This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, eeff, rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
Did Thiel stab the US banking system in the back? Are we facing another meltdown, or does Dark Biden have everything under control? Beware the Ides!
The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2022 that the Fed’s interest-rate hikes were inflicting losses at SVB — the balance sheet problem which ended up sparking the bank run last week.
Rating agencies and various short sellers also released reports documenting the same issue.
“The media knew it, shorts knew it, the rating agencies knew it, and then clearly the Fed was grossly deficient here,” Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the banking reform group Better Markets, told TPM.
That left many wondering how supervisors might have missed the same warning signs that so many others saw.
“It’s not as if supervisory authorities are toothless — there was definitely room to extract valuable info here,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of the economic research and advocacy group Employ America, told TPM.
...As regulators race to find a buyer willing to take on the bank’s domestic lending portfolio, some major companies are left scrambling to secure new lines of credit. Lobbyists are drawing battle lines as progressives in Congress push for tighter regulations. And Washington is still racing to calm investor fears of instability at other financial institutions.
...At this stage it’s extremely unlikely lawmakers would agree on a bill that would lead to any substantial changes — like Warren and Porter’s rollback of the Dodd-Frank rollback — that would make it across the finish line. Not enough Dems support it and it’s a divided Congress.
On the other hand, there are definitely signs that bank regulators are looking at things like capital requirements and better supervision. On the latter, one of the issues that’s been raised is that regulators didn’t spot the problems with SVB’s investment portfolio/depositor concentration. Fed Vice Chair Michael Barr is overseeing a review of that as we speak.
As SVB's apologists insist that tech startups should be preserved lest our IoT gadgets brick themselves, or that SVB should be preserved so that the Morganstanley cancer doesn't creep into more of our social organs, or that bailing out SVB is acceptable because it's to defend elite startup founders, not ultrawealthy bank owners, they are missing the fucking point.
But they're missing it in a useful way. Like any weird sign, these bad takes teach us a lot about how the people who utter them model our own beliefs. They think that people like smart gadgets. They think that we don't want the finance sector reformed. They think that we're motivated by schadenfreude, which means that they also think we've forgotten about broken student debt promises, about robosigning and the foreclosure epidemic. They think we are fully onboard with rugged individualism for the poor and socialism for the rich.
These bad takes reveal a profoundly out-of-touch elite, the spiritual descendants of the French aristos who went to the guillotine with sincerely baffled hearts, unable to imagine why anyone would be this angry at them.
Meanwhile, many are wondering if Dark Biden is playing 13-dimensional chess, or if he just caved to the typical Dem Operatives who truly believe that screwing the activists and appealing to “The Center” is the way to win elections, even though it NEVER works.
Joe Biden has been called the “climate president” — and deservedly so. As he boasted during last month’s State of the union address, his Inflation Reduction Act marks “the most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis.” Laws enacted during Biden’s tenure have collectively tripled the federal government’s annual spending on fighting climate change.
So it came as a shock to some this week when he greenlit a “climate bomb” of new oil drilling on Alaskan federal land. But Biden was responding to the needs of politicians constrained by the political and economic realities of a fossil-fuel-dependent state. For those disappointed by the Willow project’s approval, it’s worth exploring what might be done to change those realities.
The administration sounded nearly apologetic in approving Willow, which will allow ConocoPhillips to tap into 600 million barrels of oil and could lead to 9.2 million metric tons of additional annual greenhouse gas emissions. “Interior Department Substantially Reduces Scope of Willow Project,” read the administration’s press release – emphasizing that it had denied two of the company’s five requested drilling sites, and forced the company to relinquish 68,000 acres of federal land. And it pointed out that the company’s leases long predated the administration – which may have doomed it to lose in court if it blocked the project. The Department of the Interior paired the Willow announcement with an apparent olive branch to environmentalists by also moving to protect 16 million acres of Arctic land and water from drilling.
“We realized some time ago this was going to be a decision that was ultimately made at the White House level – not only by senior leaders, but actually with the president’s direct involvement,” Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told CNN Monday. “This was not something that was ultimately going to reside with the secretary of interior; I think a decision had been made some time ago that this was at the highest political level.”
While Haaland spoke extensively with Alaska Natives and other groups on both sides of the project and called lawmakers in the weekend leading up to the announcement, the secretary’s name was conspicuously absent from the final document that solidified its approval….
...“Were there people within the administration that were working to actively kill this? Absolutely, positively,” Murkowski said. Up until the moment the decision was posted, “I think there were still folks working to kill this.”
Earthjustice filed a lawsuit today on behalf of conservation groups, together with NRDC (the Natural Resources Defense Council), to stop the massive Willow oil-drilling project in Alaska’s Western Arctic, which the Biden administration approved March 13. This approval of an enormous new carbon source undermines President Biden’s promises to slash greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030 and transition the United States to clean energy.
Trustees for Alaska has filed a separate legal challenge on behalf of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic and conservation groups.
