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Michigan Republicans Really, Really Want to Allow Concealed Guns in Schools

by hanhuogekennog Posted on February 11, 2013

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Damn the veto, full speed ahead for more guns in schools!

That may as well be the rallying cry for some Republican lawmakers in Michigan. GOP Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed legislation in mid-December that would have allowed concealed guns on the grounds of schools, churches, and daycare facilities. But State Rep. Greg MacMaster (R) is undeterred. He recently introduced the “Michigan School Protection Act,” which would allow licensed teachers and administrators to carry concealed pistols at school, the Associated Press reports. MacMaster, whose legislation has the support of numerous state GOP lawmakers, told the AP that his bill would let schools decide how to implement on-campus concealed carry policies. The speaker of the Michigan House, Republican Jase Bolger, has yet to embrace the new bill, saying lawmakers need to “take a breath” before moving ahead on the measure. But Bolger has also questioned the wisdom of making schools gun-free zones, suggesting he might be open to MacMaster’s legislation.

On December 13, the day before the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., the GOP-controlled Michigan legislature approved concealed-carry legislation for schools, churches, and daycare centers. Post-Newtown, citizens barraged Snyder’s office with emails and phone calls urging him to veto the bill, which he did. “While we must vigilantly protect the rights of law-abiding firearm owners, we also must ensure the right of designated public entities to exercise their best discretion in matters of safety and security,” Snyder said in a statement. “These public venues need clear legal authority to ban firearms on their premises if they see fit to do so.”

Snyder did sign two other gun-related measures at the time, one streamlining the background check process for handgun purchases and another easing the sale of rifles and shotguns between buyers and sellers in states bordering Michigan. During a recent visit to an elementary school, Snyder sounded bearish on the idea of more guns in schools. “I don’t view dwelling on guns as the big conversation we should be having,” he told MLive.com. “If you look at the tragedy at Sandy Hook and the issues there, one of the big things we need to look at is the issue of mental health, and the issues of how do we help kids that have needs and different challenges in their life.”

MacMaster’s isn’t the only divisive gun bill introduced by Michigan GOPers lately. In mid-January, 13 Republican state senators offered the “Michigan Firearms Freedom Act,” a measure that would exempt guns or ammunition made in Michigan from federal regulations. Michigan joined nearly three-dozen other states in introducing such legislation. The measure is, for now, a purely symbolic one: There are no gun or ammo makers in Michigan.

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Senator: Let’s Have a Targeted Killing Court

by hanhuogekennog Posted on February 8, 2013

The United States should set up a secret court that would consider the use of lethal force against American terror suspects abroad, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said Thursday at the Senate intelligence committee hearing on White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan’s nomination to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Having the executive be the prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner is very contrary to laws and traditions of this country,” King told Brennan. King suggested that the court would involve a “FISA-type process,” referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court that considers requests for surveillance against people who are suspected of working for foreign governments. “At least that would be some check on the activities of the executive.” The days, weeks, and months-long process of determining whether someone can be targeted, King suggested, meant that targeted killing was not like soldiers shooting each other on a traditional battlefield and should be subjected to some form of judicial accountability.

Brennan was negative to non-committal, telling King that although the idea was “worthy of discussion,” that courts were traditionally used for adjudicating guilt or innocence, not to prevent the sort of “imminent” threat Brennan claims lethal force is reserved for. A recently leaked Department of Justice memo on targeted killing, however, defines “imminence” as membership in a terrorist organization, not necessarily involvement in an unfolding plot that threatens American lives. Nor are courts used solely to adjudicate guiltâ&#128;&#148;King noted that judges also approve warrants.

When asked about the targeted killing process earlier in the hearing, Brennan said that the administration goes through “agony” before determining whether a strike should take place. But the agony isn’t great enough for Brennan to want someone outside the executive branch to double-check the administration’s decision. Speaking to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) later in the hearing, Brennan said “any American who joins Al Qaeda, will know full well that they have joined an organization which is at war with the United States.” That’s true, but saying someone has joined Al Qaeda isn’t the same as proving it.

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Americans spent 4 percent of household income on gas in 2012

by hanhuogekennog Posted on February 4, 2013

Americans spent 4 percent of household income on gas in 2012

By Philip Bump

In 2012, Chevron made $26.2 billion in profits. Exxon, $44.9 billion. Shell, $26.59 billion. At today’s prices, that’s enough to buy almost 25 billion gallons of gas in California.

Last year, Americans paid record-high average gas prices, a fact that is certainly linked to the oil companies’ massive profits.

How much did Americans spend on gas? From the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

Gasoline expenditures in 2012 for the average U.S. household reached $2,912, or just under 4% of income before taxes, according to EIA estimates. This was the highest estimated percentage of household income spent on gasoline in nearly three decades, with the exception of 2008, when the average household spent a similar amount. Although overall gasoline consumption has decreased in recent years, a rise in average gasoline prices has led to higher overall household gasoline expenditures.

