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Woman Convicted for Laughing During Jeff Sessions’ Confirmation Hearing

Mother Jones

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Three women involved with the activist group Code Pink were convicted Wednesday on disruption charges after protesting Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing in January. One of the women, Desiree Fairooz, was found guilty of “disorderly or disruptive” conduct for laughing at Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R-Ala.) claim that Sessions had a well-documented record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.”

Federal prosecutors said Fairooz’s laughing caused enough of a disruption to turn heads and divert attention from the hearing. They also accused her of provoking further disturbance when she protested her eventual ejection from the hearing.

The campaign director for Code Pink, Ariel Gold, who was sitting near Fairooz during the January 10 hearing, described the laughs as merely a “reflex” and said they were fainter than a cough. HuffPost‘s Ryan J. Reilly was also present at the hearing and recorded Fairooz’s removal:

The other two women convicted on Wednesday, Tighe Barry and Lenny Bianchi, were found guilty on “parading or demonstrating” charges after dressing in Ku Klux Klan robes for the hearing. The New York Times reports they were not convicted of the same disorderly conduct charge as Fairooz because they stood up in costume before the hearing officially began.

All three women pleaded not guilty to the charges. They face up to 12 months in prison each.

Sessions’ nomination to lead the Justice Department was highly contested. Critics claimed he had a history of racist comments and actions, including blocking black judges from serving in federal court and working to prevent black people from voting.

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Woman Convicted for Laughing During Jeff Sessions’ Confirmation Hearing

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Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doesn’t Want to Combat Climate Change

Mother Jones

On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump has chosen Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican Conference, to be his Secretary of Interior. The Interior Department is responsible for three quarters of the nation’s public lands, and includes under its umbrella agencies like the National Parks Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Reclamation—all which are on the front lines of the fight against climate change.

But if her record in Congress is any indication, don’t expect McMorris Rogers to make climate science or conservation a priority. In 2008, after Al Gore earned a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, she dismissed the former vice president’s warnings about global warming. “We believe Al Gore deserves an ‘F’ in science and an ‘A’ in creative writing,” she joked.

One year later, McMorris Rodgers sang a slightly different tune, telling a group of students from her district that “we should be taking steps to reduce our carbon emissions”—but that’s been the extent of her climate awakening. In 2010, she earned plaudits from the Koch Brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity for opposing a cap-and-trade carbon-pricing system aimed at reducing emissions. In 2011 she voted three times against a resolution acknowledging that “climate change is happening and human beings are a major reason for it.” More recently, she co-sponsored the House bill to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency (which is not part of Interior) from regulating carbon emissions; EPA carbon regulations form the core of President Barack Obama’s climate policy.

McMorris Rodgers has explicitly voted against letting the Interior Secretary consider climate change when setting policy. In 2014, while supporting legislation designed to protect hunters’ access to public lands, she opposed an amendment stipulating that, “Nothing in this Act limits the authority of the Secretary of the Interior to include climate change as a consideration in making decisions related to conservation and recreation on public lands.”

Even the firsthand effects of climate change on her district have done little to spur the congresswoman to action. When forest fires swept through Eastern Washington in August, the state’s Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, argued that the fires, aided by tree-killing bugs and dry conditions, were a problem that would only get worse due to climate change—a position shared by the US Forest Service. McMorris Rodgers declined to make that connection when asked by reporters about Inslee’s comments, instead urging authorities to simply focus on “better forest management.”

McMorris Rogers, who has a four-percent lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters, has taken concrete steps to curb the power of the department she’s now set to run. She’s repeatedly backed legislation that would limit the president’s authority to protect public lands under the Antiquities Act, which President Barack Obama and his predecessors have used to create marine sanctuaries and to set aside large chunks of the West as national monuments. (The impetus for the most recent push was Obama’s creation of Basin and Range National Monument, to be run by the Bureau of Land Management, in central Nevada.) She also backed a proposal loosen environmental laws in national parks and wildlife refuges within 100 miles of the US–Mexican border. That’s not a good sign for fragile desert ecosystems—but it might come in handy when construction starts on Trump’s wall.

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Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doesn’t Want to Combat Climate Change

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Ohio rolls back green energy standards — cue widespread hair-tearing

Ohio rolls back green energy standards — cue widespread hair-tearing

Nikki Burch

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Congratulations, Ohio! Not only do you purportedly enjoy the most heinous unofficial state food in the union (please refer to item No. 52 on the linked list), you’re also vying for the position of Most Regressive Energy Policies in an Already Relatively Behind-the-Times Country. And that is definitively a contest in which no one wins.

Yesterday, the Ohio House of Representatives passed a bill that will freeze requirements that utilities gradually increase their use of renewable energy and energy efficiency. It rolls back a law passed by a wide majority of the state House and Senate in 2008. The state Senate has also approved the bill, and Gov. John Kasich (R) is expected to sign it.

