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Oz says he was 'exhausted' when he made video of crudité shopping trip

Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz said in a new interview that he was “exhausted” when he made a video that later went viral showing the celebrity doctor shopping for ingredients for “crudité” while mispronouncing the name of the grocery store.

“I was exhausted. When you’re campaigning 18 hours a day you, listen, I’ve gotten my kids’ names wrong as well. I don’t think that’s a measure of someone’s ability to lead the commonwealth,” Oz told Newsmax on Wednesday when asked about why he said “Wegners,” a cross between the Redner’s and Wegmans chains.

In April, Oz put out a video showing him grocery store shopping in which he sought to show how inflation had made buying items like broccoli, asparagus, guacamole and salsa more expensive. 

The campaign for his Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, seized on the video last week to argue that Oz was out of touch with voters.

Fetterman’s campaign pointed to Oz’s mispronunciation of the grocery store’s name and stressed that he was shopping for ingredients for “crudité.” Fetterman’s campaign reported on Tuesday that it had fundraised more $500,000 off of the Oz video, including raising $65,000 from one sticker alone, which had the phrase “Wegners: Let them eat Crudite” on it.

“So I rolled my sleeves up my whole life. I’ve taken care of patients, saved lives, invented devices. I’ve started foundations where we take care of tens of thousands of teens around the country trying to help wherever I can. That’s what my life’s been about,” Oz told Newsmax when asked if he could relate to most Pennsylvania residents.

“We’ll do whatever we need to do to make sure that people of Pennsylvania respect what we’re about and then we’re going to work as hard as we can to fix their problems.”

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Thursday shifted its rating of the Pennsylvania Senate seat from “toss up” to “lean Democrat.” 

Source: TEST FEED1

Inflation Reduction Act media tour won’t ease economic turmoil for ordinary Americans

The reports of President Biden’s resurgence are greatly exaggerated. On Tuesday, Biden signed into law the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which the media are touting as a significant “Biden victory.” The press celebration is just the culmination of a broader public relations effort claiming the Biden presidency is gaining “momentum.”

Yet small businesses on the front lines of the economy tell a very different story of economic turmoil, which this tax-and-spend legislation will worsen. 

Consider the Job Creators Network Foundation’s latest SBIQ survey. Three-quarters of American small businesses say the economy is fair or poor, and 50 percent say the current climate is bad. Most respondents worry they’ll have to close their doors because of the Biden economy.

This pessimism is no surprise when you consider ongoing historic inflation. This is the biggest story affecting ordinary Americans since the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s one that seemingly has been banished from the front pages.

Last week, the Labor Department announced consumer prices rose 8.5 percent over the past year, hovering near a 41-year high. Wholesale prices, which small businesses pay, are rising even faster. Real inflation, measured the same way it was historically, is well into the double digits.

Biden and the media are trying to gaslight Americans about the inflation crisis. Biden ridiculously claimed last week that inflation is “zero” because it didn’t get even worse in July. The silence of the countless media “fact-checkers” in response to this assertion is deafening.

Still, Americans don’t need the media to tell them about inflation. They are feeling it every day — every time they shop, fill up their gas tanks, pay their energy bills, or sign their kids up for summer camp.

Runaway inflation is especially problematic for American seniors whose incomes are mostly fixed. Seniors face the double whammy of high inflation and declining savings because of a depressed stock market.

Inflation has been rising about two-thirds faster than wages over the past year, meaning even working Americans are experiencing a Biden pay cut of falling real wages. The White House and media are trying to deceive, deflect and distract Americans from this painful decline in living standards.

The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will fuel this inflationary fire. It spends $433 billion on Democrats’ climate and health care projects, including extending expanded ObamaCare subsidies that will further inflate health care premiums.

It increases taxes on businesses, including small businesses, by more than $500 billion. It adds a football stadium worth of new IRS agents to overwhelm small businesses with audits. These new costs will make it harder for small businesses to expand and increase supply to bring down prices.

Only 12 percent of Americans think the bill will actually reduce inflation; 36 percent think it will increase it. Recognizing that the American people are not buying the claim that this legislation will reduce inflation, the media are changing its name to the “climate and health care bill.”

The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation finds that most of the revenue collected from the law’s tax hikes will be paid by everyday Americans earning less $400,000, as corporations, responsible to their shareholders, are forced to pass along tax increases in the form of higher prices to maintain their profit margins. 

The legislation breaks Biden’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on these ordinary earners. This one-two punch of runaway inflation and higher taxes on everyday Americans and small businesses will deepen the ongoing recession.

Yet, as summer winds down and election season heats up, expect to hear a lot more IRA misinformation from the White House and media. Biden is planning to take a “victory lap” to try to keep this destructive partisan law in the news cycle for as long as possible.

The PR effort won’t change the real economic pain that Americans are facing. Biden’s signature legislation is a microcosm of his failed presidency, full of reckless spending and burdens on small businesses. No amount of spin can remove the legislation’s stains.

Alfredo Ortiz is president and CEO of Job Creators Network. 

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The Hill's Morning Report — Under microscopes, CDC and IRS to get overhauls

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Treasury secretary each issued announcements on Wednesday vowing to overhaul two prominent public-facing agencies that have long been criticized as myopic and hobbled by past practices.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky concurred with many scientists, lawmakers, state officials and members of the public when she conceded the agency she has led since 2021 did not “reliably” meet its mission during the COVID-19 pandemic — and must change (The New York Times and The Hill). The coronavirus has killed more than a million people in the U.S., and deaths still average more than 400 a day.

Walensky’s prescriptions after an external review: faster CDC responses, less focus on publication of academic papers, improved and stable management, and clearer, simpler communication and public guidance.

“My goal is a new, public health action-oriented culture at CDC that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication, and timeliness,” she said.

Walensky, a former Harvard Medical School professor and infectious disease expert, appointed Mary Wakefield, a former Obama administration health official, to lead the agency’s reorganization and transition plan, which on Wednesday remained vaguely described.  

Down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took aim at the IRS soon after President Biden signed the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act that includes tax changes hotly criticized by the GOP.

She told IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig on Wednesday to take six months to come up with an $80 billion overhaul that will clear a backlog of unprocessed tax returns, improve taxpayer service, revamp antiquated technology, and hire and train thousands of new employees (The New York Times).

Yellen tasked Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo to work with Rettig to get it done. She said the plan must have metrics for its various areas of improvement so that Congress can hold the agency accountable.

Lawmakers from both parties have identified plenty of shortcomings at the CDC and the IRS over the years.

