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Ocasio-Cortez: 70 percent tax on mega-rich could pay for Green New Deal

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New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a lot of big ideas, including the Green New Deal, an economy-wide green jobs initiative to combat climate change. But big ideas require big funding — and she has a new plan to make that happen.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper on Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Ocasio-Cortez floated the possibility of taxing the wealthiest tax brackets — people who make $10 million a year or more — up to 60 or 70 percent to fund the Green New Deal. “There’s an element where, yeah, people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes,” she said.

A 70 percent tax rate might seem astronomically high, but only if you have a short memory. “Under Eisenhower, the top earners paid a 91 percent marginal rate,” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias points out. Under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, that rate was closer to 70 percent, and now it’s around 37 percent.

Right now, someone who makes $10 million gets taxed at the same rate as a person who makes $550,000. Ocasio-Cortez’s progressive tax would basically ensure that there are more tax rate milestones between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. She’s suggesting a rate that rises as you make more money, with steeper percentages kicking in above certain benchmarks.

If that sounds radical to you, AOC is fine with that. “I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” she said.

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Ocasio-Cortez: 70 percent tax on mega-rich could pay for Green New Deal

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When criminal justice and environmental justice collide

Rhonda Anderson and her daughter, Siwatu-Salama Ra, have spent much of their lives working to protect their Detroit community from polluters. Anderson has organized for the local Sierra Club for nearly two decades. And Ra represented the Motor City during the landmark Paris climate talks.

Fellow activists credit Ra with bringing this year’s Extreme Energy Extraction Summit — where activists from vulnerable communities strategize on fighting polluters — to Detroit for the first time.

Ra, however, won’t be able to attend. Last month, a judge sentenced the 26-year-old mother, who is currently 7-months pregnant, to a mandatory two years in prison after she was controversially convicted of felony assault and firearm possession. She faces the prospect of giving birth in prison — away from her family, as well as the community she works to lift up.

“My daughter — my baby — she’s not doing well,” Anderson tells Grist. Ra, who had complications in her last pregnancy, is already experiencing contractions this time around. Her mother describes a pelvic examination her daughter recently had to endure while shackled.

“It’s medieval,” Anderson says. “And it reminds me of slavery.”

Black communities in the United States, like the one Ra and Anderson serve, face a host of structural challenges that impact day-to-day life — from environmental injustice to heightened policing and racial profiling. Black people are 75 percent more likely than other Americans to live in neighborhoods that border oil and natural gas refineries — and they face a disproportionate amount of health threats as a result of air pollution. As a black woman, Ra is more likely to be incarcerated than a white woman — four times more likely, in fact. These systemic injustices have collided in Ra’s case, as her supporters say a double standard and a flawed legal system have robbed her community of one of its most dedicated defenders.

“Siwatu has spent her life fighting environmental injustice and pushing back against the big polluters who are violating the law to poison her community,” the Sierra Club’s executive director, Michael Brune, said in a statement. “In this case, it does not appear that she is being afforded the protection of the law she deserves, as is all too often the case for women of color dealing with our criminal justice system.”

Here’s how Ra arrived at her current predicament: This past summer, at Anderson’s home, Ra got into an argument with another woman. As the dispute escalated, the woman reportedly rammed her vehicle into Ra’s car — which had Ra’s toddler inside — before allegedly aiming her car at Anderson. In response, Ra, who says she repeatedly asked the woman to leave, reportedly took out her unloaded, registered firearm. The woman called the police before Ra did, which authorities said made Ra the assailant in the case.

Michigan has a stand-your-ground law that protects people from facing criminal charges if they use deadly force in self-defense. It’s the same legal strategy George Zimmerman successfully employed in Florida after he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was walking to his father’s Orlando-area home. To prove her innocence under the provision, Ra needed to convince jurors that she was afraid for her life.

