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NOAA picked Trump over science. Here’s why that’s a big deal.

Hurricane Dorian has come and gone, but the irrevocable upheaval it brought on the Bahamas continues. In Washington, a different kind of debacle is brewing in Dorian’s aftermath.

On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued an unsigned statement that defended President Trump’s baseless assertion that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama “(much) harder than anticipated.” Trump originally made the claim in a tweet on Sunday, September 1, and has continued to try to justify it on Twitter and with a doctored hurricane map in the week since. NOAA’s statement also rebuked the National Weather Service’s Birmingham division for contradicting the president in a tweet that clarified, “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”

“From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama,” read NOAA’s statement. “The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.” The New York Times is reporting that political officials at NOAA put out the statement after Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross threatened to fire them.

The unsigned statement — along with an earlier internal directive telling NOAA staffers not to “provide any opinion” on Trump’s tweet — seems to have set off a firestorm within the agency. NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Craig McLean, is investigating whether the agency’s response to Trump’s claims about Hurricane Dorian constituted a violation of policies and ethics, according to the Washington Post. And the head of the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA, publicly defended the Birmingham forecasters at a meeting of the National Weather Association.

For NOAA scientists, and meteorologists outside the federal agency, the organization’s apparent willingness to bend the truth for political reasons undermines their integrity.

“This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around,” said a meteorologist the Post spoke with on the condition of anonymity. “One of the things we train on is to dispel inaccurate rumors and ultimately that is what was occurring — ultimately what the Alabama office did is provide a forecast with their tweet, that is what they get paid to do.”

Elbert Friday, the former director of the National Weather Service, went even further, calling the unsigned statement “deplorable” in a public statement on Facebook: “This rewriting history to satisfy an ego diminishes NOAA.”

For some meteorologists, NOAA’s independence is a matter not only of scientific integrity but of life and death. The agency’s statement is “concerning as it compromises the ability of NOAA to convey life-saving information necessary to avoid substantial and specific danger to public health and safety,” McLean wrote in an email to NOAA employees obtained by the Post. If people stop trusting NOAA to provide unbiased forecasts during severe weather events, the thinking goes, the confusion could put them at physical risk.

After all, as Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School, told to BuzzFeed News: “There’s enough uncertainty in a hurricane forecast as it is. We don’t need to introduce a whole lot more.”

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NOAA picked Trump over science. Here’s why that’s a big deal.

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Bribery trial reveals Jeff Sessions’ role in blocking EPA action targeting major donor

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When a coal executive and two lawyers stood trial in Alabama last month for bribery and related crimes, it was clear from the start that things might get uncomfortable for Jeff Sessions. The attorney general’s name, after all, appeared on a list of possible witnesses.

Though he was never called to the stand, detailed references to Sessions and key members of his staff thread their way through the record of the four-week trial, which concluded on July 20 when David Roberson, vice president of Drummond Coal, and Joel Gilbert, a partner in the Birmingham-based law firm Balch & Bingham, were found guilty of paying off an Alabama lawmaker to oppose a federal environmental cleanup effort that could have cost Drummond millions. (The judge dismissed the charges against a second Balch lawyer, Steve McKinney.)

Sessions has long had close ties to Balch and Drummond — the companies respectively ranked as his second- and third-biggest contributors during his Senate career, collectively donating nearly a quarter of a million dollars to his campaigns. And as Mother Jones and the Project on Government Oversight have previously reported, then-Senator Sessions directly intervened with the Environmental Protection Agency to block the cleanup at the center of the federal bribery case.

Upon becoming attorney general, Sessions had a glaring conflict of interest in a criminal prosecution that he was technically overseeing as the nation’s top law enforcement official. Yet despite questions from Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont,  and others, he repeatedly refused to say whether he had recused himself from the matter. His silence seems even more questionable given evidence introduced as part of the case.

Billing statements, meeting minutes, and other records briefly made public during the trial — and quickly placed under seal by the judge presiding over the case, but not before Alabama columnist Kyle Whitmire saved copies — reveal that Sessions and his Senate staff coordinated more closely with the defendants than previously known. The documents indicate extensive contact on the EPA action between Sessions’ office and Roberson, Gilbert, and McKinney, including at least 13 phone calls and two in-person meetings in Washington, D.C. And they show that Drummond’s attorneys at Balch & Bingham coached Sessions’ staff on how to attack the EPA’s position and that Sessions’ staff reported back to the lawyers about their interactions with the agency.

