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Dr. Ouncessides with vitality trade after receiving oil, gasoline donations

Dr. Oz sides with energy industry after receiving oil, gas donations

dr Mehmet Oz has championed the oil and gas industry as he sees to win a coveted Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

The former TV personality’s vocal support for the energy business follows years of industry donations to his nonprofit and then his campaign, according to financial records reviewed by CNBC. Oz also has a personal stake in oil and gas through investments in two major energy companies, according to his financial disclosures.

Pennsylvania’s next senator will be a key vote for the energy industry, as it has a major presence in the Keystone State. Pennsylvania is the nation’s second-largest natural gas producer after Texas and the third-largest coal producer, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Oz backed the energy industry this year as Americans felt the strain from spiking gas prices. In a recent interview, he ripped President Joe Biden after he called on companies that run gas stations to bring down prices at the pump.

“Now, they’re blaming the energy companies for the gas prices. And I’m thinking, like most Americans, what are you talking about? I mean, you did things that make it, make it impossible for these companies to exist, ” Oz said in a July interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. He called Biden’s comments “class warfare.”

As Oz champions oil and gas in his bid to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate, both his campaign and personal coffers have benefited from the industry and its executives.

Oz, a veteran physician and television host, is running against Democrat John Fetterman for a Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. Oz is trailing Fetterman by just under 8 percentage points in an average of recent polls, according to RealClearPolitics. Fetterman’s campaign has raised over $25 million, while Oz and his team have brought in just over $18 million, according to data from the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.

Oz and his wife, Lisa, have a financial stake in the industry he has championed, as they own shares of oil and gas giants ConocoPhillips and Pioneer Natural Resources, according to their financial disclosure report. The filing notes they own shares of ConocoPhillips valued between $15,001 and $50,000 and Pioneer stock valued between $1,001 and $15,000.

Oz’s connections to the industry formed before he pursued politics.

His nonprofit HealthCorps, which promotes itself as a group aiming to help teens with their health and wellness, has seen at least $210,000 in contributions from gas and oil producer Continental Resources since 2016, according to the group’s annual financial reports. Continental’s support has continued into Oz’s Senate bid: The company’s founder and chair, Harold Hamm, endorsed Oz for Senate in an April campaign video.

The backing from energy industry leaders has led to contributions to Oz’s campaign.

Hamm is among a group of over a dozen oil and gas industry leaders who have combined to contribute over $200,000 to Oz’s campaign since he announced his run for Senate late last year, according to a CNBC review of Federal Election Commission filings. Others with ties to the oil and gas business who have donated at least $2,900 to Oz’s campaign include Jimmy Haslam, an owner of the Cleveland Browns and chair of Pilot Company, a business that owns fueling stations across the country. His father and Pilot founder, James Haslam II, also donated to the Oz campaign.

Other top energy donors in recent months include Brad Cox, the chair of oil producer Cox Operating, and Janet Cafaro, the president of Silcor Oilfield Services, FEC records show.

Jimmy Haslam and his wife, Susan “Dee” Haslam, combined to give $50,000 to the per-Oz super PAC American Leadership Action.

Jimmy and Dee Haslam told CNBC in a statement that they have “tremendous respect for the long, successful career Dr. Oz has had in the private sector and appreciate that he now wants to serve his country by bringing his expertise and experience to the United States Senates.” The Haslam family, as of 2015, had a net worth of $6 billion, according to Forbes.

Representatives for Cox and Cafaro did not return requests for comment.

Hamm told CNBC in a statement that he considers Oz a “friend.” He said the two have known each other for almost a decade, with the goal of bringing HealthCorps’ services into Oklahoma schools.

Hamm explained that he believes Oz will be a key advocate for the energy sector, which has enriched the oil billionaire. He and his family have a net worth of at least $21 billion, according to Forbes.

“Dr. Oz will champion American energy in the US Senate much like he’s championed health his entire career,” Hamm said.

The nonprofit’s annual reports from 2016 through 2020 give a range of how much donors contributed to HealthCorps. Continental Resources regularly ranked among the Oz group’s top backers. The company is often listed as donating between $50,000 and $99,999 during those years. A HealthCorps filing says it received a range of $10,000 to just under $25,000 from Continental in 2018.

In its earlier filings before 2016, HealthCorps lists Continental as either a “national” or a “community” sponsor. The group’s website notes that its national sponsors contribute $1 million and its community donors write checks for $250,000. The disclosures pre-2016 do not say or show a range of how much the company gave those years.

