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Melissa Lucio is scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on April 27 after her 2008 conviction for killing her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah. But a growing number of advocates and lawmakers say that state officials will be killing an innocent woman should they go through with the execution. They cite an investigation and trial so deeply flawed that five jurors who convicted Lucio have since asked for Texas to halt her execution and give her a new trial.

“I am now convinced that the jury got it wrong and I know that there is too much doubt to execute Lucio,” juror Johnny Galvan Jr. wrote in the Houston Chronicle this month. “If I could take back my vote, I would.”

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Both Galvan and the Innocence Project, a leading organization that has fought to exonerate wrongly convicted people, noted that prosecutors’ case largely rested on the confession that Lucio gave after hours of interrogation. Detectives tormented Lucio the night of Mariah’s death. The child had fallen down some stairs but initially appeared to be fine. But two days later, she never woke back up from a nap.

“In the interrogation room, officers berated and intimidated Ms. Lucio, who was pregnant and still reeling from the loss of her child, for five hours,” the Innocence Project said. “Research has shown that survivors of sexual abuse and violence, like Ms. Lucio, are more vulnerable to falsely confessing under such coercive conditions.”

But at 3 AM, “physically and emotionally exhausted” from hours of interrogation, Lucio said “’I guess I did it’ in the hopes that they would end the interrogation.” This coerced statement was then used in her trial as a false confession. In his op-ed, Galvan Jr. wrote that he was not made aware of Lucio’s history as a physical and sexual abuse victim, and how that “made her vulnerable to falsely confess when subjected to aggressive interrogation tactics on the night of her daughter’s death.”

He said no one told him that she pleaded her innocence more than 100 times before saying, under duress, that she did it. But Lucio has always been clear: “Mariah was my baby, I loved her,” she said last month, according to Innocence Project.

There have been further disturbing developments in the time since Lucio’s conviction. Armando Villalobos, the Cameron County district attorney who fought to have her executed as part of a likely cynical reelection ploy, has himself been sentenced to more than a decade in prison on charges of bribery and extortion. “Mr. Villalobos argued that Ms. Lucio abused her daughter leading to her death, but thousands of pages of interviews and records from Child Protective Services show that Ms. Lucio’s children never said she was violent with any of them,” Innocence Project continued.

Not with just days until Lucio may become the first Latina to be executed by the state of Texas, more than 80 state lawmakers have called on “Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Lucio clemency or a reprieve,” the Dallas Observer reports.

“New evidence that has emerged since Ms. Lucio’s trial points to the fact that her daughter, Mariah, died after a tragic accident and not by her mother’s hands,” lawmakers wrote. “A commutation or a reprieve would give her lawyers the time they need to develop all the evidence that could prove Ms. Lucio’s innocence. While we understand the gravity of the issue before you and the important role that the Board of Pardons and Paroles plays in our criminal justice system, we also believe this is an opportunity to prevent a miscarriage of justice that would undermine public trust in our legal system.”

“Ms. Lucio’s case is one that gives even proponents of the death penalty pause,” lawmakers continued. “Doctors who recently reviewed the autopsy—including a leading specialist from The University of Texas Medical Branch—concluded that the jury heard false testimony about whether Mariah was abused.”

“A panel of federal judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a unanimous three-judge opinion that Ms. Lucio was denied the right to present ‘a meaningful defense,’” Innocence Project continued. “And in a subsequent decision following an appeal from the state, 10 out of the Fifth Circuit’s 17 judges agreed that the exclusion of the psychologist’s testimony skewed the evidence against Ms. Lucio.” 

Innocence Project said last month that 100,000 people had signed a petition urging the state to halt Lucio’s execution. Since that time, that number has swelled to over 230,000. Just days ago, Lucio’s team appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for a stay of execution.

“I want to tell my supporters that I’m very grateful for all the letters they have sent me, their words of encouragement, their support, and their belief in me,” she said according to Innocence Project. “I’m just very excited that so many people have signed the petition, so many have believed in me and know that I was wrongfully convicted, I’m hoping that I will be set free from this place.” Click here and help a life by urging Gov. Greg Abbott to grant clemency for Melissa Lucio.