Michael Lewis, who wrote “The Premonition,” about the CDC’s failures during the Trump administration as COVID-19 spread, told NPR early last year that his reporting showed “that the bigger picture is we as a society have allowed institutions like the CDC to become very politicized. And this is a larger pattern in the U.S. government. More and more jobs [are] being politicized, more and more people in these jobs being on shorter, tighter leashes.”

Perhaps emblematic of that condition, Walensky and Yellen are looking over the horizon. Democrats, led by Biden, tell voters that the federal government works to solve problems and improve Americans’ lives. At the same time, conservatives promise oversight of both agencies next year if the GOP gains majorities in either or both chambers.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), an ophthalmologist, early this month released a video telling people to flout CDC guidance. “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us. They can’t keep all of your kids home from school,” he said on Twitter. “We don’t have to accept the mandates, lockdowns and harmful policies of the petty tyrants and bureaucrats. We can simply say: ‘No, not again.’”

Looking beyond 2024, some Republicans who are contemplating presidential bids, including former President Trump, champion an executive order known as “Schedule F,” which they say could cull the federal workforce and install personnel more attuned to GOP aims.

Bashing the IRS currently is a popular GOP midterm election theme, The Hill’s Emily Brooks reports. Ignoring Yellen’s denials, Republicans tell voters the Inflation Reduction Act’s increased funding for the IRS means middle-class Americans and small businesses will be audited and perhaps investigated by armed IRS agents. 

Yellen, in her Wednesday memo, said the IRS would focus on cracking down on wealthy tax dodgers and big companies that have long evaded paying what they owe to the federal government. She also promised that middle-class households would not face more onerous scrutiny and that their audit rates would not rise.

“These investments will not result in households earning $400,000 per year or less or small businesses seeing an increase in the chances that they are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen wrote. “Instead, they will allow the IRS to work to end the two-tiered tax system, where most Americans pay what they owe, but those at the top of the distribution often do not.”

Related Articles

▪ The Hill: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told “CBS Mornings” that a decision about extending the government’s current freeze on federal student loan repayments will be communicated “soon.”

▪ Breaking Defense: Air Force Special Operations Command on Tuesday grounded all 52 of its CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft indefinitely as the result of an “increased number of safety incidents.”

LEADING THE DAY

➤ POLITICS

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday said that he has not ruled out sitting down with the Jan. 6 select committee for an interview, effectively opening the door to an unprecedented sit-down over Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election.

Pence, a possible presidential candidate in 2024, told a crowd in Manchester, N.H., that he would give an invitation to testify “due consideration.”

“If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it,” Pence said at St. Anselm College. “Any invitation directed at me, I’d have to reflect on the unique role I was serving in as vice president. It would be unprecedented in history for the vice president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill. 

“I don’t want to prejudge ever any formal invitation rendered to us,” he added. 

Testimony by the former vice president has been long sought after by the Jan. 6 select committee due to the pressure campaign waged by Trump and his allies for Pence to reject the 2020 election outcome in a number of states. However, the committee did receive testimony from Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff at the end of the Trump presidency. 

Committee members have said in recent months that they were considering whether to subpoena the former VP (Reuters). The panel is expected to resume its slate of hearings next month after Congress returns to work. 

Pence also made waves by panning attacks from within the Republican Party aimed at the FBI and law enforcement officials following last week’s search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. 

“I also want to remind my fellow Republicans we can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI,” Pence said to applause from attendees. “The Republican Party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state and local level. And these attacks on the FBI must stop.”

Pence added that calls within the party to “defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police” (The Hill).

▪ The New York Times: Plea deal requires Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg to plead guilty to 15 felonies.

▪ The Hill interview: James Carville: Trump scandal could be “biggest story since 9/11.”

▪ Politico: Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), chairman of Senate GOP campaign arm, suggested the GOP could shut down the government next year if it retakes the chamber’s majority while working to unravel components of the Democrats’ newly enacted climate change, tax and health care legislation.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) on Wednesday following her primary defeat told NBC’s “Today” that she is “thinking about” a possible White House run and will make that decision in the “coming months.” For now, she says she is focused on her work with the Jan. 6 panel, which will wrap at the end of the year (The Hill).

▪ The Washington Post: Trump’s dominance in GOP comes into focus, worrying some in the party.

▪ Aaron Blake, The Washington Post: Cheney for president? Why it could actually matter.

▪ The Hill: Who is Mary Peltola, the Democrat outperforming expectations in Alaska?

On the Senate side, a new Marquette Law School Poll survey released on Wednesday shows Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D) holding a 7-percentage point advantage over Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), handing a boost to the Democratic effort to keep hold of the majority. 

Barnes, fresh off a primary triumph last week, leads with 51 percent to only 44 percent for the two-term incumbent. The previous poll taken in June showed Barnes leading by 2 percentage points. 

Despite the poor numbers, Johnson still has reasons for optimism. As his team readily notes, both Marquette Law School Poll surveys taken in August 2016 during his last reelection fight showed him down 11 and 3 points, respectively, against former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.). In fact, almost every single poll taken of the 2016 contest showed him trailing (RealClearPolitics). 

In addition, Wednesday’s poll showed that 41 percent of voters either haven’t heard enough about Barnes to form an opinion or do not know enough about him.

▪ Hanna Trudo, The Hill: How Barnes, a populist Democrat, is taking on Johnson in Wisconsin.

▪ Politico: Dems mount $10 million ad campaign to sell landmark law — and skirt a November wipeout.

▪ The Associated Press: Post-Roe differences surface in GOP over new abortion rules.

▪ The Hill: State prosecutor sues Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over ouster.

IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES

➤ POX, PANDEMIC & HEALTH

Reps. Jerry Nadler and Ritchie Torres, both New York Democrats, on Wednesday urged the administration along with colleagues to use the Defense Production Act to compel the domestic manufacture of needed monkeypox vaccine doses (The Hill).

A case of monkeypox was diagnosed in a man whose “primary risk factor” was close, nonsexual contact, including dancing, at a crowded outdoor event in the United Kingdom, the CDC reported (CNN). The case expands possible transmission routes and implications for “epidemic control,” researchers wrote. 

Ahead of the upcoming academic year, the University of Maryland said Wednesday that the campus community has its first presumptive case of monkeypox — in a staff member (WTOP). 

New York City health officials announced the West Nile virus has been detected in two people as the city experiences a record number of mosquitos. The cases were detected in Queens and Brooklyn (The Hill).