The backdrop for the bribery case is North Birmingham’s 35th Avenue neighborhood — an impoverished, largely black enclave sandwiched between the city’s airport and various industrial sites, including a Drummond plant. For years, residents have reported unusually high levels of cancer and respiratory illness, and they have complained about the dark soot that coats their homes. In 2013, the EPA found such high levels of toxins in the area that it designated a 400-acre section of the neighborhood a Superfund site; federal health authorities warned parents not to allow their children to play outside in their own yards. The EPA determined that Drummond was one of the companies potentially responsible for the pollution, and thus possibly on the hook for some of the cleanup costs.

When, in 2014, EPA officials tried to elevate the neighborhood to the National Priorities List — a select group of highly polluted sites picked for accelerated and more extensive cleanups — they hit a brick wall of resistance from Alabama’s mostly Republican political establishment. But to the surprise of EPA officials, a local Democratic state lawmaker, Oliver Robinson, also joined the opposition, sending a February 2015 letter to Alabama environmental authorities decrying the EPA effort.

It would later turn out that this letter was ghostwritten by Balch & Bingham’s Joel Gilbert, who, on behalf of Drummond, was funneling money to Robinson’s personal foundation in order to secure the lawmaker’s cooperation in blocking the EPA cleanup. Last summer, Robinson pleaded guilty to accepting $360,000 in bribes. He then began cooperating with prosecutors as they built their case against the Drummond and Balch officials he said were at the heart of it: Roberson, Gilbert, and McKinney (lawyers for all three men declined to comment for this article.)

Like Robinson, Sessions also sent a letter ghostwritten by Balch lawyers, this one to the EPA. Records released during the trial shed light on how this letter, sent a year after Robinson’s, came to be, as well as the extensive actions Sessions took on behalf of his top political donors to thwart EPA action in North Birmingham. Sessions’ office did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

On Feb. 4, 2015, Balch lawyers convened to discuss their plan to derail the 35th Avenue site’s inclusion on the National Priorities List. According to notes of that meeting released at trial, Balch had prepared a draft “letter but no signatures” for Alabama’s congressional delegation that disputed the methods the EPA had used to determine responsibility for the pollution (and thus potential liability for the cleanup). The Balch meeting notes list a Sessions staffer named Brandon Middleton as the only lobbying contact for Alabama’s congressional delegation on the matter. The day after the meeting, internal Balch records show that Gilbert reached out to Sessions’ office. And they note that on Feb. 18, McKinney spoke with Middleton “regarding North Birmingham.”

The next month, Drummond and Balch’s political action committees contributed a combined $10,000 to a political action committee controlled by Sessions — and run in part by a former Sessions staffer named Ed Haden,who is now a senior partner at Balch.

During the rest of 2015 and into early 2016, Sessions staffers communicated extensively with representatives of Balch and Drummond over the letter, sending drafts back and forth. On September 15, 2015, Drummond’s Roberson and Balch’s Gilbert flew from Birmingham to Washington, D.C., for meetings with staffers for Sessions, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Alabama). In an “Environmental Update” subsequently posted on Balch & Bingham’s website (and since removed), the firm said its attorneys “met with Senator Jeff Sessions” and predicted that a letter issued “shortly” from “key members of the Alabama congressional delegation” would make the case for opposing the effort to make Drummond and other companies pay for cleaning up the polluted site in Birmingham. Two months later, on Feb. 26, 2016, Middleton delivered a letter signed by Sessions, Shelby, and Palmer to the EPA. The letter also summoned top EPA officials to a meeting “to discuss the concerns.”

“Any information given to Senator Shelby’s office would have been one of many tools used to help inform the senator,” said a spokesperson. Palmer’s office did not respond to questions.

After the letter was delivered, Sessions’ office continued to work in close coordination with the Balch attorneys at the center of the bribery case to aggressively undermine the possibility of a cleanup. In March 2016, the EPA responded to Sessions’ letter, expressing disagreement but offering to meet. According to an email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Middleton told an EPA official that he was “waiting to hear back from our folks and boss on how they’d like to approach meeting.” But Sessions’ staffers weren’t just looking for feedback from Sessions. Balch records show that over the course of several months, Balch attorneys and Middleton exchanged emails and spoke over the phone about how to deal with the EPA’s response and prepare for the meeting with EPA officials.