On what basis could one oppose such a green energy policy? Let’s ask an Ohio Republican. From The Columbus Dispatch:

The standards needed to be changed because they “are simply not achievable or sustainable,” said Rep. Peter Stautberg, R-Anderson Township.

Alright, then! Let’s keep dreaming big, America.

Across the country, conservative organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have spent the past couple of years trying to roll back state renewable energy standards. Until yesterday, their efforts had largely failed.

To be fair to Ohioans, this outcome doesn’t appear to be representative of their actual desires at all — and thus the irony of American democracy strikes again. Last month, a survey commissioned by the Ohio Advanced Energy Economy showed that 72 percent of Ohio residents expressed a preference for pursuing solar and wind power as alternatives to coal and nuclear energy. Eighty-six percent supported the 2008 clean energy law as it was.

And many businesses — including Honda, one of the state’s largest employers — opposed the rollback as well, pointing out that the renewable mandate has spurred the growth of the state’s clean energy industry. Even the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association said the rollback “will drive up electricity costs for customers and undermine manufacturing competitiveness in Ohio.”

But even while clean energy is becoming more mainstream, some Republicans are still managing to make it more politically partisan – which threatens to undo significant progress made on clean energy at the state level. From The New York Times:

“It used to be that renewables was this Kumbaya, come-together moment for Republicans and Democrats,” said Michael E. Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. “The intellectual rhetoric around why you would want renewables has been lost and replaced by partisanship.”

Now that we’re all nice and depressed about the future of American green energy, who’d like to join me for a steaming bowl of Cincinnati chili? No one? I don’t blame you.


Source
Kasich agrees to sign bill revamping green-energy requirements, The Columbus Dispatch
A Pushback on Green Power, The New York Times
Ohio Legislature Votes To Delay And Weaken State’s Renewable Energy Law, The Huffington Post

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.

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Ohio rolls back green energy standards — cue widespread hair-tearing

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Watch Live: Darren Aronofsky Discusses “Noah” and Climate Change

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Watch Live: Darren Aronofsky Discusses “Noah” and Climate Change

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Baseball Player Takes 2 Days of Paternity Leave. Sports Radio Goes Ballistic.

Mother Jones

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New York Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy has been getting all sorts of flak on sports radio today for missing last night’s game against the Washington Nationals. Why? Because yesterday was his second (and final) day of paternity leave, which is apparently one too many.

Murphy got word late on Sunday night that his wife was in labor, and rushed to Florida to be with her. He was there for the birth of their first child the next day, Monday, which also happened to be Opening Day. The Mets had Tuesday off, and Murphy decided to stay with his wife Wednesday before flying back in time for today’s game, also against the Nationals, which he played in. Murphy told ESPN that he and his wife decided together that it would be best for him to stay the extra day. “Having me there helped a lot, and vice versa, to take some of the load off,” he said. “It felt, for us, like the right decision to make.”

For a number of sports commentators, however, Murphy’s decision seemed ludicrous. New York-based radio host Mike Francesa kicked off the outrage yesterday afternoon, devoting his entire WFAN show to asking, exasperatedly, why on earth a man would need to take off more than the few hours during which his child is actually born. “For a baseball player, you take a day. All right. Back in the lineup the next day. What are you doing? What would you be doing? I guarantee you’re not sitting there holding you’re wife’s hand.”

“You’re a major league baseball player. You can hire a nurse to take care of the baby if your wife needs help,” he said. “I don’t see why you need…What are you gonna do? Are you gonna sit there and look at your wife in the hospital bed for two days? What are you gonna do?

Repeating this question at least five more times over the course of a 20-minute segment, Francesa also continued to confuse maternity and paternity leave. Noting that it’s possible for the lucky few to stagger their paternity leave rather than using it in one chunk, Francesa was dumbfounded: “What do you do? You work the next day, then you take off three months, to do what? Have a party? ‘The baby was born…But I took maternity leave three months later.’ For what? To take pictures? I mean, what would you possibly be doing? That makes no sense. I didn’t even know there was such a thing.” (The full clip is above.)

Hosts of WFAN’s “Boomer & Carton” spent their morning show today piling on to the criticism. “To me, and this is just my sensibility: 24 hours,” Craig Carton said. “You stay there, baby’s good, you have a good support system for the mom and the baby. You get your ass back to your team and you play baseball.”

Cohost and former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason thought even 24 hours was too much time: “Quite frankly, I would’ve said, ‘C-section before the season starts. I need to be at Opening Day.'”