Cases of hand, foot and mouth disease are being seen with more frequency by pediatricians, who believe the typically common infection ebbed during the pandemic when youngsters were more isolated from one another (WTOP). The disease is usually not serious, but it’s contagious and spreads quickly at schools and day care centers. Symptoms usually mimic a cold, with a fever, sore throat and runny nose. Then a rash of tiny, red, oval shapes that sometimes blister and scab can develop on various body parts.

Total U.S. coronavirus deaths reported as of this morning, according to Johns Hopkins University (trackers all vary slightly): 1,039,026. Current average U.S. COVID-19 daily deaths are 398, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The New York Times: Following a November jury verdict in the opioid crisis, a federal judge in Ohio on Wednesday ruled that CVS, Walgreens and Walmart must pay $650.5 million to two Ohio counties because the nation’s largest pharmacy chains continued to dispense mass quantities of prescription painkillers over the years while ignoring signs that the pills were being abused. Drug manufacturers and drug distributors, two other groups in the pharmaceutical chain that have been sued, also bear responsibility, the judge said. The pharmacy chains plan to appeal, their lawyers said.

Leana S. Wen, contributing columnist, The Washington Post: The reemergence of polio is a public health emergency. And a tragedy. 

OPINION

■ Cheney’s defense of democracy needs a political strategy, by Jonathan Bernstein, columnist, Bloomberg Opinion. https://bloom.bg/3A0mN5X 

■ How to fight polio with cultural sensitivity, by Jeneen Interlandi, editorial board member, The New York Times. https://nyti.ms/3PylXTD

WHERE AND WHEN

The House will meet on Friday at 11 a.m. for a pro forma session. It will reconvene on Sept. 13. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will hold a press event in San Francisco at 10 a.m. PT to celebrate the CHIPS and Science Act. 

The Senate convenes on Friday at 2:30 p.m. for a pro forma session during its summer recess, which ends Sept. 6.

The president has no public events scheduled. He is in Wilmington, Del.

First lady Jill Biden is in South Carolina at a private residence while isolating with a confirmed case of COVID-19. 

Vice President Harris has no public events. She and second gentleman Doug Emhoff are in Kauai, Hawaii.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra will travel to Phoenix for a roundtable discussion about reproductive rights with Planned Parenthood clinicians at 9:30 a.m. PT at the organization’s Central Phoenix Health Center. Becerra will lead a second event with Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) at Phoenix’s Chicanos Por La Causa Maryvale Community Service Center about provisions in the recently enacted Inflation Reduction law designed to result in lower-cost prescription drugs for seniors.

Economic indicator: The Labor Department at 8:30 a.m. will report on filings for unemployment claims in the week ending Aug. 13. The National Association of Realtors at 10 a.m. will report on existing home sales in July. 

🎂 Former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who made a public appearance in Georgia over the weekend, is 95 today. Happy birthday! (Fox5 Atlanta).

🖥  Hill.TV’s “Rising” program features news and interviews at http://thehill.com/hilltv, on YouTube and on Facebook at 10:30 a.m. ET. Also, check out the “Rising” podcast here.

ELSEWHERE  

➤ INTERNATIONAL

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to host Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and U.N. Secretary General António Guterres in Lviv today. On the agenda: talks about how to expand grain exports from the key European area and the ongoing issues at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine that is under Russian control. The meeting with Erdoğan comes only a month after the Turkish leader met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the grain issue as prices skyrocketed following the invasion (The Associated Press).

The Wall Street Journal: U.S. veterans race to train Ukrainians as Marines; “Time is not on their side.”

Iran this week responded to what had been described as a final road map from the European Union toward restoring the nuclear deal following Trump’s 2018 decision to withdraw. Tehran’s written reaction encouraged Western negotiators even if it was not a definitive “yes” because Iran didn’t raise new objections, The New York Times reported. Iran wants assurances that the United States would lift punishing economic sanctions and that such assurances would be valid after Biden leaves office.

Syria says it does not have U.S. journalist Austin Tice, The Washington Post reported. Tice was abducted in Damascus on Aug. 14, 2012, just days after his 31st birthday. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and later became a journalist covering Syria, including for the Post. 

➤ SPACE

NASA’s new moon rocket made the lengthy trek to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, arriving ahead of its inaugural flight in less than two weeks. The rocket departed its hangar late on Tuesday, and it took 10 hours for the 322-foot object to travel four miles to the launch pad, having arrived at sunrise. Liftoff is slated for Aug 29 (The Associated Press).

➤ ENVIRONMENT 

In Texas, drought threatens America’s cattle heartland and is forcing ranchers to make agonizing decisions about whether to sell livestock at a loss or gamble on rain. “We’ll keep selling cows ‘til it rains,” Texas High Plains rancher Jim Ferguson told Amarillo station KAMR, which collaborated with The Hill’s Saul Elbein on drought coverage.

THE CLOSER

Take Our Morning Report Quiz

And finally … It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for this week’s Morning Report Quiz! Inspired by former President Clinton’s 76th birthday on Friday, we’re eager for some smart guesses about his natal days of old.

Email your responses to asimendinger@thehill.com and/or aweaver@thehill.com, and please add “Quiz” to subject lines. Winners who submit correct answers will enjoy some richly deserved newsletter fame on Friday.

Clinton made his birthplace part of his campaign in 1992. Where was he born?

1. Liberty, Texas
2. Champion, Ohio
3. Truth or Consequences, N.M.
4. Hope, Ark.

In 1995, the 42nd president celebrated his 49th birthday during a long vacation in which state? (Hint: It appeared in headlines this week.)

1. Wyoming
2. Alaska
3. Arizona
4. California

In 1996, Clinton marked middle age and his 50th birthday with 5,300 of his closest friends at Radio City Music Hall and raised $10 million for the Democratic Party. Which entertainer sang for the president during that reelection-year birthday bash?

1. Aretha Franklin
2. Tony Bennett
3. Barbra Streisand
4. James Taylor

Two days before his birthday in 1998, Clinton addressed the nation. What was the topic?

1. Welfare reform
2. Midterm elections
3. Relationship with Monica Lewinsky and his admissions during grand jury testimony under oath 
4. Bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa

Stay Engaged

We want to hear from you! Email: Alexis Simendinger and Al Weaver. Follow us on Twitter (@alweaver22 & @asimendinger) and suggest this newsletter to friends!

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Lawmakers push for improved cybersecurity in health sector amid growing cyber threats

Lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to strengthen the federal government’s cyber defenses in the health care sector amid a spike in cyberattacks, a push industry leaders see as a way to help protect a critical sector that stores sensitive information.

