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.
She’s gone. What a lady… we won’t see — or hear — her like again.
This Kossack wrote a diary about his family growing up as neighbors of Tina’s family in the Tennessee hamlet of Nut Bush:
And it may not be the popular choice, but this was always my favorite of Tina’s songs:
Getting back to the other news of the night….
Is Biden playing ninth-dimensional chess?
By opposing an injunction in the main lawsuit challenging the debt ceiling, the president has deliberately boxed himself into negotiations with legislative terrorists.
...But consider the current situation. House Republicans are insisting upon a draconian set of demands to hobble federal spending (not on the military, of course, because those hundreds of billions of dollars magically don’t impact the budget for some reason). After insisting for months that there would be no negotiation on the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, Biden started negotiating. He then ruled out any other option beyond reaching a deal, cutting off his own leverage at the knees. And he’s now gone beyond that, by actively opposing one of the few methods of escape available.
I concur with what Thomas Geoghegan, attorney for the plaintiffs, said in court today. It’s the president who has said the fallout from a default would be catastrophic, Geoghegan remarked. The only reason they aren’t saying it as a defendant is to keep their options open in the negotiations. They don’t want to take a side, because then the talks might break up.
So, to put it bluntly, the White House may have initially stumbled into the box in which they now find themselves, but now they’re standing firmly in it on purpose. They’ve created the conditions by which there is no alternative. If they wanted to pry an alternative open, they had an option with this case. The case will go forward, of course, but a May 31 hearing leaves almost no time for it to have much bearing on the situation. It’s just another marker in the future that pressures the White House into making a deal.
Just a little reminder of who is responsible for the debt ceiling crisis — Thanks, Joe Manchin!
...In 2022, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and with Republicans on the precipice of winning the majority in the midterm elections, Mr Sanders proposed raising the debt limit through budget reconciliation, which would have allowed Democrats to sidestep a Republican filibuster.
...But Mr Manchin balked at the idea, telling reporters at the time, “I don’t think it should go to reconciliation” and “my goodness, it’s something we’ve always worked together on.”
This represented a willful ignorance on the part of the West Virginia Democrat. He had not served in the Senate for a year when House Republicans took the global economy to the edge of collapse in 2011 during debt limit negotiations with the Obama administration. He had seen them do this time and again, but still assumed that Republicans would act in good faith on the debt limit and not tank the economy.
One possible explanation — He was hoping to slip his Dirty Deal “permitting reform” for fossil fuels into the debt ceiling lift. So far, it’s not working out for him. So sad.
A bipartisan group of senators is holding talks on pursuing a broad permitting agreement outside the confines of tense debt ceiling negotiations, a move aimed at maintaining the political momentum to overhaul the rules for energy infrastructure, but which would push them beyond the early June deadline.
Republicans in the House have been pushing to include a modest set of permitting changes alongside any agreement with the White House to raise the federal debt ceiling, but with the deadline to avoid a catastrophic default fast approaching, the senators are laying the groundwork to bring the issue back to the hill.
Senate Energy Chair Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Environment Public Works Chair Tom Carper (D-Del.), and the ranking members of those panels, Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), met Thursday morning to discuss negotiating a bipartisan permitting deal over the next few months through regular order.
More than half of Americans want to see the debt limit raised regardless of spending cuts, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll shows.
As the deadline to raise the debt limit approaches, 52 percent of poll respondents said they believed the U.S. should increase the ceiling first and then talk about cuts to spending later, while 42 percent said any increase should be contingent upon spending cuts, even if that meant risking default.
Responses largely fell along party lines, with 75 percent of Democrats saying the debt limit should not be tied to decreased spending and 65 percent of Republicans saying it should be. A plurality of independents — 48 percent — sided with attaching spending cuts to a debt limit increase.
Meanwhile, CNN continues it’s slide to the bottom, running with exactly the opposite finding:
Sixty percent of Americans say Congress should only raise the nation’s debt ceiling if it cuts spending at the same time, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, as the government’s June 1 “hard deadline” to avoid economic catastrophe looms large over Washington. Few see President Joe Biden or the Republicans in Congress as acting responsibly in negotiations over the debt limit, with most in both parties more concerned that their side will give up too much than that the United States will default on its debt.
Still, a broad majority of Americans favor raising the debt ceiling (84%), with just 15% saying Congress should not do so under any circumstances. Besides the 60% who support raising the ceiling alongside spending cuts, 24% say it should happen no matter what.
These findings come amid widespread doubts about the nation’s political leaders more broadly. Few Americans say that Biden (31%) or the Republican leaders in the House of Representatives (29%) have the right priorities. Among independents, 60% say that neither Biden nor GOP leaders are paying enough attention to the country’s most pressing problems.
There’s just one small problem. If you look at the CNN Poll crosstabs, you find:
Among the enEre sample,
29% described themselves as Democrats
30% described themselves as Republicans
41% described themselves as independents or members of another party.
