thenation--2020-06-18--Robert’s DACA Ruling Had Nothing to Do With His Own Moral Awakening

Donald Trump ’ s lazy incompetence has defeated Donald Trump ’ s racism and bigotry—again .
Last year , it was over his attempt to add a question about citizenship to the Census .
This time , it was over his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program ( DACA ) .
The Trump administration keeps failing one of the easiest tests of policy-making in our country—basic competence—with the happy result that hundreds of thousands of people are now spared the threat of deportation .
In a 5-4 decision , the Supreme Court ruled earlier today that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was “ arbitrary and capricious ” under the Administrative Procedures Act ( APA ) .
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the four liberal justices—Ruth Bader Ginsburg , Stephen Breyer , Sonia Sotomayor , and Elena Kagan—to rule against the president ’ s position .
But while Roberts ’ s decision was a clear victory—and lifeline—for some 700,000 Dreamers , it ’ s also worth noting that he wrote the majority opinion in the most narrow way possible .
Roberts ’ s opinion was similar to the opinion he wrote last year on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said the president can do whatever he wants—just not like this .
The only requirement the APA makes of the government is that it give a valid reason for its actions .
It doesn ’ t require the government to have a “ good ” reason .
It doesn ’ t require the government to be objectively correct in its reasoning .
The APA simply requires the government to have a truthful and legally valid reason for doing whatever it is the government wants to do .
Trump ’ s stated reason— “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rapists ” —is not a valid legal reason .
Racism is not a valid legal reason .
I get that Trump and many Republicans think that a general dislike for brown foreigners is enough of a reason to do anything , but courts keep trying to tell them otherwise .
Everybody , including Roberts , understands that bigotry and xenophobia are the real reasons behind Trump ’ s policies .
And Roberts keeps indicating that he ’ s willing to overlook that—never forget that in Trump v. Hawaii ( better known as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ squarely bigoted immigration change to go forward .
All Roberts asks is that Trump gives him one facially valid reason for policies we all know to be motivated by racial animus .
But usually , Trump can ’ t .
Trump ’ s consistent failure to clear the low bar of giving a non-bigoted cover reason for his policies would be comical if the stakes weren ’ t so serious .
He ’ s like a child who keeps throwing their food on the floor instead of eating it , and then wonders @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speaking , Trump doesn ’ t understand what his mouth is for .
And he won ’ t learn .
Trump interpreted the Supreme Court ruling through the only lens his drooling narcissism allows him to : as a personal affront .
He tweeted : “ Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn ’ t like me ?
” But former acting solicitor general and Supreme Court savant Neal Katyal explained to me that Trump ’ s losses have nothing to do with Trump ’ s personality and everything to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : “ Trump ’ s insinuation that the Supreme Court keeps ruling against him because it doesn ’ t like him is silly .
They don ’ t like his arguments .
A halfway normal administration could have ended DACA ( or added a citizenship question to the Census ) and made a decent case for it .
But Trump and his minions are so incompetent , so brazen in their ignorance of the law , that they keep losing.
” Quite simply , Trump is not being held to an unfair standard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end DACA would have ended it .
That ’ s because DACA is not an act of Congress .
It ’ s not a constitutional principle or right .
It ’ s an enforcement decision made by the previous president .
The current president inherently has the power to reverse that enforcement decision .
He just can ’ t reverse it because his only reason is that he doesn ’ t like brown people .
It really is that simple .
That ’ s why this decision , while wonderful for the hundreds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ here by their parents , is also incomplete and vulnerable .
Roberts could have protected Dreamers much more forcefully .
Noted conservative lawyer Ted Olson argued this case in defense of DACA recipients , and he made two arguments : that the Trump administration violated the APA in its attempts to end DACA , and that the administration violated the equal protection rights of DACA recipients .
Everybody is entitled to due process , and Trump ’ s actions deprived people of that right because of where they were from—and he all but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would have protected Dreamers from future attempts by the Trump administration to end this program .
Roberts rejected the equal protection claim .
Amazingly , while Roberts found that Trump may have acted with racial animus , he said he couldn ’ t find that Trump ’ s administration acted with that same animus when carrying out his orders .
It ’ s a ludicrous proposition ; then again , this is John Roberts .
He ’ s not a moderate , and he ’ s not a friend .
We know from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ willing to give this administration multiple bites at the apples until they chomp upon a valid legal reason for their bigotry .
Justice Sotomayor highlighted this problem with Roberts ’ s ruling in her concurrence to the decision .
She said that she would not have foreclosed the equal protection claim .
She writes : “ [ T ] he impact of the policy decision must be viewed in the context of the President ’ s public statements on and off the campaign trail .
At the motion-to-dismiss stage , I would not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ executive decision disproportionately harms the same racial group that the President branded as less desirable mere months earlier.
” Sotomayor understands that a future administration might be just as racist but not as incompetent .
The difference between Sotomayor and Roberts is that Roberts wants Trump to give him a better reason for being racist , while Sotomayor wants Trump to not be racist .
Neil Gorsuch Stuns the Nation , Does the Right Thing Trump ’ s Retreat on the Census Question Is Not a Victory SCOTUS Is Back in Session and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not changed his mind since the Muslim ban .
He has not had an epiphany about the evils of the Trump administration or the dangers of state-sponsored bigotry .
He ’ s not becoming more moderate .
He ’ s not , at all , becoming some kind of turncoat , as the far right would have you believe .
He wants to support Trump and the Republican agenda just as much as he always has ; he just doesn ’ t want to look gross and bad doing it .
He doesn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the historical legal incompetence of this administration .
That ’ s all .
That ’ s why DACA has not been “ saved.
” If Trump wins reelection this November , Roberts will surely let Trump try to end DACA again .
Next time , Trump might succeed , in the same way that , given enough time and typewriters , a troupe of monkeys might someday write Hamlet .
Donald Trump is bad at his job .
His incompetence is terrible for the country when it comes to pandemic prevention or economic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sanity .
But when he shows up to court , Trump ’ s incompetence is the only thing that saves us from him .
That ’ s a thin ledge to hang on to .
If he wins in November , we ’ ll fully lose our grip .

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Donald Trump’s lazy incompetence has defeated Donald Trump’s racism and bigotry—again. Last year, it was over his attempt to add a question about citizenship to the Census. This time, it was over his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). The Trump administration keeps failing one of the easiest tests of policy-making in our country—basic competence—with the happy result that hundreds of thousands of people are now spared the threat of deportation.
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled earlier today that Trump’s attempt to end DACA was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the four liberal justices—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—to rule against the president’s position. But while Roberts’s decision was a clear victory—and lifeline—for some 700,000 Dreamers, it’s also worth noting that he wrote the majority opinion in the most narrow way possible. Roberts’s opinion was similar to the opinion he wrote last year on the citizenship question; essentially, Roberts said the president can do whatever he wants—just not like this.
The only requirement the APA makes of the government is that it give a valid reason for its actions. It doesn’t require the government to have a “good” reason. It doesn’t require the government to be objectively correct in its reasoning. The APA simply requires the government to have a truthful and legally valid reason for doing whatever it is the government wants to do.
Trump’s stated reason—“Mexicans are criminals, drug dealers, rapists”—is not a valid legal reason. Racism is not a valid legal reason. I get that Trump and many Republicans think that a general dislike for brown foreigners is enough of a reason to do anything, but courts keep trying to tell them otherwise. Everybody, including Roberts, understands that bigotry and xenophobia are the real reasons behind Trump’s policies. And Roberts keeps indicating that he’s willing to overlook that—never forget that in Trump v. Hawaii (better known as the Muslim ban case) he allowed a squarely bigoted immigration change to go forward. All Roberts asks is that Trump gives him one facially valid reason for policies we all know to be motivated by racial animus.