In a letter addressed to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) urged the agency to better protect the health care and public health sector from the growing number of cyber threats. 

“With cyber threats growing exponentially, we must prioritize addressing the [health care and public health] sector’s cybersecurity gaps,” wrote King and Gallagher, who both co-chair the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

“Ransomware attacks on the [health care and public health] sector have skyrocketed in the past two years as opportunistic criminals recognized that hospitals may pay quickly to resolve issues and protect patient safety,” the letter said.

The lawmakers additionally requested an urgent meeting with health officials in the Biden administration for an update on their current cyber posture. King and Gallagher added that they are also concerned about HHS’s lack of timely information sharing about ongoing threats with industry partners.

“We certainly applaud Senator King and Representative Gallagher’s letter to HHS and the fact that they recognize the intense cyber threat that we are facing as a sector right now,” said John Riggi, the national adviser for cybersecurity and risk at the American Hospital Association.

Riggi added that cyberattacks increased dramatically amid the pandemic, posing a serious risk to a sector that was already vulnerable.

He explained that the health care sector is a prime target for cyber criminals because they understand that the priority for health care workers is to deliver care and save lives, which increases the likelihood that hospitals will pay ransoms in order to resume their operations.

“They understand that we are vulnerable, they understand that we in health care possess all kinds of valuable information,” Riggi added.

Denise Anderson, president and CEO of the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said that patient data is very valuable to criminals and can be used to steal identities. 

She added that cyber criminals targeting the health care sector are also after intellectual property related to medical research and technology.

“The health sector is highly interconnected and sensitive data is continuously moving between entities,” Anderson said. 

Another challenge the health care sector faces is that medical devices, which are expensive and operate 24 hours a day, cannot easily be taken offline to fix vulnerabilities and are not easily replaceable because some run on operating systems that are no longer supported, Anderson explained. 

A recent report from Kroll, an investigation and risk consulting firm, found a 90 percent increase in the number of attacks against health care organizations in the second quarter of this year compared to the first quarter. 

The report also found that ransomware is the most common type of cyberattack used against the health care sector, closely followed by email compromise.

“Across the board, ransomware groups continue to use tried and tested techniques to compromise their victim’s environments, taking advantage of security weaknesses to gain footholds into systems and launch malicious payloads,” the report said. 

“This makes maintaining and building cyber resilience a priority to avoid being compromised by a ransomware attack,” the report added.

Riggi said that his organization and the federal government strongly discourage hospitals from paying ransoms because he said doing so emboldens criminals to continue attacking the health care sector and makes carrying out such attacks a lucrative business for them. 

In addition, ransom payments can also get into the hands of international criminal groups that often work on behalf of adversarial nation-states like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Riggi said, adding that essentially these groups also represent a national security threat. 

In July, U.S. federal agencies issued a warning to the health care sector of a ransomware known as “Maui” that has been linked to the North Korean government. 

The agencies said that Maui ransomware has been used by North Korean-sponsored hackers since at least last spring to target health care and public health sector organizations. 

The government agencies also discouraged health sector organizations from paying ransoms because they said doing so does not guarantee the recovery of stolen data. They instead recommended that businesses adopt cybersecurity best practices and report ransomware attacks to law enforcement.

The FBI has been actively disrupting cyberattacks against hospitals. In June, the agency said it thwarted a cyberattack last summer that intended to disrupt the network of the Boston Children’s Hospital. 

According to the FBI, Iranian-sponsored hackers were behind the attack. FBI Director Christopher Wray said at the time that the attack was “one of the most despicable cyberattacks” he’s ever seen.

For the health care sector to effectively counter these growing threats, it needs to substantially increase its human and financial capital, Riggi said. But that will prove to be a challenge, as there is a massive labor shortage of cyber professionals across industries.

“Unfortunately, we in health care, just like the federal government and all sectors, are facing a massive shortage of cybersecurity personnel,” Riggi said.

“On one hand, we all want to increase our cyber defenses, but we’re also competing for the same limited pool of cybersecurity professionals,” he added.

Despite the labor shortage, hospitals have significantly increased their cybersecurity budget and have attempted to hire where they can to meet the growing demands of protecting health facilities from cyberattacks, Riggi said. 

“Almost every hospital CEO that I speak to now ranks cyber risks as their number one or number two top enterprise risk issue,” he added.

Riggi and Anderson both agreed that the government and the private sector should continue to work together to combat cyber threats. They recommended that both sectors continue to share information as well as best practices to help mitigate threats.

“It is absolutely important for the public and private sectors to work together to combat [ransomware] thefts,” Anderson said. 

“Government can provide incentives to help hospitals and other health delivery organizations implement cyber resources such as staff and tools, and cybersecurity best practices,” she added. 

A bipartisan bill was introduced in March to do just that. The Healthcare Cybersecurity Act, a piece of legislation co-sponsored by Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), would require that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) collaborate with HHS to improve cybersecurity standards in the health care and public health sector. It would also require both agencies to share information with the private sector to increase cyber resilience. 

“Cybersecurity in the health care sector is fundamentally about the ability to deliver clinical care and ensure patient safety, which is why cybersecurity must be a top priority for every health care organization, including for boards of directors and c-suite executives,” said Eric Goldstein, CISA’s executive assistant director, in a statement to The Hill. 

“A key step toward greater resilience is operational collaboration with government partners such as CISA to rapidly exchange, enrich, and amplify actionable information,” he added.

Source: TEST FEED1

Why Great Plains agriculture is particularly vulnerable to drought

The American West is experiencing its driest period in human history, a megadrought that threatens health, agriculture and entire ways of life. DRIED UP is examining the dire effects of the drought on the states most affected — as well as the solutions Americans are embracing.

The underground aquifer system that supplies water for a quarter of U.S. food production is in severe and possibly terminal decline.

By the end of the century, production of grain, meat and dairy across the Southern Plains, and especially in Texas, could collapse as rainfall patterns change and temperatures rise, putting ever more pressure on declining reserves of water from below.

But while the drought — and the climate change driving it to its current extremes — is exacerbating a long-running agricultural crisis from the Texas Panhandle to South Dakota, it did not cause the original problem.

Too much underground water from sources such as the Ogallala Aquifer is being used too fast. That water source, the High Plains Aquifer, feeds about a quarter of U.S. crop production, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

And as farmers, climatologists and agricultural economists told The Hill and our investigative partners at Amarillo, Texas, station KAMR, it’s a dilemma that is simple in theory — and nearly unsolvable in practice.

