set. We are talking about throwing in state-of-the-art sensors, revolutionary HomeKit technology, as well as a really large LCD display that arrives in a stunning anodized aluminum body.

Not only that, it will also come with a touch of elegance that will be evident regardless of which particular room you decide to place it in, or even if you think that it would have a better place outdoors. Eve Degree basically empowers you with insights concerning temperature as well as humidity, and all of this information are sent right to your iPhone or iPad. The Eve app itself stashes away and visualizes current and past climate data via eye-opening graphs which will facilitate precise climate monitoring. This is also beneficial to functional spaces such as greenhouses or wine cellars.

Apart from that, courtesy of Bluetooth low energy technology, power will be drawn from a long-lasting, replaceable battery. This means all kinds of direct communication with your iOS device would do away with the need for a bridge or gateway. The Eve Degree will be available from June 6 onward with a recommended retail price of $69.95 apiece. I suppose you can call the Eve Degree to be one of the higher end thermometers in the market, but the fact that it can be seamlessly integrated into the iPhone is a testament to its technological advancement and capability. Any takers?

Press Release

[ Elgato reveals Eve Degree temperature and humidity monitor copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

WASHINGTON ― When 37 Democrats cast their votes to confirm Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in January, they did so in spite of heavy opposition to the policies he would be tasked to carry out: more deportations, a southern border wall and a travel ban targeting Muslims.

Their hope was that the former Marine general would be a moderating influence on President Donald Trump and a better option than other names floated for the post. Kelly wasn’t known for being a virulent crusader against unauthorized immigration, and he had experience with Central and South America as former head of the U.S. Southern Command. He said in his confirmation hearing that he opposed a registry based on ethnicity or religion, which Trump once floated for Muslims.

Four months later, some of the Senate Democrats who voted for Kelly are exasperated, disappointed and, in some cases, even wondering if they made a mistake. Arrests of non-criminal undocumented immigrants are up significantly, plans for a border wall are underway, and Kelly has joined Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in framing immigration almost exclusively in terms of crime. He defended the now-blocked ban on refugees and most travelers from several Muslim-majority nations and joked with Trump about using a saber “on the press.”

“I think the secretary has gone above and beyond even what the president’s dictates are and I’m disappointed in the way he’s acted,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who supported Kelly’s confirmation, told HuffPost.

The senator said he wouldn’t vote for Kelly if he had the chance now.

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) voted for Kelly as well, but went on to publicly spar with him over the deportation of a Honduran mother and child who had been detained in Pennsylvania. Casey wouldn’t go so far as to say he regretted his vote, remarking instead that he would “try to work with Secretary Kelly and encourage him and the Administration to move in a better direction.”

But the senator acknowledged that he’s frustrated by the administration’s decisions to deport children and families. His “hope that Secretary Kelly would be more evenhanded on enforcement … hasn’t been borne out.”

“The administration’s approach is not only wrong, but it also doesn’t make our nation safer,” said Casey via email. “When you talk to Secretary Kelly, he says he’s just following order[s] but he was confirmed to lead, not just to go along with some wrongheaded immigration approach that was cooked up during the campaign.”

Kelly, more than most figures in Trump’s orbit, illustrates the stain that the administration’s policies can leave on an individual’s public standing. The secretary has been at the forefront of both the legally contentious travel ban and the highly controversial crackdown on undocumented immigrants. His willingness to defend both has given him a reputation as the kind, respected face of draconian initiatives.

He was confirmed to lead, not just to go along with some wrongheaded immigration approach that was cooked up during the campaign.
Sen. Bob Casey

Kelly has chafed at such criticisms. He has argued that if agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection encounter people who are removable from the U.S., they must work to remove them. His officials have said that even people without criminal records and with longstanding ties to the U.S. can fit that category under the law and they won’t be exempt from removal, although they were often passed over under President Barack Obama.

This focus on what the law broadly directs has come up repeatedly, including when Kelly responded to Casey’s call to stop the deportation of the Honduran mother and child.