But usually, Trump can’t. Trump’s consistent failure to clear the low bar of giving a non-bigoted cover reason for his policies would be comical if the stakes weren’t so serious. He’s like a child who keeps throwing their food on the floor instead of eating it, and then wonders why they’re hungry. Legally speaking, Trump doesn’t understand what his mouth is for. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
And he won’t learn. Trump interpreted the Supreme Court ruling through the only lens his drooling narcissism allows him to: as a personal affront. He tweeted: “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”
But former acting solicitor general and Supreme Court savant Neal Katyal explained to me that Trump’s losses have nothing to do with Trump’s personality and everything to do with his administration’s incompetence: “Trump’s insinuation that the Supreme Court keeps ruling against him because it doesn’t like him is silly. They don’t like his arguments. A halfway normal administration could have ended DACA (or added a citizenship question to the Census) and made a decent case for it. But Trump and his minions are so incompetent, so brazen in their ignorance of the law, that they keep losing.” Current Issue View our current issue
Quite simply, Trump is not being held to an unfair standard. Any other administration that wanted to end DACA would have ended it. That’s because DACA is not an act of Congress. It’s not a constitutional principle or right. It’s an enforcement decision made by the previous president. The current president inherently has the power to reverse that enforcement decision. He just can’t reverse it because his only reason is that he doesn’t like brown people. It really is that simple.
That’s why this decision, while wonderful for the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who were brought here by their parents, is also incomplete and vulnerable. Roberts could have protected Dreamers much more forcefully. Noted conservative lawyer Ted Olson argued this case in defense of DACA recipients, and he made two arguments: that the Trump administration violated the APA in its attempts to end DACA, and that the administration violated the equal protection rights of DACA recipients. Everybody is entitled to due process, and Trump’s actions deprived people of that right because of where they were from—and he all but said so. The equal protection claim would have protected Dreamers from future attempts by the Trump administration to end this program.
Roberts rejected the equal protection claim. Amazingly, while Roberts found that Trump may have acted with racial animus, he said he couldn’t find that Trump’s administration acted with that same animus when carrying out his orders. It’s a ludicrous proposition; then again, this is John Roberts. He’s not a moderate, and he’s not a friend. We know from his Muslim ban decision that Roberts is willing to give this administration multiple bites at the apples until they chomp upon a valid legal reason for their bigotry.
Justice Sotomayor highlighted this problem with Roberts’s ruling in her concurrence to the decision. She said that she would not have foreclosed the equal protection claim. She writes: “[T]he impact of the policy decision must be viewed in the context of the President’s public statements on and off the campaign trail. At the motion-to-dismiss stage, I would not so readily dismiss the allegation that an executive decision disproportionately harms the same racial group that the President branded as less desirable mere months earlier.” Sotomayor understands that a future administration might be just as racist but not as incompetent. The difference between Sotomayor and Roberts is that Roberts wants Trump to give him a better reason for being racist, while Sotomayor wants Trump to not be racist. More from Mystal Neil Gorsuch Stuns the Nation, Does the Right Thing Elie Mystal Trump’s Retreat on the Census Question Is Not a Victory Elie Mystal SCOTUS Is Back in Session and Cruelty Is on the Docket Elie Mystal
Roberts has not changed his mind since the Muslim ban. He has not had an epiphany about the evils of the Trump administration or the dangers of state-sponsored bigotry. He’s not becoming more moderate. He’s not, at all, becoming some kind of turncoat, as the far right would have you believe. He wants to support Trump and the Republican agenda just as much as he always has; he just doesn’t want to look gross and bad doing it. He doesn’t want his legacy sullied by the historical legal incompetence of this administration. That’s all.
That’s why DACA has not been “saved.” If Trump wins reelection this November, Roberts will surely let Trump try to end DACA again. Next time, Trump might succeed, in the same way that, given enough time and typewriters, a troupe of monkeys might someday write Hamlet.
Donald Trump is bad at his job. His incompetence is terrible for the country when it comes to pandemic prevention or economic resiliency or international trade or unity or sanity. But when he shows up to court, Trump’s incompetence is the only thing that saves us from him.
That’s a thin ledge to hang on to. If he wins in November, we’ll fully lose our grip.


thenation--2020-06-18--It’s Time for Roger Goodell to Change the Name of the Washington Football Team

Roger Goodell wants the public to think he is sincere about fighting racism in the NFL .
He has now said that the league was “ wrong ” to discourage political protest in the recent past .
He announced that the NFL will pledge $ 250 million over 10 years to racial justice causes ( that works out to about $ 700,000 a year per team , basically coins in the cushions for this multibillion-dollar behemoth of a sports league ) .
Yet there is one thing that Goodell could do right away to show that he will address the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as commissioner : call for a new name for the Washington football team .
Currently a racial slur that adorns the NFL team in Washington , D.C. , the name ’ s history is drenched in bloody racism , genocide , and a tradition of white supremacist ownership .
Back in 2010 , when the Washington football team was led by star rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III , games were briefly must-see TV .
I said that I thought the name would be changed within five years .
Wow , was I wrong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ team to new heights and with that would come national scrutiny that this brand could not endure .
But RGIII got hurt and the team has been mired in mediocrity ever since .
This has saved them from outrage on a national scale , until now .
We are living in the midst of a national uprising against racism .
Statues are being toppled .
There ’ s nowhere to hide .
The name must change .
Team owner Dan Snyder might not like it .
And Goodell might be too scared to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ owns most NFL teams , but the time is now .
Goodell could show his sincerity by turning toward ownership and showing some courage and leadership—though those have not exactly been hallmarks of his tenure .
NBA Players Face the Question : To Boycott or Not to Boycott Why NASCAR ’ s New Ban on the Confederate Flag Is Such a Big Deal It ’ s Time for White NFL Players to Take the Knee I reached out to Suzan Shown Harjo , a person of Cheyenne and Muscogee descent who is president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ national Indigenous rights organization in D.C. Harjo has been on the front lines of the battle to change the name for decades .
She said , “ This is a mighty time of change and action .
More and more people are opening their minds and hearts to demands for justice and accountability , to condemnations of bigotry and brutality and all their symbols .
The pandemic has heightened both exasperation and contemplation , forcing some to conclude that now is the time to act on solutions long identified to problems too long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ white supremacy in statuary and brands , Aunt Jemima , Uncle Ben , Chief Wahoo , and the ‘ Indian ’ butter maiden .
If ever there were a moment to consign R*dsk*ns to history , this would be it .
The vile name and stereotypical logo are a national affront because of their proximity to governmental power .
Continued use and celebration of that race-based slur sends a worldwide signal that state-sponsored skinning of our ancestors by bounty hunters was OK because white folks needed land to own in our countries .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the same time , protective colorization for and contributing factor to the murders and other forms of savage violence against Native peoples today.
” In addition , D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has now adopted a much stronger position regarding the team ’ s moving back from suburban Maryland to Washington , saying a name change would be a prerequisite .
“ I think it ’ s past time for the team to deal with what offends so many people , ” Bowser told Team 980 radio .
“ This is a great @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s beloved in Washington , and it deserves a name that reflects the affection that we ’ ve built for the team.
” The person who bestowed this slur on the team was the original owner , George Preston Marshall , a proud white supremacist who dreamed of keeping the R*dsk*ns white .
Under his leadership , Washington was the last team to integrate , when it signed the recently deceased legend Bobby Mitchell .
It would be difficult to think of a greater tribute to Mitchell and what he endured as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ statue of Marshall that stands outside the team ’ s old home RFK stadium and erect one of Mitchell .
Frankly , that should have happened years ago .
It ’ s past time for Goodell to show some leadership .
It ’ s past time for him to cease his performative anti-racism and actually pledge something that shows he understands that we need to turn the page on this current period in history .
That means tackling the most visible expression of racism in the National Football League and , finally , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ name .

Roger Goodell wants the public to think he is sincere about fighting racism in the NFL. He has now said that the league was “wrong” to discourage political protest in the recent past. He announced that the NFL will pledge $250 million over 10 years to racial justice causes (that works out to about $700,000 a year per team, basically coins in the cushions for this multibillion-dollar behemoth of a sports league). Yet there is one thing that Goodell could do right away to show that he will address the blind spots that have marred his tenure as commissioner: call for a new name for the Washington football team.
Currently a racial slur that adorns the NFL team in Washington, D.C., the name’s history is drenched in bloody racism, genocide, and a tradition of white supremacist ownership.
Back in 2010, when the Washington football team was led by star rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III, games were briefly must-see TV. I said that I thought the name would be changed within five years. Wow, was I wrong. I thought RGIII would bring the team to new heights and with that would come national scrutiny that this brand could not endure. But RGIII got hurt and the team has been mired in mediocrity ever since. This has saved them from outrage on a national scale, until now.
