Category Archives: Holmes

7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

by SoniaAlarcon Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of Baltimore’s upheaval, President Obama, among others, reminded the country that the city’s longstanding economic inequality was beneath the response to Freddie Gray’s death. “This is not new,” Obama said. “This has been going on for decades.”

In a new study published this week, a group of Harvard economists quantified Baltimore’s problem with economic mobility. Of the 100 largest counties in the country, they found, Baltimore was where children in low-income households faced the worst odds in terms of upward mobility, followed by Mencklenburg, North Carolina; Hillsborough, Florida; Orange, Florida; and Cook, Illinois.

Check out The Upshot‘s interactive map of the Harvard study findings.

That’s just one of many sobering measures of life for some in Baltimore, as the Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, and others have pointed out in recent days. Here are a few examples:

Life expectancy in 15 Baltimore neighborhoods, including the one where Freddie Gray lived, is shorter than in North Korea, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. In eight Baltimore neighborhoods, the life expectancy rate is worse than in Syria.

Christopher Ingraham/Wonkblog

Baltimore teens between 15 and 19 years old face poorer health conditions and a bleaker economic outlook than those in economically distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China, and South Africa, according to recent research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Teens in Baltimore, along with Johannesburg, saw the highest prevalence of sexual violence, substance abuse, depression, and PTSD. They were also most likely to report witnessing community violence.

Vocativ

In 2014, Baltimore—a city where the unemployment rate (8.1 percent) is nearly one and a half times than the national rate (5.5 percent)—had one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor in the country, according to the Brookings Institution. The typical Baltimore resident in the bottom fifth of earners made $13,588 in 2013, whereas those in top 5 percent made an average of $166,924 that year.

In 2010, Baltimore had Maryland’s highest rate of arrests for marijuana possession, and Maryland had one of the highest such arrest rates in the country, according to a 2013 report by the American Civil Liberties Union.

American Civil Liberties Union, 2010

Baltimore incarcerates a greater portion of its population than New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles County, according to the Justice Policy Institute. It also has one of the highest inmate populations in the country, according to the latest available Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

Justice Policy Institute

When it comes to income inequality between blacks and whites, Baltimore is not alone. As FiveThirtyEight reported, this racial disparity is common in cities where at least 10 percent of the population is black.

Ben Casselman/FiveThirtyEight

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7 Charts Explaining Baltimore’s Economic and Racial Struggles

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How the Aurora Mass Shooting Cost More Than $100 Million

by mlodyseo7 Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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What Does Gun Violence Really Cost?


16 Charts That Show the Shocking Cost of Gun Violence in America


This Is What It’s Like to Survive a Gunshot


Methodology: the Data Behind Our Investigation


Watch: The Total Cost of Gun Violenceâ&#128;&#148;in 90 Seconds

“We focus on the proceedings. We focus on the death penalty. We focus on the perpetrator. But we don’t focus on the people affected.”

That was how Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was among the 12 people murdered in a movie theater in July 2012, described the American public’s perception as the trial of mass shooter James Holmes got underway on Monday in Aurora, Colorado. It’s a fair point given the inordinate attention that such killers crave, and tend to get, from the media. Yet as Phillips also noted, “that ripple effect of how many people are affected by one act by one person, one animal, is incredibly large.”

She’s right—not just in terms of the trauma and suffering borne by the victims (an additional 58 wounded and 12 others injured in the chaos), their families, and their communities, but also in terms of the literal cost. The price tag for what was one of the worst mass murders in US history is in fact stunningly high: well over $100 million, according to our groundbreaking investigation into the costs of gun violence published earlier this month.

For a quick explanation of the data behind the large sums our country pays for this problem, watch the following 90-second video, with more details on the Aurora tally continuing just below:

The economic impact of Aurora: For starters, long before the attorneys gave opening statements this week, legal proceedings for Holmes had already topped $5.5 million back in February, including expenses related to the unusually large pool of 9,000 prospective jurors called for the case. Add to that the total costs for each of the 12 victims killed: At an average of about $6 million each, that’s another $72 million. For the 58 who survived gunshots and were hospitalized, with an average total cost for each working out to about $583,000, add another $33 million. (Costs for some of the gunshot survivors may have varied widely, of course.) And these figures don’t even begin to account for what the city of Aurora, the state of Colorado, and the federal government have since spent on security and prevention related to the attack.

