Author Archives: ShaniTasman

Flint’s mayor, who promised to clean up its water problems, faces a recall election.

by ShaniTasman Posted on November 7, 2017

Kathleen Hartnett White, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality, stammered through her confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

When Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, a Democrat, asked if she believes climate change is real, she wavered but settled on the right answer: “I am uncertain. No, I’m not. I jumped ahead. Climate change is of course real.”

That’s a surprise. Hartnett White, a former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has a long history of challenging climate science and promoting fossil fuels. Notably, she has said that carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant.

But that’s not to say she’s made peace with established science. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, quizzed Hartnett White over how much excess heat in the atmosphere is absorbed by oceans. “I believe there are differences of opinions on that,” she said, “that there’s not one right answer.” For the record, the number is about 90 percent.

Then things got bizarre. Appearing frustrated with equivocating answers, Whitehouse pressed her on basic laws of nature, like whether heat makes water expand. “I do not have any kind of expertise or even much layman study of the ocean dynamics and the climate-change issues,” she said.

Watch below, if you dare:

After the hearing, Whitehouse tweeted, “I don’t even know where to begin … she outright rejects basic science.”

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Flint’s mayor, who promised to clean up its water problems, faces a recall election.

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Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System

by ShaniTasman Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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If Sandra Bland indeed committed suicide after spending three days in a Texas jail, as the Harris county medical examiner determined last week, her death fits a pattern: Half of all suicides behind bars occur within the first 14 days of custody. Twenty-three percent happen within the first 24 hours following an arrest. And like two-thirds of the 750,000 people in US jails, Bland had not yet been convicted of any crime.

Bland had two options to get out of jail. The court set a $5,000 bond. If she had the money, which she didn’t, she could have posted it and gotten it back when she appeared for trial. Alternately, she could have paid a bail bondsman a 10 percent fee to post bond for her—$500 that she or her family would not get back. Her family’s attorney has said that they were working on trying to secure the fee to have her released.

This system, in which people either stay locked up or pay money to a private company to get out, is almost entirely unique to the United States. The Philippines is the only other country with something similar. In Canada, acting as a bail bondsman can earn you two years in prison on a charge equivalent to bribing a juror. “We don’t have a system currently that does a decent job of separating who is dangerous and who isn’t,” Tim Murray, director of the Pretrial Justice Institute, told me when I wrote about the commercial bail industry. “We only have a system that separates those who have cash and those who don’t.”

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Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What Sandra Bland’s Death Says About Our Broken Bail System