We are living in the midst of a national uprising against racism. Statues are being toppled. There’s nowhere to hide. The name must change. Team owner Dan Snyder might not like it. And Goodell might be too scared to confront the right-wing, Trump-funding cabal that owns most NFL teams, but the time is now. Goodell could show his sincerity by turning toward ownership and showing some courage and leadership—though those have not exactly been hallmarks of his tenure. More From Dave Zirin “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash August 15, 2023 Why the Right Wanted the USWNT to Lose August 10, 2023 Carli Lloyd’s Attacks on the USWNT Are Personal—and Political August 1, 2023
I reached out to Suzan Shown Harjo, a person of Cheyenne and Muscogee descent who is president of the Morning Star Institute, a national Indigenous rights organization in D.C. Harjo has been on the front lines of the battle to change the name for decades.
She said, “This is a mighty time of change and action. More and more people are opening their minds and hearts to demands for justice and accountability, to condemnations of bigotry and brutality and all their symbols. The pandemic has heightened both exasperation and contemplation, forcing some to conclude that now is the time to act on solutions long identified to problems too long debated—racism in law and order systems, white supremacy in statuary and brands, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Chief Wahoo, and the ‘Indian’ butter maiden. If ever there were a moment to consign R*dsk*ns to history, this would be it. The vile name and stereotypical logo are a national affront because of their proximity to governmental power. Continued use and celebration of that race-based slur sends a worldwide signal that state-sponsored skinning of our ancestors by bounty hunters was OK because white folks needed land to own in our countries. This ongoing commodification and objectification is, at the same time, protective colorization for and contributing factor to the murders and other forms of savage violence against Native peoples today.”
In addition, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has now adopted a much stronger position regarding the team’s moving back from suburban Maryland to Washington, saying a name change would be a prerequisite. “I think it’s past time for the team to deal with what offends so many people,” Bowser told Team 980 radio. “This is a great franchise with a great history that’s beloved in Washington, and it deserves a name that reflects the affection that we’ve built for the team.”
The person who bestowed this slur on the team was the original owner, George Preston Marshall, a proud white supremacist who dreamed of keeping the R*dsk*ns white. Under his leadership, Washington was the last team to integrate, when it signed the recently deceased legend Bobby Mitchell. It would be difficult to think of a greater tribute to Mitchell and what he endured as a team trailblazer than to tear down the statue of Marshall that stands outside the team’s old home RFK stadium and erect one of Mitchell. Frankly, that should have happened years ago. It’s past time for Goodell to show some leadership. It’s past time for him to cease his performative anti-racism and actually pledge something that shows he understands that we need to turn the page on this current period in history. That means tackling the most visible expression of racism in the National Football League and, finally, at long last, changing the damn name.


thenation--2020-06-18--Deadly Heat Is Killing Americans

Deadly Heat Is Killing Americans

This investigation was conducted by Columbia Journalism Investigations and the Center for Public Integrity and co-published in partnership with The Guardian .
It is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now .
hoenix—Charlie Rhodes lived alone on a tree-sparse street with sunburned lawns just outside this Arizona city .
At 61 , the Army veteran ’ s main connection to the world was Facebook ; often , he posted several times a day .
But as a heat wave blanketed the region in June 2016—with temperatures among the highest ever recorded—his posts stopped .
Three weeks later , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prompted a call to police .
When officers arrived , they were overcome by the odor of rotting garbage , worsened by the still-searing heat .
Inside the home , they found the air conditioner broken and its thermometer reading 99 degrees .
Rhodes lay dead in the bedroom , his body decomposing .
The cause , his autopsy shows : “ complications of environmental heat exposure.
” Yearly heat-related deaths have more than doubled in Arizona in the last decade to 283 .
Across the country , heat caused at least 10,000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , tornadoes , or floods in most years .
Scientists link the warming planet to a rise in dangerous heat in the United States , as well as the spread of infectious diseases and other health conditions .
Federal research predicts heat stroke and similar illnesses will claim tens of thousands of American lives each year by the end of the century .
Already , higher temperatures pose lethal risks : The top five warmest years nationwide have all occurred since 2006 .
In the last six decades , the number of annual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , on average , tripled .
In contrast to a viral pandemic , this is a quiet , insidious threat with no endpoint .
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is charged with helping cities and states adapt to threats like extreme heat .
Its climate program , created more than 10 years ago , is the federal government ’ s only sustained effort to bolster state and local health departments ’ fight against global warming .
But the program has been hampered by a decade of underfunding , limited expertise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Investigations and the Center for Public Integrity found .
Interviews with more than 100 people and a review of hundreds of pages of government records show that the Obama administration , while pushing measures to combat climate change , missed opportunities to expand the program .
Under President Donald Trump , officials have tried to eliminate it .
The tepid federal response has left state and local health workers ill equipped to act , exposing communities to underappreciated threats that will only get worse .
Arizona ’ s health department receives around $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ team .
But for a state with 7 million people—including a growing number of isolated , older residents like Rhodes—experts say it ’ s not enough money to pay for research and , most importantly , action .
What Does It Mean to Be a Climate Refugee ?
Rhodes , a once-gregarious jokester who cut himself off from family and friends after the loss of his job and father , had devised a method to handle the heat : He covered his windows with aluminum foil and ran the air conditioner in his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 120 degrees near his home , no one checked on him .
Asked what the program has done to prevent people like Rhodes from dying of heat , Arizona health department spokesperson Holly Poynter said that its advisories on the hottest days include a sentence encouraging people to check on at-risk friends , family , and neighbors twice a day .
“ Heat-related deaths are preventable , ” she said , “ and continued work is needed due to increasing vulnerable populations within the state.
” The CDC defended its efforts on climate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health departments successfully for years .
“ We ’ re proud of the work that our program is doing , ” said Patrick Breysse , who heads the agency ’ s environmental health center and oversees its climate activities .
“ We ’ re excited about the leadership role we play.
” Some CDC-aided health departments lead the nation in heat illness prevention .
San Francisco ’ s climate program helped devise heat emergency response plans and mapped vulnerable city neighborhoods .
Now , officials use these maps to encourage neighbors to check @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helped change the threshold for heat advisories from 100 to 95 degrees after finding that residents get sick at lower temperatures .
Yet many departments funded by the CDC are struggling to fulfill the program ’ s mission , according to government and academic reports and interviews with state and local health workers .
In North Carolina , program employees asked their CDC counterparts for guidance and expertise to identify the state ’ s climate health threats .
Records show the agency failed to provide the assistance it promised early on .
After @ @ @ @ @ @ @ workers only recently began reaching out to the most vulnerable residents .
In Florida , heat-related hospitalizations are on the rise .
But health officials there barred the state climate team from publicly acknowledging global warming ’ s link to heat .
Then , with the CDC ’ s imprimatur , they evicted the program from the health department .
Most of the country ’ s 3,000 state and local health departments , meanwhile , get no such funding .
They ’ re on their own to figure out what to do and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officials have known for decades that climate change poses a public health crisis .
In 1989 , the US Environmental Protection Agency issued a 100-page report on how global warming could affect human health .
It urged public health agencies to fund research on extreme heat and provide health departments with “ trained professionals.
” By 2000 , the United States released its first recurring assessment of the changing climate ’ s impacts .
Again , it called for “ investments in advancing the public health infrastructure.
” Five years later , Dr. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to run CDC ’ s environmental health center , brought the nation ’ s leading public health agency into the battle against climate change .
“ We knew that the climate was warming , ” said Frumkin , who viewed the CDC as “ past the point where we needed to be stepping up.
” In 2009—then the second-hottest year on record—Frumkin seized an opportunity to expand the CDC ’ s climate efforts .
That February , he testified before a congressional committee about challenges brought by global warming .
Health departments , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ training and data to plan for impacts .
“ CDC has in place many of the building blocks , ” he told the committee , but it needed to assemble them into a serious effort .
We Can not Postpone Climate Talks Until 2021 A month later , a Democrat-led Congress gave the CDC $ 7.5 million for its climate program , to be renewed yearly with congressional approval .
The new initiative seeded climate and health activities in 10 health departments .
Frumkin hoped it would eventually expand to all 50 states @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Dr. Thomas Frieden , then the newly appointed CDC director , introduced his “ winnable battles ” —seven health initiatives that his agency prioritized .
Climate was not among them .
Most of those programs—nutrition , food safety—received an annual $ 50 million to $ 700 million by the end of his eight-year tenure .
The climate program , by contrast , never exceeded $ 10 million .
In 2013 , the CDC recommended reducing that budget .
As the CDC ’ s director , Frieden rarely used his bully pulpit to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
During a 20-minute keynote speech at a national environmental health conference , he discussed the topic for 13 seconds .