“I say it over and over again: If the laws are not good laws, then change them,” Kelly declared during a speech in early May. “Don’t call me, or Twitter or tweet, or go to the press with outrageous stories about how we do business or why we’re deporting somebody.”

Homeland Security spokeswoman Joanne Talbot made the same point in a statement to HuffPost: “Secretary Kelly has said that if lawmakers do not like the laws they’ve passed and we are charged to enforce, then they should work to adopt legislation instead of asking DHS to ignore existing law and court orders. The Secretary— like all DHS law enforcement officers— has taken an oath to follow the Constitution.”

Kelly “firmly believes that the policies adopted by the President to secure our borders and combat terrorism and transnational criminal organization are Constitutional,” Talbot said.

Other Democratic senators still support for Kelly and say that some of their hopes for the secretary have been borne out, at least behind the scenes. At a hearing last week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who voted for Kelly’s confirmation, told the secretary that he and many of his colleagues “are so proud that you have agreed to serve in this position, makes us all feel a lot better.”

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mt.) was similarly enthusiastic at that hearing.

“When I voted for your confirmation, Mr. Secretary ― and I would do it again today ― I said you are one of the adults in the room that I am dependent on to make good decisions for this country’s security,” Tester said. “I still believe that.”

Even one of the toughest critics of Trump’s immigration policies suggested that Kelly has been a moderating influence. At the time he voted for Kelly, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he wouldn’t have backed him if the confirmation vote were “a referendum on President Donald Trump’s immigration policy.” Earlier this month, Durbin told HuffPost that behind the scenes, when senators have brought specific cases to Kelly, “he has dealt with them quickly and honestly, and that’s all I can ask.”

Even as the controversies piled up, Durbin was willing to give the secretary a bit more leeway to make his mark.

“I’ve maintained a closer-than-usual relationship with him and frequent conversation, and I think there have been forces within the administration which want to move him into a more radical position,” Durbin said. “Am I happy with everything he’s done? No. But I want to continue to work with him.”

According to Democratic House members, Kelly has insinuated in private meetings that he helped save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows some undocumented young people to stay in the U.S. Trump promised to end the program immediately and yet he still hasn’t. In March, Kelly repeatedly told House Democrats that he was the “best thing that ever happened to DACA folks,” Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.) said at the time.

Kelly’s critics say no one should be surprised by the early results of his tenure. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) was one of 11 Democrats to vote against his confirmation. Her staff emailed other Democratic senators ahead of the vote to note that at his confirmation hearing, Kelly hadn’t committed to not sharing the personal information of DACA recipients with ICE or to shield them from deportation.

She told HuffPost that those concerns persist today, as do concerns about the travel ban, standards for hiring border patrol agents and Kelly’s “ability to manage the department as it relates to giving clear guidance to the tens of thousands of people that work in that department about the policies of the administration writ large and his policies as the director of that agency.”

Whether surprising or not, Kelly’s actions are disappointing to immigration reform supporters who had been cautiously optimistic about him. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) said that Kelly’s experience with Central America should have given him “a better appreciation of the factors pushing refugees to flee the region and factors driving migration in other parts of the world.”

“[B]ut there have been no indications of compassion, expertise, or cooperation coming from the DHS Secretary or his senior staff,” Gutiérrez said in an email. “DHS seems to wish Congress would just go away and stop asking them about what they are doing and why, which is not an option.”

Immigrant rights advocates argue that Kelly is wrong to claim his hands are tied by the law. He has the discretion to avoid deporting certain people and focus on others, as previous homeland security secretaries did, said Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro of the National Council of La Raza. Thus far, she doesn’t think he has used it.

“There was a sense that perhaps given his experience he would bring a more tempered approach to the issue of immigration and immigration enforcement,” Martínez-de-Castro said. “I think that based on what we’ve seen, now the question is whether he is a helpless executioner or a willing one of what are, at the very least, ethically questionable policies.”

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“Tell everyone on the train I love them.”