Indeed, a mass shooting like the one in Aurora doesn’t just have an outsize psychological impact but also a financial one. And these days, fiscal conservatives may want to note, we’re paying that price more often.

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How the Aurora Mass Shooting Cost More Than $100 Million

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

by JoannWreford Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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When most of us think of Mexican food, we visualize tacos, burritos, and chiles rellenos. But we should probably add cucumbers, squash, melons, and berries to the list—more or less the whole supermarket produce aisle, in fact. The United States imports more than a quarter of the fresh fruit and nearly a third of the vegetables we consume. And a huge portion of that foreign-grown bounty—69 percent of vegetables and 37 percent of fruit—comes from our neighbor to the south.

Not surprisingly, as I’ve shown before, labor conditions on Mexico’s large export-oriented farms tend to be dismal: subpar housing, inadequate sanitation, poverty wages, and often, labor arrangements that approach slavery. But this week, workers in Baja California, a major ag-producing state just south of California, are standing up. Here’s the Los Angeles Times: “Thousands of laborers in the San Quintín Valley 200 miles south of San Diego went on strike Tuesday, leaving the fields and greenhouses full of produce that is now on the verge of rotting.”

In addition to the work stoppage, striking workers shut down 55 miles of the Trans-Peninsular Highway, a key thoroughfare for moving goods from Baja California to points north, the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada (in Spanish) reported after the strike started on March 17.

The blockade has been lifted, at least temporarily. But the “road remains hard to traverse as rogue groups stop and, at times, attack truck drivers,” the LA Times reports. And the strike itself continues. The uprising is starting to affect US supply chains. An executive for the organic-produce titan Del Cabo Produce, which grows vegetables south of the San Quintín Valley but needs to traverse it to reach its US customers, told the Times that the clash is “creating a lot of logistical problems…We’re having to cut orders.” And “Costco reported that organic strawberries are in short supply because about 80% of the production this time of year comes from Baja California,” the Times added. The US trade publication Produce News downplayed the strike’s impact, calling it “minor.”

Meanwhile, the strike’s organizers plan to launch a campaign to get US consumers to boycott products grown in the region, mainly tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, inspired by the successful ’70s-era actions of the California-based United Farm Workers, headed by Cesar Chavez, La Jornada reported Tuesday. And current UFW president Arturo Rodriguez has issued a statement of solidarity with the San Quintín strikers.

Such cross-border organizing is critical, because the people who work on Mexico’s export-focused farms tend to be from the same places as the people who work on the vast California and Florida operations that supply the bulk of our domestically grown produce: the largely indigenous states of southern Mexico. And the final market for the crops they tend and harvest is also the same: US supermarkets and restaurants.

In a stunning four-part series last year, LA Times reporter Richard Marosi documented the harsh conditions that prevail on the Mexican farms that churn out our food. He found:

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.
Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.
Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.
Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences, and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.
Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

As for their counterparts to the north, migrant-reliant US farms tend to treat workers harshly as well, as the excellent 2014 documentary Food Chains demonstrates. The trailer, below, is a good crash course on what it’s like to be at the bottom of the US food system. In honor of National Farm Worker Awareness Week, the producers are making it available for $0.99 on iTunes. And here‘s an interview with the film’s director, Sanjay Rawal, by Mother Jones‘ Maddie Oatman.

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

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5 Must-See True Crime Documentaries to Catch After "The Jinx"

by DylanFreeling Posted on March 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sunday’s finale of the HBO documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst ended with the eccentric protagonist muttering a seeming confession to three murders over the last 30 years.

“What the hell did I do?” Durst said. “Killed them all, of course.”

The revelation culminated an eight-year investigation into the life and trials of Durst, the estranged son of a New York real estate dynasty. He has maintained his innocence in the 1982 disappearance of his first wife and was acquitted in the 2001 slaying of Morris Black in Galveston, Texas. But Durst was arrested on Saturday, a day before the finale aired, in a New Orleans hotel after new evidence emerged that law enforcement officials allege linked him to the 2000 murder of confidante Susan Berman. On Monday, Los Angeles prosecutors charged Durst with first-degree murder in California, in addition to weapons charges in Louisiana.

All eyes will surely stay glued to Durst’s case as it unfolds, but The Jinx, a well-paced journalistic masterpiece, is over. The inevitable question for today’s budding Sherlock Holmes becomes: What to watch next?