A 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office , a congressional watchdog , criticized the CDC for failing to provide leadership on the issue .
Frieden , for his part , disputes claims that he did not prioritize climate change and insists he cares about the issue , pointing to the CDC ’ s work combating dangerous particulate matter produced by cars and coal plants .
“ It will have major public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ climate change .
“ But there ’ s only a certain amount that public health programs can do.
” The CDC ’ s lackluster response contrasted with President Barack Obama ’ s public overtures and policy initiatives on climate .
Former senior White House officials—including those who helped implement climate policies—admit the administration didn ’ t apply enough pressure on the CDC to act .
In December 2015 , Republicans in Congress rejected a proposal to boost spending on the CDC program to $ 18 million .
The increase would have more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2016—when Charlie Rhodes died—showed there was no time to lose in the push to understand and stem heat death .
The previous eight years , the number of heat-related fatalities in Arizona had averaged 145 .
That jumped to 219 in 2016 , and 264 the year after .
A report produced by Maricopa County—where the largest number of the state ’ s heat deaths have occurred—found that men , Native Americans , and people 75 and older were most at risk .
TV Weathercasters Who Are Shifting Public Opinion on the Climate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all three categories .
A Quechan Tribe member , he spent much of his life on its reservation , near Yuma , Arizona , before moving near Phoenix in 2010 to live with his son .
Over the years , Moore ’ s health declined , but he remained mobile and enjoyed talking on the phone with friends , according to his son , Ivan .
In June 2017—several weeks after Ivan had his home air conditioner repaired—he took his family camping in the mountains .
Moore stayed behind .
The day Ivan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Phoenix went 11 days at or above 110 , one of only five such stretches on record .
Four happened in the last three decades .
A week later , Ivan ’ s brother called to say Moore had stopped answering his phone .
Ivan dialed the police .
They found Moore dead on his bedroom floor , his window open .
The air conditioner had broken again , and the temperature inside topped 105 degrees .
Moore ’ s autopsy shows cardiovascular disease caused his death , while heat played a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still don ’ t know why more residents like Moore are dying or how best to protect them .
Temperatures are rising in the state , but the hottest summers don ’ t always match the highest death tolls .
ASU researcher David Hondula , who works with the state ’ s climate team , contributed to a study ruling out temperature as the only reason .
Other factors such as homelessness and substance abuse may play a role , he said , but the climate program doesn ’ t have money to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ additional funding existed , we could really dive in to answer this question , ” Hondula said .
Instead , the limited CDC money—budgeted before the spike in deaths—supports awareness campaigns in poorer areas like Yuma County .
Many Arizona cities offer cooling centers—air-conditioned libraries , churches , and other shelters—for residents to escape the heat .
Moore and Rhodes both had access to a vehicle .
Cooling centers were nearby .
Health workers are now surveying residents who visit cooling centers , but say it takes money to determine why so many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s son , who grew up hearing about heat death victims on the radio , blames himself for what happened to his father .
“ I should have had someone check on him sooner , ” Ivan said , even though less than 36 hours had passed between Moore ’ s last e-mail to his family and when police found him .
“ He had quite a few years left on him.
” In North Carolina , the CDC-funded program has helped enable what health department spokesperson Kelly Haight Connor described in an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ climate and health adaptation ” there .
Even so , documents show the climate team ran into roadblocks almost as soon as it tried to evaluate the state ’ s preparedness for climate change .
It was still seeking the agency ’ s assistance when , in 2015 , it completed an analysis showing heat-related mortality would increase over the coming decade .
Climate-Justice Stories Are in Every Community , Waiting to Be Told Just Like Covid-19 , Racial Justice Is a Climate Story More in this series On June 22 that year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ returned to work after vacation and had nine days before she was due to retire .
For nearly 40 years , she worked at the same oil- and air-filter factory in Fayetteville , North Carolina , a city in the Sandhills .
She ’ d learned to pack frozen water bottles in a cooler to keep herself refreshed on the hot assembly line .
But that day , as the temperature outside hit 96 degrees , she collapsed during her shift .
Rushed to a hospital , Winfrey died early that afternoon .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ next day found that heat from industrial ovens and the metal walls and roof of the unair-conditioned production line raised the indoor heat index—a combined measure of temperature and humidity—to over 106 degrees and into the Occupational Safety and Health department ’ s “ Danger ” heat classification .
The inspector recommended that the factory allow employees time to acclimate to the heat after an absence .
But the investigation into Winfrey ’ s death ended after a medical examiner found that Winfrey suffered “ a fatal pulmonary embolism and did not die @ @ @ @ @ @ @ research suggests this type of blood clotting may be brought on by daily temperature swings .
Danny Muhammad , Winfrey ’ s son , has no doubt heat contributed to her death .
Winfrey complained to family about the factory ’ s stifling environment .
“ The heat index was out of this world that day , ” Muhammad said .
It was the ninth consecutive day that temperatures had reached at least 94 degrees—seven degrees hotter than the June average .
Winfrey ’ s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2017 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ temperatures as the cause of her death , but the case was later dismissed .
A spokesperson for the factory declined to comment .
It took another three years after Winfrey ’ s death for the North Carolina program ’ s heat education efforts to begin in four Sandhills counties—and not where she had lived .
In the years since the Trump administration took over , the political pressure hampering some of the CDC climate program ’ s grantees has also been applied to the program itself .
Former and current staff said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s denials of climate science , have tried to keep the program operating under the radar .
Self-censorship surfaced quickly after the 2016 election , even before Trump assumed office .
In December of that year , CDC Environmental Health Director Patrick Breysse indefinitely postponed a first-ever climate symposium that was scheduled after the inauguration .
George Luber , then the CDC ’ s climate chief , remembers his superiors warning the event would be poorly timed ; Breysse said the postponement was for budgetary reasons .
The environmental health chief acknowledges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the term “ climate change.
” He later combined the climate and asthma programs and , internal documents suggest , omitted the word “ climate ” from the new branch ’ s title .
Breysse insists the White House never directed his actions .
But they served as the basis for a whistle-blower complaint filed by Luber , who was removed from his CDC post in 2018 .
The complaint alleged that Luber was ousted because of his outspokenness on global warming .
It stirred a hornet ’ s nest of public attention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ removal had more to do with his mismanagement and mistreatment of employees than his advocacy .
The CDC , which refused to comment on “ personnel matters , ” said its climate program is running better than ever .
The agency pointed to the “ mini grants ” it has doled out through partner organizations to help another 10 health departments , one-time funding of $ 5,000 to $ 50,000 .
Meanwhile , every one of Trump ’ s budget proposals has tried to eliminate the program .
The inaction in Washington contrasts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ endangered by the climate crisis .
In Phoenix , spurred on by the sustained surge in heat deaths , some groups hand out 250,000 bottles of water annually to the homeless .
Others distribute heat awareness magnets and brochures to the elderly .
Still others are developing home sensors that will notify friends and family when indoor temperatures climb .
Many vulnerable residents fall through the cracks .
Arizona medical examiner records of heat deaths are filled with accounts of aging and isolated people who hadn ’ t been heard from for days @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Among them were Larry and Kathleen Purchase , 69 and 68 respectively , who died from environmental heat exposure in their Phoenix home during an unusual string of triple-digit days in September 2018 .
Married for almost 50 years , the two were active in their community and ran a small computer repair service , said Larry ’ s brother , Terry .
When their 1970s rooftop air conditioner broke , they didn ’ t have the several hundred dollars to fix it .
Terry remembers them as “ good stewards of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Christian faith .
They didn ’ t believe in human-caused climate change , he said .
The day they were found , the temperature in their home hovered around 100 degrees .
Funding for Columbia Journalism Investigations , an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School , comes from the school ’ s Investigative Reporting Resource and the Energy Foundation .
Additional support for this story was provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism .
The Center for Public Integrity , a nonprofit investigative news organization , provided editing , fact-checking , @ @ @ @

Dean Russell, Elisabeth Gawthrop, Veronica Penney, Ali Raj, Bridget Hickey

This investigation was conducted by Columbia Journalism Investigations and the Center for Public Integrity and co-published in partnership with The Guardian. It is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now.