Those were the reported last words of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, 23, who died from a stab wound on Friday, May 26, according to a bystander. The recent college grad was one of the victims in a hate-fueled attack on a train in Portland, Oregon, that targeted two young women, one of whom was wearing a headscarf and was Muslim.

Friends and family described Namkai-Meche as having a “huge heart” and “a joyful and magical spirit” ― qualities he appears to have shared with his mother, Asha Deliverance.

Deliverance and hundreds of other Portlanders gathered for a vigil on Saturday to honor the lives of Namkai-Meche and Rick Best, 53, who was also killed in the attack after defending the young women. Micah Fletcher, 21, was also injured in the incident and survived.

During the vigil, Deliverance cried, embraced people in the crowd, and encouraged those gathered to “Give it up for love.”

A one point a woman wearing a white headscarf approached the grieving mother, who warmly leaned forward and embraced her.

On Monday, Deliverance penned an open letter to President Donald Trump, urging him to be a be a “President for all Americans.”

“Please encourage all Americans to protect and watch out for one another,” the letter reads in part. “Please condemn any acts of violence, which result directly from hate speech & hate groups. I am praying you will use your leadership to do so.”

Namkai-Meche, Best and Fletcher intervened on Friday when Jeremy Joseph Christian, the accused attacker, reportedly made anti-Muslim comments directed at the two girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab. All three were injured in the altercation, Namkai-Meche and Best fatally so.

Namkai-Meche was a recent college grad who worked at an consulting firm focused on environmental issues. The 23-year-old’s family released a statement on Saturday, urging people to “use this tragedy as an opportunity for reflection and change.”

Best, an Army veteran and a married father of four, worked for the city of Portland and was remembered as a “hero” by his family. “He couldn’t just stand by and do nothing. He died fighting the good fight protecting the innocent,” his eldest son, Erik, told KATU News.

Fletcher, a student at Portland State University, said he’s still “healing” and trying to make sense of what happened. “I got stabbed in the neck on my way to work, randomly, by a stranger I don’t know, for trying to just be a nice person,” he told USA Today.

A LaunchGood fund initiated by two Muslim nonprofit groups had raised more than $500,000 to support the victims families as of Wednesday afternoon.

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As President Donald Trump continues his crusade against what he brands “fake news,” 60 percent of those who voted for him view the media as their “enemy,” according to a new Huffpost/YouGov poll.

That’s up from the 51 percent of Trump supporters who gave that answer in a February survey.

Overall, 25 percent of Americans in the new poll say the media is an enemy to people like themselves, with 19 percent calling it unfriendly. Just 17 percent label the media friendly and 13 percent view it as an ally, with 26 percent not sure.

Those figures are similar to the ones in the February poll.

The latest survey follows a string of recent anti-press incidents. Four journalists were either manhandled or arrested while reporting in May, and a Kentucky newspaper’s windows were shattered.

Trump, who often lashed out against journalists during his presidential campaign, has continued to do so as president. On Wednesday afternoon, his campaign texted backers a fundraising appeal including the phrase, “FAKE NEWS is the enemy.”

As noted in February, the rating scale ― ally, friendly, unfriendly, enemy ― is one YouGov typically uses to measure Americans’ views of foreign countries rather than the Fourth Estate. But the metric seems newly appropriate for domestic use given Trump’s attitude toward the press, as well as record levels of political animosity.

Indeed, 49 percent of Republicans consider the Democratic Party to be the “enemy,” while almost the exact same number of Democrats ― 48 percent ― say that about the GOP.

As for attitudes toward Trump, 40 percent of Americans consider him an ally or a friend to people like themselves, with 16 percent considering him unfriendly and 27 percent an enemy.

Ill-feelings from the contentious election linger, with 86 percent of Trump voters saying Hillary Clinton voters are either the enemy of people like themselves or unfriendly. Among Clinton’s supporters, 81 percent apply one of those characterizations to Trump voters.

Use the widget below to further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted May 26-27 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

HuffPost has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.

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