Since True Detective reportedly won’t return until this summer, and the second season of Serial isn’t out yet, here are a few true-crime documentaries to check out now:

Central Park Five

The 2012 Ken Burns documentary looks into the 1989 case of five black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park. The film, which is on Netflix, takes a look at the case and its aftermath from the perspectives of the accused, whose convictions were later tossed out after a convicted rapist confessed to the crime.

Into The Abyss

Acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog dives into the aftermath of a triple homicide in the small city of Conroe, Texas as part of a larger examination into capital punishment in the United States. This 2011 doc is still on Netflix.

The Imposter

A 13-year-old boy in Texas disappears in 1994, then reportedly resurfaces three years later in Spain. But that’s not the whole story. A French con artist tells all in this gripping 2012 documentary, which can be seen on Netflix.

The Paradise Lost trilogy

In this three-part series, renowned filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky focus on the infamous case of the “West Memphis Three,” a trio of teenagers who were convicted of the brutal triple homicide in 1993 of three young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. The three men were later freed after 18 years in prison. You can find this one on Amazon Prime.

The Thin Blue Line

A throwback from 1988, Errol Morris investigates the questionable conviction of Randall Dale Adams, who was wrongly sentenced to life in prison for killing a Dallas police officer in 1976. The film, which is on Netflix, played a role in exonerating Adams a year later.

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5 Must-See True Crime Documentaries to Catch After "The Jinx"

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Inside the Bizarre Cow Trials of the 1920s

by MaxieKnqzqbb Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

From a 1920 USDA publication titled, “Runts—and the Remedy”

A version of this article was originally published on Gastropod.

Something extremely bizarre took place in the early decades of the 20th century, inspired by a confluence of trends. Scientists had recently developed a deeper understanding of genetics and inherited traits; at the same time, the very first eugenics policies were being enacted in the United States. And, as the population grew, the public wanted cheaper meat and milk. As a result, in the 1920s, the USDA encouraged rural communities around the United States to put bulls on the witness stand—to hold a legal trial, complete with lawyers and witnesses and a watching public—to determine whether the bull was fit to breed.

In 1900, the average dairy cow in America produced 424 gallons of milk each year. By 2000, that figure had more than quadrupled, to 2,116 gallons. In the latest episode of Gastropod—a podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history—we explore the incredible science that transformed the American cow into a milk machine. But we also uncover the disturbing history of prejudice and animal cruelty that accompanied it.

Livestock breeding was a normal part of American life at the dawn of the 20th century, according to historian Gabriel Rosenberg. The United States, he told Gastropod, was “still largely a rural and agricultural society,” and farm animals—and thus some more-or-less scientific forms of selective breeding—were ubiquitous in American life.

Meanwhile, the eugenics movement was on the rise. Founded by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, eugenics held that the human race could improve itself by guided evolution—which meant that criminals, the mentally ill, and others of “inferior stock” should not be allowed to procreate and pass on their defective genes. America led the way, passing the first eugenic policies in the world. By the Second World War, 29 states had passed legislation that empowered officials to forcibly sterilize “unfit” individuals.

Combine the growing population, the desire for cheap meat and milk, and the increasing popularity of eugenics, and the result, Rosenberg said, was the “Better Sires: Better Stock” program, launched by the USDA in 1919. In an accompanying essay, “Harnessing Heredity to Improve the Nation’s Live Stock,” the USDA’s Bureau of Animal Industry proclaimed that, each year, “a round billion dollars is lost because heredity has been permitted to work with too little control.” The implication: Humans needed to take control—and stop letting inferior or “scrub” bulls reproduce!

The “Better Sires: Better Stock” campaign included a variety of elements to encourage farmers to mate “purebred” rather than “scrub” or “degenerate” sires with their female animals. Anyone who pledged to only use purebred stock to expand their herd was awarded a handsome certificate. USDA field agents distributed pamphlets entitled “Runts—and the Remedy” and “From Scrubs to Quality Stock,” packed with charts showing incremental increases of dollar value with each improved generation as well as testimonials from enrolled farmers.

The USDA’s script for prosecuting an inferior bull. The document was unearthed by Duke historian Gabriel Rosenberg, who is writing a book on the subject.