Oz’s support from the massive energy industry coincides with an apparent shift in his opinion on fracking, which allows companies to drill deep into the earth for oil and gas resources. Critics say that fracking hurts the environment by harming water supplies and polluting the air.

Before Oz ran for Senate, he repeatedly wrote columns that took aim at fracking, noting its potential threat to public health, Vice reports.

“And in Pennsylvania, there are multiple reports of air and water contamination, possibly from hydraulic fracturing sites, causing folks breathing problems, rashes, headaches, nosebleeds, numbness, nausea and vomiting,” Oz said in a 2014 column critical of fracking.

Brittany Yanick, a spokeswoman for the Oz campaign, said the candidate has not changed his view on fracking and is a strong supporter of the drilling method. She also took aim at Fetterman’s position on the issue.

“As a scientist, Dr. Oz understands that, like with COVID, the Biden administration is ignoring the science and the benefits of natural gas in order to satisfy the radical Left, the same liberal Democrats that are supporting radical environmental measures and funding John Fetterman’s campaign,” Yanick said in an emailed statement. “John Fetterman has called fracking a ‘stain’ on Pennsylvania, he’s called for a moratorium on fracking, and he would be a rubber stamp for the failing Biden Agenda.”

Fetterman has a mixed history with where he stands on fracking. Inside Climate News reported that Fetterman dropped his support for a fracking moratorium after his failed 2016 primary run for Senate. His position evolved after the state moved toward stricter regulations on fracking.

Emilia Rowland, a spokeswoman for Fetterman’s campaign, told CNBC that “John does not support a ban on fracking in Pennsylvania and that includes a moratorium on new fracking sites.” She said he hasn’t taken any campaign money from the fossil fuel industry.

“John believes fully heartedly that we have to preserve the union way of life for the thousands of workers currently employed by the natural gas industry in Pennsylvania and the communities where they live. We can’t just abandon these people, and tell them to go learn how to code,” Rowland said in a statement. “It’s a totally false choice that we have to choose between jobs and a clean environment. That’s just not true. We can have both.”

Still, Oz appears more vocal than Fetterman in publicly supporting the oil and gas industry. In a recent op-ed, he said it’s “gross, and deeply unpatriotic” for oil companies to charge high gas prices while their businesses are making massive profits. Fetterman namechecked Chevron, Exxon and Shell in the op-ed.

Oz has rubbed elbows with industry officials during his campaign.

He was invited to a June “energy industry meet and greet” by longtime lobbyist Missy Edwards. The invite says the meeting was set to take place at Edwards’ offices in Washington. Her current clients include Southern Company and General Motors, OpenSecrets says.

A spokeswoman for General Motors said she was “not sure if GM had a representative in attendance.” Edwards and a representative for Southern Company did not return requests for comment.

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Supreme Court docket sides with Catholic adoption company that refuses to work with LGBT {couples}

Supreme Court sides with Catholic adoption agency that refuses to work with LGBT couples

Women pose for a photo outside the U.S. Supreme Court building after the court ruled in favor of a Catholic agency sued after Philadelphia refused to foster children for applying to same-sex couples to become denied foster parents. in Washington, USA, June 17, 2021.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

The Supreme Court on Thursday inflicted a unanimous defeat on LGBT couples in a high-profile case because Philadelphia may refuse to enter into a contract with a Roman Catholic adoption agency that says their religious beliefs prevent them from working with same-sex foster parents.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a statement for a majority in the court that Philadelphia violated the First Amendment by refusing to enter into a contract with Catholic Social Services after learning that the organization was not up for adoption would certify.

“The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which is applicable to states under the Fourteenth Amendment, provides that ‘Congress must not make any law … prohibiting the free exercise of religion,'” wrote Roberts.

“First of all, it is clear that the city’s actions have weighed on the religious practice of CSS by giving them the choice of curtailing their mission or allowing relationships that are incompatible with their beliefs,” he added.

According to long-standing precedents of the Supreme Court, religiously neutral and generally applicable laws can be compatible with the constitution, even if they incriminate religion. However, Roberts said the city’s non-discrimination policy is not generally applicable, citing Philadelphia’s ability to allow exceptions to it.

“Regardless of the level of deference we show to the city, the inclusion of a formal system of fully discretionary exceptions” in their standard care contracts “makes the contractual non-discrimination requirement not generally applicable,” wrote Roberts.