Meanwhile, Balch’s political action committee continued contributing to Sessions’ campaign coffers. On June 30, 2016, Balch donated $1,000 to Sessions’ political action committee. That day, according to another email obtained under FOIA, Middleton sent the EPA a message setting the agenda for a July 7 sit-down in Sessions’ office to discuss why the proposed Birmingham cleanup should not go forward.

The day before the meeting, McKinney met Sessions staffers to prep them, according to the firm’s billing records.

On July 7, two high-level EPA officials met with members of Sessions’ staff, who grilled them on the Birmingham cleanup and attacked the methods the agency had used to measure toxins in the neighborhood. Sessions himself was scheduled to attend, but at the last minute he backed out to spend the day with then-candidate Donald Trump, who had decided to make a round of visits to Republican senators on Capitol Hill.

One of the EPA officials who attended the meeting told Mother Jones that he was surprised by the stridency with which Sessions staffers opposed the EPA’s actions in North Birmingham, especially considering the situation on the ground. “For residents, there was an immediate threat,”said Mathy Stanislaus, who was then an assistant EPA administrator, but “the public health risk didn’t seem to be a prominent concern from those who opposed it.”

During his confirmation process to become attorney general, Sessions was asked how he would handle an investigation involving campaign donors. Sessions said he would consult with Justice Department ethics officials on any investigation where a possible conflict might exist, but his office has repeatedly refused to discuss whether he insulated himself from the Drummond bribery case.

And he isn’t the only Justice Department official linked to matters involving the 35th Avenue Superfund site. When Sessions became attorney general, he installed in key positions at least two people involved in the conversations his office had on the subject. Among them was Brandon Middleton, who served as the liaison between Sessions’ office and the Balch lawyers working to undermine the 35th Avenue cleanup. Sessions appointed Middleton as a top deputy in the Justice Department’s environmental and natural resources division — the office responsible for bringing cases against corporate polluters, such as Drummond, to force them to fund environmental remediation. (Middleton has since moved on to a position at the Interior Department.) And Sessions named Jeff Wood, a Balch & Bingham partner who was part of the firm’s 35th Avenue lobbying effort, to the top job in that division. (Wood recused himself from the matter.) Middleton and a spokesman for Wood did not respond to questions.

With the convictions of Gilbert and Roberson, the lead prosecutor in the case claimed victory for the people of North Birmingham. “We’re happy for the citizens of Birmingham that someone is finally speaking on their behalf,” prosecutor George Martin told reporters after the trial ended. “This is a righteous verdict.”

Balch’s managing partner Stan Blanton said in statement, “Although our firm was not a party to the case, I and the rest of our partners, associates and staff are deeply disappointed in any conduct that does not adhere to our commitment to the rule of law and to the communities in which we are fortunate to live and work.” Yet Drummond blamed Balch for Roberson’s legal troubles. “We consider David to be a man of integrity who would not knowingly engage in wrongdoing,” according to a company statement, “When an environmentalist group raised allegations regarding our operations in the Birmingham area, Drummond responded by hiring one of Alabama’s most well-respected environmental law firms … We were assured the firm’s community outreach efforts on our behalf were legal and proper.”

If anything, what the trial exposed was just how intricate the ties were between powerful corporate interests such as Drummond and Balch and members of the Alabama political establishment, notably Sessions.

If justice was delivered for North Birmingham, it still may not feel that way to the people who continue to live there. Roberson and Gilbert may have been convicted on bribery charges, but the plan they carried out has worked so far. With the help of Sessions and other Alabama lawmakers, they blocked the EPA from mounting a large-scale cleanup — and Drummond has yet to pay a dime for any role it might have played in turning an impoverished neighborhood into a Superfund site.

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Bribery trial reveals Jeff Sessions’ role in blocking EPA action targeting major donor

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How Ann Coulter and the Far Right Are Using the Lefty Playbook to Troll Berkeley

Mother Jones

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Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, published in 1971 at the height of the counterculture movement, has long been required reading for community organizers on the left. It inspired activists with the labor movement, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. A young Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky and fawningly corresponded with him. But recently Alinsky has drawn a less likely group of devotees: the white nationalists and other bigots who make up the so-called alt-right.