By far the most peculiar aspect of the campaign, however, came in 1924, when the USDA published its “Outline for Conducting a Scrub-Sire Trial.” This mimeographed pamphlet, which Rosenberg recently unearthed, contained detailed instructions on how to hold a legal trial of a non-purebred bull, in order to publicly condemn it as unfit to reproduce. The pamphlet calls for a cast of characters to include a judge, a jury, attorneys, and witnesses for the prosecution and the defense, as well as a sheriff, who should “wear a large metal star and carry a gun,” and whose role, given the trial’s foregone conclusion, was “to have charge of the slaughter of the condemned scrub sire and to superintend the barbecue.”

In addition to an optional funeral oration for the scrub sire and detailed instructions regarding the barbecue or other refreshments (“bologna sandwiches, boiled wieners, or similar products related to bull meat” are recommended), the pamphlet also includes a script that begins with the immortal lines: “Hear ye! Hear ye! The honorable court of bovine justice of ___ County is now in session.” The county’s case against the scrub bull is laid out: that he is a thief for consuming “valuable provender” while providing no value in return, that he is an “unworthy father,” and that his very existence is “detrimental to the progress and prosperity of the public at large.” Several pages and roughly two hours later, the trial concludes with the following stage direction: “The bull is led away and a few moments later a shot is fired.”

Within a month of publication, the USDA reported receiving more than 500 requests for its scrub-sire trial pamphlets. Across the country, the court of bovine justice was convened at county fairs, cattle auctions, and regional farmers’ association meetings, forming a popular and educational entertainment.

These bull trials may seem like a forgotten, bizarre, and ultimately amusing quirk of history, but, as Rosenberg reminded Gastropod, “They are talking about a lot more than just cattle genetics here.”

Indeed, the very same year—1924—that the USDA published its “Outline for Conducting a Scrub-Sire Trial,” the state of Virginia passed its Eugenical Sterilization Act. Immediately, Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, Director of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, filed a petition to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old whom he claimed had a mental age of 9, and who had already given birth to a supposedly feeble-minded daughter (following a rape). Buck’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. upholding the decision in a 1927 ruling that concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Historians estimate that more than 60,000 Americans were sterilized in the decades leading up to the Second World War, with many more persecuted under racist immigration laws and marriage restrictions.

Eugenics, with its philosophical kinship to Nazism, largely fell out of favor in the United States by World War II. But the ideas promoted in the bull trials—that humans can and should take increasing control of animal genetics in order to design the perfect milk machine—have gained ground throughout the past century, as breeding has become ever more technologically advanced. As we discuss in this episode of Gastropod, the drive to improve dairy cattle through livestock breeding has led to huge innovations—in IVF, in genomics, and in big-data analysis—as well as much more milk. But it has also continued, for better and for worse, to highlight the ethical problems that stem from this kind of techno-utopian approach to reproduction.

In this episode of Gastropod, we find out about the bull trials of the 1920s and meet the most valuable bull in the world, as we explore the history and the high-tech genomic science behind livestock breeding today. Along the way, we tease out its larger, thought-provoking, and frequently deeply troubling implications for animal welfare and society in general. Listen below.

Gastropod is a podcast about the science and history of food. Each episode looks at the hidden history and surprising science behind a different food and/or farming-related topic—from aquaculture to ancient feasts, from cutlery to chili peppers, and from microbes to Malbec. It’s hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning science reporter, and Nicola Twilley, author of the popular blog Edible Geography. You can subscribe via iTunes, email, Stitcher, or RSS for a new episode every two weeks.

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Inside the Bizarre Cow Trials of the 1920s

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The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

by FaithAEHxvuqw Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Back in 2010, I visited a labor camp that houses some of the migrant workers who grow America’s fruit and vegetables. I found people living densely in shanty-like structures made of scrap metal and cinder block, surrounded by vast fields and long rows of greenhouses. Strangers in a strange land who didn’t speak the language, hundreds of miles from home, they lived at the mercy of labor contractors who, they claimed, made false promises and paid rock-bottom wages. Like all Big Ag-dominated areas, the place had a feeling of desolation: all monocropped fields, mostly devoid of people, and lots of billboards hawking the products of agrichemical giants Monsanto and Syngenta.

You might think I had made my way to Florida’s infamous tomato fields, or somewhere in the depths of the California’s migrant-dependent Central Valley. Those places remain obscure to most Americans, but the gross human exploitation they represent has at least been documented in a spate of excellent recent books, like Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, Tracy McMillan’s The American Way of Eating, and Seth Holmes Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. But I was somewhere yet more remote and less well-known: Sinaloa, a largely rural state in Mexico’s northwestern hinterland.