“The prosecutor convinced the jury and judge that I lacked fear, and that’s not true,” Ra said during her sentencing. “I was so afraid, especially for my toddler and mother. I don’t believe they could imagine a black woman being scared — only mad.”

Ra’s advocates have called into question the fact that the jury was not informed that finding Ra guilty would result in a mandatory sentence. Because of the required punishment for a guilty verdict, letters of support from the community attesting to her years of service had no effect in lessening her punishment.

“In environmental-justice organizing, you’re dealing with a lot of small emergencies all the time, especially in an underdeveloped, under-resourced city like Detroit,” says William Copeland who worked alongside Ra at the East Michigan Environmental Coalition. Her incarceration, he adds, “is a big emergency.”

Copeland says Ra excels at getting people who are often left behind engaged in environmental justice work. As a teen, she founded a program to get urban youth involved in the East Michigan Environmental Coalition — reeling in a group that other environmentalists hadn’t been able to reach.

“The successes that she had shows the depth of being able to speak people’s language — to be able to read something that’s written in one language and translate it to the language of the ‘hood or the language of the people,” Copeland says. “[Without Ra], those folks wouldn’t be getting involved.”

That’s one reason why he and Anderson say they need Ra back in the community immediately. In the past, she’s also worked to hold a Marathon Petroleum refinery and the Detroit Renewable Power trash incinerator accountable for their emissions. “Get her back out here so she can continue the work that she’s been doing all these years,” Anderson says.

Ra’s attorneys are working toward an appeal and asking that she be released on bond so that she can give birth outside of prison. On Wednesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations Michigan Chapter filed a complaint on behalf of Ra and other Muslim women at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, noting that they have not been allowed religious meal accommodations or access to a hijabs.

As part of her campaign to free her daughter, Anderson is calling for the larger environmental community to realize that pollution is just one of many inequities people in fence-line communities face. But polluting and criminalizing these groups essentially go hand-in-hand, she explains.

“As long as we find a whole group of people dispensable, the environment is going to continue to be impacted. You can pollute them and do whatever to them, and white folks and anybody else can sit off to the side and say, ‘I’m safe — it’s not me,” Anderson says. “We are the ones that are preyed upon.”

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When criminal justice and environmental justice collide

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Please Tell Us Why These Movie Stars Are Paid Less Than Men

Mother Jones

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In early December, Emmy Rossum became the latest actress to demand the appropriate pay for her work. Rossum, who plays the feisty Fiona Gallagher on the hit Showtime series Shameless, asked for greater compensation than her co-star, William Macy, who has more experience but less screen time on the show. Variety reported that the studio offered Rossum pay equal to Macy’s, but that her team asked for more in order to compensate for her previous seven seasons of lower earnings.

Hollywood’s wage gap can’t compare with the wage gap affecting everyone else, particularly the working class and, to an even greater degree, women of color. But these movie stars show that no woman, regardless of her status, is completely exempt from gender-based disparity in pay. A report released by Forbes earlier this year reviewing Hollywood salaries found that the nation’s top actresses collectively are paid less than half of what their male counterparts earn. Top-earning actress Jennifer Lawrence was paid $46 million from June 2015 to June 2016. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, America’s top-earning actor, was paid $64.5 million. Melissa McCarthy, the runner-up for the top female earner, earned $33 million, compared with Jackie Chan’s $61 million.

Some leading ladies have spoken out about the wage gap and how they handle it. Here’s what they have to say:

Felicity Jones: The female lead for the latest installment in the Star Wars universe negotiated a seven-figure salary for her role in Rogue One. Diego Luna and Ben Mendelsohn, the male leads in the blockbuster, earned six figures. “I want to be paid fairly for the work I’m doing,” Jones said in an interview with Glamour. “That’s what every single woman around the world wants.”

Robin Wright: During an event called “Insight Dialogues,” billed as a series of conversations with thought leaders and activists hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, Wright said she had recently demanded pay equal to that of co-star Kevin Spacey on the Netflix political drama House of Cards. “I was looking at statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than Frank’s for a period of time,” Wright said. “So I capitalized on that moment. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public,’ and they did.”