Mining for water

Before the mid-20th century, the High Plains were largely used for cattle, which were spread sparsely over sprawling land where they ate what grass could grow off the area’s occasional rains. 

New forms of irrigation allowed farmers and hydraulic engineers to reach the fossil reserves of groundwater deep beneath the prairie, allowing the cultivation of vast rows of thirsty crops such as corn in a landscape that would not usually support them.

Ninety percent of the water drawn from the Ogallala goes to agriculture, pumped up to feed row crops such as corn and soybeans, or given to cattle to drink.

“It’s inevitable that we are going to run out of water in this region. And we are seeing this more this year than we have with previous droughts,” irrigation specialist Jourdan Bell of West Texas A&M’s Agrilife told The Hill.

Given current rates of usage, the Ogallala as a whole may see a 70 percent decrease in water levels by 2080 — but parts of the High Plains may run out before midcentury, reports KAMR, which is owned by The Hill’s parent company Nexstar Media Group.

Climate change is making things worse

The decline in the Ogallala was inevitable the moment it was tapped in the 1940s, Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told The Hill.

The timing of when the Ogallala begins to run out “is going to be affected by climate change, but it’s not something that is going to be avoided no matter what,” he said.

Aquifers depend on water seeping slowly down from the surface to charge, and if they are being drained for irrigation faster than that happens, they will eventually go dry.

“Recharges never kept up with demand and extraction in Texas,” Nielsen-Gammon said. Groundwater reserves are “used like a natural resource that will eventually run out.”

The challenge, he said, is “basically managing that transition” to a fully arid Great Plains.

But human-caused climate change is helping drive the decline in rainfalls, exacerbating the problem. 

A study published in July in the Journal of the American Water Association found that the Ogalalla would decline 50 percent faster in a world where rain amounts fall by 25 percent and the number of days above 96 degrees doubles.

“The increased demand will directly lead to either accelerated depletion of the aquifer or loss of irrigated farmland,” Nielsen-Gammon added.

Texas is in particular trouble

The long-term discrepancy between Great Plains rainfall and its need for water is a conundrum for the entire Ogallala region, particularly for the Texas Panhandle, which sits between 200 and 400 feet above the underground water supplies, separated from it by a thick and largely impermeable layer of clay, Bell of West Texas A&M said.

That’s very different in the Northern Plains, where the aquifer may be just a few feet below the surface and a sandy soil mix allows rainwater to filter back in. 

The regulatory regimes are different too. In South Dakota, farmers can only pump to the level at which the aquifer can recharge. In Kansas, a state program provides farmers with incentives and expertise to help them ratchet down the amount of water they’re pumping from the aquifer.

In Texas, however, groundwater reserves provide a form of almost regulation-free water. Farmers with legal water rights there can draw as much water from underground as their wells can reach and their pumps can handle — regardless of impacts on their neighbors.

This creates a situation sometimes called the “law of the biggest pump,” in which whoever can pump the most water gets the most water, KAMR reported in July. 

But while decline looms, for now water is plentiful for those who can drill for it — and Texas’s lax groundwater regulations have drawn thirsty industries such as dairy from states with more restrictive policies.

Over the last two decades, Bell said, enormous dairies have spread around Amarillo, ushering in a wave of other agro-industries to make products such as cheeses.

Farmers often point to the dairies’ use of water to explain the region’s shortfalls, Bell said. “These are very big dairies,” she said, “I mean 50,000-plus head of cattle.” 

Shortages have already begun

Some small communities have already run out of potable water as their wells can no longer reach the depleting levels of groundwater, and are having it shipped in on trucks, Bell said.

Without groundwater for irrigation, some farmers will shift to hardier but less productive “dryland” systems dependent on rain.

Others will lean on raising cattle, David Anderson of Texas A&M’s Agrilife said, but in many cases it’s growing too dry for that.

Once the land can no longer support cattle, “there’s really no alternative,” Anderson said. “There won’t be any other alternative crops or stock.”

KAMR’s Cat Keenan contributed to this report.

Previously in this series:

Lakes Mead and Powell are at the epicenter of the biggest Western drought in history

Seven stats that explain the West’s epic drought

Source: TEST FEED1

IRS becomes GOP boogeyman ahead of midterms

As Republicans rail against the FBI in the wake of last week’s search at Mar-a-Lago, they are also hyping the danger to voters from another three-letter federal agency: the IRS. 

The GOP is warning that the $80 billion funding boost to the IRS included in Democrats’ tax, climate and health care package, which President Biden signed into law on Tuesday, will target middle-class Americans with an “army” of new enforcement agents.

The calls have become a key part of Republicans’ messaging ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) released a video earlier this week that slams Democrats for expanding the IRS, arguing that it will harm everyday Americans despite Democrats’ insistence that the extra funding is intended to make sure wealthy taxpayers and corporations don’t stiff the government.

“Biden and Democrats are out-of-touch and do not care about the pain and suffering they are causing Americans. Democrats celebrate raising taxes on families during a recession they created and weaponizing the IRS to target small businesses and hardworking Americans,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement.

Democrats, the Biden administration and various fact-checkers have pushed back on the claims. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig that audit rates should not “rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000 annually” and that new resources should not be directed to audits of families or businesses that fall below those levels. Yellen wrote that “enforcement resources will focus on high-end noncompliance.”

But Republicans counter that there is nothing in the law to prevent an increase to audits of middle-class Americans and note that Democrats voted against a GOP amendment to prevent the new funds from being used to go after lower earners.

Republicans have also frequently misstated that all the 87,000 new IRS employees will be “agents,” when many will work as support staff, auditors and replacements for those who leave the agency.

Criticisms of the messaging have not, however, led to Republicans lightening up.

Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), the head of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, wrote an open letter to the “American Job Seeker” on Tuesday, urging them to not take a new position with the IRS since a Republican majority would immediately attempt to reverse the funding increase.

“The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them,” Scott said in the letter.

He was referring to a job posting for a position in IRS Criminal Investigation that mentioned a willingness to “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary” in its job requirements. The IRS, like the Postal Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, has its own law enforcement officers. That job posting was later removed.

“We’re hiring 87,000 IRS agents. You see in the job listing posting, in the description, it says that these new hires are required to be armed, and to use deadly force if necessary. Taxation is theft, and this is armed robbery,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) said last week.

Republicans have also tried to connect the new taxation fears with their base’s outrage about the FBI executing a search at former President Trump’s Florida home.