The Mike and Mike show on ESPN Radio also devoted tons of airtime to scrutinizing the nondrama. Cohost Mike Golic, a former NFL defensive lineman, weighed in: “If you wanna be there for the birth of your child, I have zero problem with it. That said, when the baby is born…The baby was born on Monday. And he didn’t play in a game on Wednesday? This is just me, I would have been back playing.”

Notably, the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the players association allows for three days of paternity leave. That’s better than most jobs—only about 13 percent of workplaces offer paternity leave at all, and the United States is one of four countries in the world that doesn’t mandate leave for new moms and dads.

For his part, Murphy seems to be shrugging off the criticism: “We had a really cool occasion yesterday morning, about 3 o’clock. We had our first panic session,” Murphy told ESPN. “It was just the three of us at 3 o’clock in the morning, all freaking out. He was the only one screaming. I wanted to. I wanted to scream and cry, but I don’t think that’s publicly acceptable, so I let him do it.”

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Baseball Player Takes 2 Days of Paternity Leave. Sports Radio Goes Ballistic.

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I Can’t Believe Terry McAuliffe Is Going to Be Governor of Virginia

Mother Jones

Terry McAuliffe and I go way back. I first started writing about him in 1997, when Mother Jones assigned me to look into a lawsuit in DC Superior Court in which McAuliffe, the Democrats’ super-fundraiser, was being sued by some of his business associates. That story turned into something much bigger. I went down the rabbit hole of McAuliffe’s business dealings, probing his relationship with a pension fund run by a union he raised lots of money from—a money trail that ended up making McAuliffe part of my life for over a year. During that time, he never returned one of my phone calls and I never had the opportunity to meet in person the glad-handing, boyish “Macker,” who first drew headlines by wrestling an alligator for a political donation. Nonetheless, the time I spent covering McAuliffe—who became head of the Democratic Party during George W. Bush’s first term—has left me dumbfounded that he (according to the polls) is poised to become the next governor of Virginia.

Allow me to explain. McAuliffe represents an unseemly slice of Washington. His primary role in politics for the past two decades or more has been raising money—most notably, for the Clintons. He cooked up the idea of essentially renting out the Lincoln bedroom during the Clinton administration as a fundraising vehicle, and he smashed all previous presidential fundraising records in the process. When McAuliffe was the Dems’ top fundraiser, a campaign finance scandal besieged the Clinton White House. Coincidence? No. McAuliffe was all about pushing the envelope when it came to the political money chase.

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I Can’t Believe Terry McAuliffe Is Going to Be Governor of Virginia

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Chart of the Day: The Collapse of the American Middle Class

Mother Jones

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Via Harrison Jacobs, here’s a recent study showing the trend in income segregation in American neighborhoods. Forty years ago, 65 percent of us lived in middle-income neighborhoods. Today, that number is only 42 percent. The rest of us live either in rich neighborhoods or in poor neighborhoods.

This is yet another sign of the collapse of the American middle class, and it’s a bad omen for the American political system. We increasingly lack a shared culture or shared experiences, and that makes democracy a tough act to pull off. The well-off have less and less interaction with the poor outside of the market economy, and less and less empathy for how they live their lives. For too many of us, the “general welfare” these days is just an academic abstraction, not a lived experience.

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Chart of the Day: The Collapse of the American Middle Class

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This Map From 1812 Is Missing a Whole Continent

1812 was a weird year. The U.S., as a country, was still a baby. For the second time, America was at war with the British, and Canada had just burned down the White House. Looking back after 200 years, this mapmade by esri, provides a view of how things have changed: it’s an interactive window on political geography, that layers the old and the new.

So how was the world of 1812 different from today? Well, for one, the U.S. was much, much smaller.

Photo: esri

The U.S., in green, is just a fraction of its current size. Louisiana, now part of the U.S., fresh off the Louisiana purchase of 1803, is in yellow. But off to the west, large tracts of land were still controlled by Spain, while the northwest was under British control.

North America wasn’t the only country with shifting political boundaries. Australia, until 1824, was known as New Holland.

Photo: esri

In 1812, European mapmakers like John Pinkerton (who published the older map) were lacking in knowledge of certain parts of the planet. Colonial interest in Africa didn’t reach its fever pitch until a few decades later, and in 1812, a mapmaker could get away with leaving blank huge parts of sub-Saharan Africa and labeling them “Unknown Parts.”

Photo: esri

In Africa, Eurocentric mapmakers at least thought it was worth noting what they didn’t know. But, elsewhere, whole parts of the Earth were missing. The map of 1812 was shorter than the world as we know it. The North was cut off past Svalbard, and Antarctica is entirely absent, despite the fact that the southern continent was discovered nearly half a century earlier. Then again, even today maps often skip Antarctica, even though it’s a fair bit larger than the U.S.