If most Americans have heard of Sinaloa at all, it’s because of the state’s well-earned reputation as a center of Mexico’s bloody drug trade. But in addition to the eponymous drug cartel, Sinaloa also houses vast-scale, export-oriented agriculture: farms that churn out the tomatoes, melons, peppers, and other fresh produce that help fill US supermarket shelves. And the people who do the planting, tending, and harvesting tend to be from the indigenous regions of Mexico’s southern states, Oaxaca and Chiapas, where smallholder farming has been ground down by decades of free-trade policies pursued by the Mexican government, which left millions in search of gainful work to the north.

In my brief time there, I found Sinaloa overwhelming: a scary cauldron of labor exploitation, industrial agriculture, and drug violence. Now, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Marosi and photographer Don Bartletti have documented the grim conditions faced by workers on Mexico’s export-focused mega farms in a long-form investigation, after 18 months of reporting in nine Mexican states, including, most prominently, Sinaloa. The Times plans to publish it in four parts; the first, here, is stunning.

Marosi found that Mexico’s mega-farms adhere to the strictest standards when it comes to food safety and cleanliness, driven by the demands of big US buyers. “In immaculate greenhouses, laborers are ordered to use hand sanitizers and schooled in how to pamper the produce,” Marosi writes. “They’re required to keep their fingernails carefully trimmed so the fruit will arrive unblemished in US supermarkets.”

While the produce is coddled, the workers face a different reality. Pay languishes at the equivalent of $8 to $12 a day. Marosi summarizes conditions that often approach slavery:

• Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.

• Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.

• Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.

• Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

• Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

The piece includes excellent photography and is chockfull of stories straight from the mouths of farm workers. And it shines a bright light on a hugely important source of our food. The US now imports nearly a third of the fruit and vegetables we consume, and Mexico accounts for 36 percent of that foreign-grown cornucopia, far more than any other country. And we’re only growing more reliant on our southern neighbor—imports of Mexico-grown fresh produce have increased by an average of 11 percent per year between 2001 and 2011, the USDA reports, and now amount to around $8 billion. The Times investigations demonstrates, with an accumulation of detail that can’t be denied or ignored, that our easy bounty bobs on a sea of misery and exploitation.

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The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

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How a Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay “Political Terrorist” Could Help Keep Colorado Democrats in Power

by SamaraLetters Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Colorado gun-rights crusader Dudley Brown has a simple political philosophy: “No compromise.” He says the NRA is spineless. (An NRA official once tagged him the “Al Sharpton of the gun movement.”) He loathes middle-of-the-road politicians. For show, he occasionally drives a Pinzgauer, a bulky Austrian-made troop transport vehicle, which he describes as his “political pain delivery vehicle.” His opponents—Democrats and Republicans alike—call him “poison” and a “political terrorist.” After Democratic lawmakers in the state passed new gun-control laws in response to the Aurora and Newtown mass shootings, Brown told NPR, “There’s a time to hunt deer. And the next election is the time to hunt Democrats.” But, as it turns out, Brown’s bid for political revenge has upped the odds that Democrats will hold on to power in the state legislature.


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Brown—who is widely referred to just as “Dudley”—is the face and voice of the absolutist gun-rights movement, which opposes any and all gun-related restrictions. A frequent guest on Fox News, Brown founded an outfit called Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO); it’s Colorado’s more extreme version of the NRA. He also runs a group called the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), which butts heads with the NRA and is allied with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Brown’s groups have spent millions lobbying state and federal politicians and trying to sway Republican primaries in favor of hard-line pro-gun candidates. As Brown’s organizations bolster their membership lists and war chests, they could play a key role in the 2016 Republican presidential primary contest—but perhaps at a price for the party. In Colorado, Brown’s take-no-prisoners tactics have splintered the state GOP. And this year, RMGO helped three far-right candidates win Republican state Senate primaries, which has boosted the chances for the Democrats in those races and given the Ds a good shot of retaining control of state Senate.

Born in Wyoming, Brown studied at Colorado State University and chaired the College Republicans of Colorado with the confrontational style that would become his trademark. “The College Republicans were having doughnuts with the College Democrats, even during Reagan’s re-election year,” Brown told Denver’s 5280 magazine. “I didn’t want to have doughnuts with them. I wanted to beat them over their heads.” After college, he kicked around state politics working for US Sen. Bill Armstrong, the state House’s GOP caucus, the Firearms Coalition of Colorado, and the Colorado Conservative Union. In 1996, he struck out on his own and formed Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.