Michelle Rodriguez: The Fast and Furious actress told TMZ she gets paid less than her colleagues. “It’s like, ‘Oh damn. Darn my luck. I wish I was born somewhere else or maybe some other way,'” she said. “That’s the world we live in, it’s a patriarchal society.”

Jennifer Lawrence: In an essay for Lenny Letter, Lawrence wrote about her frustration with the wage gap and, not surprisingly, the 26-year-old Hunger Games star did not mince words. “When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony,” she wrote. “I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early.” Lawrence went on to describe how women have been socialized to not seem “difficult,” and how any hint of such behavior will garner negative responses from male colleagues. As of 2016, Lawrence is the world’s highest-paid actress.

Sharon Stone: Last year, the actress and producer told People that after her 1992 performance in Basic Instinct, she could not get the pay she knew she deserved. “I remember sitting in my kitchen with my manager and just crying and saying I’m not going to work until I get paid,” she said. “I still got paid so much less than any men.” She observed that eliminating the earning disparities has to start with “regular pay, not just for movie stars, but regular pay for regular women in the regular job.”

Rooney Mara: Perhaps best known for her jarring performance as the lead in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Mara told the Guardian about her own experience with the wage gap. “I’ve been in films where I’ve found out my male co-star got paid double what I got paid, and it’s just a reality of the time that we live in,” she said. “To me, it’s frustrating but, at the same time, I’m just grateful to be getting paid at all for what I do.”

Patricia Arquette: The Boyhood actress made headlines last year when she used her acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress to speak out against the wage gap. She told Mother Jones that her fight goes far beyond Hollywood—Arquette has gone to the halls of Congress to lobby for the Equal Pay Act. “I don’t want the wage gap to be viewed as this myopic problem, because it’s not,” she said. “It’s in 98 percent of all businesses, and it’s easy for people to dismiss the conversation when they think it’s around white women entertainers. But this is about all women in America.”

Viola Davis: In an interview with Mashable, Viola Davis, who recently won an Emmy for her role on in How to Get Away With Murder, said the wage gap sends the wrong message to young women. “What are you telling your daughter when she grows up?” Davis asked. “‘You’ve got to understand that you’re a girl. You have a vagina, so that’s not as valuable.'” But the barriers are much harder to surmount for women of color. “The struggle for us as women of color is just to be seen the same as our white female counterparts.”

Rose McGowan: Last year, McGowan, best known for her roles in Charmed and Grindhouse, hijacked a bipartisan political gala in DC to take a stand against unequal pay. “And I would say to you: One, get out of my body; two, equal pay for women; three, integrate,” she shouted before storming out. She had not been invited to speak at the event. McGowan had been fired by her agent months earlier after her very public criticism of a casting call for an Adam Sandler film that called for actresses to wear pushup bras.

Gillian Anderson: Twice Anderson was offered less pay than her co-star David Duchoveny on The X-Files—first when the show aired in the ’90s, and again when they revived their roles for a new season in 2015. The second time, Anderson objected and reportedly won out in the end. The two actors were paid the same for the reboot.

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Please Tell Us Why These Movie Stars Are Paid Less Than Men

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Questions Mount About a Mentally Ill Black Woman’s Death in Police Custody

Mother Jones

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Since Tanisha Anderson’s death in November 2014, few details have been made public about how the 37-year-old black woman died while in the custody of two Cleveland police officers. Anderson, whose family reported she was mentally ill, died after falling unconscious while lying handcuffed on a sidewalk outside her home. The 15-month long investigation is now in the hands of Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine: In a statement last Tuesday, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty requested DeWine take over the case following a Cuyahoga County sheriff’s investigation, which McGinty said revealed “facts that created a conflict of interest” for his office. McGinty—who led the controversial investigation into the police killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and is running for reelection next month—did not specify what that conflict of interest was.