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Leadership abhors a vacuum and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is Exhibit A. First, McConnell had the chance to finish off Donald Trump’s political future during his second impeachment but failed to seal the deal.

Next, McConnell had a chance to give Americans a Republican vision they could vote for in November, but he demurred—choosing instead to offer nothing for which Republicans could be held to account as a cynical campaign strategy.

Now, McConnell’s getting burned on both fronts—by Scott and Trump alike. Trump is getting his jollies by carpet bombing the 2022 landscape with endorsements at will. At the same time, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who’s running the Senate GOP’s bid to retake the upper chamber, has pounced on McConnell’s unsteady grip on the caucus.

After Scott dropped his disastrous 11-point plan to “Rescue America” last month on “an unsuspecting party,” he relished the upheaval he created, according to a delightful Washington Post account.

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Scott used a Wall Street Journal op-ed to malign his critics as “careerists in Washington” and jeered, “Bring it on.” He also restructured the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s fundraising efforts to line his own campaign coffers and then punched back at his detractors.

“We don’t spend much time worrying about criticisms from anonymous Republican consultants who lost the Senate last cycle and who have gotten rich off maintaining the status quo,” Chris Hartline, NRSC communications director and Scott campaign spokesperson, told the Post.

But the pugnacity of Scott and his allies doesn’t reverse the fact that he’s adding significant deadweight to GOP efforts in November.

For one, he sucking up a lot of money for himself. Donors at some of his events (including in Florida) have been asked to divide their first $10,800 between Scott’s campaign account and his own leadership PAC before gifting more to the NRSC account.

The Senate GOP committee is pretty flush at $33 million—$13 million more than at the same point in 2020 and more than twice as much in 2018.

But Scott isn’t up for reelection and, as one GOP strategist noted, “He is doing it in a state where there is an incumbent senator who is in-cycle.” That would be Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

But that’s just one example plaguing what colleagues joke has become the “National Rick Scott Committee.” Another change includes Scott whittling down the cut for candidates who let the NRSC fundraise off their images in digital ads. Candidates used to split the haul 50-50 with the committee along with getting donors’ names but, under Scott, they get just 10% of donations plus donor names.

Overall, the takeaway among many of the colleagues Scott is supposed to be helping is that “Rick Scott seems to care a lot more about his political future than the Senate incumbents he is supposed to be working for,” according to one anonymous source.

But one group that is extremely pleased with Scott’s efforts is Senate Democrats.

“We’ve got three words for him: Keep it up,” said David Bergstein, the communications director at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has been readily highlighting Scott’s plan to raise taxes on more than 100 million American households as well as sunset Medicare and Social Security.

“No NRSC chair has done more for Senate Democrats than Rick Scott,” Bergstein added.

Someone else who applauds Scott’s self-serving actions is a fellow Florida man who loves anyone and anything that becomes a thorn in McConnell’s side.

“I don’t agree with everything in the plan, but Rick is a good man,” Donald Trump said.

Trump’s statement, however, surely says more about his hatred for McConnell than it does Scott’s stewardship of the NRSC.

“I’d take Romney over McConnell,” Trump recently said of Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who became the lone GOP senator to vote in favor of Trump’s first impeachment. “I think he’d do a better job, and I think Romney is a lowlife.”

For his part, McConnell would be in a much better position to put Scott’s GOP agenda to rest if he would bother to pound out a plan of his own. But the fact is, Scott dared to tell Americans what Republicans stand for and McConnell hasn’t. And there’s really no telling who will be running the Senate GOP caucus if Trump runs again in 2024 and wins.

McConnell can thank himself for that too.

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Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn has been a busy bee these past few weeks. The blaring drone of his misinformation madness machine (aka his mouth), usually reserved for simply telling vacuous lies, has been cranked up to slander of late. His relentless pathological need to say anything and everything in order to glorify himself has led him to slander his own political party. Whether these moves by Rep.Cawthorn are a desperate attempt at boosting fundraising numbers remains to be seen.

