#lee zeldin

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[nodynasty4us]

Who will Trump choose for VP? (final round)

I had to delete the first version of this because I accidentally set it for only one day and I misspelled a name.

This does not necessarily mean who you would prefer, just who you think is most likely to get the nod.

These choices are the high scorers in the preliminary round of polls, names leaked by the Trump campaign to several news outlets earlier this week, and a couple of people mentioned by one columnist after the preliminary polls began.

As always, please reblog this poll so that more people have the opportunity to vote in it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alice Herman, Joanna Walters, and Rachel Leingang at The Guardian:

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick, was among several cabinet nominees and appointees of the president-elect’s incoming administration who were targeted with bomb threats and so-called “swatting” on Wednesday, the Guardian has learned.

Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman of New York and Trump’s pick for US ambassador to the United Nations, who has emerged as a hard-right loyalist of Trump in the last few years, was the subject of a bomb threat, her office said. The home of Howard Lutnick, Trump’s choice for commerce secretary and part of his transition team, was threatened, the Bronx outlet News 12 reported. And Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency pick, saw his Long Island home threatened, News 12 in Long Island also reported. Zeldin later posted on X saying: “A pipe bomb threat targeting me and my family at our home today was sent in with a pro-Palestinian themed message.” He said they were not at home and were trying to find out more. A report also emerged via CNN that Matt Gaetz was also targeted. The former congressman was Trump’s first choice for US attorney general but withdrew after eight days amid a sexual misconduct scandal that meant he risked not being confirmed by the Senate.

[...] The threats were made on both Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Members of law enforcement and various authorities acted quickly to ensure the safety of those targeted, according to Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokesperson and incoming White House press secretary, who released a statement. Leavitt did not give further details on the nature of the different threats. Spokespeople for the FBI and the justice department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Several of Donald Trump’s picks to serve in his cabinet were subjected to swatting and bomb threats.

See Also:

HuffPost: Trump Appointees Targeted With Bomb Threats, Swatting

[yetisidelblog]

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[rjzimmerman]

Who Is Lee Zeldin? (Sierra Club:

Excerpt from this story from the Sierra Club:

President-elect Donald Trump’s selection to lead the Environmental Protection Agency is, in a word, unexpected. The appointment announced on November 11—in which the Trump transition team erroneously referred to the EPA as the “Environmental Protective Agency”—was not an energy industry lobbyist like Andrew Wheeler or a MAGA insider like Mandy Gunasekara, who authored the EPA chapter of Project 2025. Instead, Trump chose Lee Zeldin, a little-known former Republican congressman from Long Island, New York, whose background on environment and energy issues is relatively skimpy. 

So, then: Who is this person who will be in charge of the federal agency tasked with protecting the environment and public health?  

Zeldin is a politician and military officer who grew up in New York’s Suffolk County. From 2015 to 2023, he represented New York’s First District (eastern Long Island) in Congress, where he sat on the House Foreign Affairs and Financial Services Committees. Before that, he served for four years in the New York state senate. In 2022, he ran for governor of New York against Democrat Kathy Hochul, a race that he lost by six points. 

He’s a booster of fossil fuels and promises to unleash “energy dominance.”

In his run for governor of New York, Zeldin campaigned on expanding fossil fuel extraction. He called for allowing “the safe extraction of natural resources in the southern tier” of the state, approving new pipelines, and repealing the gasoline tax. He also was a staunch opponent of New York’s ban on fracking and ran on ending it. “[Zeldin] has a record of being pro-fracking, and that’s a record I think he’s going to clearly carry forward into the Trump administration,” Eric Weltman, a senior organizer in Food and Water Watch’s New York office, told Sierra. 

Zeldin has mentioned pursuing “energy dominance” as one of three top priorities in heading up the EPA. “It is an honor to join President Trump’s cabinet as EPA administrator. We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI,” Zeldin said in a statement on X.

He has taken more than $410,000 from the oil and gas industry, and he questions the scientific consensus on climate change.

According to Climate Power, Zeldin has received over $410,000 from the oil and gas industry in his election campaigns, including over $260,000 while running for Congress and more than $150,000 in his gubernatorial run. He has taken more than $60,000 from Koch Industries over the course of his political career, according to Open Secrets data. 

His voting record in Congress is mostly anti-environment, with an LCV lifetime score of just 14 percent.

