Political signs were torched in Westmoreland County and police are now looking for the arsonist. The edges of the signs are charred and the grass is burned underneath. The person responsible set fire to two signs and ripped down two more along Route 30 in Hempfield Township. All of the signs belonged to Democratic candidates.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Seedlings from the 9/11 survivor tree will be donated and planted in Pittsburgh as a memorial for a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue that killed 11 people. The Callery pear tree was nursed to health after being found in the rubble after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It’s now located at the Sept. 11 Memorial. The nonprofit that runs the memorial began to send out seedlings in 2013 to areas affected by violence or disaster.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A 30-year-old man whose relatives reported concerns about his behavior and far-right extremist rhetoric after last year’s Pittsburgh synagogue massacre awaits sentencing for his conviction on a federal gun charge. Jeffrey Clark Jr. is scheduled to be sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly in Washington, D.C. Clark pleaded guilty in July to illegal possession of a firearm.

WEATHER FORECAST FOR FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13TH, 2019

 

TODAY – PARTLY CLOUDY WITH AFTERNOON SHOWERS OR
THUNDERSTORMS. HIGH – 86.

TONIGHT – SCATTERED THUNDERSTORMS THIS EVENING
BECOMING MORE WIDESPREAD OVERNIGHT.
LOW – 67.

SATURDAY – THUNDERSTORMS IN THE MORNING.
REMAINING CLOUDY THROUGHOUT THE DAY.
HIGH NEAR 80.

SUNDAY – MOSTLY SUNNY. HIGH – 81.

HOUSTON (AP) — Just hours before Thursday night’s debate in Houston, former Vice President Joe Biden went up with a digital ad aimed at deflecting criticism of President Barack Obama’s administration. Biden is shown saying in footage from a campaign event that Obama “was a president our children could and did look up to.” After a debate earlier this summer in Detroit, Biden said he was surprised at the flak he took from fellow Democrats about Obama’s legacy.

HOUSTON (AP) — Despite the miles traveled, the tens of millions of dollars raised and the ceaseless churn of policy papers, the Democratic primary has been remarkably static for months with Joe Biden leading in polls and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders vying to be the progressive alternative. That stability is under threat on Thursday.

All of the top presidential candidates will share a debate stage, a setting that could make it harder to avoid skirmishes among the early front-runners. The other seven candidates, meanwhile, are under growing pressure to prove they’re still in the race to take on President Donald Trump next November.

The debate in Houston comes at a pivotal point as many voters move past their summer vacations and start to pay closer attention to the campaign. With the audience getting bigger, the ranks of candidates shrinking and first votes approaching in five months, the stakes are rising.

“For a complete junkie or someone in the business, you already have an impression of everyone,” said Howard Dean, who ran for president in 2004 and later chaired the Democratic National Committee. “But now you are going to see increasing scrutiny with other people coming in to take a closer look.”

The debate will air on a broadcast network with a post-Labor Day uptick in interest in the race, almost certainly giving the candidates their largest single audience yet. It’s also the first debate of the 2020 cycle that’s confined to one night after several candidates dropped out and others failed to meet new qualification standards.

If nothing else, viewers will see the diversity of the modern Democratic Party. The debate, held on the campus of historically black Texas Southern University, features several women, people of color and a gay man, a striking contrast from the increasingly white and male Republican Party. It will unfold in a rapidly changing state that Democrats hope to eventually bring into their column.

Perhaps the biggest question is how directly the candidates will attack one another. Some fights that were predicted in previous debates failed to materialize with candidates like Sanders and Warren in July joining forces to take on their rivals.

The White House hopefuls and their campaigns are sending mixed messages about how eager they are to make frontal attacks on anyone other than President Donald Trump. That could mean the first meeting between Warren, the rising progressive calling for “big, structural change,” and Biden, the more cautious but still ambitious establishmentarian, doesn’t define the night. Or that Kamala Harris, the California senator, and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, look to reclaim lost momentum not by punching upward but by reemphasizing their own visions for America.

Biden, who has led most national and early state polls since he joined the field in April, is downplaying the prospects of a titanic clash with Warren, despite their well-established policy differences on health care, taxes and financial regulation.

“I’m just going to be me, and she’ll be her, and let people make their judgments. I have great respect for her,” Biden said recently as he campaigned in South Carolina.

Warren says consistently that she has no interest in going after Democratic opponents.

Yet both campaigns are also clear that they don’t consider it a personal attack to draw sharp policy contrasts. Warren, who as a Harvard law professor once challenged then-Sen. Biden in a Capitol Hill hearing on bankruptcy law, has noted repeatedly that they have sharply diverging viewpoints. Her standard campaign pitch doesn’t mention Biden but is built around a plea that the “time for small ideas is over,” an implicit criticism of more moderate Democrats who want, for example, a public option health care plan instead of single-payer or who want to repeal Trump’s 2017 tax cuts but not necessarily raise taxes further.

Biden, likewise, doesn’t often mention Warren or Sanders. But he regularly contrasts the price tag of his public option insurance proposal to the single-payer system that Warren and Sanders back. The former vice president, his aides say, is willing to have discussion over health care, including with Warren.

Ahead of the debate, the Biden campaign also emphasized that he’s released more than two decades of tax returns, in contrast to the president. That’s a longer period than Warren, and it could reach back into part of her pre-Senate career when she did legal work that included some corporate law.

Biden’s campaign won’t say that he’d initiate any look that far back into Warren’s past, but in July, Biden was ready throughout the debate with specific counters for rivals who brought up weak spots in his record.

There are indirect avenues to chipping away at Biden’s advantages, said Democratic consultant Karen Finney, who advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. Finney noted Biden’s consistent polling advantages on the question of which Democrat can defeat Trump.