Recently, the youngest GOP fiscal conservative hypocrite has been under the microscope after his FEC campaign filings revealed his finances to be what economists would call piss poor. On Sunday, the Washington Examiner published a report on the North Carolina teller of untruths and his extravagant use of taxpayer money. According to the report, Cawthorn spent just under $5,000 on “legislative planning food and beverage” expenses over a week in August. Also during that week, he took a trip to the Skylaranna luxury mountain resort in North Carolina.

RELATED STORY: Madison Cawthorn raised $3.5 million but seems to only have a little over $100K left

Before we go further, it is important to note here that Cawthorn was one of 174 Republicans to vote against the PACT Act at the beginning of March. This bill is set to help cover the broad range of expenses that military service members, who have been injured or poisoned during their service to our country, need in medical treatment. The Republican Party and Madison Cawthorn’s excuse for not voting to support our troops is that they would like to find a cheaper way to not deal with the military members they enjoy sending off to conflicts in foreign lands.

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The Examiner broke down some of the expenses accrued during the week of Aug 6-10:

• $2,950 allotted to his Skylaranna resort stay.
• $556 for four trips to local grocery stores that week.
• $491 spent at Papa’s and Beer Mexican Restaurant
• $382 worth of Chick-fil-A
• $53 at Joey’s NY Bagel
• $47 at Bojangles

It sounds almost like a party. What was Madison talking about while signing away American taxpayer cash to resorts and fast food and beverage joints?

The fact that this story has come through a conservative media outlet like the Examiner is just another example of the civil war going on within the den of thieves called the Republican Party. Cawthorn’s hyper-MAGA-style hucksterism has freaked out the more neocon established sectors of the party. That’s in part because the conservative Christian political party may be having all kinds of non-Christian-style drug-fueled orgies (if Madison is to be believed), and also because Cawthorn and other Republican members of Congress like Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar represent a new tea party-inspired rat that has climbed aboard the sinking Republican ship. And trapped in a small space, rats will eat anything until there is only one rat left.

But to put Cawthorn’s expenses into perspective, the Washington Examiner gave an easy-to-understand comparison of Madison’s frivolousness—even in his own craven and corrupt political party:

About 286 representatives reported spending $0 for legislative planning events in 2021, House disbursement records show. The 149 representatives that did pull from their allowance to pay for legislative planning expenses spent $1,170 on average.

Only one representative spent more than Cawthorn for legislative planning events in 2021: Republican Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who reported spending $6,000 for legislative planning that year.

In a different time in our country’s history, Rep. Cawthorn would have been expelled from the House of Representatives so many times it would have have created new laws in our country. Excuse me for one second, Madison Just finished off a couple hundred dollars in chicken sandwiches. He just wiped his hands with a wet towlette.

It’s nice if you can have someone else pay for it. It seems like Madison thinks of those “dollars” as “HIS” dollars, not “OURS.” It is important to realize here how truly malignant a narcissist like Cawthorn is. As the Smokey Mountain News reported on Monday, a former Cawthorn staff member is filing a labor violation claim against him, saying she was fired after being “denied leave when her uncle passed away and her husband had a heart attack during the same week.”

Lisa WIggins was a former caseworker and campaign aide to Rep. Madison Cawthorn, whose complaints were legally recorded by “David Wheeler, co-founder of nonpartisan advocacy PAC American Muckrakers.” Among other things, Wiggins explains that Cawthorn has closed virtually all of his district offices, making it more than difficult for constituents to interact with their representative. She also claimed that Cawthorn’s home offices in Henderson, North Carolina, housed more liquor bottles than water bottles.

“As far as the candidate himself, I mean, he’s just a bad person. He’s a habitual liar and he’s going to say and do anything he can to your face but behind your back he’s completely opposite,” she said. “There’s some good stories I have – a lot of good stories.”

Please, Miss—may I have another?