The recently completed sheriff’s investigation, which has not been disclosed publicly, raises questions about the Cleveland Police Department’s official account presented in November 2014. According to a law enforcement official familiar with the sheriff’s investigation who spoke to Mother Jones, the investigation reveals significant details that the Cleveland PD’s account did not include. One is that the officers had put Anderson in the back of their squad car before she became agitated and a physical struggle ensued. Another is that Anderson remained handcuffed after an EMS team arrived and began administering aid, despite that she was unconscious.

The investigation also shows that Anderson was on the ground in handcuffs for approximately 20 minutes before the EMS team arrived, the law enforcement official told Mother Jones. The Cleveland PD’s initial account did not specify how long Anderson was on the ground prior to EMS arriving; the officers later told sheriff’s investigators in a written statement that Anderson was on the ground for approximately 5 to 10 minutes.

According to the Cleveland PD’s account, officers Scott Aldridge and Bryan Myers arrived at Anderson’s home around 10:51 p.m. on November 12, 2014, in response to a call about a mentally ill family member causing a disturbance. After speaking with the officers, the Cleveland PD account stated, Anderson agreed to be escorted to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, but as the three approached the squad car, she “began actively resisting the officers.” After they handcuffed her, Anderson began to kick at the officers, and “a short time later the woman stopped struggling and appeared to go limp.” The officers said they “found a faint pulse” on Anderson “and immediately called EMS and a supervisor to respond to the scene at 11:34 p.m..” Within the hour, Anderson was taken to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The initial police account included no details about how or why Anderson fell limp on the sidewalk.

According to the sheriff’s investigation, Aldridge and Myers had placed Anderson in the back seat of their squad car with her feet still hanging out, where she began yelling and struggled to get out of the car. As the officers tried to put her back in the car “a physical altercation ensued,” the law enforcement official told Mother Jones, and they soon had Anderson in handcuffs and on the ground.

In their written statement to sheriff’s investigators, the officers said Anderson was laying on the ground and handcuffed by 11:20 p.m., when they radioed for a police supervisor to come to the scene. The officers subsequently requested an EMS response, the official said. The officers estimated that Anderson was in that position for a total of 5 to 10 minutes. According to call logs and witness interviews reviewed by sheriff’s investigators, the EMS team arrived at 11:41 p.m.—indicating that Anderson had been on the ground for at least 20 minutes. When the EMS team checked Anderson’s condition, one member found a faint pulse while a second was unable to find one, the official said. The handcuffs remained on Anderson as they began rendering aid; they asked the officers to remove them because they were interfering with their work. The officers complied with that request, the official said.

A spokesperson for the Cleveland PD declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing investigation. Attorneys representing the two officers did not respond to a request for comment.

Anderson’s family members, who filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Cleveland on January 7, said she suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Family members who lived with Anderson dialed 911 to request medical assistance after Anderson became disoriented and walked out of her house into the cold, wearing only a nightgown, according to the court filing. The family had already called for police assistance earlier in the night after Anderson walked outside; another pair of officers had come to the scene, but left after Anderson went back into her house, the family said.

According to the lawsuit, Anderson’s family members said that after Anderson started to panic in the squad car, Aldridge grabbed her, “slammed her to the sidewalk, and pushed her face into the pavement.” Aldridge then pressed his knee on Anderson’s back and handcuffed her while Myers assisted in restraining her, the family said, and within moments Anderson lost consciousness. The lawsuit also alleged that when family members asked the officers to check on her condition, the officers “falsely claimed she was sleeping” and delayed calling for medical assistance. “During the lengthy time that Tanisha lay on the ground,” the family said, Aldridge and Myers “failed to provide any medical attention to Tanisha.”

Anderson’s family told sheriff’s investigators that a few weeks prior to the incident, she had been released from a psychiatric hospital. In January 2015, the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s office announced that Anderson’s death was ruled a homicide and classified as a sudden death in association with “physical restraint in a prone position,” “ischemic heart disease,” and “bipolar disorder with agitation.”