EIA

Click to embiggen.

Four percent of household income went to gasoline in 2012. But here’s the kicker:

U.S. gasoline consumption fell in 2011 to 134.2 billion gallons, its lowest level since 2001. However, at the same time, EIA’s average city retail gasoline price rose 26.1% in 2011, and another 3.3% in 2012, when it reached $3.70 per gallon. The effect of the higher prices in 2011 and 2012 outweighed the effect of reduced consumption.

We are paying more for gas even though we’re using less. Allowing just three oil companies to rake in nearly $100 billion in profits.

Hat-tip: Ed Crooks.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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California levies record $1 million fine against Chevron for refinery fire

by hanhuogekennog Posted on February 1, 2013

California levies record $1 million fine against Chevron for refinery fire

By Susie Cagle

Nearly six months after a Chevron refinery erupted in flames in Richmond, Cailf., there’s a tiny bit of charred justice for residents of the San Francisco East Bay area.

In an announcement Wednesday, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) said it would be fining Chevron $963,200 for the fire — the biggest fine ever levied by the agency, and the biggest fine Cal/OSHA was even legally able to levy.

Cal/OSHA enforces workplace-safety law, and this judgment stemmed directly from 25 violations the agency said Chevron had committed. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The state said 11 of the violations were willful and that Chevron had disregarded known and obvious hazards, a category that carries a fine of $70,000 per instance. Twelve other violations were deemed serious, with fines ranging from $6,000 to $25,000 apiece. The other two violations were minor.

Cal/OSHA found that Chevron officials ignored their own reliability department’s urging in 2002 that they replace the pipe that ultimately failed. Company inspectors told managers that the line was vulnerable to corrosion.

The line had lost more than 80 percent of its thickness to corrosion when it finally ruptured, a separate federal investigation has found. …

The state also found several violations at the refinery that weren’t related to the fire, but which suggest that Chevron’s safety regimen was lax.

Among those were nine makeshift repairs of pipe leaks in which Chevron had tried to fix the problems with clamps, Cal/OSHA said. Such repairs should have been temporary, but “in some cases the clamps remained in place for years, rather than (Chevron) replacing the pipes themselves,” the agency said.

The judgment did not say whether Chevron’s own workers had actually made the situation worse by puncturing another pipe.

In a move that surprised no one, Chevron vowed to appeal the decision, specifically the “willful” characterization.

Chevron wasn’t the only passive-aggressive problem at this party. Cal/OSHA itself was criticized after the fire when it was discovered the agency had not fined a major oil company in 10 years, and had been inspecting refineries in about 50 hours each, compared to 1,000 hours spent on average by federal officials.

As for members of the general public who also suffered from Chevron’s black plumes — about 15,000 of whom sought medical attention at local hospitals — Chevron says it’s paid $10 million to area medical centers in compensation.

It’s a little bit of justice for poor, dirty Richmond, but it’s not likely to quell the unrest there. Two weeks ago, even Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin joined in a demonstration at the refinery protesting Chevron’s comically large money sacks of influence over local politics. The oil giant can build all the community gardens it wants — this town will still remember the time Chevron sent their kids to the hospital with acute respiratory distress, and then tried to buy the city council.

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Waste heat from cities can heat up other parts of the planet

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 28, 2013

Waste heat from cities can heat up other parts of the planet

By Susie Cagle

Cities aren’t perfectly efficient energy machines, you guys. They’re great, especially when transit and density make it possible for city dwellers to use less energy, but cities still release a lot of waste heat out of tailpipes and chimneys. And all that waste heat has to go somewhere.

According to a new study published in Nature Climate Change, that waste heat is disrupting the jet stream and warming up other parts of the world, thawing winters across northern Asia, eastern China, the Northeast U.S., and southern Canada. From Reuters:

That is different from what has long been known as the urban-heat island effect, where city buildings, roads and sidewalks hold on to the day’s warmth and make the urban area hotter than the surrounding countryside.

Instead, the researchers wrote, the excess heat given off by burning fossil fuels appears to change air circulation patterns and then hitch a ride on air and ocean currents, including the jet stream. …

[S]tudy author Aixue Hu of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado said in a statement that the excess heat generated by this burning in cities could change atmospheric patterns to raise or lower temperatures far afield.

Researchers say this is a “partial story” of where waste heat goes, but all that wandering heat adds up to, they say, a global temperature increase of about 0.02 degrees. I still love you, cities, but it wouldn’t hurt us to put on a sweater and take the bus, right?

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Mississippi and the State of Abortion 40 Years After Roe

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 22, 2013

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Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion throughout the United States. To mark the date, we’ve posted my dispatch from Jackson, Mississippi, where women may soon be unable to exercise the right Roe v. Wade guaranteed them, because the state is threatening to close its last abortion clinic.