“​​The Biden Admin has fully weaponized DOJ & FBI to target their political enemies. And with 87K new IRS agents, they’re coming for YOU too,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted last week.

Polling sponsored by the conservative American Action Network earlier this month found that highlighting the increase in IRS employees could be effective for Republicans in some races.

Surveys in three competitive congressional districts — held by Democratic Reps. Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Sean Patrick Maloney in New York and Henry Cuellar in Texas — found that half or more of likely voters were less likely to vote for the member after learning that the Inflation Reduction Act “doubles the size of the IRS by hiring 80,000 more agents, without hiring a single new border patrol agent.”

Other polling on the public’s view of the IRS is somewhat mixed. Gallup surveys found that the percentage of Americans who said that the IRS was doing an excellent or good job fell from 53 percent in 2019 to 30 percent in 2021. A 2020 Pew survey found that 29 percent had an unfavorable view of the IRS, while 65 percent had a favorable view.

Many Republicans have argued that instead of increasing enforcement actions, the IRS tax code should be simplified so that much enforcement is not necessary.

“I don’t engage in, like, overblown rhetoric,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) told reporters last week, but he added that increasing the number of new IRS agents “does piss people off.”

“It’s kind of unnecessary,” Crenshaw said. “If you think that … the tax code is so complicated and difficult to enforce, then maybe simplify the tax code. That would be the proper solution to that instead of just trying to catch Middle America in their mistakes, which you obviously will make if you do your own taxes. It’s pretty difficult.”

Alex Muresianu, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation think tank, also said that there will “inevitably” be an increase in the number of people audited who are already paying the taxes that they owed but that they will be subjected to additional costs of compliance.

The cost estimate of that to taxpayers, though, is unclear.

Mike Lillis contributed.

Source: TEST FEED1

How this populist Democrat is taking on Ron Johnson in Wisconsin

Wisconsin has experienced its share of political wildcards: being snubbed by Hillary Clinton, handing Donald Trump and Joe Biden victories, and hosting a COVID-19 debacle at the Democratic National Convention.

Now, Democrats are hoping for another surprise in the making: a populist millennial senator.

Democrats have gone all-in on Mandela Barnes, the state’s 35-year-old lieutenant governor, to oust Republican Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) as part of their keep-the-Senate strategy this fall. Critics think it will take a lot to see that seat turn blue. Skeptical optimists call it a toss-up. But others see a nation in economic hardship over inflation, a myriad of GOP scandals and a flawed, unpopular opponent as encouragement that the purple battleground could actually deliver Barnes a victory.

“He is really the embodiment of Wisconsin values,” state Sen. Kelda Roys (D) told The Hill. “That’s one of the reasons that he connects across the state, regardless of geography, regardless of political affiliation, regardless of income.”

Democrats in Washington have leaned into Barnes’s obvious progressive streak. He’s against corporate PAC money and is for Medicare for All and environmental protections by way of a Green New Deal, two signature markers of the left. He’s also backed by liberal Senate heavyweights, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whose ranks he hopes to join, and a slew of grassroots organizations.  

“He’s a top priority,” said Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, which backed Barnes during the primary and is investing in his race. 

“He’s tapped into the national zeitgeist,” she said. “This is not a normal election. The Republicans that are running this cycle have embraced the MAGA ideology, which is anti-democratic, it is taking away our rights and freedoms, and he is clearly running to protect them.”

At the local level, however, Democrats see Barnes in another light, as something harder to categorize. Those on the ground largely believe his economic populist push to uplift the middle class surpasses any branding attempts — either by national party figures or the Republican opposition. It’s not that they don’t see the progressive throughlines, it’s just that they believe he’s not confined to them.

“Mandela is able to, in some sense, not exactly transcend political labels, but the way that he talks and the issues he talks about are things the vast majority of Wisconsinites care about,” Roys said. 

“We want to have affordable health care. We don’t think that seniors should not get to have prescription drugs. We don’t think that people should be bankrupted to pay for their insulin. That’s not a radical position,” she said. “That’s a position that’s shared by the majority of Democrats, independents and Republicans.”

A source close to Barnes familiar with his campaign apparatus echoed that assessment. 

“Barnes has been campaigning as a leader focused on building a coalition across the state,” said the source. “Not appealing to a select ideological group.”

That strategy — leaning less on big bucket identifiers like “liberal” or “progressive” — has gained traction this cycle among Democratic candidates competing against Republicans in swing states. In Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is running a populist bid against Mehmet Oz, the GOP nominee, and in Georgia, Stacey Abrams has tacked to the center to reach voters from Atlanta to Athens in her quest to beat current Gov. Brian Kemp in a rematch. While they enjoy the support of many left-wing organizations and elected officials, they have strategically distanced themselves from those descriptions. 

Wisconsin is no exception. The state went for Trump and former Gov. Scott Walker (R), while also electing Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) and former President Obama. In 2020, Biden squeaked by with just about 1 percent of the vote. It’s constantly ranked one of the nation’s most unpredictable battlegrounds, with voters embracing everything from deep-red and -blue ideology to considering themselves totally apathetic to politics. 

The outcome in November is expected to have an outsized impact on the Senate’s makeup. A Barnes victory would likely give Democrats a strong chance to maintain their majority, while offering them hope for the next presidential cycle, where election watchers have already started turning their attention. Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee announced that it will hold its 2024 convention in Milwaukee, the site of the DNC’s event in 2020.

The midterms are leading up to that, and Democrats are looking to Barnes to boost their prospects through an economic message that they believe resonates especially well now, while millions of Americans are still struggling as the Biden administration looks to make improvements at home. 

“I know Republicans love to talk about their grab bag of opposition research that they think makes this guy out to be something he’s not, but the reality is, all his paid communications is squarely focused on a growing the middle-class message,” said Joe Zepecki, a Democratic strategist based in Wisconsin. “Talking about his background, his upbringing, which roots him in the Wisconsin experience in a way that, I’m sorry, Ron Johnson’s experience doesn’t.”

Indeed, Barnes’s focus on income inequality creates what many in the party hope is an inherent contrast. Where Johnson has millions of dollars in the bank, Barnes has spoken about financially struggling at times. His campaign has centered around themes like the rising price of goods and high cost of everyday living to get at that sentiment. In Barnes’s first ad, he said he believes most senators aren’t able to identify the price of a gallon of milk, which has increased with inflation, along with other groceries.  