After the white nationalist figure Nathan Damigo was filmed punching a female counterprotester at a provocative “free speech” rally this month in Berkeley, California, fueling a backlash online, his fans on the fringe message board 4chan/pol/ turned to Alinsky’s playbook. “Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is like Antifa’s Quran,” one 4channer wrote. “They follow his rules explicitly and inflexibly. Why not turn them back against them?” Everyone agreed that at the next scuffle they should spray female counterprotesters with silly string—an idea inspired by Alinsky’s Rule 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

“The Left is getting massively out-Alinskyed, and the hilarious thing is that this band of withered hippies, unemployable millennial safe-space cases, and unlovable + unshaven libfeminists don’t even know it,” wrote right-wing columnist Kurt Schlichter recently in TownHall. “Thank you, Andrew Breitbart. You yelled ‘Follow me!’ and led a movement that had previously been dominated by doofy wonks and bow-tied geeks over the top in a glorious bayonet charge against the paper tiger liberal elite.”

Begrudging respect for Alinsky and the leftist protest tactics he inspired is nothing new on the right; FreedomWorks, the Koch-funded political organization, reportedly handed out Rules for Radicals to tea party activists. But the alt-right appears to have really taken Alinsky’s strategic thinking to heart—or at least when they are not just straight-up hyping their next opportunity to beat the hell out of some antifa.

“A lot of the strategy of this site is based on it,” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, wrote in September, urging his followers to read the book. In November, another neo-Nazi site, The Right Stuff, published a detailed analysis of Alinsky’s rules, concluding that “the Alt-Right is already in something of an unholy alliance with (((Alinsky))).” (The “echo” parenthesis are used by white supremacists to single out Jews.)

Far-right provocateur Gavin McInnes, whose “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys were among those who waged bloody fights with antifa in Berkeley, described Alinsky to me as “an immoral human being”—but nevertheless professed to be a student of his writings. “This isn’t us taking on a brilliant book because we admire the guy,” he told me. “It’s us seeing what your tactics are and using them against you.”

Nowhere has that strategy more clearly been on display than in Berkeley, where supporters of Trump-boosting media provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter have gleefully taken their cue from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. Although the University of California-Berkeley canceled each of their planned speeches over mounting security concerns—exacerbated by the mayhem around Yiannopoulos’ scheduled appearance in March—officials worked to reschedule Coulter’s speech. She declined. On Monday, conservative student groups filed suit against the university, arguing that canceling Coulter’s talk violated their free-speech rights. Then Coulter vowed to show up anyway. Then she vowed not to come—on Wednesday the New York Times reported she was out. “Everyone who should believe in free speech fought against it or ran away,” Coulter declared. (Alinsky’s Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”) Then she told Fox News that she might still come: “I think I am still going to Berkeley, but there will be no speech.”

Though most of Alinsky’s devotees on the left eschew violence and laud, as he did, the passive resistance techniques of Mahatma Gandhi and the civil rights movement, his writings are not necessarily inconsistent with the alt-right’s and antifa’s embrace of street battles. “The future does not argue for making a special religion of nonviolence,” he wrote. “It will be remembered for what it was, the best tactic for its time and place.”

The alt-right’s repeated physical clashes with counterprotesters in Berkeley and elsewhere represent an evolution in tactics for what had been mostly an online movement. They also dovetail with the alt-right’s penchant for generating viral memes: An image of Kyle Chapman (a.k.a. Based Stick Man) pummeling an antifa counterprotester in Berkeley made him an alt-right celebrity and led to the birth of his own anti-antifa Proud Boys militia group, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights. (Chapman was arrested in Berkeley in mid April on an outstanding warrant for battery.) Thanks to additional publicity whipped up by Coulter, discussion and planning for the next Berkeley showdown has consumed 4chan since last week, with more than 100 recent posts dedicated to the subject, including talk of busing people in from around the country. No one seems deterred by Coulter’s waffling. “Folks are still going to Berkeley as a protest against the Domestic Terrorist Organization known as BAMN,” began one 4chan thread on Wednesday. “Spread the word. This changes nothing.”

“She’s apparently still going,” said another 4channer, “so we’re still on to bash some Antifa.”

“Regardless of Ann Couture’s (sic) decision,” Chapman wrote on Facebook, “we will have our rally. We will go back to MLK Civic Center Park and stand against these demons.”