P hoenix—Charlie Rhodes lived alone on a tree-sparse street with sunburned lawns just outside this Arizona city. At 61, the Army veteran’s main connection to the world was Facebook; often, he posted several times a day. But as a heat wave blanketed the region in June 2016—with temperatures among the highest ever recorded—his posts stopped. Three weeks later, a pile of unopened mail outside his door prompted a call to police.
When officers arrived, they were overcome by the odor of rotting garbage, worsened by the still-searing heat. Inside the home, they found the air conditioner broken and its thermometer reading 99 degrees. Rhodes lay dead in the bedroom, his body decomposing. The cause, his autopsy shows: “complications of environmental heat exposure.”
Yearly heat-related deaths have more than doubled in Arizona in the last decade to 283. Across the country, heat caused at least 10,000 deaths between 1999 and 2016—more than hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods in most years.
Scientists link the warming planet to a rise in dangerous heat in the United States, as well as the spread of infectious diseases and other health conditions. Federal research predicts heat stroke and similar illnesses will claim tens of thousands of American lives each year by the end of the century. Already, higher temperatures pose lethal risks: The top five warmest years nationwide have all occurred since 2006. In the last six decades, the number of annual heat waves in 50 US cities has, on average, tripled. In contrast to a viral pandemic, this is a quiet, insidious threat with no endpoint.
A decade of missed opportunities
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is charged with helping cities and states adapt to threats like extreme heat. Its climate program, created more than 10 years ago, is the federal government’s only sustained effort to bolster state and local health departments’ fight against global warming. But the program has been hampered by a decade of underfunding, limited expertise, and political resistance, Columbia Journalism Investigations and the Center for Public Integrity found.
Interviews with more than 100 people and a review of hundreds of pages of government records show that the Obama administration, while pushing measures to combat climate change, missed opportunities to expand the program. Under President Donald Trump, officials have tried to eliminate it. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
The tepid federal response has left state and local health workers ill equipped to act, exposing communities to underappreciated threats that will only get worse.
Arizona’s health department receives around $200,000 a year to fund its climate team. But for a state with 7 million people—including a growing number of isolated, older residents like Rhodes—experts say it’s not enough money to pay for research and, most importantly, action. Climate Refugees What Does It Mean to Be a Climate Refugee? Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Rhodes, a once-gregarious jokester who cut himself off from family and friends after the loss of his job and father, had devised a method to handle the heat: He covered his windows with aluminum foil and ran the air conditioner in his bedroom. But as the temperature hit 120 degrees near his home, no one checked on him.
Asked what the program has done to prevent people like Rhodes from dying of heat, Arizona health department spokesperson Holly Poynter said that its advisories on the hottest days include a sentence encouraging people to check on at-risk friends, family, and neighbors twice a day. “Heat-related deaths are preventable,” she said, “and continued work is needed due to increasing vulnerable populations within the state.”
The CDC defended its efforts on climate change, saying its program has assisted health departments successfully for years. “We’re proud of the work that our program is doing,” said Patrick Breysse, who heads the agency’s environmental health center and oversees its climate activities. “We’re excited about the leadership role we play.”
Some CDC-aided health departments lead the nation in heat illness prevention. San Francisco’s climate program helped devise heat emergency response plans and mapped vulnerable city neighborhoods. Now, officials use these maps to encourage neighbors to check on each other. Climate programs elsewhere helped change the threshold for heat advisories from 100 to 95 degrees after finding that residents get sick at lower temperatures.
Yet many departments funded by the CDC are struggling to fulfill the program’s mission, according to government and academic reports and interviews with state and local health workers.
In North Carolina, program employees asked their CDC counterparts for guidance and expertise to identify the state’s climate health threats. Records show the agency failed to provide the assistance it promised early on. After nearly a decade of research, health workers only recently began reaching out to the most vulnerable residents.
In Florida, heat-related hospitalizations are on the rise. But health officials there barred the state climate team from publicly acknowledging global warming’s link to heat. Then, with the CDC’s imprimatur, they evicted the program from the health department.
Most of the country’s 3,000 state and local health departments, meanwhile, get no such funding. They’re on their own to figure out what to do and how to pay for it.
A slow start
Federal officials have known for decades that climate change poses a public health crisis. In 1989, the US Environmental Protection Agency issued a 100-page report on how global warming could affect human health. It urged public health agencies to fund research on extreme heat and provide health departments with “trained professionals.” By 2000, the United States released its first recurring assessment of the changing climate’s impacts. Again, it called for “investments in advancing the public health infrastructure.”
Five years later, Dr. Howard Frumkin, a veteran epidemiologist hired to run CDC’s environmental health center, brought the nation’s leading public health agency into the battle against climate change. “We knew that the climate was warming,” said Frumkin, who viewed the CDC as “past the point where we needed to be stepping up.”
In 2009—then the second-hottest year on record—Frumkin seized an opportunity to expand the CDC’s climate efforts. That February, he testified before a congressional committee about challenges brought by global warming. Health departments, he said, require climate and health training and data to plan for impacts. “CDC has in place many of the building blocks,” he told the committee, but it needed to assemble them into a serious effort. Without Delay We Cannot Postpone Climate Talks Until 2021 Ilana Cohen
A month later, a Democrat-led Congress gave the CDC $7.5 million for its climate program, to be renewed yearly with congressional approval. The new initiative seeded climate and health activities in 10 health departments. Frumkin hoped it would eventually expand to all 50 states.
Shortly after Congress funded the program, Dr. Thomas Frieden, then the newly appointed CDC director, introduced his “winnable battles”—seven health initiatives that his agency prioritized. Climate was not among them. Most of those programs—nutrition, food safety—received an annual $50 million to $700 million by the end of his eight-year tenure. The climate program, by contrast, never exceeded $10 million. In 2013, the CDC recommended reducing that budget.
As the CDC’s director, Frieden rarely used his bully pulpit to address threats posed by the warming planet. During a 20-minute keynote speech at a national environmental health conference, he discussed the topic for 13 seconds. A 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, criticized the CDC for failing to provide leadership on the issue.
Frieden, for his part, disputes claims that he did not prioritize climate change and insists he cares about the issue, pointing to the CDC’s work combating dangerous particulate matter produced by cars and coal plants. “It will have major public health consequences,” he said of climate change. “But there’s only a certain amount that public health programs can do.”
The CDC’s lackluster response contrasted with President Barack Obama’s public overtures and policy initiatives on climate. Former senior White House officials—including those who helped implement climate policies—admit the administration didn’t apply enough pressure on the CDC to act.
In December 2015, Republicans in Congress rejected a proposal to boost spending on the CDC program to $18 million. The increase would have more than doubled its size.
When a broken air conditioner is lethal
The summer of 2016—when Charlie Rhodes died—showed there was no time to lose in the push to understand and stem heat death. The previous eight years, the number of heat-related fatalities in Arizona had averaged 145. That jumped to 219 in 2016, and 264 the year after. A report produced by Maricopa County—where the largest number of the state’s heat deaths have occurred—found that men, Native Americans, and people 75 and older were most at risk. Meteorology TV Weathercasters Who Are Shifting Public Opinion on the Climate Crisis Pam Radtke Russell
Gene Moore, 82, fit all three categories. A Quechan Tribe member, he spent much of his life on its reservation, near Yuma, Arizona, before moving near Phoenix in 2010 to live with his son. Over the years, Moore’s health declined, but he remained mobile and enjoyed talking on the phone with friends, according to his son, Ivan.
In June 2017—several weeks after Ivan had his home air conditioner repaired—he took his family camping in the mountains. Moore stayed behind. The day Ivan left, the temperature hit 118 degrees. Phoenix went 11 days at or above 110, one of only five such stretches on record. Four happened in the last three decades.
A week later, Ivan’s brother called to say Moore had stopped answering his phone. Ivan dialed the police. They found Moore dead on his bedroom floor, his window open. The air conditioner had broken again, and the temperature inside topped 105 degrees. Moore’s autopsy shows cardiovascular disease caused his death, while heat played a significant contributing factor.
Arizona health officials still don’t know why more residents like Moore are dying or how best to protect them. Temperatures are rising in the state, but the hottest summers don’t always match the highest death tolls. ASU researcher David Hondula, who works with the state’s climate team, contributed to a study ruling out temperature as the only reason. Other factors such as homelessness and substance abuse may play a role, he said, but the climate program doesn’t have money to keep studying the problem.
“If additional funding existed, we could really dive in to answer this question,” Hondula said. Instead, the limited CDC money—budgeted before the spike in deaths—supports awareness campaigns in poorer areas like Yuma County.