Zeldin unsurprisingly has an overall poor voting track record, as scored by the League of Conservation Voters. “Trump made his anti–climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during his first term and again during his 2024 campaign. During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14 percent environmental score if he wants to be charged with protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink, and finding solutions to climate change,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president for government affairs, said in a statement. 

He supported a few conservation efforts for his district.

While in Congress, Zeldin backed several conservation initiatives for his district in Long Island. According to the campaign website for his gubernatorial run, he helped save Plum Island—a tiny island off the eastern tip of Long Island—by securing repeal of a 2008 law requiring it to be sold to the highest bidder. He also worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to “protect our coastlines, advancing the ambitious Fire Island to Montauk Point project,” a climate resiliency coastal risk reduction project to help safeguard Long Island’s prized beaches. 

He appears to be against clean energy funding and tried to gut public transit funding in New York.

In addition to voting against the IRA and its massive clean energy investments, Zeldin early on in his political career attempted to divert funding away from clean energy programs in New York and undermine the New York City area’s transit system, according to Environmental Advocates NY. The New York environmental organization bestowed its “Oil Slick” award in 2011 on Zeldin, a rookie state senator at the time who led an effort to try to weaken public transit. He sponsored a bill that would have defunded the MTA, resulted in service cuts and fare increases, and discouraged public transit use. The bill would have also diverted $100 million away from clean energy programs to “plug holes in MTA’s finances.”

[targethitsquad]

[jessica-marie-baumgartner]

2024 can't come soon enough

[huntingtonnow]

Suffolk Closeup: Zeldin Nomination Brings Controversy

The views are certainly mixed, to put it mildly, about President-elect Donald Trump announcing that he would nominate Lee Zeldin, the former congressman from Suffolk County, to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment based in Farmingdale, told Newsday: “The good news is: he lives here. He understands that…

[alyfoxxxen]

Trump taps Lee Zeldin to run the EPA : NPR

[charlotte-lancer]

I misread a news article's mention of Lee Zeldin as Led Zepplin and for a moment I just unquestioningly accepted the idea that Trump had appointed a 70s rock band to head the EPA.

[mel-rhodes-place]

IS A SPLIT COMING IN THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP?

(Picture credit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1e4hcl3/how_keir_starmer_was_quick_to_court_donald_trump/?rdt=48858) Margaret Thatcher once said that the great lesson of the twentieth century was that, when Britain and America stood together, they always win.   She was a Conservative prime minister and one of the greatest Britain ever had.  Now, under Starmer, things are very…

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[loudlylovingreview]

Brett Wilkins: Trump Cabinet Picks So Far Decried as 'Nightmare Fuel'

“The good news is, we can win these types of fights,” said one campaigner. “We helped drive out three Cabinet secretaries from office last time, and we can do that kind of thing again.” U.S. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) applauds as former Republican President Donald Trump prepares to speak at a January 19, 2024 campaign event in Concord, New Hampshire. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Marans at HuffPost:

Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, summed up the Republican pitch to Jewish voters succinctly in his speech to the Republican national convention in Milwaukee on Tuesday evening. “My message today to the Jewish community is clear: There is only one pro-Israel party, and it’s the Republican Party,” Brooks declared, as Jewish convention attendees waved yellow signs with the words, “We are Jews for Trump.” In keeping with their historically Democratic leanings, in 2020, the overwhelming majority of Jewish voters opted for President Joe Biden over former President Donald Trump.

And Trump, whose daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner, has even disparaged Jewish Democrats, claiming they “hate Israel.” But Trump’s allies apparently see an opening following Hamas’ deadly terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7. Democrats remain divided on support for the ferocious invasion of Gaza Israel launched in response, which has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are civilians. Brooks’ message got greater amplification on Wednesday — the theme of the day’s programming was “Make America Strong Again,” and it focused heavily on foreign relations and the military. The lineup of primetime speakers included, in quick succession, Orthodox Jewish campus activist Shabbos Kestenbaum; Orna and Ronen Neutra, the parents of an American citizen, Omer, captured by Hamas while serving in the Israeli military; and former Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Jewish Republican who ran an unexpectedly spirited race to unseat New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022.