“The whole idea of having Trump/free speech rallies in Berkeley is the historic nature of it,” a 4channer wrote earlier this month. “In 1968 the free speech movement happened in Berkeley to support communism. Now it is happening again in 2017 to support anti-communism, in hostile territory. It’s a battle on the front lines and the lefties help us make fun memes for the ages.” (Alinsky’s Rule 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”)

Activists on the right have much less experience than leftists with turning street protests into media tools. The civil rights, anti-war, and Occupy movements rose to prominence with the spread of photographs and videos documenting police brutality against protesters, from the use of fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama, to pepper spray by a police officer at the University of California-Davis. The viral video of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer getting punched is a relatively rare example of the radical left celebrating violence. Yet for the meme-makers of the far right, humiliating their rivals by presenting their street brawlers as physically dominant is the preferred theme: “We’re just braver, and that makes for better jokes,” says McInnes. “The left are the new Church ladies. They’ve been sheltered in their own bubble for so long, they don’t know fun.”

An alt-right meme based on the Damigo punching video

Few people on the far-right have done more to turn the ideas of the left against it than Yiannopoulos, who enjoyed a rising career of co-opting “identity politics” in the interest of white males, before a pedophilia scandal knocked him from his perch. On Friday, he doubled down on the strategy of appropriating leftist concepts, announcing that he will host a “free speech week” this year that may include “a tent city on UC-Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza.” The idea repurposes an approach last seen on a large scale in 2011 at UC Berkeley and other university campuses in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street—but this time, in service of the right to say nasty things about women, people of color, and Muslims.

Which points directly to another Alinskyism that the alt-right is now testing: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” As one proponent of the idea explained on the neo-Nazi site The Right Stuff: “We want to get to the point where being labeled by the establishment as a racist, sexist, or antisemite (sic) is a sign of having done something correct.”

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How Ann Coulter and the Far Right Are Using the Lefty Playbook to Troll Berkeley

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How Come Trump Didn’t Mention Arab Americans Cheering 9/11 in This Interview Two Days After Attacks?

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump did it again. And then again.

At a rally on Saturday in Birmingham, Alabama, the leader in the GOP presidential contest claimed that on September 11, 2001, “I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” Clearly, he meant thousands of Arab and Muslim Americans. Quickly he was challenged on this point—local police denied any such event had happened, no one could find news video of it, and various observers pointed out that this story was a specious internet rumor. Yet on Sunday on ABC News’ This Week, Trump stuck to his claim in an interview with George Stephanopoulos:

There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down—as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well covered at the time, George. Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.

In other words, Trump saw something that did not occur. And the fact-checkers pounced. Politifact.com awarded Trump a “Pants on Fire” rating for peddling this false anecdote. The Washington Post hit him with four Pinocchios—the lowest (or highest) mark a politician can receive for lying—for his “outrageous claim,” and it noted, “Trump has already earned more Four-Pinocchio ratings than any other candidate this year.”

It’s hard to figure out what this episode says about Trump. Is he delusional? Is he merely unable to admit any error? (Trumpites and other conservatives often respond to accusations of GOP fabrications by noting that Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign told a false story about landing in Bosnia in 1996 and coming under sniper fire. At least, Clinton, after being called out on this, acknowledged she had committed a “mistake.”) Or is Trump consciously making stuff up to play to nativist GOP voters? As two GOP strategists working against Trump noted in a recent memo, “Trump voters are exceedingly low-information voters. They do not read The Washington Post or Politico or even conservative blogs. They do not watch cable news rigorously.” To put it less politely, Trump voters are susceptible to his BS that reinforces their own assumptions and biases.

But if Trump really did see thousands of Americans cheering the traumatic demise of the World Trade Towers and the horrific deaths of thousands of their fellow citizens—which, of course, he did not—this did not seem to affect him greatly at the time. Two days after 9/11, Trump granted an interview to a German television station. With the smoke still rising from the remains, Trump was…well, completely sane. He described the horrors he had seen at Ground Zero. He noted that he was sending over 200 workers to help with the removal and rescue operation underway. He called for the rebuilding of a “majestic” project on the site. And when asked how the United States ought to respond, Trump calmly replied, “I think they have to respond quickly and effectively. They have to find out exactly what the cause was, who did it. And they have to go after these people because there is no other choice.”

You can watch here:

Notice what’s missing from Trump’s reaction? He says nothing about witnessing thousands of Americans celebrating the attack. True, he wasn’t asked directly about this. But had he actually seen such activity, he could have been expected to be seething about it, and he certainly did not bring it up here.

All of this is a reminder that once upon a time Trump was merely an arrogant, bombastic, celebrity real estate magnate, not a loony arrogant, bombastic, celebrity real estate magnate. Yet now he routinely says crazy crap that isn’t true and doubles or triples down when challenged. And sorry, fact-checkers, but so far none of this appears to register with his “low-information” fans. This fabulist remains the Republican front-runner.