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A pipeline break in Webb County, Texas, sent around 900 metric tons of methane into the atmosphere last month, according to a Bloomberg report. The rupture of a section of the Big Cowboy pipeline, a 16-inch natural gas pipeline that spans 45 miles in Webb—which includes the city of Laredo—and Zapata counties and delivers gas to an Exxon operation emitted plumes large enough to likely be seen from space. In addition to methane, the pipeline also emitted greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and contained chemicals that may be dangerous to humans, like n-pentane, though there is not enough research to definitively quantify its effects. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) categorizes n-pentane as a class D carcinogen, which means more research must be done before issuing a decision on its harm to humans.

Lack of research on leaks such as the one that occurred on March 17 points to the unequal impact of environmental damages that occur from the fossil fuel industry. Until EPA head Michael Regan pushed for more environmental justice in monitoring polluters, few communities had quantifiable data as to how the industrial giants around them were impacting their health. Webb County has existed as a region of opportunity for the oil and gas industry, but that fossil fuel boom has done little to uplift its residents. Numerous pipelines criss-cross the county, which is considered part of the Eagle Ford Group known for its fossil fuels. Yet, like many communities that bear the brunt of polluters, Webb County is a vulnerable one. According to recent census data, more than 95% of residents are Latino and nearly 20% of residents live in poverty.

What is rare is accountability. The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), which oversees a bevy of oil and gas projects in the state, told Bloomberg it was investigating the pipeline break—though even Energy Transfer, the company that operates the line itself, admits that the Big Cowboy pipeline is unregulated. Complaints have abounded from advocacy groups like Commission Shift over the RRC’s lack of oversight in fossil fuel matters, though it’s no surprise as to why the RRC usually fails to act until after the fact at best. According to a Commission Shift report, the four most recent commissioners of the RRC received 67% of their campaign funds from the oil and gas industry. Seemingly no politician with ties to the region has their hands clean of donations from polluters: Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz both have received thousands from Energy Transfer as well as executives with Kinder Morgan, the company that entered into partnership with Energy Transfer for its Big Cowboy project.

In the meantime, the EPA is awaiting answer from the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality, which didn’t receive a report about the Big Cowboy pipeline break until March 30. Similarly, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration also hasn’t received any information about the incident, though new onshore reporting requirements for pipelines like Big Cowboy are set to take effect on May 16. Under those guidelines, all gas-gathering lines are subject to the mandatory disclosure to the agency of incident reports, closing a previous loophole that made it harder for “unregulated” pipelines to be monitored. It’s a step in the right direction on the federal level, but it still allows for errors to pile up on a state and county level.

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Federal District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle has voided the Centers for Disease Control-issued mask mandate, which requires masks at airports and transportation hubs nationally. In her 59-page ruling, Mizelle argued that the CDC had exceeded its legal powers by issuing the mandate in January 2021.

“The Court concludes that the Mask Mandate exceeds the CDC’s statutory authority and violates the procedures required for agency rulemaking under the [Administrative Procedure Act],” Mizelle wrote. “Accordingly, the Court vacates the Mandate and remands it to the CDC.” It’s a sweeping ruling, one that will likely create chaos at airports and transportation hubs across the country while the Department of Justice, White House, and CDC prepare an appeal.

The scope of the ruling is a surprise, as is the source. Mizelle was one of the judges on Mitch McConnell’s conveyor belt pushed through in the lame duck session after the 2020 election, while the nation was in the depths of the COVID-19 crisis. At 33, Mizelle was the youngest of all of Donald Trump’s successful nominees to the judiciary. She was the 10th to be deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.

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The ABA’s standing committee on nominee evaluations sets the bar for judicial experience at at least 12 years in practice, and “substantial courtroom and trial experience as a lawyer or trial judge is important.” Mizelle had been admitted to the Florida bar in 2012, so had just eight years experience.  “Since her admission to the bar,” the ABA committee wrote, “Ms. Mizelle has not tried a case, civil or criminal, as lead or co-counsel.”

“She presents as a delightful person and she has many friends who support her nomination,” the committee wrote. “Her integrity and demeanor are not in question. These attributes however simply do not compensate for the short time she has actually practiced law and her lack of meaningful trial experience.”