The BLM’s record of decision approving Willow essentially greenlights ConocoPhillips’ desired blueprint while ignoring pleas from around 5.6 million people, including leadership from the nearby village of Nuiqsut, asking the federal government to halt Willow.
In happier news, Twitter has disabled many of its security measures, with fun results:
(For those without Twitter: Tucker Carlson was hacked, and his bio @TuckerCarlson now describes him as “Non-binary climate change activist of color. Visionary tech founder. CNBC market analyst. Informal Zelensky advisor)
And the GOP war on Red State Cities continues — “We only want Democracy if WE’RE in charge”
The leaders of the Houston Independent School District, the largest school district in Texas and one of the largest in the nation, will be replaced by a new board appointed by the state Commissioner of Education, the district said Wednesday.
The Texas Education Agency intends to replace the district’s superintendent and board of education trustees “in the next few months,” the current board of education said in a statement.
...“The state and its officials will now be responsible for more than 180,000 students, and 25,000 school employees,” [Texas American Federation of Teachers President Zeph] Capo said. “For their sake, I have no choice at this point but to wish them well and hope that they succeed. But make no mistake, we will watch every move.”
Trumpism has cost the GOP in three consecutive elections, and yet it looks like the Republican base may continue to follow their basest ideological urges and stick with their guy in the next contest. A new CNN poll found that the majority of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) “care more about picking a 2024 GOP nominee who agrees with them on issues than one who can beat [Joe] Biden.” This polling runs contrary to the GOP-elites wishcasting described Wednesday in Politico: “Even die-hard supporters of former president Donald Trump, they’ve reasoned, are finally sick of losing.”
If this polling is right, the base is not “sick of losing.” There is no tangible evidence to support the GOP braintrust’s fantasy. If anything, the base seems stuck in 2016, as four polls last month showed Trump experiencing a February bump, expanding his lead over Ron DeSantis. It’s been clear for months—to me, at least—that Trump shouldn’t be counted out, whereas “several top Republicans,” Axios noted Tuesday, “keep saying there’s no way” he can win the nomination.
But what’s the base saying? Thirty-eight percent of CNN respondents said they consider America’s “increasing racial, ethnic, and national diversity” to be a threat. More than half of the respondents want a candidate who would “support government action to oppose ‘woke’ values,” while a whopping “78% majority of Republican-aligned Americans” said that “society’s values on sexual orientation and gender identity are changing for the worse.” Oh, and 84% of those who identify as very conservative consider Biden’s indisputable 2020 victory to be illegitimate. Trump continues to very much have a hold over the hearts and minds of the GOP base.
The National Audubon Society announced Wednesday that its board of directors had voted to retain the organization’s name despite pressure to end its association with John James Audubon, the 19th-century naturalist and illustrator who enslaved people, drawing backlash from fellow bird groups that have already changed their names.
The bird conservation group said its decision came after more than a yearlong process that included input from hundreds of its members, volunteers and donors. Despite Audubon’s history as an enslaver with racist views toward Black and Indigenous people, Elizabeth Gray, the CEO of the National Audubon Society, said in a statement Wednesday that the board of directors “decided that the organization transcends one person’s name.”
She added that the name Audubon had “come to symbolize our mission and significant achievements that this organization has made in its long history.”
This is a long excerpt, thanks to ridiculously long paragraphs. It’s worth reading the whole thing:
Right now, the country is waiting on one judge in Texas to make a ruling. The ruling is supposed to determine whether access to a drug that, as part of a two-step process, causes an abortion will be curtailed. At least, ostensibly, that is what the ruling is about—whether the Food and Drug Administration was wrong to approve this drug when it did so 22 years ago. This ruling will certainly have serious, dramatic effects on access, and therefore on real women’s lived lives. More than half of all abortions are done via mifepristone, the drug whose approval is now in question, along with misoprostol. While it’s possible to offer the same medication abortion with misoprostol alone, it’s more painful for the patient and has a lower success rate. Already there are stories of pharmacies that are afraid to carry and fill orders for these drugs, even when they are prescribed for other reasons—Walgreens, for instance, has stopped offering mifepristone nationwide. There is no question that a ruling in this case against the FDA’s approval will have real, chilling effects on Americans’ access to reproductive care, even in states that responded to the end of Roe v. Wade by attempting to improve access to care.
But this case is not really about whether mifepristone remains accessible, and FDA-approved. What this case is actually about is the same thing every abortion battle over the past five decades has been about: Who has power in America? Indeed, who holds the power and who doesn’t has been the fundamental question about abortion rights ever since they were left out of the Constitution in the first place, because women sure didn’t have any power when it was written. But the mifepristone case is the first one to show us the full amount of havoc that has been wrought on our legal system thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe last June. It’s funny, really, considering all of the hypothetical things yet to emerge that could have exposed the fractures and ruptures that Dobbs caused—a doctor defying the law to serve a patient’s mental health, an inter-state travel ban, an underground abortion clinic. It’s strange that it’s a 22-year-old FDA approval process of a commonly used and incredibly safe drug that seems to be the thing that will break the illusion that Dobbs does not affect all of us. But that’s how this is all shaping up.