“You wouldn’t have known that Tanisha was bipolar unless she told you,” Anderson’s mother, Cassandra Johnson, told Fox 8 Cleveland in December 2015. “That day was just a bad day.”

According to personnel records obtained by Cleveland.com, Aldridge was hired in April 2008, and in 2013 he was suspended for three days without pay over a taser incident that involved a female suspect. (He was also one of the officers involved in the car chase that led to the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in 2012.) Myers was a rookie cop who joined CPD in 2014, after graduating from the police academy that August. Cleveland.com reported that Aldridge and Myers received 16 hours of crisis intervention training while at the academy, but it is not clear whether they received any further such training once on the job at Cleveland PD. The two remain on desk duty pending the outcome of the investigation.

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Questions Mount About a Mentally Ill Black Woman’s Death in Police Custody

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Gillian Anderson Reveals the Hardest Part of the "X-Files" Reboot

Mother Jones

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When it comes down to it, actress Gillian Anderson is way more Gibson than Scully.

Or at least Stella Gibson, the no-nonsense detective she portrays on BBC’s The Fall (Dana Scully needs no such introduction), is the character Anderson likes best. In the decade-plus since The X-Files wrapped up its nine-season, two-movie run, the British-American actress and mum of three has moved on to roles that are more complex and fulfilling than the maddeningly skeptical FBI agent who made Anderson a household name.

Now, of course, she’s returning for the six-episode X-Files reprise that kicks off January 27 on Fox. Although the premiere was widely panned, TV critics promise it gets better: Many are raving about the third episode, which was written by fan favorite Darin Morgan and includes a role for X-Files superfan and Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani.

Once Anderson’s initial tenure as Scully concluded, she moved back to London and did a play in order to “take a breath…It was important for me to remove myself from the intensity of the business as I had experienced it during the show,” she says.

That break was short lived. The British-American actress has been busy ever since, co-starring in dark TV dramas such as The Fall and Hannibal and pursuing numerous other screen and stage projects—if you’re lucky, you can still score tickets for her upcoming stint as Blanch DuBois opposite Ben Foster’s Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Anderson also has a role in War and Peace, a new BBC miniseries based on the epic novel, which premiered in the United States on January 18. And while most all of Anderson’s work is pretty great, this interviewer, at least, is overwhelmed with nostalgia for Scully’s signature eye roll. Watch the trailer, and then we’ll talk.

Mother Jones: So, how did you react when you were approached to do The X-Files again?

Gillian Anderson: My initial reaction wasn’t very positive because my experience of doing it before was doing 24 episodes a year! That’s just not feasible with three kids and other commitments. When it appeared that Fox would be willing to do a smaller amount of episodes, I suddenly had a bit more interest in having the conversation.

MJ: Was it difficult to play Scully again after all this time?

GA: It was natural to a certain degree, in that it’s a little like getting on a bicycle. But because it’s been so long, and because I’ve tried really hard to get as far away from her as possible in the other roles I’ve been playing, she was a bit further away than I had expected.

MJ: How has Scully changed since we last saw her?

GA: She hasn’t really changed that much. They’re no longer on the X-files, so she’s not an active FBI agent. She’s working as a surgeon, and her day-to-day life is pretty simple. She’s refocused.

MJ: What’s your favorite X-Files episode ever?

GA: “Bad Blood,” one of our comedic episodes. It’s been my favorite for a long time. I find it funny. It’s a very effective premise to have the two agents just about on trial for what may or may not be the death of somebody, and they have very different takes on what transpired. The nature of the different perceptions are quite extreme and show a lot about Mulder and Scully’s internal thinking.

MJ: I’ve always been struck by how your character paved the way for more diverse portrayals of women in sci-fi.