The ABA didn’t remark upon one of Mizelle’s more extremist fringe notions, expressed in a speech at the 2020 Florida Chapters Conference of the Federalist Society, that she believes “paper money” is unconstitutional. “This view, popular in fringe conservative circles, is explicitly contravened by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Knox v. Lee and Parker v. Davis, which have affirmed the constitutionality of paper money,” explains the Vetting Room, a blog analyzing judicial nominations.

None of that mattered to Trump or Senate Republicans. Because what she had going for her was a stint as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the backing of the Federalist Society, and a husband, Chad Mizelle, who worked for Trump. He was a big booster of white supremacist adviser Stephen Miller, and that got him a job as acting general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), even though (there’s a theme here) he had far less legal and administrative experience than previous appointees to the position.

Mizelle also worked on the 2016 Trump campaign, where he “Monitored election-day activities to reduce voter fraud; reported incidents of illegal voting procedure to Philadelphia district attorney.” Uh, huh. We got ourselves another Clarence and Ginni Thomas in the making with these two.

We also have a rotten federal judiciary, larded up with Trump judges like this one. Yes, President Joe Biden has had tremendous success in getting actually qualified and diverse judges on the bench, but the damage that these ideologues can do can’t be exaggerated.

An appeal of Mizelle’s decision will go to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of three courts of appeal that Trump and McConnell flipped from a majority appointed by Democrats to a majority appointed by Republicans—including Trump, who appointed a whopping six of the judges there. Biden nominated Nancy Gbana Abudu, a civil rights litigator, to a vacancy on the 11th Circuit in January.

The chances of the Biden administration prevailing in the 11th look slim, and nonexistent in the Trump Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court already ruled that the CDC can’t impose national measures to curb the pandemic when it struck down the CDC’s eviction moratorium while the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging last summer. It did that from the shadow docket.

It’s not just the Supreme Court that needs expanding: The circuit and district courts need to have a new injection of qualified non-extremist judges to dilute the wack jobs who think we need to be running around with pocketfuls of gold coins. But the Supreme Court would be a very good place to start.

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In a statement released Friday, the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) announced it had rejected 41% of K-12 math books for not meeting Common Core standards and/or for “indoctrination” or “exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts,” aka critical race theory (CRT).

The April 15 document outlines that of the 132 textbooks submitted to FDOE, 54 were rejected, with 28 denied “because they incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT.”

Twelve of the math books were tossed after claims by FDOE that they did not meet Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards, adopted in 2019 to replace Common Core, but none of the titles of the books were included in the statement.

RELATED STORY: A tiny, largely unknown Christian college is at the epicenter of today’s dark conservative movement

“It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “I’m grateful that Commissioner Corcoran and his team at the Department have conducted such a thorough vetting of these textbooks to ensure they comply with the law.”

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Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran, who is a former House speaker appointed by DeSantis, wrote that “Florida has become a national leader in education under the vision and leadership of Governor DeSantis.” He added, “When it comes to education, other states continue to follow Florida’s lead as we continue to reinforce parents’ rights by focusing on providing their children with a world-class education without the fear of indoctrination or exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts in our classrooms.”

In an op-ed for the Florida Phoenix, writer Diane Roberts called Corcoran “grossly unqualified,” citing his lack of experience in education and his ongoing attacks on public schools over charter schools.

Corcoran announced he will leave his position at the end of the year.

As has been reported numerous times, CRT is not taught in K-12 but is a graduate-level law school subject. DeSantis, who will likely run for president in 2024, has continued to report otherwise and tagged any sort of teaching about race and racism as CRT. He has gone so far as to write laws banning CRT in the classroom and offering parents the right to sue teachers if they believe it’s being taught.

In December 2021, DeSantis gave a press conference to announce his “Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act,” aka the Stop W.O.K.E. Act.

“Our legislation will defend any money for K-12 going to CRT consultants,” the governor said at the time. “No taxpayer dollars should be used to teach our kids to hate our country or hate each other.”