Those were the halcyon days for Colorado Republicans. They had enjoyed almost uninterrupted majorities in the state House and Senate since the 1970s. After the 1998 elections, the GOP controlled the governorship, the legislature, both US Senate seats, and four of six congressional districts. And it was conservative Republicans who were ascendant in the state. Using RMGO, Brown took aim at GOPers who did not pass his pro-gun ideological test. In one early instance, RMGO attacked a Republican congressional candidate named Don Ament, who for Brown was insufficiently pro-gun, with a mailer showing Ament purportedly leaving a Denver strip club. The mailer declared, “Send Denver Don home to his wife.” But the state Republican Party’s office was located down the street from the strip club, and the photo of Ament was a set-up. Ament lost in the Republican primary to a far-right challenger.

After the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, Colorado voters approved a ballot measure mandating that buyers at gun shows undergo a background check first. (Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had obtained their guns illegally from a straw buyer.) Bill Owens, Colorado’s newly elected Republican governor, backed the measure, putting him in Brown and RMGO’s sights. RMGO badgered Owens at public events, blitzed his office with angry mail, and bird-dogged him at public events. Sean Tonner, Owens’ deputy chief of staff, told 5280, “All Dudley wanted to do was create controversy. He makes his money when there’s turmoil, real or perceived, because that’s what gets his members to write him checks.”

But Colorado’s political landscape has shifted in the past decade. The state has attracted large numbers of young people and Hispanics, turning the state “greener and browner,” as local political consultants put it. Colorado progressives organized in the early 2000s and soon took back the legislature and the governorship. Still, gun rights (or gun safety) has remained a contentious issue, essentially a proxy battle in a changing Colorado, pitting new Coloradans against old. And Brown has capitalized on this intense fight to expand RMGO’s profile and political clout.

Brown’s controversial tactics have drawn national attention. In a 2012 GOP primary, conservatives sought to oust state Sen. Jean White, a Republican who had voted twice in favor of civil unions. So Brown and a right-wing group out of Virginia crafted a mailer showing two men kissing with the tagline, “State Senator Jean White’s idea of family values?” Here was the rub: The two men in the photo lived in New Jersey, and, through some clever editing, Brown’s team had replaced the Manhattan skyline with snowy pine trees reminiscent of Colorado. (The two men sued the conservative group that distributed the mailer; a judge ruled in April that RMGO had a right to use the photo under the First Amendment.) White ended up losing her primary to an RMGO-backed state representative and rancher named Randy Baumgardner.

As Brown stoked his supporters’ fears of gun-grabbing Democrats and as RMGO’s bank account grew, the group became a potent force in Republican primaries—and a headache to the state GOP. “He’s exactly what’s wrong with the Republican Party all rolled up into one guy,” Sean Duffy, a former spokesman for Bill Owens, told 5280. “He’ll say or do anything to destroy viable candidates and legislators who agree with him 90 percent of the time, because you’re either 100 percent with him, or you’re 100 percent against him.”

The mass shootings in 2012 at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, did nothing to slow Brown. In an email blasted out to RMGO supporters, he sent condolences to the families of those affected and then attacked “the Washington, DC, gun control lobby”—calling it “circling vultures”—for “shamelessly using the blood of innocents to advance their anti-gun agenda.” When told that Aurora gunman James Holmes had 6,000 rounds with him the night he shot 70 people, killing 12, Brown replied: “I call 6,000 rounds running low.” His National Association of Gun Rights spent $6.7 million in 2013 lobbying against new gun-control measures in Congress—nearly twice what the NRA spent on lobbying. NAGR has gone far beyond the NRA in its gun-rights advocacy, fighting reauthorization of the Patriot Act (because it allows “unconstitutional” gun searches) and suing to overturn the ban on firearms in post offices. Sen. Rand Paul, who was endorsed by the NAGR in 2010, has signed fundraising appeals for the group.

This year, RMGO helped three far-right candidates win Republican primaries in crucial Colorado state Senate races in Jefferson County, west of Denver. These were major victories for the RINO-bashing RMGO. But the result could be good news for the Democrats. Had the more moderate Republicans won those primaries, political handicappers observed, the GOP would have had a good chance of winning those seats in the general election and regaining control of the Senate. (Democrats currently have a one-seat majority in the state’s upper chamber.) But with Brown-preferred (and die-hard) candidates on the ballot, Democrats may be able to eke out victories in these critical races. “Dudley Brown could be the Democrats’ savior this year,” says Laura Chapin, a Democratic consultant based in Denver.