GA: It was a groundbreaking role for women, period. When The X-Files launched, there wasn’t anything else that was sci-fi on television and barely anything on film. So it not only was the first for a female character like that in sci-fi; it was the first female character like that on TV.

MJ: How did your preparation for playing Stella Gibson on The Fall compare with your prep for Scully? I mean, both are investigators, but they’re totally different.

GA: Scully—I don’t know how much proper research I did back then. I didn’t really have time. I got the job on a Thursday and we started shooting the following Monday. At some point, Fox arranged for us to go to the FBI and talk to a couple of agents. I did a lot more work for Stella Gibson to understand the nature of the troubles in Northern Ireland and the British occupation, the police presence in Northern Ireland and the impact that had on the ground, and also what it meant to be detective superintendent.

MJ: I love that The Fall highlights how sexually empowered women are judged by men, even as the male lead is a sexually motivated serial killer.

GA: I felt like I had never read a character like Stella before. There was something extremely enigmatic about her. She’s still a mystery to me, and that’s very unusual. Usually so much information is revealed about characters. But the lack of information matches who she is. It’s a sly way for the writer to lead people on. She continues to be compelling and interesting, even though we don’t know very much about her.

MJ: Do you prefer playing her to playing Scully?

GA: Yeah. She’s probably my favorite character I’ve ever played. I feel compelled by her in a different way. I don’t know how much of that is because I played Scully for such a long time that I appreciate the change of scene. I feel like I identify with Stella more, and I am more curious about where she’s headed.

MJ: She’s complicated, and not hesitant to tell people to fuck off. It’s refreshing to see that in a female TV character.

GA: Yep. Well, I don’t know if we need more women out there to say, “Fuck off!” But television isn’t the issue. There are a lot of female characters on TV who are intelligent, and a good enough portion of them aren’t all about the date and the car and the plastic surgery. It’s in film that it’s lacking! It would be great to see more women in a wider range of characters—and better populated in film.

MJ: It seems like that problem stems from a dearth of female directors and writers.

GA: I think there’s a lot of them out there—I just don’t think their material gets made. Studios don’t believe they’ll have an audience if women make it. A lot of female directors can’t pay somebody to hire them.

MJ: Would you say that situation is slowly improving?

GA: Laughs. I think it’s stagnant, in a big way. That’s what makes the change difficult. The numbers are astounding.

MJ: Vis-a-vis your upcoming role as Blanche DuBois, what’s the biggest difference for you between stage acting and your work on camera?

GA: You’re doing the same thing over and over onstage, so one of the biggest challenges—aside from being live in front of an audience—is keeping it fresh and new every night.

MJ: What do you like about playing Blanche?

GA: She’s one of the most extraordinary and complicated characters ever written. Tennessee Williams is extraordinary—playwright, poet, writer of letters. He was a brilliant man who had a tragic life experience, and his experience dramatically affects the pieces that he created. Blanche got all of his pain. In the South, where the play is set, you don’t show your pain—especially back then. Women are meant to behave in the world, and she’s a victim of that time. I find her an extremely moving and challenging character.

MJ: Tell me about War and Peace.

GA: This adaptation was done by Andrew Davies House of Cards, a British writer who has a talent in adapting large novels to screenplays. This is probably one of his best works. It’s directed by Tom Harper, and it’s a massive, massive accomplishment: It’s so beautiful and rich, you really feel like you’re in Russia—even though everyone is speaking with a British accent. Laughs. It’s very detailed in the relationships between these families, which was so integral to the story and the history of Russia. It’s got some of the most moving war scenes I’ve ever seen. You really get to care about the characters that are in this story, and that’s quite rare, I think. You have the intimacy of the relationships to invest in. People seems to be liking it in the UK and I hope they like it over here.