Many Arizona cities offer cooling centers—air-conditioned libraries, churches, and other shelters—for residents to escape the heat. Moore and Rhodes both had access to a vehicle. Cooling centers were nearby. Health workers are now surveying residents who visit cooling centers, but say it takes money to determine why so many others don’t.
Moore’s son, who grew up hearing about heat death victims on the radio, blames himself for what happened to his father. “I should have had someone check on him sooner,” Ivan said, even though less than 36 hours had passed between Moore’s last e-mail to his family and when police found him. “He had quite a few years left on him.”
A worker collapses at a sweltering factory
In North Carolina, the CDC-funded program has helped enable what health department spokesperson Kelly Haight Connor described in an e-mail as “the substantial growth in climate and health adaptation” there. Even so, documents show the climate team ran into roadblocks almost as soon as it tried to evaluate the state’s preparedness for climate change. It was still seeking the agency’s assistance when, in 2015, it completed an analysis showing heat-related mortality would increase over the coming decade. Covering Climate Now How to Stop the Spread of Climate Disinformation Erika Seiber and Michael Khoo A Soundtrack for the Climate Emergency Mark Hertsgaard Can Gen Z Save the Midterms for Democrats? Mark Hertsgaard
On June 22 that year, Sherion Winfrey, 63, just returned to work after vacation and had nine days before she was due to retire. For nearly 40 years, she worked at the same oil- and air-filter factory in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a city in the Sandhills. She’d learned to pack frozen water bottles in a cooler to keep herself refreshed on the hot assembly line. But that day, as the temperature outside hit 96 degrees, she collapsed during her shift. Rushed to a hospital, Winfrey died early that afternoon.
A state inspection of the factory the next day found that heat from industrial ovens and the metal walls and roof of the unair-conditioned production line raised the indoor heat index—a combined measure of temperature and humidity—to over 106 degrees and into the Occupational Safety and Health department’s “Danger” heat classification. The inspector recommended that the factory allow employees time to acclimate to the heat after an absence. But the investigation into Winfrey’s death ended after a medical examiner found that Winfrey suffered “a fatal pulmonary embolism and did not die from exposure to extreme temperatures.” Recent research suggests this type of blood clotting may be brought on by daily temperature swings.
Danny Muhammad, Winfrey’s son, has no doubt heat contributed to her death. Winfrey complained to family about the factory’s stifling environment. “The heat index was out of this world that day,” Muhammad said. It was the ninth consecutive day that temperatures had reached at least 94 degrees—seven degrees hotter than the June average. Winfrey’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2017 against the factory, citing extreme indoor temperatures as the cause of her death, but the case was later dismissed. A spokesperson for the factory declined to comment.
It took another three years after Winfrey’s death for the North Carolina program’s heat education efforts to begin in four Sandhills counties—and not where she had lived.
Budget cuts and self-censorship under Trump
In the years since the Trump administration took over, the political pressure hampering some of the CDC climate program’s grantees has also been applied to the program itself. Former and current staff said senior agency officials, aware of Trump’s denials of climate science, have tried to keep the program operating under the radar.
Self-censorship surfaced quickly after the 2016 election, even before Trump assumed office. In December of that year, CDC Environmental Health Director Patrick Breysse indefinitely postponed a first-ever climate symposium that was scheduled after the inauguration. George Luber, then the CDC’s climate chief, remembers his superiors warning the event would be poorly timed; Breysse said the postponement was for budgetary reasons.
The environmental health chief acknowledges that his staff debated whether to use the term “climate change.” He later combined the climate and asthma programs and, internal documents suggest, omitted the word “climate” from the new branch’s title. Whistle-Blowers ‘The Silenced’: Meet the Climate Whistle-Blowers Muzzled by Trump Oliver Milman
Breysse insists the White House never directed his actions. But they served as the basis for a whistle-blower complaint filed by Luber, who was removed from his CDC post in 2018. The complaint alleged that Luber was ousted because of his outspokenness on global warming. It stirred a hornet’s nest of public attention, but some program insiders allege his removal had more to do with his mismanagement and mistreatment of employees than his advocacy.
The CDC, which refused to comment on “personnel matters,” said its climate program is running better than ever. The agency pointed to the “mini grants” it has doled out through partner organizations to help another 10 health departments, one-time funding of $5,000 to $50,000.
Meanwhile, every one of Trump’s budget proposals has tried to eliminate the program.
The inaction in Washington contrasts with some local efforts to save lives endangered by the climate crisis. In Phoenix, spurred on by the sustained surge in heat deaths, some groups hand out 250,000 bottles of water annually to the homeless. Others distribute heat awareness magnets and brochures to the elderly. Still others are developing home sensors that will notify friends and family when indoor temperatures climb.
Many vulnerable residents fall through the cracks. Arizona medical examiner records of heat deaths are filled with accounts of aging and isolated people who hadn’t been heard from for days before a wellness check was requested.
Among them were Larry and Kathleen Purchase, 69 and 68 respectively, who died from environmental heat exposure in their Phoenix home during an unusual string of triple-digit days in September 2018. Married for almost 50 years, the two were active in their community and ran a small computer repair service, said Larry’s brother, Terry. When their 1970s rooftop air conditioner broke, they didn’t have the several hundred dollars to fix it.
Terry remembers them as “good stewards of the environment,” a tenet of their Christian faith. They didn’t believe in human-caused climate change, he said.
The day they were found, the temperature in their home hovered around 100 degrees.
Funding for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School, comes from the school’s Investigative Reporting Resource and the Energy Foundation. Additional support for this story was provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization, provided editing, fact-checking, and other support.


thenation--2020-06-18--Remembering Jim Bouton’s ‘Ball Four’

Remembering Jim Bouton’s ‘Ball Four’

In 1964 , an 18-year-old New York Military Academy first baseman named Don Trump slammed a game-winning home run against Cornwall High School that piqued the interest of scouts for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Boston Red Sox .
No question about it—the big kid was a professional prospect !
That same year , a 25-year-old New York Yankees pitcher named Jim Bouton , an All-Star the previous season , won two World Series games against the St. Louis Cardinals .
Hall of Fame , here we come !
Neither of those hotshots fulfilled their baseball promise .
Unpacking why @ @ @ @ @ @ @ day without baseball at a time when—thanks to that now grown-up first baseman—we really need the diversion .
And it may remind us of what we ’ re missing .
As you may already have guessed , Don Trump was never really a pro prospect .
That home run , in fact , would prove just a foretaste of his talent for hyping himself .
It never happened .
He made it up .
In fact , his team didn ’ t even play Cornwall that year .
Trump , who actually was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has long claimed that he was the best athlete there , a boast rarely challenged because coaches and classmates tended to praise him once it became in their best interests to do so .
And what about that Yankee phenom , nicknamed “ Bulldog ” by his teammates ( including legendary superstar Mickey Mantle ) for his ferocious tenacity on the mound ?
Only six years after his World Series heroics , sportswriters would be furiously writing him off as a “ journeyman ” ballplayer , a “ social leper ” who had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tell-all ” book written for him by a lefty journalist .
This year , Jim Bouton , who died in 2019 at age 80 , will get more of the acclaim owed him as a revolutionary sports figure thanks to the publication of an excellent new biography and a forthcoming 50th anniversary Kindle edition of his memoir , Ball Four , arguably the best sports book of all time .
In 1999 , Ball Four was , in fact , selected by the New York Public Library as one of the “ Books @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Four may now seem quaint .
( Who would be shocked today to discover that ballplayers of that era actually cursed , popped amphetamines , or tried to peek at women through hotel windows ? )
In 1970 , however , that book turned the national pastime on its head .
Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to have it banned or at least force Bouton to declare it “ fiction.
” Players who didn ’ t bother to read it nonetheless felt violated by it or were convinced that they should feel that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ depended on the idea that they were the only conduit fans had to the true life of the locker room , were infuriated .
They had been exposed as faux insiders .
As former Wall Street Journal reporter ( and sportswriter ) Stefan Fatsis said , in retrospect , “ I think you can argue that Ball Four completely reshaped journalism.
” No one who ’ s written about Bouton ’ s book , however , has caught its deeper spirit better than his widow , the psychologist Paula Kurman , in an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Ball Four , ” she wrote , “ was an extraordinary study of a strange , isolated tribe—from inside the tribe—which any anthropologist would be proud to have authored .