Kestenbaum, a recent graduate of Harvard University, has already made national waves with his criticism of pro-Palestinian campus activism, which he has said veers into antisemitism. He is now suing Harvard for allegedly violating his and other Jewish students’ civil rights. [...] Kestenbaum, a registered Democrat who was so progressive in 2020 he posed with then-congressional candidate Jamaal Bowman, told the Forward earlier this week he still supports many domestic progressive policies, such as raising the minimum wage and the Green New Deal, but said progressives’ abandonment of Israel and refusal to take antisemitism seriously had pushed him to accept Republicans’ invitation to speak at their convention. In his remarks on Wednesday, Kestenbaum sounded every bit the true believer in Trump’s second term, listing the ways in which he believed Trump would stand up for pro-Israel Jewish students and what he sees as the anti-American streak in higher education.

[...] In fact, Biden, who has expressed pro-Israel views dating back to the 1970s, has angered many on the left, as well as Arab American and Muslim voters, with his refusal to impose material consequences for what many human rights groups and Western governments have determined are Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Biden showed his dedication to Israel by shepherding a foreign aid bill through Congress in April that included $26 billion in military and economic assistance to Israel, along with $1 billion in humanitarian aid for Palestinians. Like other recent presidents from both parties, Biden has instead mostly expressed his disapproval of Israeli decisions in conversations with Netanyahu. He won some progressive praise in May for pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, on the grounds that those munitions pose unnecessary danger to civilians in dense areas, but he has yet to follow through on promises of a broader weapons cutoff in the event of a massive Israeli invasion of Rafah.

[...] Brooks might have been overstating the case. But given how divided rank-and-file Democrats are on the topic of Israel, many national party leaders would just as soon avoid the topic. It is hard to imagine a speaker making a similar request of the crowd at the Democratic national convention in Chicago this August, let alone getting that kind of positive response.

With Jewish speakers (including lifelong Dems) being featured at the RNC, the GOP sees a play to win over Jewish voters incensed at the fairly still pro-Israel Democratic Party’s increasingly pro-Palestinian turn, especially after October 7th.

[yetisidelblog]

Now that Trump has already begun naming right-wing extremists like Marco Rubio and Lee Zeldin to important cabinet positions, it’s more important than ever that we get enough judges and regulators in position to keep them in check. “While still in charge of the Senate and the White House, we must do all we can to safeguard our democracy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer must use every minute of the end-of-year legislative session to confirm federal judges and key regulators—none of whom can be removed by the next President!” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren for TIME. Making the most of this lame-duck period is the most important thing that Democrats can do to help weather the coming storm. Add your name and tell Leader Schumer to start speed-running the confirmations for as many judges and regulators as possible before it’s too late! Tell Leader Schumer to confirm as many judges as possible before the GOP takes over!

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[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Nation of Change:

“Unqualified,” declared Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, about Lee Zeldin being nominated by President-elect Trump to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The nomination, Jealous said, “lays bare Donald Trump’s intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs and future out to corporate polluters. Our lives, our livelihoods, and our collective future cannot afford Lee Zeldin—or anyone who seeks to carry out a mission antithetical to the EPA’s mission.” In issuing the statement, the Sierra Club noted that it “is America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization with millions of members.” What Zeldin heading the EPA is centrally about was summed up well in the first two paragraphs of the underplayed Page 14 article in the New York Times about the November 10th nomination. Trump, it said, “announced…he would nominate former Representative Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a position that is expected to be central to Mr. Trump’s plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.” “Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to ‘kill’ and ‘cancel’ EPA rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells,” it continued.

There were also some hoorays for the nomination. “Congrats to Representative Zeldin on his nomination to be the 17th EPA administrator,” said Andrew Wheeler, an EPA administrator under Trump in his first term as president. Prior to that he was a lobbyist for major coal, chemical and uranium companies. Walker further said on Elon Musk’s X in a quote also cited by the National Review: “I know he will do a great job tackling the regulatory overreach while protecting our air and water.”

As to the record on the environment of Zeldin, he has a 14% score from the League of Conservation Voters on its National Environmental Scorecard. In the years during which he was a member of the House of Representatives—2015 to 2023—initiatives he voted against, notes the organization, included “cracking down on Big Oil price gouging, against clean water and clean air protections, against methane pollution safeguards.” The organization’s senior vice president for government affairs, Tiernan Sittenfeld, said after Trump announced Zeldin’s nomination: “Trump made his anti-climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during his first term and again during his 2024 campaign. During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14 percent.”

Etc. Etc. Etc. Basically......shit show.