(h/t @KatieAnnieOakly)

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How Come Trump Didn’t Mention Arab Americans Cheering 9/11 in This Interview Two Days After Attacks?

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The Science of Why New York’s Bagels Taste So Damn Good

Mother Jones

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MANHATTAN—New York City has the best bagels in America. This is a truth handed down from generation to generation. Why are the bagels here better than the bagels in Boston, Boise, Birmingham, or even cities that begin with letters other than B? Legend has it that it has something to do with the water that’s piped down here from upstate. That’s never really felt right. I’m not a water scientist but it just seems like some nonsense that sounds like it could be true so what the hell, sure, it’s true! Doctor Oz probably credits NY bagels to the water.

So, anyway, some cats from the American Chemical Society got together and ran some tests and spoke to some chefs and concluded that indeed it’s not the magical properties of the Empire State’s water supply that makes NYC bagels unique, but rather the unique competence of NYC bakers. Yes, the softness of the water plays a role but not an integral one. The baking method used in New York is just better than the baking method bakers in other cities use—but there is no reason why those bakers couldn’t start using the NYC method (with some slight modifications), or so sayeth the video.

Is this video accurate? I have no idea. I am not a professor of baked goods. It sounds maybe reasonable to me. It sort of makes sense, right? Because, yeah, New York has the best bagels but I’ve certainly had good bagels other places. But those bagels are normally the exception to the bagel culture of the area. I’ve definitely had one or two okay bagels in LA. Maybe those bakers are using the NY method? I don’t know. What do you think?

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The Science of Why New York’s Bagels Taste So Damn Good

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High School Police Ask Judge to Let Them Pepper-Spray and Arrest Unruly Students

Mother Jones

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When B.J. ambled into his fourth-period class at PD Jackson-Olin High School in Birmingham, Alabama, he could hardly have predicted that he would soon be handcuffed and crying, with pepper spray searing his eyes and nasal passages. Nor would he have guessed that by the day’s end he would be sequestered in a holding cell, vomiting from the chemicals.

Here’s how it happened, as described in court documents: One day in September 2010, “Mr. Cook,” a substitute teacher in the Birmingham City Schools, told B.J. (his initials), then a wiry 10th-grader, that he couldn’t be in the classroom until he tucked in his shirt. The teen obliged—dress violations were known to escalate at the school—but as he slipped back into the room a few minutes later, the sub heard someone among the rows mutter, “Fuck you, Mr. Cook.” Unsure who’d dissed him, he zeroed in on B.J. and summoned “Assistant Principal Gaston.”

Out in the hallway, Gaston subjected B.J. to a forced physical search. B.J. objected, and wriggled to loosen himself from the administrator’s grip. He tripped and landed facedown on the floor—whereupon Gaston took advantage of B.J.’s vulnerable position to check his back pockets. B.J.’s defiance led Gaston to call in backup. The kid soon found himself upright and pinned to a row of lockers by Gaston and a fellow administrator, “Assistant Principal Gates.”

That’s when School Resource Officer (SRO) Marion Benson arrived on the scene. Her face was the last thing B.J. saw before she blasted him with a cloud of pepper spray. He sunk to the ground in tears. If you try getting up, I am going to spray you again, she told him, her knee digging into B.J.’s back. She handcuffed him and led him to the main office.

“Woo! That’s the first macing of the year!” Mr. Gates remarked as the shackled teen sat in the office. Twenty minutes later, still wearing his chemical-infused clothes, B.J. was taken to the hospital, where staff said it was too late to do anything about the pepper spray, and then to a nearby detention center. He was held in a cell there until 7 p.m., when his grandmother came to pick him up.

This Was One of eight stories presented to US District Judge Abdul Kallon these past few weeks in a lawsuit whose outcome, which is expected in a decision Monday, may determine whether the city cops who work within the Birmingham school district as SROs can keep using pepper spray to break up fights and thwart what they consider disorderly conduct.

The suit, filed in 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleges that eight students, including B.J., suffered physically and emotionally from unnecessary use of pepper spray. It names six SROs, as well as Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper. In 2012, a judge granted the case class action status, which means the outcome will henceforth apply to all of the district’s students.

“We want it to be declared unconstitutional because it allows officers to spray people, specifically students, without considering a wide variety of factors—such as whether they are in a school environment, the fact that they are in a closed environment, and the fact that these things that they are accusing kids of doing and acting on are actually just student misconduct issues,” says Ebony Howard, the SPLC staff attorney representing the students.

