Over the summer, Trumpworld operatives, Republican Party oppo researchers, and GOP aides in Congress have all gleefully celebrated planting unflattering stories about Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris. But no one seems to have landed a lasting blow on Elizabeth Warren. The earliest days of the Massachusetts senator’s presidential campaign provided ample fodder for Republicans. After an attempt to blunt President Donald Trump’s racist taunts about her Native American heritage by presenting the results of a DNA test fell flat, GOP operatives had a field day, and figured they’d feast off that misstep for some time. But Warren has recovered from that initial stumble, and steadily gained ground in the Democratic primary. And now Republicans are wondering why there is so little critical coverage of the senator and why the stories out there are making next to no dent.

“We all push out the bad Warren stories but they don’t go very far,” one Republican strategist said.

The frustration Republicans are beginning to feel about Warren’s non-stick nature was picked up repeatedly in interviews with 10 Republicans, including Trump campaign and White House officials, associates of the president, and other GOP operatives with knowledge of the situation. These sources stressed that the anti-Warren effort within GOP circles hadn’t fallen off since the DNA snafu. Indeed, everyone from officials on Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, to the Republican National Committee, to a select group of opposition researchers have been sifting through her record in search of vulnerabilities. But with few punches landing, the worry is that Trump may have already taken his best shot, and that Warren will end up looking increasingly formidable for having bounced back.

“Sure the Republican base will ultimately loathe Warren, but she doesn't inspire the same kind of historic vitriol that Hillary Clinton did,” a separate Republican strategist said. “That, combined with fact that SCOTUS isn’t on the line as it was in ’16, and remembering that Trump needed the perfect inside straight to barely win last time, and any Democrat is going to be tough to beat, Warren included.”

Within Trumpworld and the president’s re-election effort, there has been a dramatic shift in how Warren is talked about now, versus how she was discussed as a potential nominee a year ago...A year later, they’re not laughing her off. In recent months, senior Trump campaign officials have increasingly discussed Warren as a growing threat, in large part because of the enthusiasm they believe she can inspire on the progressive left, and her improving poll numbers in the primary, two knowledgeable sources say. The president of the United States appears to be taking her candidacy more seriously, as well. According to three people who have spoken to Trump about Warren over the past two months, the president has specifically highlighted what he views as her surprising political and populist talents during the Democratic primary, and has told multiple advisers and associates that he hears she could be “tougher” in a general election than many initially expected. One of these sources said Trump asked the room if they thought Warren was a “fighter.”

The Warren campaign declined to comment for this piece. But multiple Republicans argued that while Sanders received his fair share of attacks by Democrats and critical coverage both in 2016 and in 2020, Warren has largely gone unscathed. And they view her ability to campaign without taking too much incoming fire as a testament to her skill. “Bernie just screams and shakes his fist but she’s very strategic,” one Republican Senate aide said about Warren.

More at https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-and-elizabeth-warren-trumpworld-anxiety-grows-over-the-massachusetts-democrat

WASHINGTON — Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released an ambitious new climate change plan on Tuesday, embracing goals laid out by a former presidential rival and calling for $3 trillion in spending over a decade to combat human-driven global warming.

Ms. Warren made her announcement on the eve of a CNN town-hall-style event on global warming, which 10 top Democrats in the 2020 field are scheduled to attend on Wednesday — the first time in a presidential campaign that the question of what to do about the heating planet has merited its own major forum on prime-time television.

...Ms. Warren’s new climate plan explicitly adopts ideas from Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who focused his presidential campaign on combating climate change but dropped out last month after it became clear he was unlikely to qualify for the next primary debate. “While his presidential campaign may be over, his ideas should remain at the center of the agenda,” Ms. Warren wrote in her new climate plan.

Mr. Inslee released six detailed climate plans, totaling over 200 pages, which were widely praised by environmental policy experts for their rigor. He said he hoped they would help “raise the ambition” of other candidates’ climate policies, and he has since had conversations with several candidates about how to incorporate his ideas into their plans, said his former campaign spokesman, Jared Leopold.