“His policy plans and paid ads have focused on economic issues,” said the campaign source close to Barnes. For the nail-biter race, that means “bringing manufacturing back to Wisconsin, supporting family farms and cutting taxes on the middle class.”

Polling shows a close contest. The latest FiveThirtyEight average placed them within just a few points, but some state and national Democrats predict that Barnes will ultimately pull ahead with a more comfortable margin. A new survey released by Marquette Law School on Wednesday showed 51 percent of registered voters in the state support Barnes, while 44 percent are in favor of Johnson.

Democrats argue that Johnson’s favorability in the state – where he hit just a 37-percent approval rating in the latest Marquette University Law School poll taken in June – and Barnes’s experience as the state’s lieutenant governor will ultimately give him an edge.  

They also point to his identity as one factor that could help inspire infrequent or younger voters to vote for the Democratic ticket, which is notably more diverse than on the Republican side. Should Barnes win in November, he would be the state’s first Black senator.

“It’s a signal,” Zepecki said. “When you look at the Republican candidate for governor, and the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, and the Republican candidate for senator and you see three white guys, and then you turn and you look at the Democrats and you have a white guy who’s a candidate for governor, a woman who’s a candidate for lieutenant governor, a young Black man who’s a candidate for the United States Senate, because that is such a different look, I do think it is helpful on the margins.” 

“Here in Wisconsin, because it’s 50-50 all the damn time, it all matters,” he said.

Source: TEST FEED1

DRIED UP: Texas cattle industry faces existential crisis from historic drought

The American West is experiencing its driest period in human history, a megadrought that threatens health, agriculture and entire ways of life. DRIED UP is examining the dire effects of the drought on the states most affected — as well as the solutions Americans are embracing.

AUSTIN, Texas — The megadrought in the Western U.S., the region’s worst in 1,200 years, is threatening America’s cattle heartland: withering pastures, wrecking feed harvests and endangering a quintessential way of life. 

The drought is forcing ranchers here in Texas and across the Southern plains to make an agonizing decision: Sell early now for less money than they planned on — or hold on, pray for rain and risk losing everything. 

“We’ll keep selling cows till it rains,” Texas High Plains rancher Jim Ferguson told Amarillo station KAMR, which collaborated with The Hill on this story. 

For now, Ferguson is just selling his oldest calves, for which he’ll be able to get the best price. But with no rain in the forecast, and therefore no prospect of lush winter pastures for his herds to eat, “it won’t be long before we start getting into the younger ones.” 

The drought is echoing through beef supply chains, resulting in higher prices for consumers for at least the next two years — and likely serving as the final blow to many small, family-run cattle herds that represent a key part of the industry. 

“The lack of water in general, it’s hurting us all the way around. Any way you can think of,” cattle buyer Josh Sturgeon told KAMR, which is owned by The Hill’s parent company, Nexstar Media. 

Sturgeon had come to auction in search of deals from ranchers such as Ferguson, forced to liquidate their herds for lack of water to grow cattle feeds — or the money to buy them. 

But “you’re almost afraid to buy,” Sturgeon said. “Cattle drink a lot of water, especially this time of year. With this drought, they’re drinking a lot of water. Cattle are dying because of this. Even the best of cattle are struggling.” 

The sudden bump in sales as the drought worsens are “intense, protracted — it’s nothing like we’ve seen in the last 15 years,” Walter Kunisch of consultant group Hilltop Securities told The Hill, adding that many farmers are even selling off their breeding stock, which they rely on to produce the next generation of cows. 

“That’s a big signal to me that, you know, that future supplies at some point are going to run tight,” Kunsich added. 

Shrinking herds follow declining rains

More than 80 percent of the West is in severe drought this year, according to the National Drought Monitor — up from just 20 percent last year. According to a survey by the U.S. Farm Bureau, more than three-quarters of farmers in drought-stricken states have pulled farmland out of production, and 85 percent of ranchers reported selling off some portions of their herds.  

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s cattle report last month found that herds are down by 2.4 percent nationwide since last year. That’s a decrease of 750,000 cows, and a fall of 2 million since the national herd peaked in 2018 — just before the drought began to worsen across much of the West. 

Over the last two weeks of July, the national cattle sale rate also jumped to 120 percent above 2021 levels — an average that reporting by The Hill and KAMR suggested conceals even higher frenzies of sales in some markets.   

The sales are playing out against the background of declining rains and falling levels of underground water in the massive Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches beneath much of the Great Plains and which the regions’ vast agricultural footprint — much of it devoted to protein-rich feeds for cattle — is steadily and irrevocably soaking up.

Cattle’s role in the situation is complex: They are also a substantial global contributor to climate change, which means they are playing some role in worsening the drought that is killing their own feed crops.  

Beef and dairy cattle make up 62 percent — a little under two-thirds — of the 8.1 gigatons of global greenhouse gas emissions released worldwide by livestock, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. With around 5 gigatons released, that makes the global cattle industry responsible for more emissions than the entire U.S., which emitted 4.8 gigatons in 2021.

The last bastion of the American cowboy

Small, family-run cattle operations are in many ways the last survivors of the vast consolidation of the American agricultural system over the last 40 years, which has driven the structure of farm ownership towards ever-larger operations producing bigger and more specialized arrays of crops. 

Cow-calf producers — ranching companies such as Ferguson, which raise cattle to sell to buyers like Sturgeon, which fatten them for slaughter in feedlots — have stood as a partial exception to the sweeping vertical integration of animal protein. 

Since the 1990s, chicken and pork markets have been transformed from diverse regional markets to ones dominated by a few massive corporations that control enormous flows of company-owned animals, raised on company-owned feed and antibiotics, through enormous, confined feeding operations.

Meanwhile, through a system of secret deals that many farmers complain are illegal, huge meat packers such as the Brazilian-owned JBS and Marfrig drove a similar consolidation in the feedlots where cattle were fattened for slaughter. 

But because it remains very difficult to breed beef cattle in confinement, cow-calf producers — the closest thing that still exists to the classic image of the cowboy — have stood apart as a last, romantic image of both Western independence and the structure of farming as it used to be. 

About 27 percent of all cattle sold in America come from herds of less than 50, run by people who use them as part of a diversified family income stream that may include other crops, contract work or a separate job in town, according to data from the Department of Agriculture.  

Those small producers are “a pretty darn important part of the system of beef production, because I mean, the only way we produce 27, or last year, 28 billion pounds of beef is because we have all of these people with cows,” David Anderson, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University’s Agrilife Extension Service told The Hill. 

