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Newsmax's Rick Santorum criticizes Pope Leo XIV for using "buzzwords of the left"

#pope leo xiv #newsmax #Rick santorum #speak english

Even someone who is filthy rich struggles with coming out. Maybe they have more to lose?

Kevin McClatchy is a member of a newspaper publishing dynasty which was co-founded by his great-great-grandfather James McClatchy in 1857. In addition to being a member of the McClatchy Company Board, in 1996, when Kevin was 33, he led an investor group to buy the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team.

But Kevin has a secret that could have torpedoed the purchase. He was gay, and no one knew. If his secret was exposed, it could end the deal.

“I think I was paranoid, for sure, about people. And suspicious, definitely. And angry. In the back of my mind was: ‘What are you doing? You’re going into the most public arena possible with a secret.”

In the event the secret became public, Kevin privately told his sister he was gay, so the revelation wouldn’t be entirely out of the blue.

Kevin had been dyslexic as a boy, which held him back academically. His outlet and passion was sports, whether football, basketball, tennis, or baseball. As an adult, this led him to lead the partnership that bought the Pirates. He knew his business experience would help the team. He spent 11 ½ years as the managing general partner and CEO.

In that time, no one on the team, nor other MLB owners, questioned his sexuality. If someone asked why he wasn’t married, he would explain he was too busy to get married - working crazy hours. He admits it was a convenient excuse to hide behind.

“I think quite a few (suspected). Nobody would ask. The media never asked. The players didn’t ask. I would get some mail that would insinuate that people heard rumors…”

In 2007, Kevin stepped down as the CEO of the Pirates. Then in 2012, on his 50th birthday, he came out in an interview with the New York Times. When he was asked why he didn’t come out earlier:

“I’m sure people will criticize me because I came out later, and I should have come out while I was in baseball and in the thick of it… (would have been a) gamble at that point to come out and do it and if there had been a negative reaction… so I was focused, I guess, on what was directly in front of me . . . I was frightened that my own personal situation could in some way jeopardize the whole franchise.”

He decided to come out in 2012 because the time felt right. That outsiders couldn’t understand what it’s like in his footsteps, nor the pressures he was facing at that time. But he hopes that by his coming out it helps with the ongoing discussion of LGBT athletes in professional sports.

During the interview with the NYT, the reporter asked Kevin about the rumors that his father C. K. McClatchy II was gay or bisexual. Kevin replied:

"I don't think it's right for me to talk about my father's story. He passed away when I was 25 years old. What I’m doing … is try to tell my story and how it relates to sports. I want this story to be about the awareness of gays and professional sports.”

In 2012, McClatchy joined the board for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, the organization created by Elizabeth Taylor. Kevin is now a Co-Chair of the amfAR board.

Kevin met his partner Jack Basilone, through a staffer to former Republican Senator Rick Santorum. (Santorum, BTW, is a vocal opponent of gay rights.) Kevin and Jack Basilone are now married and proud parents of son Connor McClatchy.

#gay icons #Kevin McClatchy #pittsburgh pirates #amfAR #coming out #gay marriage #Rick Santorum #homophobia #Jack Basilone #McClatchy newspaper dynasty

Whatever happened to Rick Santorum

This is what I wrote about Rick Santorum during a GOP debate liveblog nearly 10 years ago, and my feelings haven't changed, so I'm just happy that I can say I have no idea what he's currently doing.

#Rick Santorum #Politics #People who suck #“Latin for asshole”

its rick sanchez and his avoidant attachment style against the world

#rick and morty #rick santorum #avoidant attachment #im writing on his avoidant attachment

Project 2025 would all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Zoë Schlanger at The Atlantic:

In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasts are a freely accessible government amenity. The National Weather Service issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio, or newspaper can know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, whether a hurricane is heading toward their town, or if a drought has been forecast for the next season. Even if they get that news from a privately owned app or TV station, much of the underlying weather data are courtesy of meteorologists working for the federal government.

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but given that it was largely written by veterans of his first administration, the document is widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.

NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” Project 2025 reads. The proposals roughly amount to two main avenues of attack. First, it suggests that the NWS should eliminate its public-facing forecasts, focus on data gathering, and otherwise “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which the authors of the plan imply will improve, not limit, forecasts for all Americans. Then, NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave (and which the document calls “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”), should be aggressively shrunk. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s. The U.S. is, without question, experiencing a summer of brutal weather. In just the past week, a record-breaking hurricane brought major flooding and power outages to Texas amid an extreme-heat advisory. More than a dozen tornadoes ripped through multiple states. Catastrophic flash flooding barreled through wildfire burn scars in New Mexico. Large parts of the West roasted in life-threatening temperatures. Facing any of this without the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be mayhem. And future years are likely to be worse.

The NWS serves as a crucial point of contact in a weather crisis, alerting the public when forecasts turn dangerous and advising emergency managers on the best plan of action. So far in 2024, the NWS has issued some 13,000 severe-thunderstorm warnings, 2,000 tornado warnings, and 1,800 flash-flood warnings, plus almost 3,000 river-flood warnings, according to JoAnn Becker, a meteorologist and the president of the union that represents NWS employees. NOAA is also home to the National Hurricane Center, which tracks storms, and the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, whose pilots fly “hurricane hunter” planes directly into cyclones to measure their wind speed and hone the agency’s predictions. NOAA even predicts space weather. Just this past May, it forecast a severe geomagnetic storm with the potential to threaten power grids and satellites. (The most consequential outages never came to pass, but the solar storm did throw off farmers’ GPS-guided tractors for a while.) Privatizing the weather is not a new conservative aim. Nearly two decades ago, when the National Weather Service updated its website to be more user-friendly, Barry Myers, then executive vice president of AccuWeather, complained to the press that “we work very hard every day competing with other companies, and we also have to compete with the government.” In 2005, after meeting with a representative from AccuWeather, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill calling for the NWS to cease competition with the private sector, and reserve its forecasts for commercial providers. The bill never made it out of committee. But in 2017, Trump picked Myers to lead NOAA. (Myers withdrew his nomination after waiting two years for Senate confirmation.)

Funding for many of NOAA’s programs could plummet in 2025, and the agency already suffers from occasional telecommunications breakdowns, including a recent alert-system outage amid flooding in the Midwest. It is also subject to political pressures: In 2019, the agency backed then-President Trump’s false claim (accompanied by a seemingly Sharpie-altered map) that Hurricane Dorian was headed for Alabama. Private companies might be better funded and, theoretically, less subject to political whims. They can also use supercomputing power to hone NOAA’s data into hyperlocal predictions, perhaps for an area as small as a football stadium. Some, including AccuWeather, use their own proprietary algorithms to interpret NWS data and produce forecasts that they claim have superior accuracy. (Remember, though: Without NWS data, none of this would happen.)

[...] The NWS also has perks that a private system would be hard-pressed to replicate, including a partnership with the World Meteorological Organization, which allows the U.S. access to a suite of other countries’ weather models. International collaboration proved crucial in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy was still churning in the Atlantic Ocean. Initially, the American model predicted, incorrectly, that the storm would turn away from the East Coast. But the European model accurately forecast a collision course, which bought emergency managers in the U.S. crucial time to prepare before Sandy made ferocious landfall in New Jersey.

Project 2025 could have an impact on how accurate and precise weather forecasts are delivered, since NOAA and NWS could be significantly altered.

This is one of many reasons why we must vote Blue up and down the line.

#rick santorum

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