Photo: esri

Photo: esri

More from Smithsonian.com:

170 Years of America’s Evolution In One Animated Gif
Today We Celebrate the Time Canada Burned Down the White House

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This Map From 1812 Is Missing a Whole Continent

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The Scary Truth About Antibiotic Overprescription

Mother Jones

When a patient complains of a sore throat or bronchitis, doctors prescribe antibiotics much more often than is medically necessary. That’s the main takeaway of a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Findings from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey reveal that doctors prescribed antibiotics to 60 percent of sore throat patients—despite the fact that the drugs are only thought to be necessary in about 10 percent of cases. For acute bronchitis, antibiotics are not recommended at all, yet the researchers—a team from Harvard—found that doctors prescribed antibiotics to an astonishing 73 percent of patients diagnosed with the condition.

The number of doctor visits for acute bronchitis tripled between 1996 to 2010, from about 1.1 million visits to 3.4 million visits. The number of sore throat visits actually declined from 7.5 percent of all visits in 1997 to 4.3 percent in 2010—and yet the rate of antibiotic prescription remained consistent.

Another interesting finding: the growing popularity of expensive, broad-spectrum antibiotics such as azithromycin over tried-and-true strep-targeting drugs like penicillin. Last year, the New York Times noted that azithromycin “may increase the likelihood of sudden death” in adults who have or are at risk for heart disease. In that piece, Dr. John G. Bartlett, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told the Times that he believed that overprescription of azithromycin could also contribute to antibiotc resistance. “We use azithromycin for an awful lot of things, and we abuse it terribly,” he said. “It’s very convenient. Patients love it. ‘Give me the Z-Pak.’ For most of where we use it, probably the best option is not to give an antibiotic, quite frankly.”

If the looming threat of antibiotic resistance isn’t reason enough for concern about doctors’ free hand with antibiotics, there’s also the considerable cost to our healthcare system—an estimated $500 million for antibiotics prescribed unnecessarily for sore throat alone between 1997 and 2010. If you include the cost of treating the side effects of unnecessary antibiotics such as diarrhea and yeast infections, the study’s authors estimate that the cost would increase forty-fold.

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The Scary Truth About Antibiotic Overprescription

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Dems plan to talk about climate action during August, Republican deniers plan to talk nonsense

Dems plan to talk about climate action during August, Republican deniers plan to talk nonsense

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Democrats are betting that Americans are smart enough to understand climate change.

Democrats are planning to talk, talk, and talk some more about climate change while Congress is recessed for the month of August.

The planned chorus of warnings about the dangers of global warming is intended to generate support for President Obama’s climate plan, including proposed regulations on coal-burning power plants. The Democrats also plan to mock their Republican counterparts for saying really stupid stuff about the climate. From Politico:

The full-court press shows that liberals have learned from past August congressional recesses, when Republicans, aided by the tea party, out organized Democrats and managed to demonize cap and trade and blame them for high gas prices. …

The strategy is two-fold. First, liberals hope to better articulate the threats posed by climate change to the average citizen, including sea level rise, drought and wildfires. Second, they plan to call out Republicans in Congress who are skeptical about climate change science. …

Organizing for Action, the successor to Obama’s campaign arm, is planning a “national action” day Aug. 13, which will focus on climate change.

Ivan Frishberg, climate change campaign manager at OFA, said the group is organizing events in the states and districts of the 135 lawmakers it has labeled “climate deniers” as part of the action day. The events are aimed at “holding them accountable” for questioning climate science, he said.

The official Republican plan is to avoid the topic of climate change, but some GOP members of Congress just can’t seem to stop saying dumb things on the topic. From a followup article in Politico:

Republican strategists have laid out an aggressive game plan for seizing the high ground on energy during the August recess: talk about gas prices and jobs, jobs, jobs.

But some Republicans are straying from the script, spouting off instead about the Book of Genesis, claims about scientific conspiracies and arguments that the Earth is cooling. And they show no signs of stifling their skepticism — even at the risk of providing a stream of YouTube-worthy sound bites that play into Democrats’ own strategy, which includes painting the GOP as the anti-science party. …

On the other hand, scoffing at climate science is popular enough with the party base that many congressional Republicans hesitate to openly challenge the skeptics. One longtime Republican operative explained that even GOP lawmakers’ most extreme statements about climate change “play well” among conservatives.

Still, some Republicans are sounding the alarm.

“It’s dawning on us that we’re going to lose people who are focused on the future — that would be young people — if we continue in this disputing of the science,” said former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who wants his party to support a carbon tax as a more free-market alternative to Obama’s proposed regulations. “We’re going to lose credibility. We’re going to lose the sense that we have anything to offer.”

Sing it, Democrats.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Dems plan to talk about climate action during August, Republican deniers plan to talk nonsense

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