Reports from the Texas courtroom today, where Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk spent four hours hearing arguments, indicate that the Trump appointee seemed open to the argument that the FDA did indeed rush the approval of the drug. It’s hard to describe how fundamentally absurd and dishonest these arguments are, but several of my colleagues have tried. I think it’s worth revisiting their points, which help explain why this random district judge has become such a point of focus for the entire freaking country. Merritt Tierce, who wrote one of the most searing and memorable pieces in recent years on the stakes of abortion within a woman’s life, actually read the complaint to understand what the arguments were. Not only are the anti-abortion groups at the center of this case arguing that the FDA “rushed” when it approved a drug that was already approved in Europe following a four-year process—and now two decades later has been shown to have a safety record that puts it on par with Tylenol. They are also claiming that doctors are harmed by this drug because when it malfunctions (again, at a rate comparable to Tylenol) it distracts them from their current patients, and that OB-GYNs specifically are harmed by the drug because when abortions happen, it denies these doctors of money-making opportunities. Seriously.
The team incorporated a layer of L-glutathione, a tripeptide molecule made up of three amino acids: glutamine, cysteine, and glycine. It’s an antioxidant found naturally in the human body, and it’s sold over the counter as a dietary supplement to support overall health and well-being.
The team found that adding L-glutathione extended the solar cells’ lifetime, improved their efficiency, and still allowed sunlight to reach plants in the greenhouse prototype, which was about the size of a small dollhouse.
Organic solar cells tend to degrade more quickly than inorganic solar cells because sunlight causes them to oxidize and thus lose electrons. The researchers found that the additional L-glutathione layer stopped the other materials in the solar cell from oxidizing. That in turn resulted in the organic cells maintaining more than 80% efficiency after 1,000 hours of continuous use — as opposed to less than 20% without the added layer, according to the UCLA Samueli newsroom.
Why does the Earth have continents and ocean basins and plate tectonics, when we don’t see that on any other planet that we’ve explored?
It’s not just an academic question. A dynamic planet keeps upcycling the elements that are crucial to life. Without plate tectonics, Earth could be just as static — and dead — as Mars or Venus.
I’ve seen this explanation posited before, but there’s new evidence, and… read the article!
The leading explanation for the origin of the moon proposes that a Mars-sized planet, dubbed Theia, struck the nascent Earth, ejecting a cloud of debris into space that later coalesced into a satellite (SN: 3/2/18). New computer simulations suggest that purported remains of Theia deep inside the planet could have also triggered the onset of subduction, a hallmark of modern plate tectonics, geodynamicist Qian Yuan of Caltech reported March 13 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
The story offers a cohesive explanation for how Earth gained both its moon and its moving tectonic plates, and it could aid in the search for other Earthlike worlds. But others caution that it’s much too early to say that this is, in fact, what happened.
Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the initiation of subduction, a tectonic process in which one plate slides under another (SN: 5/2/22; SN: 6/5/19; SN: 1/2/18). Yuan and his colleagues chose to focus on two continent-sized blobs of material in Earth’s lower mantle known as large low-shear velocity provinces (SN: 5/12/16). These are regions through which seismic waves are known to move anomalously slow. Researchers had previously proposed these regions could have formed from old, subducted plates. But in 2021, Yuan and colleagues alternatively proposed that the mysterious masses could be the dense, sunken remnants of Theia….
RIP Pat Schoeder — a great lady and a personal inspiration. I would have been SO happy to see her as our nominee in 1984 instead of Walter Mondale!
She was the first woman on the House armed services committee but was forced to share a seat with Ron Dellums of California, the first African American. Schroeder said the chair, F Edward Hebert of Louisiana, thought the committee was no place for a woman or an African American and they were each worth only half a seat.
Republicans were livid when Schroeder and others filed an ethics complaint over a televised lecture series given by the speaker, Newt Gingrich, charging that free cable time amounted to an illegal gift. Gingrich became the first speaker reprimanded by Congress. He said he regretted not taking Schroeder and her allies more seriously.
Asked by one congressman how she could be a mother of two small children and a congresswoman, she replied: “I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.”
It was Schroeder who branded Ronald Reagan the Teflon president for his ability to avoid blame.
In the male-dominated halls of Congress, she was known for her quick wit and barbs. She coined the phrase “Teflon President” for former President Ronald Regan, a moniker that still sticks for any politician who can avoid blame. When asked how, as a mother of two young children, she’d balance Congress and her family, she famously replied, “I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.”
[Colorado Governor Jared] Polis knew her since he was a kid and described Schroeder as a mentor.
"She championed family leave, healthcare, and equal rights. She was known and loved for her incredible sharp wit," Polis said in a post on his Facebook page. "Her passion, her love for country will be missed not only by those who knew her, but by our whole state and the entire nation. Farewell Pat, and thank you for being uniquely yourself."
Who are you remembering tonight? Tell us in the comments...