Last April, Mississippi passed a new law requiring all doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The two doctors that provide abortions at JWHO live out of state and don’t have those admitting privileges, although the clinic already has a relationship with a local obstetrician who can admit women to the hospital in case of an emergency. When the law passed, the clinic knew it would not be able to comply. The local hospitals in this largely anti-abortion state refused to grant admitting privileges to abortion providers. A judge gave the clinic until mid-January to apply, but, as expected, no hospital would grant the privileges.

This was, I should note, the point of the law. Upon signing the legislation, Republican Gov. Phil Bryant called it “the first step in a movement, I believe, to do what we campaigned on—to say that we’re going to try to end abortion in Mississippi.”

Now Jackson Women’s Health Organization could be closed very soon. Last week, the Health Department completed its inspection and determined the clinic is not complying with the new law. This was expected; the clinic’s legal representatives from the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a motion asking the court to block enforcement of the law because it could not comply. The inspection begins the legal process to revoke the clinic’s license, but actually doing so will take until the first week of March, according to the clinic’s lawyers. The clinic is briefing the judge later this week, and expects that there will be a hearing or some sort of decision before March.

The goal in highlighting the Jackson Women’s Health Organization is to illustrate the state of abortion care 40 years after Roe. Mississippi is the most extreme example of a state where lawmakers have introduced restriction after restriction in the past decades, pushing providers to the point where they have one clinic and zero in-state abortion providers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state has the lowest abortion rate in the country.

Many people will say, “Oh yeah, well, it’s Mississippi, what do you expect?” But there are other states that aren’t too far away from this reality. Both North and South Dakota are also down to one clinic and zero in-state providers. The number of abortion providers in the country has declined 38 percent from its peak in 1982, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. Meanwhile, states have passed a record number of new abortion restrictions in the past two years: 92 new laws in 2011 and 43 in 2012. So although many women may have the right to access abortion, the actual opportunity to do so is becoming harder to come by.

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SEC Could Require Corporations to Disclose Their Dark Money

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 8, 2013

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In August 2011, a group of 10 law professors submitted a petition (PDF) to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging the agency to consider requiring publicly held companies to fully disclose their political spending to their investors. After the proposal received more than 320,000 public comments, an unprecedented number, the SEC placed it on its 2013 agenda on the Friday before Christmas.

As it stands now, corporations must publicly disclose much of their political spending, but there is no way to know their total spending, partly because they can cloak their contributions by channeling them through outside-spending groups with lax disclosure requirements. For example, the insurance giant Aetna handed over more than $7 million to the American Action Network and Chamber of Commerce to quietly influence recent elections; those donations were only revealed inadvertently.

The Corporate Reform Coalition, a collection of campaign-finace reform groups led by Public Citizen, is applauding the SEC’s willingness to consider the new rules. “Investors have been clamoring for this information from the SEC for some time,” said Robert Jackson, a Columbia University law prof who cosponsored the SEC petition, during a conference call organized by the coalition this morning.

Some corporations already voluntarily disclose all of their political spending; others argue that mandatory disclosure would be too burdensome. Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), a member of a newly formed House task force on election reform that’s taking aim at Citizens United and one of 42 members of the House to publicly support the SEC proposal, has rejected that argument, calling for the agency to “mandate uniform disclosure of a minimum dataset” of political spending.

Corporate response to shareholders’ demands for political spending disclosure, based on figures from the Center for Political Accountability.

While proponents of the proposal expect strong opposition from corporate America, they are hopeful that the SEC, influenced by what Pennsylvania state treasurer Rob McCord called a “moderate, centrist, good-government impulse,” will implement the new rule this year. One of the SEC’s four commissioners, Luis Aguilar, is already an outspoken proponent of uniform disclosure requirements. Without them, he’s said, “it is impossible to have any corporate accountability or oversight.”

And for all the controversy surrounding Citizens United, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly upheld the constitutionality of disclosure requirements as part of its ruling. (Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.) The CU decision explicitly acknowledged the importance of shareholders’ “corporate democracy” in “determining whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits.”

Rep. Sarbanes has called the SEC’s willingness to consider the rule-change proposal “an incredibly important development.” On this morning’s conference call, he referred to outside spending groups as “money drones”: “You’re walking down the street running your campaign, next thing you know they come at you with a lot of money, and the people operating those drones are hidden because we don’t have proper disclosure.”

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League of Women Voters ad asks Obama for climate action

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 4, 2013

League of Women Voters ad asks Obama for climate action

By Philip Bump

The League of Women Voters hopes to politely intrude on President Obama’s last weekend in Hawaii via this full-page ad in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Click to embiggen.