The Chief Justice wrote that Philadelphia had not shown it had an overriding interest in denying Catholic social services an exception to its non-discrimination policy.

“Once the interests of the city are properly narrowed down, they are no longer sufficient,” wrote the George W. Bush-appointed employee.

Roberts admitted that the city had an interest in “equal treatment of prospective foster parents and foster children”.

“We don’t doubt that this interest is a weighty one, because[o]Our society has recognized that gay individuals and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth, ”wrote Roberts, citing the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission case.

“Based on the facts of this case, however, this interest cannot justify denying the CSS an exception for its religious practice,” he wrote.

Remarkably, Roberts’ opinion was closer than conservative activists had hoped. LGBT rights supporters feared the Supreme Court would use the case to set its 1990 precedent known as Employment Division v. Smith, which protects neutral and generally applicable laws that incriminate religion. This precedent gives states and cities leeway to prohibit discrimination in different contexts.

Roberts’ opinion was endorsed by Judges Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Judges Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch agreed with the outcome of the case but did not sign Roberts’ reasoning.

Alito, along with Thomas and Gorsuch, represented the majority decision not to question the Employment Division’s case. Alito wrote that Roberts’ narrow reasoning will make the court’s action temporary at best.

“That decision might as well be on paper sold in magic shops,” wrote Alito. “The city has persistently put CSS under pressure to give in, and if the city wants to bypass today’s decision, it can simply remove the never-used exemption authorization.”

Alito wrote that the Labor Department court “abruptly pushed aside nearly 40 years of precedent and found that the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment tolerates any rule that categorically prohibits or orders certain conduct as long as it does not target religious practice.”

“Even if a rule does not serve an important purpose and has a devastating effect on religious freedom, Smith says the constitution does not offer protection. This strict stance is ripe for re-examination,” added Alito.

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Employment Division was drafted by the late Conservative Judge Antonin Scalia.

Barrett, in agreement with Kavanaugh and in part von Breyer, said she found the arguments for overturning Smith persuasive, but added that “there would be a number of problems to be solved if Smith were overridden.”

“We don’t have to grapple with these questions in this case, however, because regardless of whether Smith stays or leaves, the same standard applies,” wrote Barrett.

Barrett said laws that weighed down religious practice must stand a rigorous scrutiny – a legal threshold – before Smith if they give government officials the discretion to make individual exceptions.

“And all nine judges agree that the city cannot stand up to a severe test. So I see no reason in this case to decide whether Smith should be repealed, let alone what should replace him, ”wrote Barrett.

The Court’s decision in the Fulton v. City of Philadelphia case, nos. 19-123, reverses the opinion of the 3rd Court of Appeals, which sided with Philadelphia.

In a statement, Philadelphia City attorney Diana Cortes called the Supreme Court move “a difficult and disappointing setback for the foster youth and foster parents who work so hard to support them.”

“In today’s ruling, the court has usurped the city’s ruling that non-discrimination policies are in the best interests of the children in their care, with worrying consequences for other government programs and services,” she said.

“At the same time, the city is pleased that the Supreme Court has not radically changed existing constitutional law, as requested by plaintiffs, to adopt a standard that would enforce court-ordered religious exemptions from civil duties in any area,” added Cortes.

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Supreme Court docket sides with Fb in robocall case

Supreme Court sides with Facebook in robocall case

The Supreme Court turned to its grammar books on Thursday to give Facebook a win. It was about whether the internet giant had violated a three-decade-old federal law that curbs abusive telemarketing practices.

In a unanimous decision by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court supported a narrow definition of automated dialing systems, which are largely banned under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. The 8-0 opinion and an assent written by Justice Samuel Alito contained a lively debate about the benefits of using language textbooks to understand the importance of legal texts.

The case was brought by Noah Duguid, who said he had received login notifications from Facebook on his phone since 2014 and was unable to stop them even though he had never created an account. For about 10 months, Duguid said, he tried unsuccessfully to break free of the messages, text the company and send an email. Duguid said the news continued even after being told “Facebook texts are now off”.

Duguid attempted a class action lawsuit for himself and others exposed to the same alleged abuse. However, Facebook asked a federal district court to dismiss Duguid’s lawsuit, referring to Congress’ definition of automated dialers as systems that “store or produce phone numbers to be called using a random or sequence number generator.”