They are also the sector of beef producers being hit hardest by the drought, said agricultural economist Brock Thompson of Hilltop Securities. 

As in previous rounds of drought, “it’s your smaller herd sizes that are having to liquidate — those ranchers who may not have family that are coming back into the business, and they’re tired of fighting the cycles, are tired of battling the regulations,” Thompson said.

“In agriculture, we’ve lost a lot of attractiveness to a younger generation to come back and take over the farm,” he added. 

The ‘hollowing out of rural America’

In cow-calf states such as Texas and Missouri, those small cattle operations help support an entire ecosystem of businesses, from gate and fence installers to large animal veterinarians. 

But consolidation has squeezed all this, and the drought is squeezing it even more, exacerbating the “hollowing out of rural America,” said Joe Maxwell, rancher and president of Farm Action. 

“The cattle market has just really not been good for a long time,” Maxwell said. “The meat packers just control that price, and so the farmers haven’t had a lot of money in their pocket. So this drought is kind of like the final straw for a lot of them, they’re completely dispersing their herds.” 

He added that the drought also gives large conglomerates such as JBS an excuse to charge higher prices — which they don’t pass on to farmers — and then use the rising prices as justification to import more beef from countries such as Brazil and Australia. 

That’s something Maxwell’s allies at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union warned about earlier in the drought. The union, which includes meatpackers, is worried about any decline in domestic American beef production and the economic dislocation that ripples out from it. 

Data from the last serious drought to hit Texas — between 2008 and 2011 — support their concerns. After that drought, the state herd fell from 5.1 million head to 3.9 million. 

“Even after almost a decade of recovery from the drought a decade ago, we didn’t get all the cows back,” Anderson, of Texas A&M, said.  

Around Maxwell’s home in Missouri, derelict feedlots and silos still sit like bleached bones on the land of the farmers who once ran small feedlot operations, where they bought and fattened up the local cattle they sold on to now-defunct regional packers. 

“These communities are becoming older, and we see more and more rural hospitals closing because of the depopulation and the wealth is out, and they can’t keep the doors open,” Maxwell said. “My local hospital just closed. We’ve got to go 45 miles to go to a hospital. The pharmacist closed. The whole infrastructure of the rural community is devastated.” 

Similar situations can be seen from Texas all the way to the Canadian border.  

“We’ll keep
selling cows
till it rains.”

— Jim Ferguson, Texas rancher

‘Big and more severe fluctuations’

This summer, Montana rancher Gilles Stockton faced the same buy-or-sell conundrum as ranchers across the West. In a community “drying up like a tumbleweed,” Stockton had held onto his herd, gambling that the rains would come — and his bet paid off with heavy downpours in June.  

But the precarity was new and alarming: If he had bet wrong, his business would have been wiped out, Stockton told The Hill. When drought returned this month, even his own irrigation setup to draw water from a nearby river didn’t make him feel confident.  

He sold off 20 percent of his herd. Many ranchers he knows have gotten out of the business entirely. His neighbors aren’t talking about climate change, exactly.  

“Most of them are climate change deniers. But what they do see is these big and more severe fluctuations that they can’t deny,” he said. 

Stockton argued that the transformation of agriculture from relatively small, diverse and local to big, specialized and global had cut meat prices at the expense not only of rural civic health, but also of climate preparedness and resilience. 

“The way to survive when your climate is glitchy and you don’t know what’s going on, and you want to keep producing food — is to be diversified.” 

For ranchers, he said, that once looked like “you got cattle, everybody around here used to have sheep; you could raise a few pigs. Instead of just hay, you raised some barley to feed the pigs. You have these different options that you can jump in and out of depending on the climatic situations that you’re faced with.” 

On the macro level, however, industry and regulatory pressure overwhelmingly go the opposite direction, favoring the big and specialized, Anderson said, creating a feedback loop in which farmers need ever more land to pay off the cost of ever more expensive and specialized equipment.  

“And we have lost diversity and sort of the gene pool in those that might have given us more ability to be more flexible in a changing climate,” Anderson said. 

KAMR’s David Gay contributed to this report.

Previously in this series:

Lakes Mead and Powell are at the epicenter of the biggest Western drought in history

Seven stats that explain the West’s epic drought

Source: TEST FEED1

Alex Jones backs a possible 2024 DeSantis bid over potential Trump bid

Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Wednesday said he’d support a 2024 presidential bid from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), turning his back on former President Trump.

Jones, who was recently ordered to pay $49.3 million to parents of a Sandy Hook school shooting victim in a defamation case, said he “pig-headedly” supported Trump in the past “to keep him in office because of the nightmare scenario if Hillary or Biden got in.”

“With that, I am supporting DeSantis,” Jones said.

Trump and DeSantis have topped recent polling on a hypothetical 2024 Republican primary. A Florida poll released Tuesday saw DeSantis eke out a slight lead over the former president. 

Both potential GOP candidates have been mired in recent controversies. 

The FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last week. Agents reportedly recovered 11 sets of documents, some allegedly marked classified, which were improperly stored at the Palm Beach, Fl., resort past the end of Trump’s presidential term.

DeSantis knocked the FBI for the search, which Trump has alleged was politically motivated.

The turn away from Trump comes the same day that a Florida prosecutor sued DeSantis, alleging the Florida governor had suspended him due to his views on transgender surgery and abortion.

Source: TEST FEED1

Bolton on FBI search: 'There is no evidence there is a partisan motive here'

Former Trump White House national security adviser John Bolton argued in an interview on Wednesday that there is “no evidence there is a partisan motive” following the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

“There is no evidence there is a partisan motive here,” Bolton told Reuters in an interview. “I think everybody just ought to calm down, whether you’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, and let the process work its way through.”

Former President Trump announced last week that the FBI had executed a search warrant at his Florida residence, and court documents unsealed last Friday showed that officials had seized a slew of items, including “various classified/TS/SCI documents” – otherwise referred to as top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information. 

Officials believed that Trump may have violated several laws, including the Espionage Act. 

However, the Justice Department is resisting efforts to have the affidavit used in order to obtain the search warrant – which would establish probable cause needed in order for officials to execute their search – from being unsealed.

Prosecutors argued in a court filing earlier this week it would create “significant and irreparable damage to this ongoing criminal investigation” if the affidavit was unsealed.

In his interview with Reuters, Bolton acknowledged that while the Justice Department had good reason to not want it to be available to the public, he also asserted that “I think they have got to be more creative here given the fire storm politically that they face.”

Source: TEST FEED1