​​”They want to tear at the fabric of our society and our culture,” DeSantis warned. “They want to delegitimize the founding of the country and the Constitution.” He added that the term “equity” is used to mask critical race theory and is used by people to “smuggle in their ideology.”

In March, the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, aka “Individual Freedom” bill, was approved by the state Senate in a vote of 24-15 along party lines, and once signed by DeSantis, it will take effect July 1, 2022.

NPR reports that several Florida Democrats blasted the FDOE for banning the math books.

State House Rep. Carlos Smith tweeted in part: “#DeSantis has turned our classrooms into political battlefields and this is just the beginning.”

State Sen. Shevrin Jones tweeted: “Apparently CRT is being taught in mathematics in Florida, so the @EducationFL has banned some of the math books. No, this is not 1963, it’s 2022 in the “Free State of Florida.”

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Congress has within its grasp the chance to do something substantive to help fight inflation, address supply chain issues, and create some jobs in the U.S. in computer chip manufacturing. The rhetoric around the measure—nicknamed the China competiveness bill—has been jingoistic at times, but the U.S. Senate’s United States Innovation and Competition Act and the House version, known as the America COMPETES Act, have actual merit in addressing supply-chain vulnerabilities and catching the nation up in the manufacture of the product that is pretty much making the world function right now.

Each chamber has passed its version of the bill, and Democratic leaders have announced the members that will be on the conference committee, from the House, and Senate, with the goal of a supposed “compromise to boost computer chip industry.”  At least that’s how the AP is reporting it. Except there’s no compromise with Republicans in the offing, as usual.

“Without major concessions and changes from House Democrats, this legislation has no chance of becoming law,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell declared on April 7, the day House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced their conference members. In other words, it’s the usual definition of “compromise” for Republicans: total Democratic capitulation.

In a “background” note, McConnell’s statement listed the Republican senators who “will be officially named to the conference committee at a later date,” that later date remaining undetermined. If it ever arrives.

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This is potentially the last big bill that President Joe Biden could claim as a big win in November, so of course McConnell has no intention of helping him. Because of Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, McConnell can do that—all he needs to do is make sure fewer than 10 of his Republicans defect to help Democrats. That’s because this bill, like most legislation, is subject to a Republican filibuster which takes 60 votes to break. Now that we’re months away from another election, McConnell’s not going to let anything come easily.

McConnell claims that the House bill has “Green New Deal follies to Big Labor handouts to marijuana banking, the House Democrats’ competing bill drags these efforts leftward and backward.” He’s only going to move forward “with multiple motions to instruct conferees”—a floor process in the Senate he can make drag on as long as possible.

Both bills authorize a $52 billion investment in the semiconductor industry, with federal grants and loans to subsidize building and renovating plants. There’s $160 billion or so for research and development agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, and funding to reduce STEM workforce gaps. There’s $29 billion in the Senate bill to expand research and development in artificial intelligence and robotics, and a $13.3 bill provision in the House bill that would create a new directorate to ensure that climate change, sustainability, and social and economic inequality are incorporated. That’s part of what McConnell is bitching about—trying to save the planet.

That, of course, isn’t all: The House bill is forward-looking, with funding to help companies and local government and tribes in building and relocating manufacturing plants; job retraining and financial assistance for workers who’ve been displaced by increased imports; and a new visa category for entrepreneurs.

“This would be the largest five-year commitment to public R&D in our nation’s history,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation chair told the Seattle Times. “We need it for the job growth. We need it to stay competitive.”

But McConnell can’t have that on the Democrats’ watch. So no, “Congress” isn’t looking for a “compromise” between the House and Senate on this legislation. Democrats are fighting for the nation’s future, while McConnell is fighting to regain the Senate.

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Just because the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made redlining illegal doesn’t mean discrimination on all fronts disappeared—far from it, activists and scientists alike argue. The same Black and Latino neighborhoods that fared worse during the white supremacist tradition of redlining or deeming Black areas too risky for housing loans are now being targeted with nearly twice as many oil drilling wells as those in white neighborhoods, according to a study The Washington Post cited.