The ‘aina is part of our legacy, Mr. President, and yours. Climate change poses the greatest environmental challenge of our time. A recent report by the Pacific Islands Regional Climate Assessment (PIRCA) makes clear that the fish in our waters and the wildlife habitats in our highlands are threatened. Climate change endangers our very way of life. …

Mr. President, your legacy is our future. As you return to Washington, please use the authority you have as president to set standards for new and existing power plants under the Clean Air Act and protect our world. Please do what is pono.

I don’t know what some of those words mean.

Shortly before Christmas, the LWV also sent a letter to Obama to the same effect [PDF].

President Obama is known for his technological savvy, what with his Redditing and Twittering and campaign-winning. So I’m not sure that a letter is the best way to reach him. And I’m almost entirely confident that a newspaper ad is even worse. The LWV should instead have Snapchatted Obama (username: bigbho) and/or Flickr’d him.

Or something. I don’t know what those words mean either.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Climate change may ruin Lake Tahoe’s beautiful blueness

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 4, 2013

Climate change may ruin Lake Tahoe’s beautiful blueness

By Philip Bump

Aaron Hiler

Lake Tahoe is pretty. The water is clear; the mountains surrounding it are beautiful. For half a century, the environmental group Keep Tahoe Blue has fought to preserve the region’s environmental sanctity, primarily by putting bumper stickers on Volvos, as far as I can tell.

Turns out that those Volvos are doing more harm than good. From the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

Climate change could profoundly affect the Tahoe area, scientists say, taking the snow out of the mountains and the blue out of the water. …

New climate models show that in a worst-case scenario average temperatures in the Tahoe area could rise as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That’s equivalent to moving Lake Tahoe from its current elevation of 6,200 feet above sea level to 3,700 feet, climate scientists report in a special January issue of the journal Climatic Change. That’s as high as the peak of Contra Costa County’s Mount Diablo, which gets only an inch of snow a year. …

It’s not just the mountains that would look different in a warmer climate, according to Climatic Change. The worst-case scenarios also predict a devastating ecological collapse of the lake and loss of its signature clarity and blue color.

Many lakes undergo a process every year, or every few years, that keeps the lake water well-mixed. As water temperature changes through the seasons, it creates circulation in the lake. The warm water on top of the lake in summer cools off in the fall and sinks, mixing with cold deep water. In a warmer climate, the surface water won’t cool off enough to mix with deeper water.

Without that mixture, oxygen doesn’t penetrate the lake, changing its chemistry. So long clarity. So long blue.

alishav

Sadly, there’s not a lot that can be done besides stemming climate change globally. The process is already underway; last season, Tahoe ski resorts didn’t see natural snow until January. Happily, this season started off better.

As we’ve noted before, the problem isn’t confined to Tahoe. Warming temperatures are threatening mountain climates across the country. But few have environmental legacies — and environmental success stories — as rich as Lake Tahoe’s.

A recommendation, then, for those who wish to help: Get a “Keep Tahoe Blue” bumper sticker and paste it over your car’s tailpipe.

A wintry scene from the mountains near Tahoe. Enjoy it while you can.

Source

Climate change threatens Tahoe’s snow levels, lake clarity, Santa Cruz Sentinel

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A new year, a new Keystone XL blockade

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 3, 2013

A new year, a new Keystone XL blockade

By Susie Cagle

Late Wednesday night, the Keystone XL blockaders launched a new tree-sit in Diboli, Texas, coinciding with kickoff of a direct-action training camp.

Last month, TransCanada, which is constructing the southern leg of Keystone XL, got around an 85-day treetop blockade by rerouting the pipeline. With this new tree-sit, located 150 miles south of the old one, “blockaders have found a location around which the pipe cannot easily be rerouted,” activists said in a statement.

A number of protesters on the ground have been arrested so far today, but the two activists in the trees are still untouched, and there have not (yet) been reports of police using force against anyone. In the past, police have put blockade activists in choke holds, dragged them on the ground, and pepper-sprayed them into compliance.

Blockaders say this latest action is being done in solidarity with Idle No More, an ongoing movement of Canada’s First Nations peoples who have, among other battles, been fighting against tar-sands pipelines on their native land. “Rising up to defend our homes against corporate exploitation is our best and only hope to preserve life on this planet,” Tar Sands Blockade spokesperson Ron Seifert said in a statement. “We must normalize and embrace direct, organized resistance to the death machine of industrial extraction and stand with those like Idle No More who take extraordinary risk to defend their families and livelihoods.”

A diversity of tactics and an ability to roll with the punches pepper spray are necessary to any movement’s success. The sustained energy around this series of blockades in Texas is notable, especially after the group’s December defeat. As opposition against the Keystone XL pipeline heats up on the ground in 2013, it seems safe to say that it’ll stay strong in the trees, too.

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