Since 2006, Howard says, there have been at least 110 pepper-spray incidents in the district. At the very least, her team wants the judge to insist upon written guidelines that state explicitly the circumstances in which it would be appropriate to reach for the Freeze +P chemical agent the officers use. “We want training for these officers on adolescent development, de-escalation techniques, conflict management, and conflict resolution,” she told me. “Basically, we want them to be trained on how to actually be SROs, and to work in an environment where they have the tools to help calm down a conflict that do not involve spraying chemicals in kids’ faces.”

The modern police presence in schools emerged from the same crack-era hysteria that brought us mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and an explosion of the US prison population. During the early-to-mid-1990s, with juvenile arrests for violent crime on the rise and legislators shrilling about the so-called juvenile superpredators, more and more schools contracted with police departments to put uniformed officers on campus.

Looking back in 2013, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported that about 25 percent of existing SRO programs were originally created because of media-incited fears, and another 25 percent because of school rowdiness and vandalism. Only about 4 percent of districts and law enforcement agencies cited the level of violence in local schools as the motivation for initiating a program. (The rest of the programs were created for “other” reasons, such as a school taking advantage of grant money or taking part in a drug awareness program.)

The number of school resource officers deployed nationwide continued to surge into the early oughts. According to the CRS, there were about 12,000 SROs in 1997—by 2003, the number of officers had grown to nearly 20,000. When the Birmingham district began putting local police in its schools in 1996, it made what the authors of a Justice Department assessment would later describe as a “frequent and destructive mistake.” Like many other districts, it enlisted the cops without first working out their roles and responsibilities in a school setting. “When programs fail to do this, problems are often rampant at the beginning of the program—and often persist for months and even years,” the 2005 assessment warned.

A few years after that report appeared, the district’s then-interim superintendent Barbara Allen began to take notice of what had become an increasingly troublesome partnership. In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police were stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.

Indeed, in 2007-08, a whopping 513 students from the district landed in Jefferson County Family Court. This represented 82 percent of the referrals from schools to court in the county, even though only 25 percent of Jefferson County’s public school students attend Birmingham City Schools. Brian Huff, then a presiding judge, complained to the Birmingham News that fewer than 1 in 10 of those kids ever should have been arrested.

Allen knew she had a real problem on her hands when she learned that multiple school officials were heading to court at least once a week. “Other school systems aren’t arresting kids for small things; they handle it from within,” she told the Birmingham News in the spring of 2009. “We call the police.” The district’s high schools had a total of 12 SROs, plus two sergeants and a lieutenant, patrolling their hallways and grounds. (The same Birmingham News article quoted Mayor Larry Langford saying he would “pull officers off the streets and put them in the schools,” after the mayor had encountered graffiti and disrespectful students during a high school visit.)

After meeting with Judge Huff that summer to discuss the problem, Allen took action. That December, she persuaded the Birmingham PD to sign a “collaborative agreement,” which fleshed out, somewhat, the role of police in the schools. Notably, it acknowledged that pepper spray and cuffs were being used for minor offenses, and that teachers and administrators should be the ones addressing noncriminal violations in the future.

But the agreement had fatal flaws: For one, it didn’t detail how officers should act when their intervention was deemed necessary, so officers continued to behave in schools as they would on the streets. The document also had an “exceptional circumstances” clause, which gave police employees the right to exercise their discretion. The defense in the SPLC lawsuit is now pointing to this provision to argue that the officers have the green light to arrest and deal with students as they see fit.

IF POLICE OFFICERS happened upon a couple of 16-year-olds fighting off campus, they would be allowed to use pepper spray, so why would it be any different on a school campus? That’s a question posed by Michael Choy, the police department’s defense attorney, during the second week of the trial.

The court, Choy said, must remember that these students “are not children” but, rather, “big adults.” One of the former students in the case, he emphasized, would be testifying by video from a New York prison. The implicit message: These kids were the bad apples.

Choy’s comment was “very disturbing,” says Dennis Parker, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program. It reminds him of how police in Ferguson, Missouri, tried to portray Michael Brown as a hoodlum after one of their own shot the unarmed teenager. The tactic distracts from the question at hand, which is “whether or not the police or the SRO were acting in an appropriate way.”