In her new proposal, Ms. Warren adopts Mr. Inslee’s plan to eliminate planet-warming emissions from power plants, vehicles and buildings over 10 years, and adds an additional $1 trillion in spending to subsidize that transition. The spending would be paid for, she says, by reversing the Trump administration’s tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations.

Like Mr. Inslee’s proposal, her plan would set regulations aimed at retiring coal-fired electricity within a decade, but also fund health care and pensions for coal miners. It would create new federal regulations on vehicle tailpipe emissions with the goal of achieving zero emissions from new light-duty passenger vehicles, medium-duty trucks and buses by 2030.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-climate-change-plan.html?searchResultPosition=1

HAMPTON FALLS -- The threat of rain didn’t keep the crowd away, but it cut the questions short as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren made a Labor Day campaign stop at a local home Monday afternoon. Denis and Pam Rice hosted a house party for the Democratic presidential hopeful that brought about 800 guests into their backyard for Warren’s 15th visit to the state since January.

...Warren took two questions from the audience before the rain intensified. The first focused on whether she has what it takes to beat President Donald Trump. Warren, who didn’t respond with an attack on Trump, said she knows how to fight and win.

“I think you have to be willing to get in this fight all the way, but here’s another component, at least as I see it. I think what’s going to carry us as Democrats is not playing it safe. It is not pretending that everything was just fine and here was this one problem and we’ll get rid of that one problem and it’s all going to work out, because it’s not. It’s not. We have had problems going back decades now, and they are big structural problems,” she said.

When questioned by reporters, Warren was asked if she would ever ignore the so-called “non-aggression pact” she has with Sen. Bernie Sanders to draw more of a distinction between the two candidates to make it easier for voters to decide.

“Bernie and I have been friends for many, many years, long before I ever got into politics, and I don’t see any reason that that should change,” she said.

She added, “Look, I get out every day to try to meet as many voters as I can and talk about why I’m in this race, to talk about my vision, to talk about what’s working, to talk about my plans to fix it and to talk about how I’m building a grassroots movement to get it done. I think that’s what voters want to hear.”

More at https://www.unionleader.com/news/politics/warren-makes-labor-day-campaign-pitch-at-rainy-hampton-falls/article_da000684-0e40-52f9-9e6b-965208f1d787.html

It’s easy for most people to find a job in America on Labor Day 2019. The unemployment rate is very low; store windows are plastered with help wanted signs.

But for millions of Americans, one job is not enough.

Bridget Hughes, 29, works a regular day shift at a Burger King in Kansas City, Mo. Three nights a week, she also works the overnight shift at a nearby McDonald’s. She makes $10 an hour at Burger King and $9.50 an hour at McDonald’s and, together with her husband’s job at a gas station, they manage to feed their three children and to pay the rent.

“When I thought of my future, I thought I was going to be at football games and soccer practices and cheerleading, when in all actuality I’m lucky if I’m home for birthdays,” Ms. Hughes said. “And my children, they think if mommy is at work all the time then we should have the money. But the reality is that I’m at work all the time and I don’t have the money.”

More than eight million people — roughly 5 percent of all workers — held more than one job at a time in July, according to the most recent federal data. The economy has been growing for more than a decade, but their lives offer a reminder that not all Americans are thriving.

...Like Ms. Hughes, most people with multiple jobs worked a full-time job that just didn’t pay enough. Most workers find second jobs in the same industry, but a growing number have taken on “gig” work like driving for Uber.

Daniel Asnake, 49, sleeps in his car after his morning shift as a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C. Then he uses the car to earn as much as $145 a shift as an Uber driver well into the evening. Most days, he leaves home before his two children rise and returns after they have gone to sleep.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/opinion/working-two-jobs.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China and the United States. NewsHour Weekend's Megan Thompson sat down with Elizabeth Balkan, director of food waste for the Natural Resources Defense Council, to find out more. This report is part of our "Future of Food" series, which is supported in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Megan Thompson:
Paint the picture for me. How much food do we waste here in the United States?

