Why the hell are these two not in jail? I figured they would be after the voting fraud scam they just pulled.
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Good news
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An ongoing issue that only gets worse with climate change:
Inspector General Slams FEMA Over Repeatedly Flooded Homes
The Federal Emergency Management Agency fails to help tens of thousands of people whose homes have repeatedly flooded, according to a report by the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security.
A 2004 law requires FEMA to keep a list of homes that have repeatedly flooded, and prioritize those homes for federal assistance. But the new report finds that FEMA’s list is rife with errors and that nothing has been done to reduce the flood risk for most of the nearly 38,000 homes on the list. The Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA.
FEMA “provides neither equitable nor timely relief” to those who own homes that have repeatedly flooded, the report states.
“These properties are really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to staring down our climate change future,” says Anna Weber, a flood analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Flood risks are increasing all across the country — this isn’t just a coastal problem. So, if we don’t act to address the risk to properties like these, we’re going to see more and more repetitively flooded properties all over the nation.”
Between 2005 and 2018, the number of repeatedly flooded properties in the U.S. nearly doubled, according to FEMA’s data. Climate change is driving more frequent and severe flooding in much of the U.S. because sea levels are rising, and hurricanes and other storms are dumping more rain.
When a house floods repeatedly in a short period of time, it’s eligible for special help from FEMA. For example, homeowners can apply for money to help cover the cost of raising the house’s foundation. Or, if multiple houses in a neighborhood are flooding, the local government can apply for federal funding to update drainage infrastructure.
In the most drastic cases, FEMA can help the local government purchase a home that has flooded multiple times and demolish it, allowing the people who lived there to move to a safer place and allowing water to flow with fewer obstructions and be absorbed into the ground more easily.
Demand for flood mitigation funds has skyrocketed in the last decade, according to the new report, and consistently outstrips the amount of money available through FEMA. That has led to mounting pressure from Congress to prioritize homes that are known to be at high risk, including those that have repeatedly flooded.
The vast majority of residential flood insurance is provided through the heavily indebted National Flood Insurance Program, which is funded with tax dollars.
Despite the cost to taxpayers, FEMA does not have an accurate list of properties that have flooded repeatedly, the report found. The inspector general’s office spot-checked about 800 homes on FEMA’s list and found that 140 of them were incorrectly classified.
Of the 140 misclassified homes, 111 of them had been elevated so they were no longer prone to flooding. But, because they were on FEMA’s list, the occupants were required to pay for expensive flood insurance.
Other homes on the list didn’t exist at all. In at least one case, the inspector general’s office found that a home that was on the list in 2019 had actually been purchased using federal flood mitigation funds and demolished more than 25 years earlier, in 1993.
The report’s authors found that FEMA’s inaccurate list makes it all but impossible for the agency to prioritize who should get federal help for flooding. The authors also express concern that FEMA “does not distinguish or prioritize relief for primary versus secondary residences,” which means people stuck in homes that flood over and over are competing with those whose beach houses are at risk.
“This subset of insured properties that flood over and over again have strained the [National Flood Insurance] Program’s finances,” said Velma Smith, a flood expert at the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a March 2019 congressional hearing on flood risk. “In some years, repetitive loss properties account for as little as 1% of the program’s policyholders but make 25 to 30 percent of its claims.”
FEMA acknowledged the report’s findings and agreed with all the recommendations. In a memo responding to the report, FEMA Associate Administrator Cynthia Spishak wrote that the agency will reach out to the communities with a large number of repeatedly flooded homes and come up with a plan by the end of 2021 to allocate funds more equitably and efficiently.
Information about how many homes have repeatedly flooded hasn’t always been publicly available. For more than a decade after FEMA began tracking repeatedly flooded properties, the agency didn’t release data about its list.
In 2017, the Natural Resources Defense Council published the data for the first time, after obtaining it through an open records request. Today, the group published a dashboard that allows anyone to search by county to see how many repeatedly flooded homes are in their area.
“Stormwater management and floodplain management are done at the county level,” Weber explains. “So, people can start to get an idea of not just what the physical risk is, but how different jurisdictions are working to address that risk and how well they’re doing.”
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In relief, Dershowitz is seeking $50,000,000 in compensatory damages and $250,000,000 in punitive damages for a total of $300,000,000. Dershowitz told Law&Crime in March that he was thinking of suing CNN because CNN “doctored the truth.”