Joan Casey, lead author of the study, told The Washington Post it is “more evidence that this legacy of structural racism created through redlining boundaries has implications for health today.”

RELATED: Despite outstanding rating, banks still aren’t lending to black business owners like they should be

Casey’s work is a joint effort by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University in New York. It included data from 33 cities in 13 states, excluding southern cities in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Researchers told The Washington Post that Los Angeles houses more oil drilling sites than any other city and that those sites are mostly located in urban areas including “Tulsa, Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Lower Westchester County outside New York City.”

David J.X. Gonzalez, a co-author of the study, told the newspaper that research such as his “makes us aware that we need to focus on disparate exposures and health outcomes when we consider new policy.”   

“Studies like this can put equity into the equation,” Gonzalez added.

Researchers found that “living near oil and gas wells is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease, impaired lung function, anxiety, depression, preterm birth, and impaired fetal growth,” according to the study.

“In several studies, risk was heightened among racially and socioeconomically marginalized people, and in several U.S. regions these same groups have disproportionately high exposure to wells and natural gas flaring,” researchers added.

Black people are “nearly four times as likely to die from exposure to pollution than White people,” according to another study referenced in the Post. That same research showed that Black people are also 75% more likely to live in neighborhoods with a plant or factory in their backyards.

RELATED STORY: Finally, the EPA is aiming to hold polluters in Cancer Alley accountable with air quality monitoring

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched a civil rights investigation into two Louisiana agencies that permitted chemical plants and a grain terminal in the majority-Black parishes of St. John and St. James, the New Orleans Advocate reported. The parishes help form what environmental activists know as “Cancer Alley,” areas along the Mississippi River with reportedly elevated concentrations of pollutants and more cases of cancer than anywhere else in the state. President Joe Biden used the phrase in announcing his signing of climate and environmental justice orders.

The specific businesses the Louisiana state environmental quality and health department is being investigated for working with are the Denka Performance Elastomers plant, the proposed Formosa Plastics Sunshine plant, and the proposed Greenfield Exports grain terminal, the New Orleans Advocate reported.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan told the Associated Press the EPA will make unannounced inspections at the industrial sites in question. Earthjustice and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed complaints with the Louisiana state departments, and the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic also waged a complaint that was obtained by the AP.

”Nearly every census tract between Baton Rouge and New Orleans has … a higher estimated cancer risk from air toxics than at least 95% of U.S. residents,” the law clinic wrote in its complaint.

According to the New Orleans Advocate, the federal agency’s probe is specifically about:

• The continued release to the air of carcinogenic chloroprene from the Denka plant.
• Emissions of cancer-causing ethylene oxide from other chemical plants near the Denka facility in St. John.
• The potential release of the smallest size of particulate matter, called PM2.5, at the proposed $400 million Greenfields grain terminal in Wallace.
• The potential release of particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, volatile carbon monoxide, benzene, formaldehyde and ethylene oxide by Formosa Plastics’ proposed $9.4 billion Sunshine facility in St. James, which is owned by its FG LA LLC subsidiary.

General counsel for the Louisiana Department of Health Steven Russo told the New Orleans Advocate the department is taking “these concerns very seriously.”

“We have received the complaint in full from EPA and are reviewing it closely,” Russo said.

Robert Taylor, president of the nonprofit Concerned Citizens of St. John, has written extensively about activists’ fight for environmental justice in Black neighborhoods. “I have lived my whole life in Reserve, Louisiana, on a block a few hundred feet from a chemical plant emitting the “likely carcinogen” chloroprene,” he wrote in The Guardian last February. “It is the only location in the country to emit the compound and it makes my neighborhood, and others nearby, endure the highest risk of cancer due to airborne pollution anywhere in the United States.

“The plant was operated for half a century by DuPont and now by the Japanese company Denka. These corporations have always done what they wanted, regardless of the harm they have done to my community. We have had no way of protecting ourselves.”