It was a universal fable , in which our hero sets out to seek his fortune , or the Holy Grail , and must do battle with those who try to stop him .
It was a man from a macho world—openly talking about his feelings and insecurities .
It was a kid calling out that the Emperor had no clothes on.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ perceptions that many sports fans then had of their heroes .
It humanized them .
Not surprisingly , the book spent months on the best-seller list , less for its mildly bawdy anecdotes than for the way it reinforced the passion of baseball fans for their game .
Rigorously edited ( but not written ) by Leonard Shecter , a progressive , uncompromising veteran of the pre-Murdoch-era New York Post , Ball Four was a strange and unexpected valentine to what was still the national pastime then .
( Today , it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American brutality . )
Bouton ’ s book proved to be the sweet revelation of a true believer ’ s longing to get a tighter hold on a game that had entranced him as a young man , a hold as tight as the game had on him .
Even now , it feels like a warm hug and helps explain why baseball is still America ’ s best game , a contest without a time limit or strategic violence , a sport that adds up to a true guild of disparate talents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( no matter the mix of workingmen , thugs , and poets on the field ) .
Think of it as a sort of dream version of America .
As it happened , however , it was a glimpse into Mickey Mantle ’ s alcoholism that especially upset the establishment .
As Bouton told Neal Conan of NPR ’ s Talk of the Nation in 2012 , Mantle showed up so hung over one day that the Yankee manager excused him from the game , telling him to sleep it off in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that anecdote was his almost-fanboy way of showcasing the greatness of Mantle .
But for the sports establishment , media and otherwise , it represented a loss of control , a peek into the deeper reality of the game and of the human beings that made it what it was .
They were particularly upset at how Bouton exposed their greed , at how many now knew how little the owners paid all but a few of their players compared to their profits .
The largest salary Bouton ever earned from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the year after his World Series wins , and he had to refuse to sign his contract and hold out to get it .
All of this would , of course , seem far less shocking in the world of 2020 with the billionaire first baseman who specialized in bankruptcies in the White House and a country that , in the midst of a pandemic and the equivalent of the second Great Depression , managed to make its collective crew of billionaires $ 565 billion richer .
Most important , Bouton ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s reserve clause , which bound players to their owners in something like perpetuity .
As Kevin Baxter pointed out in the Los Angeles Times , “ ‘ Ball Four , ’ fortuitously for the players union , came out the same year that St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause by refusing to accept a trade to the Philadelphia Phillies , setting off a legal battle that eventually led to free agency .
Bouton played a part in that , too , when he was called to read @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arbitrator Peter Seitz , who eventually ruled in the player ’ s favor.
” He would also prove to be a rare sports activist outside the game .
He marched for civil rights at a time when most athletes kept their political heads down .
He participated in anti-apartheid demonstrations against South Africa ’ s white regime when most ballplayers didn ’ t know what the word meant .
He was even a George McGovern delegate from New Jersey , his home state , at the 1972 Democratic convention .
As a player @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accessible locker-room interviewee , even for sportswriters whose hostility to him was guaranteed to find its way into print .
The most affronted and belligerent of these was the controversial , right-wing New York Daily News columnist Dick Young , who claimed that Bouton had violated the sanctity of the locker room ( a transgression for which he gave only himself a pass ) .
He was the one who described Bouton as a “ social leper.
” When the pitcher greeted him amiably afterward , Young blurted out , “ I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it personally ” ( though it couldn ’ t have been more personally meant ) .
That became the title of Bouton ’ s sequel to Ball Four .
Overused by the Yankees , he would injure his arm in his fourth season and never regain the dominance of his early Bulldog days .
In a major league career that lasted 10 seasons , he would play for three more teams , trying to develop and perfect a knuckleball , a difficult pitch to deliver , without notable success .
He would then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a TV sportscaster and then an entrepreneur and motivational speaker .
He would jokingly describe himself as a “ medium celebrity , ” at about the time in the 1980s when Donald Trump first made it onto the B list of anyone who was anybody in New York City .
It was a wonder they never met .
His wife would later tell me that he “ loathed Trump from the get-go , ” but by the time he was angry enough to go on the attack , his verbal and literary skills @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a brain disease .
As for me , while working at The New York Times and elsewhere , I interviewed and covered Trump for more than 35 years and Bouton for almost 60—we eventually became friends—and I can ’ t tell you how creepy it seems to me to put both of them in the same sentence , no less compare them .
Yet they did have something in common .
They were both creatures , if not creations , of the media , highly accessible and always eminently quotable .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t like them because they were guaranteed to draw attention and provide instant colorful copy ( as the president still does daily ) .
And both were misinterpreted early .
Trump ’ s ponderous , dour personal style made him seem serious , almost thoughtful , when being interviewed .
While it was clear enough that he had no ideology beyond making money and making his own will prevail , he was regularly characterized as a cunning man and so it was easy enough to assume that he had a master plan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( as now ) , he schemed endlessly to attract attention , going so far then as to pretend to be a publicist , peddling his employer , one Donald Trump , while on the phone with reporters .
Bouton , on the other hand , rarely fished for publicity .
He did , however , have a bubbly personality and a willingness to talk to anyone about anything , a manner that obscured the very thing he had and Donald Trump lacked : a methodical , rational mind with a highly developed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Paula Kurman thinks that a media tendency to characterize him as a classic tilter at windmills was a way of diminishing the passionate pragmatism of his activism .
His last major quest was an attempt to save an old ballpark in Pittsfield , Mass.
, which he saw as a way to preserve history , be a gift to a city—he lived near neighboring Great Barrington—and make money .
Perhaps not surprisingly , given the American world of inequality and greed we now inhabit , he struck out .
As he revealed in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social observer ( even if he also had a certain sense of elitism ) , mocking the dress of various ballplayers , their sloppy chewing-tobacco habits , even the way some feigned brave limps .
That he could be seen as a flake was the clearest proof of how conservative , insular , and blinkered most ballplayers and reporters who covered them were , and how hidebound baseball still is .
Otherwise occupied , Trump has been quiet on baseball since he called for the opening of the new season in mid-April at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of his drive to restart the economy at any human cost .
Even though he once played the sport , it may be too intricate , humane , slow-moving , and collective for a man with as little patience as he has .
It ’ s unlikely he ’ s up to speed either on the current strained negotiations between the sport ’ s Trumpian owners and the players for some kind of a truncated version of a 2020 season .
Whether baseball has a season or not this year , chalk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this time of death , destruction , and protest , one that would have amused the former Yankees pitcher .
The last time I checked , a signed Jim Bouton baseball cost $ 64.99 , while one with Trump ’ s signature was going for $ 5,565.79—only slightly less than the price for a document signed by the captain of the Titanic .

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.
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In 1964, an 18-year-old New York Military Academy first baseman named Don Trump slammed a game-winning home run against Cornwall High School that piqued the interest of scouts for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Boston Red Sox. No question about it—the big kid was a professional prospect!
That same year, a 25-year-old New York Yankees pitcher named Jim Bouton, an All-Star the previous season, won two World Series games against the St. Louis Cardinals. Hall of Fame, here we come!
Neither of those hotshots fulfilled their baseball promise. Unpacking why not might just help us survive another day without baseball at a time when—thanks to that now grown-up first baseman—we really need the diversion. And it may remind us of what we’re missing.
As you may already have guessed, Don Trump was never really a pro prospect. That home run, in fact, would prove just a foretaste of his talent for hyping himself. It never happened. He made it up. In fact, his team didn’t even play Cornwall that year. Trump, who actually was his school’s team captain, has long claimed that he was the best athlete there, a boast rarely challenged because coaches and classmates tended to praise him once it became in their best interests to do so.
And what about that Yankee phenom, nicknamed “Bulldog” by his teammates (including legendary superstar Mickey Mantle) for his ferocious tenacity on the mound? Only six years after his World Series heroics, sportswriters would be furiously writing him off as a “journeyman” ballplayer, a “social leper” who had betrayed the game to produce a “tell-all” book written for him by a lefty journalist.