The defamation lawsuit against CNN comes at a time when Dershowitz is locked in a defamation lawsuit with Virginia Roberts Giuffre , who claims Dershowitz’s former client Jeffrey Epstein forced her to have sex with Dershowitz when she was a minor. Dershowitz has denied the allegations, saying Giuffre is a liar and that they have never even met.
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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: WTF - Get Out the Vote - Voter resources 2020 & Obstacles
Trump doesn’t just ignore west coast disasters.
He’s also adept at ignoring southeastern disasters, particularly floods and hurricanes.
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Yeah and if it hits his neck of Florida he’ll have FEMA money in his pocket so fast scientists will use it to study how fast light can travel through bullshit.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: More Questionable Behavior from Trump, T Admin, DOJ, and R’s vs Dems, Press, Justice
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A post was merged into an existing topic: US in crisis - Black Lives Matter Fallout - National and local responses
As Fires Rage Across the West, Trump Bails Out Big Oil & Picks Climate Denier for Top Role at NOAA
New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States
According to new data from the Rhodium Group analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley.
Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county.
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Ok…showtime. Mary Trump will be suing the Trump family.
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Trump renews, or rather continues, his antisemitic “dual loyalty” and “loyal only to themselves” attacks against Jews:
Trump said Jews are ‘only in it for themselves’ and ‘stick together,’ according to a new report
- President Donald Trump reportedly said Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” after a call with Jewish lawmakers.
- The president privately made the comments to senior officials in his administration, according to a report from The Washington Post.
President Donald Trump reportedly suggested that Jews have a loyalty to their religion above other interests, repeating an accusation that has long been used to stoke anti-Semitism.
Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together,” Trump said in front of officials in his administration, according to a new report from The Washington Post on Wednesday.
More than two dozen current and former Trump administration officials spoke with The Post about the president’s views on race and described racist remarks they said he has made while in office.
The president’s characterizations of Jews occurred after he got off the phone with Jewish lawmakers, the officials said.
Trump has made similar statements about Jewish people, including during a conference call last week with American Jews when he said “we love your country,” referring to Israel.
He also told an audience of Jewish Americans that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu is “your prime minister” and called Jews who are Democrats “disloyal.”
The idea that Jews hold a greater allegiance to their religion than their own country, otherwise known as “dual loyalty,” is widely believed to be anti-Semitic.
Many American Jews have condemned Trump’s insinuations and pointed to the history of violence and persecution that Jews have faced as evidence of what such rhetoric can lead to.
The Washington Post also reported clashes between Trump and some of his senior officials over his comments following the infamous Unite the Right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists stormed the college town and were soon met by counterprotesters, leading to violence that left many injured and one person dead.
Trump later said that there were “fine people on both sides.” Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser at the time, had an intense exchange with Trump following the statement, The Post reported.
“Not only did you say it, you continued to double down on it,” Cohn said, according to The Post. “And if you want, I’ll get the transcripts.”
John Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, also criticized Trump at the time, according to The Post.
“You have to fix this,” he said. “You were supporting white supremacists. You have to go back out and correct this.”
Trump has long used this sort of attack on Jews and other groups. I have three threads about that:
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Mary going after T and her Aunt MaryAnne for fraud with a civil lawsuit submitted today. What a dig into the family…and lays bare their finances and actions. And how would Trump like to handle it, more than likely, pay her to make it go away.
But Mary has a much greater purpose. Expose him for who he is…a fraud.
On Thursday, more than two months after the book was published and a little more than one month before the election, Ms. Trump told her story again — this time in a lawsuit.
The suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, accused Mr. Trump, his sister Maryanne Trump Barry and their brother Robert Trump, who died in August, of fraud and civil conspiracy. It seeks to recover the millions of dollars Ms. Trump claims to have lost.
In its first sentence, the lawsuit says that, for the Trumps, “fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life.” Beginning in the 1980s, the suit contends, the president and his siblings took control of the New York City real estate empire their father, Fred Trump Sr., had built and “exploited it to enrich themselves” to the detriment of everyone around them.
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Whoa.
California Moves To Ban Sales Of Gas-Powered Cars By 2035
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Trump’s racism is poisoning America in more ways than we thought.
So much tear gas has been sprayed on Portland protesters that officials fear it’s polluted the water
Tear gas from the near-nightly sieges in Portland may be trickling into the Willamette River, officials fear
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