Given that definition, Facebook argued, Duguid would have to prove that Facebook used a number generator to store or produce its phone number. He couldn’t do that, the company argued, for the simple reason that Facebook didn’t use a number generator at all.

According to Facebook, if the court had accepted Duguid’s argument, it could make using a smartphone to make a normal phone call illegal – given the ability to automatically store and call numbers.

However, Duguid argued that “using a random or sequence number generator” only applies to the production of its number, not the way the company stored it. And he argued that Facebook clearly stored his number.

The district court ruled Facebook and dismissed Duguid’s lawsuit, but the U.S. 9th appeals court overturned that decision in 2019, allowing Duguid’s case to move forward. The appeals court cited a case that it had ruled a year earlier, Marks v Crunch San Diego.

The TCPA defines an automatic telephone dialing system as “a device having the capacity to – (A) store telephone numbers to be stored or called using a random or sequence number generator, and (B) dial such numbers”.

“In Marks, we made it clear that the adverbial phrase ‘using a random or sequence number generator’ only modifies the verb ‘produce’ and not the preceding verb ‘save’,” wrote Judge Mary McKeown.

On appeal, the Supreme Court ruled that this was not entirely correct. Citing the so-called “serial qualification canon”, Sotomayor wrote that the most natural reading of the definition would apply the number generator requirement to both the storage and the production of telephone numbers.

“As several leading papers explain,” wrote Sotomayor, “a qualifying sentence separated by a comma from the antecedents is evidence that the qualifier should apply to all antecedents, not just the one immediately preceding it.”

To illustrate this, Sotomayor looked at a teacher who announced that students are “not allowed to do or review homework intended for a class using online homework help websites”.

“It would be strange to read this rule to prohibit students from doing homework with or without online assistance,” Sotomayor wrote.

Sotomayor cited a number of legal and grammatical heavyweights to support her, including a 2012 book written by the late Judge Antonin Scalia and grammarian Bryan Garner.

“According to conventional grammar rules”[w]If there is a simple, parallel construction that includes all nouns or verbs in a series, “a modifier at the end of the list” usually applies to the entire series, “wrote Sotomayor, citing Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. “

Garner was one of the lawyers for Duguid on the case.

In court records, he and other attorneys argued that the Supreme Court should eschew the serial qualification canon in favor of the “distribution phrasing canon” which would apply the modifier to the verbs most appropriate based on context, or to the “last”. preceding canon, “which would apply the modifier to the verb it immediately follows.

Garner also denied Facebook’s claim that the comma in the definition after the word “named” settled the matter.

“The comma prompts the reader to look further back to see what to do with a number generator, but doesn’t tell the reader how far back,” wrote Garner and the other lawyers, including Sergei Lemberg.

Garner declined to comment on the court’s decision.

Alito, largely in agreement with Sotomayor’s opinion, refused to join her. In his approval, he cited the majority’s “strong confidence” in the serial qualification canon, which in his opinion had “played a prominent role in our cases of legal interpretation”.

After all, wrote Alito, grammar rules are not really rules.

“Even grammar, according to Garner, is usually just an attempt to describe the English language as it is actually used,” wrote Alito, citing another book by the author, “The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage and Punctuation.” “

Alito wrote that he agreed with Sotomayor’s interpretation of the teacher’s comment, who advised her students not to use homework help websites. However, he wrote that understanding was not based on the syntax of the sentence but on the “general understanding that teachers do not want to forbid students from doing homework”.

He noted what would happen if Teacher used the word “destroy” or “burn” instead of “completely”.

“The concept of using ‘online homework help websites’ to do all of these things would be nonsensical and no reader would interpret the phrase to mean that – even if suggested in the canon for series qualifiers”, he added.

Alito suggested empirically testing the strength of the various canons by analyzing text combinations from English-language databases and examining how people use so-called series modifiers in practice. In the vast majority of cases, he suggested, “the point of the matter” would likely reveal a meaning.

In a footnote, Sotomayor wrote that she agreed with Alito that speech cannons are not inflexible rules. But, she wrote, she disagreed with him insofar as he advocated judges who relied primarily on their own linguistic sense when interpreting ambiguous laws.

“Despite the legislature’s best efforts to write in ‘English prose’, there will inevitably be difficult ambiguities in the legal text,” wrote Sotomayor. “Courts should approach these problems of interpretation methodically, using traditional instruments of legal interpretation to confirm their beliefs about the ‘common understanding’ of words.”

The case is Facebook vs. Noah Duguid, nos. 19-511.