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Gillian Anderson Reveals the Hardest Part of the "X-Files" Reboot

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Cops Raid California Pot Farm, Find Bowe Bergdahl

Mother Jones

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Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the former captive of the Taliban-linked Haqqani network in Afghanistan, was at a remote marijuana farm in Mendocino County when a local dope team raided the property on Tuesday. Sherriff Tom Allman told The Anderson Valley Advertiser, which first reported the story, that Bergdahl “was not involved” in the marijuana operation, and authorities later confirmed to NBC Bay Area that he was not arrested during the raid and is not facing any charges.

Held captive since 2009, Bergdahl was freed in May 2014 in a controversial prisoner swap in return for five Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay. While still on active duty, Bergdahl is currently awaiting a military court martial for allegations of desertion. He was on authorized leave from his post at Texas’ Fort Sam Houston and was visiting old friends at the pot farm when the drug task force showed up. Sherriff Allman told the Advertiser that Bergdahl was “above politeness” and readily produced his military ID for officers at the raid as several people were taken into custody.

As Talking Points Memo highlighted this morning, the outspoken critics of the so-called “prisoner swap” that led to Bergdahl’s release at Fox News unsurprisingly harangued Bergdahl as the news of his association with the raid broke. “Do they give him a drug test when he returns?” asked “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocy. “Shouldn’t they give him a drug test when he returns? He’s active duty. Remember, he’s protecting us right now.” And Andrea Tantaros, co-host of “Outnumbered,” had this to say:

According to the Advertiser, military authorities were notified, and once calls were made “all the way up to the Pentagon,” Bergdahl was escorted to Santa Rosa and later to his duty station at the Defense Department’s request.

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Cops Raid California Pot Farm, Find Bowe Bergdahl

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Judge Rips Alabama for Hiring a Discredited Abortion Foe

Mother Jones

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Vincent Rue, a marriage therapist best known for his discredited theories about how abortion causes mental illness, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars assembling legal teams to defend extreme anti-abortion bills. But lately, the states that hire him have been getting a raw deal.

On Monday, US District Judge Myron H. Thompson skewered Alabama for involving Rue in the defense of a law that requires abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges with a local hospital. Thompson struck down the law, which had threatened to close three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics. Notably, Thompson disregarded two arguments made by John M. Thorp, an OB-GYN at the University of North Carolina Hospital and one of Rue’s go-to expert witnesses: that complications arise from abortion more often than is reported in official statistics, and that admitting privileges are necessary to good patient care. Both claims have been key for states defending these sorts of abortion restrictions.

This is the second time this year that a federal judge has dismissed evidence brought by Rue’s favored expert witnesses. In September, a Texas judge ruling on an anti-abortion bill that would close all but six of the state’s clinics raked the state’s attorneys across the coals for bringing on Rue—and hiding his involvement.

Rue was thoroughly discredited as an abortion expert long before Alabama hired him. When he testified in two landmark abortion cases in the 1990s, judges disregarded his testimony for being personally biased and lacking expertise. Mainstream medical organizations have rejected Rue’s research on a supposed mental illness caused by abortion, “post-abortive syndrome.”

In Alabama, Rue recruited expert witnesses for the state and in one case wrote the entirety of the report the state’s witnesses submitted to the court. Rue didn’t testify. But the state paid him $82,890 for his work. It paid the two witnesses that Thompson called out in his opinion, Thorp and James C. Anderson, a Virginia emergency room physician, $40,174.75 and $76,279.20, respectively. Thorp, Rue, and Anderson did not reply to requests for comment.

Thorp based his testimony on a study he wrote for a pay-to-publish journal. (Traditional academic journals do not charge authors for printing their work.) He misplaced decimal points in his report to the court compiling abortion complication rates. When challenged about his methodology on cross-examination, Thorp told the court to “knock a point off” his estimate of complication rates.

At trial, Anderson admitted that Rue had written a report to the court that Anderson signed. Anderson also said that Rue provided most of the research for a second report Anderson wrote. Anderson further testified that he didn’t know courts had disregarded Rue’s testimony. Thompson was incredulous.