Taylor told The Guardian last week: “We need this investigation from the perspective of racial injustice. It is so obvious what’s happening is discriminatory.”

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Mere weeks after Donald Trump sicced his cultists on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Republicans began showing up at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to pledge their undying loyalty to the man who put the lives of U.S. lawmakers on the line in a desperate bid to overturn his loser status.

Republicans, including some who had feared for their lives that day, just couldn’t get enough Trump as they sought the upper hand in the next election cycle. They eagerly shelled out cash at his property, hoping to score an appearance at their event or, god willing, a supposed golden-ticket endorsement from the man who sought to end American democracy.

Trump’s political operation has since amassed more than $120 million. “Federal records show that his PAC raised more online than the party on every day but two in the last six months of 2021, one of which was Christmas Eve,” according to The New York Times.

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Now, some 15 months into the 2022 cycle, Trump is stronger than ever as he whimsically drops bomb after bomb onto an electoral landscape that, left alone, would undoubtedly favor the GOP based on historical trends alone.

Trump’s latest direct hit came over the weekend in Ohio, where he endorsed “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance in the GOP primary for an open Senate seat. Trump made his move after a harried effort by Vance’s rivals, GOP party chairs, and politicos to convince the trigger-happy meddler to keep his powder dry.

Sorry, all, bombs away! Then Trump quit taking phone calls, dodging the blowback from the havoc he’d wrought.

Trump knew the drill: He was fresh off stirring up a similar shitstorm in Pennsylvania with his second toxic primary endorsement for the state’s open Senate seat (his first went down in flames). The difference in the Keystone State is that Democrats have a decent chance of picking up a Senate seat there, and Trump’s ceaseless tinkering is helping them every step of the way. But hey, let’s not count out Democratic chances in Ohio either, especially with Trump running interference.

But even as Republican strategists pull their hair out, Trump flits merrily along.

“I’m a gambler,” Trump told one aide about wading into the Pennsylvania primary a second time—this time to endorse fellow TV huckster Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Plus, Trump “likes endorsing against candidates, advisers say, just to see their numbers go down,” according to The Washington Post. Who could have ever guessed the guy who orchestrated a deadly coup attempt to stay in power would turn out to be such a sociopath?

But as such, Trump has exactly nothing to lose this cycle. If Republicans fail to convert in either the House or Senate, he will simply blame them for not being subservient enough to him. In fact, it’s patently obvious Trump would love nothing more than to saddle Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with defeat after expectations had been so high.

Trump couldn’t care less. The Republican Party, control of Congress, and individual candidates mean nothing to him. The only thing that matters to Trump is undying loyalty, and he’ll gladly destroy anything or anyone who isn’t meeting his insatiable expectations.

Just ask the guy who once wore body armor on Jan. 6 as he did his level best to help incite Trump’s coup. Trump had endorsed Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama for that state’s open Senate seat until such time as it looked like he was turning into a loser. Instead of sticking by his guy as his candidacy faltered, Trump capriciously pulled the rug out from under Brooks.

Right on cue, Trump blamed Brooks’ faltering campaign on what he perceived as Brooks’ softening loyalty to him.

“The reason he went down is he got off the 2020 election fraud,” Trump told the Post in an interview.

Brooks hit back after Trump’s endorsement of Oz, which has confounded Keystone State Republicans across the spectrum.

“This is happening because Trump’s surrounded himself by staff who are on McConnell’s payroll & hostile to the MAGA agenda. Everybody telling Trump who to endorse in primaries works for The Swamp,” Brooks tweeted. “They played him. Again.”

The notion that Trump has surrounded himself with McConnell staffers is sheer fantasy.

But Brooks is right about the swamp—the swamp Trump generated from his White House perch is indeed playing him.

But as long as Trump can watch someone else’s poll numbers plummet after he endorses their rival, who cares? Trump’s just pocketing the cash, drinking in the sycophancy, and reveling in his thrilling game of Battleship, one candidate at a time, as Republican Party operatives hold their breath and brace for impact.

They built that.