The criminalization of minor student misconduct, and the effect it has on high school kids, is a topic Thomas Pedroni, an associate professor at Wayne State University’s College of Education, is studying in partnership with the ACLU. “Police set up a different environment in a school,” he explains. “It becomes less focused on nurturing and caring and growing, and more focused on control…It’s sort of tough in the environment of police presence to go, ‘Oh, no, we’re really a community of trust.'”

In many ways, Pedroni adds, the school-to-prison pipeline could be renamed the prison-to-prison pipeline, given how so many schools have adopted the sterile, suspicion-first qualities of juvenile detention centers.

This notion of a dehumanized high school experience played a central role in Howard’s legal strategy, especially as she aimed to convey the ripple of effects of a zero-tolerance school culture.

“When you use a tactic like chemical sprays in schools, what you do is you teach a kid who has been sprayed, a kid who may have been accidentally sprayed, a kid who saw another kid get sprayed, as well as a kid who just knows about the use of the chemical—all of those kids learn to distrust law enforcement officers,” Howard says. “They learn that they will not be treated fairly.”

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High School Police Ask Judge to Let Them Pepper-Spray and Arrest Unruly Students

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Burn Your Beatles Records!

Mother Jones

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Early August 1966, Christian groups, primarily in the Southern United States took to the streets to burn the sin out of their beloved Beatles records in response to John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

Birmingham disc jockeys Tommy Charles, left, and Doug Layton of Radio Station WAQY, rip and break materials representing the British pop group The Beatles, in Birmingham, Ala., Aug. 8, 1966. The broadcasters started a “Ban The Beatles” campaign. AP

Like all good moments of mass hysteria, getting a little context helps put things in perspective.

The quote originally appeared in March 1966, in part of an interview with Lennon published in the London Evening Standard. The interviewer, Maureen Cleave, commented that Lennon was at the time reading about religion. Here is the full, original quote from Lennon:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

In late July, five months after its original publication, a U.S. teen mag called Datebook republished the interview with Lennon. Turning to the tried and true method of generating scandal to gin up sales, Datebook put the “We’re more popular than Jesus” part of the quote on the cover. Woo-boy. Two Birmingham DJs picked up on the quote, vowing to never play the Beatles and on August 8th, started a “Ban the Beatles” campaign. Christian groups across the South rose up to protest the Beatles who, as it happened, were just about embark on what would be their last U.S. tour. Beatles records were burned, crushed, broken. Never a group to miss out on a good bonfire, the Ku Klux Klan got involved.

South Carolina Grand Dragon, Bob Scoggin of the Klu Klux Klan tosses Beatle records into the flames of a burning cross, in Chester, South Carolina, Aug. 11, 1966. The “Beatle Bonfire” was staged to take exception to a statement attributed to John Lennon, when he was quoted as saying that his group was more popular than Jesus. AP

On August 12, 1966 the Beatles set out on tour, meeting protests and stupid questions about the quote all along the way. It would be the last tour the Beatles would ever do in the United States, ending on August 29 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Young churchfolk from Sunnyvale on the San Francisco peninsula protest against the Beatles and John Lennon’s remark that The Beatles are “more popular than Jesus” outside Candlestick Park where the Beatles are holding a concert in San Francisco, Ca., Aug. 29, 1966. The picketers were seen by many of the teenagers but missed by the entertainers, who arrived and departed from a different direction. Some 25,000 fans went through the gates for The Beatles’ final U.S. performance on their tour. AP

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Burn Your Beatles Records!

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The Legacy of the Hobby Lobby Case: Protecting Anti-Gay Discrimination?

Mother Jones

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In his majority opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took pains to frame the ruling, exempting companies from complying with Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate if it violated the religious beliefs of their owners, as a narrow one. But gay and civil rights groups have long warned that a decision permitting such a religious exemption could have broad ramifications, potentially allowing employers to discriminate against gays. Now, their fears may be coming to pass.

“What we’ve seen since last week’s decision came down is that opponents of LGBT equality have pushed a misreading of that decision as having broadly endorsed discrimination against people, including LGBT people in the workplace,” says Ian Thompson, a legislative representative for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told Mother Jones that the Hobby Lobby ruling “opens the door for corporations to discriminate against anyone that doesn’t look, sound, or share the religious beliefs that they do. This isn’t a business agenda; it’s an extreme social agenda and it is deeply unpopular with the American people.”

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The Legacy of the Hobby Lobby Case: Protecting Anti-Gay Discrimination?

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