“You say you don’t know his employment or any organizations that he belongs to,” the judge asked Anderson. “Why do you trust him?”

In his Monday ruling, Thompson tried to guess at the answer: “Either Anderson has extremely impaired judgment; he lied to the court as to his familiarity with Rue; or he is so biased against abortion that he would endorse any opinion that supports increased regulation on abortion providers. Any of these explanations severely undermines Anderson’s credibility as an expert witness.”

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Judge Rips Alabama for Hiring a Discredited Abortion Foe

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GOP Governors Paying Big Bucks to Contoversial Marriage Therapist to Defend New Abortion Laws

Mother Jones

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Over the past two years, at least four Republican-controlled states have paid nearly $200,000 in taxpayers funds to Vincent Rue—a marriage therapist whose testimony has been repeatedly disregarded by judges—to help defend ultra-strict abortion laws in court.

Rue, who holds a doctorate in family relations from the University of North Carolina School of Home Economics, has claimed that “abortion reescalates the battle between the sexes” and “abortion increases bitterness toward men.” For decades, he has strived to convince mainstream researchers to recognize “post-abortion syndrome,” a supposed mental illness resulting from abortion.

But “after submission for peer review by scientists with the Center for Disease Control, the National Center for Health Statistics and other scientific institutions, Rue’s study was found to have ‘no value’ and to be ‘based upon a priori beliefs rather than an objective review of the evidence,'” according to Daniel Huyett, a federal judge who disregarded Rue’s testimony in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a landmark 1990 abortion case that eventually ended up before the Supreme Court. “His testimony is devoid of…analytical force and scientific rigor,” Huyett added. “Moreover, his admitted personal opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, suggests a possible personal bias.” Rue “possesses neither the academic qualifications nor the professional experience of plaintiffs’ expert witnesses,” another federal judge wrote in 1986 after hearing Rue’s testimony in another landmark abortion case, Hodgson v. Minnesota.

Rue “has been really thoroughly discredited by trial courts,” says Priscilla Smith, who faced Rue many years ago as a litigator and now directs the Yale Law School’s reproductive justice studies program. (Rue said he couldn’t comment for this story without the permission of the state attorneys general who’ve hired him.)

But Rue’s history hasn’t prevented Republican administrations in Alabama, North Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin from giving him lucrative work as a legal consultant. These days, though, he rarely testifies himself. Instead, he works behind the scenes to handpick expert witnesses, write reports, and guide states’ legal strategies for defending abortion restrictions. From 2012 to 2014, North Dakota paid Rue $19,936 to help defend its six-week abortion ban—which legal scholars criticized as patently unconstitutional. (A federal court struck down the ban in April; the state is appealing.) In the same time period, Alabama paid Rue $79,087.50 to defend a law that requires abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges with a local hospital. (The law threatens to shut down three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics; the case, brought by Planned Parenthood, is ongoing.) In 2014, Texas paid Rue $36,392 in “other witness fees” for work on an unspecified lawsuit.

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GOP Governors Paying Big Bucks to Contoversial Marriage Therapist to Defend New Abortion Laws

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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A member of Joint Task Force-Bravo jumps from a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during helocast training at Lake Yojoa, Honduras, Feb. 25, 2014. Several members of the Task Force spent the day training on helocasting, caving ladder, and overwater hoist operations. (U.S. Air Force photo by Capt. Zach Anderson)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for March 7, 2014

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Powerful Typhoon Causes Mass Disruption in Philippines

Typhoon Haiyan has killed at least four people and forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands. Read article here:   Powerful Typhoon Causes Mass Disruption in Philippines ; ;Related ArticlesWorld Briefing | Asia: The Philippines: Strong Typhoon LandsColorado Cities’ Rejection of Fracking Poses Political Test for Natural Gas IndustryCase of Insect Interruptus Yields a Rare Fossil Find ;

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Powerful Typhoon Causes Mass Disruption in Philippines

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