While Brown’s brand of take-no-prisoners politics has earned him enemies in both political parties, among his fellow conservatives he’s a rock star. Last Wednesday, in a packed hotel ballroom, Brown introduced his old friend David Bossie, who runs the conservative group Citizens United, at the premiere of Bossie’s latest propaganda film, Rocky Mountain Heist. The film purports to tell the story of how a secret cabal of liberal donors hijacked Colorado beginning in the 2000s, and warns that this model could turn other states deep blue. Brown stars in the movie.

Afterward, I introduced myself to Brown and asked for an interview. The smile disappeared from his face. “I don’t talk to leftists like you,” he snarled. “My guys don’t read your crap.” He brushed past me, yelled “Pravda” over his shoulder, and moved into the crowd.

For more of Mother Jones’ reporting on guns in America, see all of our latest coverage here, and our award-winning special reports.

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How a Pro-Gun, Anti-Gay “Political Terrorist” Could Help Keep Colorado Democrats in Power

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Hooray! This Young Billionaire Actually Invented Something Useful

by YvetteSepulveda Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Elizabeth Holmes is the third-youngest billionaire on the Forbes 400 list (behind Facebook tycoons Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz). And hooray for her! Her business model doesn’t depend on getting drunk teenagers to eventually regret that they ever heard of the internet. It depends instead on a genuinely useful invention: a new type of blood test that requires only a tiny pinprick and a single drop of blood. Slate’s Kevin Loria tells us about it:

Traditional blood testing is shockingly difficult and expensive for a tool that’s used so frequently. It also hasn’t changed since the 1960s. It’s done in hospitals and doctors’ offices. Vials of blood have to be sent out and tested, which can take weeks using traditional methods and is prone to human error. And, of course, sticking a needle in someone’s arm scares some people enough that they avoid getting blood drawn, even when it could reveal lifesaving information.

Holmes recognized that process was ripe for disruption….The new tests can be done without going to the doctor, which saves both money and time. Most results are available in about four hours….Blood samples have traditionally been used for one test, but if a follow-up was needed, another sample had to be drawn and sent out—making it less likely that someone would get care. The Theranos approach means the same drop can be used for dozens of different tests.

It’s cheap, too. One common criticism of the healthcare system is that the pricing structure is a confusing labyrinth that makes it impossible to know how much anything costs. Theranos lists its prices online, and they’re impressive.

It so happens that I’ve been getting more than the usual amount of blood drawn lately, and it also so happens that I’m one of those people who really hates this. My angst is for completely irrational reasons. I know it doesn’t hurt; it doesn’t take long; and it poses no danger. As it happens, my own particular phobia is so bizarre and unaccountable that I’m reluctant to even fess up to it. But it’s this: The scarless incision wigs me out. For the rest of the day after a blood test, I’m convinced that any second it’s going to pop open like an oil gusher. I used to keep that little cotton ball taped on for a full 24 hours, until the next day’s shower finally forced me to take it off. I have recently, through sheer force of will, started taking it off after only a few hours.

This makes no sense. But then, phobias rarely do. And mine isn’t even that bad. When I need to get blood drawn, I do it. Still, I often put it off, and I refuse to get it done more than once every two weeks or so. I also refuse to ever have it done in my right arm.

By now, you’re either laughing at me or else wondering if I’ve lost my marbles. But I agree with Holmes: traditional blood testing is barbaric and medieval and it’s long past time to bring it into the 21st century. So hooray for Elizabeth Holmes. My only question now is this: When is she going to sign a contract with Kaiser so that I’ll be able to benefit from her marvelous invention?

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Hooray! This Young Billionaire Actually Invented Something Useful

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Texas’ New Public School Textbooks Promote Climate Change Denial and Downplay Segregation

by ShaylaAlfred Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The battle over Texas textbooks is raging once again. On Tuesday, hundreds of citizens turned out for the first public hearing on the controversial social-science materials now under review as part of the state’s contentious once-in-a-decade textbook adoption process. During the all-day proceedings, activists and historians pointed out numerous factual errors and complained that the books promoted tea party ideology while mocking affirmative action and downplaying the science linking human activity to climate change. “They are full of biases that are either outside the established mainstream scholarship, or just plain wrong,” Jacqueline Jones, who chairs the history department at the University of Texas-Austin, said from the podium. “It can lead to a great deal of confusion in the reader.”