Compare that to the Marist/NPR crosstabs, which are far more typical of the US electorate:
Democrat 37%
Republican 30%
Independent 31%
The fight over the future of AM radio got a little more heated this week as organizations representing the auto and technology industries told Congress that its plan to mandate this mode of radio wave reception is poorly conceived and will hinder progress.
...While AM radio remains popular for local sports broadcasts and talk radio, the authors of the proposed legislation frame their act in terms of emergency alerts. That might have made sense back in the days of Marconi and Bell, but we're living in the 21st century with more than one way to broadcast alerts. What's more, for a radio alert to actually work, it has to be turned on and tuned to the right wavelength.
As the letter from the trade groups notes, 97 percent of Americans have a cellphone, which is already designed to receive Wireless Emergency Alerts, and these alerts can be received even if the cellular network is unable to send calls or other data.
Among the many plot lines in the Dianne Feinstein saga is Gov. Gavin Newsom's pledge to appoint a Black woman to replace the 89-year-old should a vacancy arise before her term expires in January 2025.
He made that promise during his 2021 anti-recall campaign, and a new article from the Associated Press' Michael R. Blood conveys the extent to which the governor may have boxed himself in. While many Black Democrats expect the governor to follow through on his pledge, the two candidates who seemed the most likely at the time of the pledge — Reps. Barbara Lee and Karen Bass — may no longer be options. Lee is running against Rep. Adam Schiff to succeed Feinstein, so Newsom may want to avoid tilting the scales in that race. Meanwhile, Bass just began her tenure as mayor of Los Angeles.
...For whatever it's worth, people in “California circles” often float a ton of unsubstantiated gossip that's more “Hey, I’m just spitballing myself here” versus “Hey, a person close to the actual decision-maker told me this thing.” On the Oprah rumor specifically, however, there's reason to believe it may be closer to the latter than the former.
Target announced it will remove some of its LGBTQ+ merchandise from its Pride Month collection after threats and backlash from customers, making the corporation just one of several recent examples of prominent companies caving to right wing attacks on the LGBTQ+ community.
The mega retailer has offered products celebrating Pride Month for more than a decade, but according to company spokeswoman Kayla Castañeda stores have experienced an uptick in threats against staff safety over this year’s collection.
Target’s backsliding comes just a week after the Los Angeles Dodgers announced the team would no longer honor an LGBTQ advocacy group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, with a community service award, citing “the strong feelings of people who have been offended” by them. The group describes itself as “a leading-edge order of queer and trans nuns,” and advocates for sexual tolerance.
Why we strike: The Writers Guild is up against the wall
Newsweek — AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can't Go Quietly
...The Writer's Guild of America (WGA) is currently on strike against the AMPTP, the representation of the Hollywood studios and streamers. A number of demands were made and were met with the expected pushback, but one pushback was alarming: the refusal to even have a conversation about the potential for AI to displace screenwriters in films and series.
As a WGA writer, a Directors Guild of America (DGA) director, a former Screen Actors' Guild (SAG) board member, former SAG negotiating committee member, and coder who holds a UCLA degree in computer science and digital media management, I knew this signaled that they were not only thinking about using AI to displace us, but that they had already begun.
…
I believe this is the last time any labor action will be effective in our business. If we don't make strong rules now, they simply won't notice if we strike in three years, because at that point, they won't need us.
Deadline — Max Reverses Credits Display “Mistake” After DGA & WGA Blasted It As “Insulting” To Directors & Writers
Warner Bros. Discovery has corrected changes it made to director and writer credits in its rollout of Max after receiving harsh blowback from the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild. In a statement today, Max said: “We agree that the talent behind the content on Max deserve their work to be properly recognized. We will correct the credits, which were altered due to an oversight in the technical transition from HBO Max to Max and we apologize for this mistake.”
Prior to Max’s reversal, the DGA, which is currently in negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers for a contract, called the company’s unilateral move “a grave insult,” saying that will take “the strongest possible actions” to reverse it. The WGA, which has been on strike for more than three weeks, called the change “disrespectful and insulting.”
“For almost 90 years, the Directors Guild has fought fiercely to protect the credit and recognition deserved by Directors for the work they create,” said DGA President Lesli Linka Glatter. “Warner Bros. Discovery’s unilateral move, without notice or consultation, to collapse directors, writers, producers and others into a generic category of ‘creators’ in their new Max rollout while we are in negotiations with them is a grave insult to our members and our union. This devaluation of the individual contributions of artists is a disturbing trend and the DGA will not stand for it. We intend on taking the strongest possible actions, in solidarity with the WGA, to ensure every artist receives the individual credit they deserve.”
There is a paradox at the heart of our changing climate. While the blanket of air close to the Earth’s surface is warming, most of the atmosphere above is becoming dramatically colder. The same gases that are warming the bottom few miles of air are cooling the much greater expanses above that stretch to the edge of space.