Elizabeth Balkan:
In the U.S., up to 40 percent of the food that is produced every year goes wasted. That translates into an economic loss of $218 billion per year, and at the individual level, a household of four spends, on average, $1,500 or more, per year, on food that never gets eaten.

Megan Thompson:
What are the connections between the amount of food that we waste, and environmental impacts, climate change?

Elizabeth Balkan:
The greenhouse gasses associated with food waste amount to roughly 37 million passenger vehicles on the road. Not only do you have the contributions from methane when food waste rots in a landfill, but you have all these other resources that go into the production, the manufacturing, the transportation, the storage and distribution. All of those resources are swallowed up when we waste food, rather than eat it. Of the top 100 most impactful things that we can do to address climate change, food waste prevention is number three. It's not solar power, it's not wind power, it's food waste prevention.

Megan Thompson:
What are the biggest contributors to food waste here?

Elizabeth Balkan:
Overall consumers, and consumer facing businesses, restaurants, cafeterias are responsible for over 80 percent of the food waste in this country. For example, in restaurants, the vast majority of food waste comes from what is leftover on people's plates, or post-consumer waste. So, if we want to really tackle the food waste that's happening in restaurants, for example, we need to start addressing the harder part of the puzzle, which is customer behavior.

...Megan Thompson:
What are steps that individual consumers can take?

Elizabeth Balkan:
We don't want consumers to feel like they're the villains here. A lot of the source reason for food waste is connected to things like date labels. Date labels didn't really exist before the 1970s. And before then people would use their senses, they would use the smell test on milk, they might try a little bit of yogurt, and if something tasted fine, or smelled okay, it didn't smell like it had gone off, they would eat it. So, what you see when you look at a date label that says "best if used by," has nothing to do with food safety, but it's manufacturer suggestion about when this food item is at its peak freshness. Which is inherently a subjective thing. In fact, besides baby formula, there is really no regulation around date labels. So, there's enormous opportunity to reform date labels to be consistent with public health information, and science, and in doing do prevent a ton of food from going to waste.

More at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/americans-waste-up-to-40-percent-of-the-food-they-produce

I like Joe Biden. His gaffes, his mistreatment of Anita Hill and even his kissy-face behavior with segregationists notwithstanding, I think he’s a decent guy. If he is the Democratic nominee, next year, I’ll vote for him — twice, if I can manage it.

If that sounds like enthusiasm, it isn’t. There are cartoon characters I’d vote for if it meant cleansing the White House of its current infestation. So, while I’ll support Biden if it comes to that, I hope it doesn’t. For all his earnestness,the former vice-president, I think, misreads the needs of the nation at this juncture. Like Warren G. Harding 99 years ago, Biden seems to think that what America needs now is to be soothed. Granted, that idea took Harding to the White House, albeit for a presidency primarily recalled for its short duration (he died two years in) and massive corruption.

With Biden, any presidency that premise produces is likely to also be unsatisfactory, though for different reasons. A Biden victory would be an opportunity squandered, a chance for systemic change traded for an implicit promise to take America back to “normal.” That’s what Biden is selling, after all. He keeps touting his ability to work with Republicans, appealing for civility, reaching out to GOP voters. “Some of you voted for Donald Trump,” he said at a recent event in Iowa. “My party stopped talking to you.”

Really, Joe?

The fact is, people voted for Trump, not because they felt neglected, but because for many, he reflected their prejudices. That’s according to empirical evidence. So what Biden intends as a plea for political amity is actually an act of political cowardice.

See, we left normal a long time ago, and it wasn’t because Democrats were mean. We left it because Republicans made a conscious and calculated decision to absent themselves from the responsibilities of citizenship and governance. They broke this country, one tea party rally, one birther lie, one government shutdown, one voter suppression law, one stolen Supreme Court seat at a time. And the idea that Democrats should make it their priority to get us back to “normal” is worse than naive because it rewards and absolves the GOP for years of party-first obstructionism. “Normal” is what got us here. So rather than beg them to hold hands with the rest of us as we try to get back to where we were, let’s map a path to someplace new and challenge them to keep up.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article234564842.html#storylink=cpy.html#storylink=cpy