This year, Jim Bouton, who died in 2019 at age 80, will get more of the acclaim owed him as a revolutionary sports figure thanks to the publication of an excellent new biography and a forthcoming 50th anniversary Kindle edition of his memoir, Ball Four, arguably the best sports book of all time. In 1999, Ball Four was, in fact, selected by the New York Public Library as one of the “Books of the Century.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
Baseball Anthropology
Parts of Ball Four may now seem quaint. (Who would be shocked today to discover that ballplayers of that era actually cursed, popped amphetamines, or tried to peek at women through hotel windows?) In 1970, however, that book turned the national pastime on its head. Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to have it banned or at least force Bouton to declare it “fiction.” Players who didn’t bother to read it nonetheless felt violated by it or were convinced that they should feel that way. Traditional sportswriters, whose status depended on the idea that they were the only conduit fans had to the true life of the locker room, were infuriated. They had been exposed as faux insiders. Current Issue View our current issue
As former Wall Street Journal reporter (and sportswriter) Stefan Fatsis said, in retrospect, “I think you can argue that Ball Four completely reshaped journalism.”
No one who’s written about Bouton’s book, however, has caught its deeper spirit better than his widow, the psychologist Paula Kurman, in an introduction to that 50th anniversary edition. “Ball Four,” she wrote, “was an extraordinary study of a strange, isolated tribe—from inside the tribe—which any anthropologist would be proud to have authored. It was a universal fable, in which our hero sets out to seek his fortune, or the Holy Grail, and must do battle with those who try to stop him. It was a man from a macho world—openly talking about his feelings and insecurities. It was a kid calling out that the Emperor had no clothes on.”
For starters, it reshaped the perceptions that many sports fans then had of their heroes. It humanized them. Not surprisingly, the book spent months on the best-seller list, less for its mildly bawdy anecdotes than for the way it reinforced the passion of baseball fans for their game. Rigorously edited (but not written) by Leonard Shecter, a progressive, uncompromising veteran of the pre-Murdoch-era New York Post, Ball Four was a strange and unexpected valentine to what was still the national pastime then. (Today, it’s undoubtedly football, a tribute to American brutality.)
Bouton’s book proved to be the sweet revelation of a true believer’s longing to get a tighter hold on a game that had entranced him as a young man, a hold as tight as the game had on him. Even now, it feels like a warm hug and helps explain why baseball is still America’s best game, a contest without a time limit or strategic violence, a sport that adds up to a true guild of disparate talents only capable of succeeding by working collectively (no matter the mix of workingmen, thugs, and poets on the field). Think of it as a sort of dream version of America.
As it happened, however, it was a glimpse into Mickey Mantle’s alcoholism that especially upset the establishment. As Bouton told Neal Conan of NPR’s Talk of the Nation in 2012, Mantle showed up so hung over one day that the Yankee manager excused him from the game, telling him to sleep it off in the trainer’s room.
“Anyway, the game goes extra innings,”recalled Bouton.
We need a pinch-hitter in the 10th. Somebody went to wake up the Mick. He comes out, put a bat in his hands. He walks up to home plate, takes one practice swing and hits the first pitch into the left field bleachers, a tremendous blast. Guys are going nuts. He comes over, crosses home plate. Actually, he missed home plate. We have to send him back for that. He comes over to the dugout, and he looks up in the stands, and he says, those people don’t know how tough that really was. Then after the game, the sportswriter said, “Mick, how did you do that?”… And he said, “Well, it was very simple. I hit the middle ball.”
For Bouton, that anecdote was his almost-fanboy way of showcasing the greatness of Mantle. But for the sports establishment, media and otherwise, it represented a loss of control, a peek into the deeper reality of the game and of the human beings that made it what it was. They were particularly upset at how Bouton exposed their greed, at how many now knew how little the owners paid all but a few of their players compared to their profits. The largest salary Bouton ever earned from the Yankees was $30,000 in 1965, the year after his World Series wins, and he had to refuse to sign his contract and hold out to get it. All of this would, of course, seem far less shocking in the world of 2020 with the billionaire first baseman who specialized in bankruptcies in the White House and a country that, in the midst of a pandemic and the equivalent of the second Great Depression, managed to make its collective crew of billionaires $565 billion richer.
Most important, Bouton’s book laid bare the unfairness of baseball’s reserve clause, which bound players to their owners in something like perpetuity. As Kevin Baxter pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, “‘Ball Four,’ fortuitously for the players union, came out the same year that St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause by refusing to accept a trade to the Philadelphia Phillies, setting off a legal battle that eventually led to free agency. Bouton played a part in that, too, when he was called to read passages from his book in front of arbitrator Peter Seitz, who eventually ruled in the player’s favor.”
He would also prove to be a rare sports activist outside the game. He marched for civil rights at a time when most athletes kept their political heads down. He participated in anti-apartheid demonstrations against South Africa’s white regime when most ballplayers didn’t know what the word meant. He was even a George McGovern delegate from New Jersey, his home state, at the 1972 Democratic convention.
The Knuckleballer
As a player, Bouton was an unusually friendly and accessible locker-room interviewee, even for sportswriters whose hostility to him was guaranteed to find its way into print. The most affronted and belligerent of these was the controversial, right-wing New York Daily News columnist Dick Young, who claimed that Bouton had violated the sanctity of the locker room (a transgression for which he gave only himself a pass). He was the one who described Bouton as a “social leper.” When the pitcher greeted him amiably afterward, Young blurted out, “I’m glad you didn’t take it personally” (though it couldn’t have been more personally meant). That became the title of Bouton’s sequel to Ball Four.
Overused by the Yankees, he would injure his arm in his fourth season and never regain the dominance of his early Bulldog days. In a major league career that lasted 10 seasons, he would play for three more teams, trying to develop and perfect a knuckleball, a difficult pitch to deliver, without notable success. He would then go on to a successful career as a TV sportscaster and then an entrepreneur and motivational speaker. He would jokingly describe himself as a “medium celebrity,” at about the time in the 1980s when Donald Trump first made it onto the B list of anyone who was anybody in New York City. It was a wonder they never met. His wife would later tell me that he “loathed Trump from the get-go,” but by the time he was angry enough to go on the attack, his verbal and literary skills had been dimmed by cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease.
As for me, while working at The New York Times and elsewhere, I interviewed and covered Trump for more than 35 years and Bouton for almost 60—we eventually became friends—and I can’t tell you how creepy it seems to me to put both of them in the same sentence, no less compare them. Yet they did have something in common. They were both creatures, if not creations, of the media, highly accessible and always eminently quotable. They were both suffered by journalists who didn’t like them because they were guaranteed to draw attention and provide instant colorful copy (as the president still does daily). And both were misinterpreted early.
Trump’s ponderous, dour personal style made him seem serious, almost thoughtful, when being interviewed. While it was clear enough that he had no ideology beyond making money and making his own will prevail, he was regularly characterized as a cunning man and so it was easy enough to assume that he had a master plan of some sort. In those years (as now), he schemed endlessly to attract attention, going so far then as to pretend to be a publicist, peddling his employer, one Donald Trump, while on the phone with reporters.
Bouton, on the other hand, rarely fished for publicity. He did, however, have a bubbly personality and a willingness to talk to anyone about anything, a manner that obscured the very thing he had and Donald Trump lacked: a methodical, rational mind with a highly developed sense of justice. Looking back, Paula Kurman thinks that a media tendency to characterize him as a classic tilter at windmills was a way of diminishing the passionate pragmatism of his activism. His last major quest was an attempt to save an old ballpark in Pittsfield, Mass., which he saw as a way to preserve history, be a gift to a city—he lived near neighboring Great Barrington—and make money. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the American world of inequality and greed we now inhabit, he struck out.
As he revealed in Ball Four, Bouton was an acute social observer (even if he also had a certain sense of elitism), mocking the dress of various ballplayers, their sloppy chewing-tobacco habits, even the way some feigned brave limps. That he could be seen as a flake was the clearest proof of how conservative, insular, and blinkered most ballplayers and reporters who covered them were, and how hidebound baseball still is.
Dueling Balls
Otherwise occupied, Trump has been quiet on baseball since he called for the opening of the new season in mid-April at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic as part of his drive to restart the economy at any human cost. Even though he once played the sport, it may be too intricate, humane, slow-moving, and collective for a man with as little patience as he has. It’s unlikely he’s up to speed either on the current strained negotiations between the sport’s Trumpian owners and the players for some kind of a truncated version of a 2020 season.
Whether baseball has a season or not this year, chalk up a victory for The Donald in this time of death, destruction, and protest, one that would have amused the former Yankees pitcher. The last time I checked, a signed Jim Bouton baseball cost $64.99, while one with Trump’s signature was going for $5,565.79—only slightly less than the price for a document signed by the captain of the Titanic.