...The good news for climate scientists is that the data on cooling aloft do more than confirm the accuracy of the models that identify surface warming as human-made. A new study published this month in the journal PNAS by veteran climate modeler Ben Santer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that it increased the strength of the “signal” of the human fingerprint of climate change fivefold, by reducing the interference “noise” from background natural variability. Sander says the finding is “incontrovertible.”
But the new discoveries about the scale of cooling aloft are leaving atmospheric physicists with new worries — about the safety of orbiting satellites, about the fate of the ozone layer, and about the potential of these rapid changes aloft to visit sudden and unanticipated turmoil on our weather below.
In a statement on LinkedIn on Monday, Verra’s CEO, David Antonioli, said he would leave his role after 15 years leading the organisation that dominates the $2bn voluntary carbon market, which has certified more than 1bn credits through its verified carbon standard (VCS).
The announcement follows a difficult period for Verra, which has seen the environmental integrity of their carbon standard satirised by the comedian John Oliver and journalistic exposés about the integrity of their carbon credit certification process.
In January, a nine-month investigation by the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and the investigative group SourceMaterial found Verra rainforest credits used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations were largely worthless, often based on stopping the destruction of rainforests that were not threatened, according to independent studies. It also found evidence of forced evictions at a flagship scheme co-operated by Conservation International in Peru.
...Working with ABC News and nine ABC stations we assembled bundles of recyclable plastic bags, each containing a tracking device to see if those bags are being recycled at all.
... Of the 46 total trackers the ABC News teams dropped at bins, 23 of them last pinged at landfills or trash incinerators.
...In a statement, Target said, "Our intention is to make it easy for our guests to recycle clean and empty plastic bags and packaging in our stores. We're proud of the recycling impact we're making - last year, we recycled nearly 24 million pounds of plastic bags and plastic film materials from our in-store recycling bins and across our store and distribution center operations. We take seriously the role we play in reducing waste and we're committed to looking at our processes to improve our recycling efforts."
The GMC Hummer EV has the biggest battery pack of all EVs on the market today, with a nominal capacity of 246.8 kWh. GM made some clever engineering choices when designing the battery. One of the more interesting ones is how it stacked two 400-volt battery packs to enable 400-volt and 800-volt charging. The two packs are connected in parallel if the truck is hooked to a 400-volt charging station. When the station delivers 800 volts, the two packs are connected in series, so the GMC Hummer EV doesn't need a DC-DC converter to handle either voltage.
Still, GM also made some stupid choices in other areas, and the recent teardown by Munro Live reveals that the Ultium pack is not so cleverly designed after all. Right from the start, engineers Antonio DiNunno and Julian Aytes brought up the challenges posed by the 2,818-lb (1,278-kg) battery pack, which is as heavy as an entire compact car such as the Honda Civic. And this is not because of the 24 modules in the pack but because the battery housing is carelessly designed.
...The key takeaway from this teardown is that GM is likely losing a lot of money on the GMC Hummer. It will continue to do so if it doesn't change the fundamentals of the Ultium battery pack. Maybe this is why GM is throttling Hummer EV production and only delivered two trucks in the first quarter. The situation appears to be better with the Cadillac Lyriq, so we're curious to see what the battery pack on that one looks like.
With the U.S. supplying billions-of-dollars of munitions to Ukraine and growing tensions in the Taiwan Strait, some Pentagon generals are sounding alarms about the dwindling supply of U.S. weapons ... at a time when the cost of replacing them is skyrocketing – we wondered why the Pentagon is finding it hard to procure weapons it needs at a price taxpayers can afford? A six-month investigation by 60 Minutes found it has less to do with foreign entanglements than domestic ones - what can only be described as price gouging by U.S. defense contractors.
Shay Assad: The gouging that takes place is unconscionable. It's unconscionable.
Perhaps no one understands the problem better than Shay Assad, now retired after four decades negotiating weapons deals. In the 1990s, he was executive vice president and chief contract negotiator for defense giant Raytheon. Then he switched sides… under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Assad rose to be the Defense Department's most senior and awarded contract negotiator. The Pentagon, he told us, overpays for almost everything – for radar and missiles … helicopters … planes … submarines… down to the nuts and bolts.
...Russian President Vladimir Putin declared last week that beer in Prague, where a summit between Kremlin critics recently took place, contains “female sex hormones” and called the opposition officials who met there “half-wits.” On the same day, his best friend Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Security Council and former KGB hardliner, warned of a deadly “radioactive cloud that is now moving towards Western Europe” from Ukraine.
...While the Kremlin’s propagandists and state television shows mock Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “an unfunny comedian,” the accidental comedy show starring Kremlin officials offers a glimmer of hope for the future of Russia, according to former State Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov, who left Russia in 2019.
“Putin and his guys are turning into a comedy club, they are not lords of the ring any longer,” he told The Daily Beast. “The Kremlin is making mistake after mistake, which makes it clear to the public that they are just a bunch of ridiculous fools.”
Who are you thinking of tonight? Tell us in the comments