Other speakers raised concerns about the treatment of religion, especially the tendency of some books to play up the role of Christianity in our nation’s founding. Kathleen Wellman, a professor of history Southern Methodist University, noted with dismay that a popular civics text was filled with references to Moses and claimed that the biblical prophet had inspired American democracy. If the draft texts are adopted as is, she argued, Texas children could grow up “believing that Moses was the first American.” Conservatives, meanwhile, complained that the books gave too much space to liberal figures such as Hillary Clinton.

It’s a high-stakes debate. Because Texas has one of the nation’s largest public school systems and some of the most rigid textbook requirements, publishers have traditionally tailored textbooks they sell nationwide to the Lone Star market.

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Texas’ New Public School Textbooks Promote Climate Change Denial and Downplay Segregation

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Welcome Back to Silicon Valley’s Biggest Sausage Fest

by KrystynDanford Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The TechCrunch Disrupt conference now underway in San Francisco is arguably the most important annual gathering for tech startups. It’s also a notoriously hostile environment for women, as made clear by last year’s conference, whose hackathon produced an app called “Titstare,” which let the user “take photos of yourself staring at tits,” not to mention “Circle Shake,” an app that measures how fast guys can masturbate. The TC Disrupt crowd tends to be 80 to 90 percent male, as you might infer from my bathroom-line photo yesterday. Mike Judge lampooned the conference’s “brogrammer” vibe in his HBO comedy series, Silicon Valley.

This year, the organizers of TechCrunch Disrupt have worked to prevent an embarrassing repeat of the Titstare debacle by publishing and enforcing a detailed “anti-harassment policy.” An attendee of this weekend’s hackathon told me that TechCrunch cited the policy when it quietly nixed a plan by a group of hackers to create a “Bitcoin for strippers” app. Even so, TechCrunch hasn’t been able to completely scrub the event of everything that might be perceived as sexist. This morning, for example, guys entering the conference were mobbed and hugged by groups of women shouting “Groopie!”—they’d been hired to promote a mobile video app:

“I don’t really see the point of booth babes,” says Jenna Williams, a recruiter for the smart-home company leeo, a major outlier in that 40 percent of its tech employees are women. “If they get a question about the technology and can’t answer it, it’s not a good way to represent your product.”

Anne Ward, a software developer attending TC Disrupt for the third year, says men at tech conferences often assume that she’s a marketer, not a code jockey, and they expect her to prove her tech chops when she insists she’s a programmer. She counsels younger female techies on how to navigate the conference scene: Don’t be surprised when male geeks mistake professional interest for personal interest. And if they try to quiz your tech chops by dropping a lot of coding acronyms, just say: “Oh, I see we are using TLAs (three-letter acronyms) instead of having a real conversation.”

(One woman who literally wrote the book on coding recently wrote a hilarious Medium post about this sort of thing, culled from the anonymous gossip site Secret).

To its credit, TC Disrupt has drawn a slightly larger proportion of women this year, according to longtime attendees. Yesterday, a panel of venture capitalists discussed the gender gap onstage for a few minutes, and several panels have featured the female founders of prominent statups, such as Elizabeth Holmes of the blood test company Theranos. Today, the makers of a documentary about “debugging the gender gap” distributed flyers:

A flyer at a conference table at TechCrunch Disrupt

Still, several female techies told me that the conference organizers could do much more to help women play meaningful roles. The panel discussions, they said, felt like lip service—outlining the problem but offering few solutions. A better approach would be to “start pulling in women who are founders as keynote speakers,” says Hanna Aase, the founder of video-profile platform Wonderloop. “That’s what really shows the serious side of what we are doing.” (TechCrunch Disrupt doesn’t feature “keynote speakers,” but more than 80 percent of the people named in the printed conference agenda are men).

Ultimately, Ward says, more women will be willing to go into tech if they see others like themselves rising to the top. Earlier this year, she spoke on a “women in engineering” panel at Developer Week. “I saw tears in the eyes of women in the audience,” she says. “It was seeing them be lifted up instead of put down. Like, ‘Oh, wait, I should be here.'”

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Welcome Back to Silicon Valley’s Biggest Sausage Fest

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