A Washington Post-ABC poll this week found that among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, Biden garnered 29% support overall. Meanwhile, 45% thought he had the best chance to beat Trump, even though just 24% identified him as the “best president for the country” among the primary field.

“That puts pressure on the others to explain how they can beat Trump,” Finney said.

Voters, Finney said, “want to see presidents on that stage,” and Biden, as a known quantity, already reaches the threshold. “If you’re going to beat him, you have to make your case.”

Some candidates say that’s their preferred path.

Harris, said spokesman Ian Sams, will “make the connection between (Trump’s) hatred and division and our inability to get things done for the country.”

Buttigieg, meanwhile, will have an opportunity to use his argument for generational change as an indirect attack on the top tier. The mayor is 37. Biden, Sanders and Warren are 76, 78 and 70, respectively — hardly a contrast to the 73-year-old Trump.

There’s also potential home state drama with two Texans in the race. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former Obama housing secretary Julian Castro clashed in an earlier debate over immigration. Castro has led the left flank on the issue with a proposal to decriminalize border crossings.

For O’Rourke, it will be the first debate since a massacre in his hometown of El Paso prompted him to overhaul his campaign into a forceful call for sweeping gun restrictions, complete with regular use of the F-word in cable television interviews.

O’Rourke has given no indication of whether he’ll bring the rhetorical flourish to broadcast television.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump gets some of his worst marks from the American people when it comes to his handling of climate change, and majorities believe the planet is warming and support government actions that he has sometimes scoffed at.

While the administration has rolled back regulations to cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from power and industrial plants and pushed for more coal use, wide shares of Americans say they want just the opposite, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

About two out of three Americans say corporations have a responsibility to combat climate change, and a similar share also say it’s the job of the U.S. government.

But 64% of Americans say they disapprove of Trump’s policies toward climate change while about half that many say they approve. That 32% approval of his climate policies is the lowest among six issue areas that the poll asked about, including immigration (38 and health care (37%).

Ann Florence, a 70-year-old retiree and self-described independent from Jonesborough, Tennessee, said she faults Trump on climate change “because he doesn’t believe it’s happening. It is changing if he would just look at what’s happening.”

While a majority of Republicans do approve of Trump’s performance on climate change, his marks among the GOP on the issue are slightly lower compared with other issues. Meanwhile, 7% of Democrats and 29% of independents approve of Trump on climate change.

Ricky Kendrick, a 30-year-old in Grand Junction, Colorado, said he is contemplating leaving the Republican Party, partly over its denial of climate change.

“They don’t see it as a priority at all,” Kendrick, a hardware salesman in the heart of western Colorado’s energy belt, complained of the president and his party. “There are some (weather) things happening that I’ve never seen before. … Something’s changing.”

He was alarmed at Trump’s departure from the Paris climate accord and wants the U.S. to reduce offshore drilling, end subsidies for fossil fuels and ramp up those for renewable energy.

While the poll finds about half of Americans want to decrease or eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels, a similar share say subsidies for renewable energy should be increased.

But will Trump’s climate change denial — often voiced in tweets — matter in 2020?

“Climate has not historically been what people vote on, but I think the tides are changing on that,” said University of Maryland sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies the environmental movement.

She said her research shows that young people, who don’t vote in large numbers, are activated by climate change.

Climate change is becoming more of a national priority among Democrats but not Republicans, said Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. It might make a difference in a close race, he said.

According to the AP VoteCast survey, 7% of voters in the 2018 midterm election called the environment the top issue facing the country. By contrast, 26% said health care was the top issue, 23% said immigration and 18% said the economy and jobs. Democratic voters were far more likely than Republican voters to call the environment the top issue, 12% to 2%.

In the new poll, roughly three out of four Americans say they believe climate change is happening and a large majority of those think humans are at least partly to blame. In total, 47% of all Americans say they think climate change is happening and is caused mostly or entirely by human activities; 20% think it’s caused about equally by human activities and natural changes in the environment; and 8% think it’s happening but is caused mostly or entirely by natural changes in the environment.

There’s a large gap between partisans on the issue. Ninety-two percent of Democrats say climate change is happening, and nearly all of those think it’s caused at least equally by human activity and natural changes in the environment. While more than half of Republicans, 56%, say they think climate change is happening, only 41% think human activities are a factor.

Americans are slightly more likely to favor taxing the use of carbon-based fuels than to oppose it, 37% to 31%. If that revenue is turned into a tax rebate to all Americans, approval ticks up to 43%.

About two-thirds of Americans also favor regulating carbon emissions from power and industrial plants.

People say they are more likely to oppose than favor expanding offshore drilling (39% vs. 32, allowing more use of hydraulic fracking to extract oil and natural gas (45% vs. 22%) and building new nuclear power plants (43% vs. 26%).

Compared with five years ago, Americans are somewhat more positive toward policies focused on renewable energy and somewhat more negative toward those that extract oil and gas. In November 2014, 66% of Americans favored funding research into renewable energy sources, while nearly 80% do so today.

“We don’t need coal and oil anymore,” said Brenda Perry, a 77-year-old retired hotel executive and Democrat living in Plymouth, Massachusetts. “We have other ways of doing energy.”

Rodney Dell, 65, likes that Trump has resisted what Dell sees as panic about the climate.

“His direction is correct,” Dell, a Republican who runs a distribution warehouse, said of the president. “I think the climate policies are overblown a lot.”

Still, Dell, of Irving, Texas, worked in his youth assembling solar panels and is proud that his local library is 100% powered by renewables. He wants more subsidies for green energy and less offshore drilling.

“If you can do something to conserve energy by using the sun and the wind that’s there every day, it’d be ridiculous not to use them,” he said.

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,058 adults was conducted Aug. 15-18 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.