Category Archives: Sterling

Donald Sterling’s $2.5 Million Fine Isn’t As Much As You Think It Is

Mother Jones

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Donald Sterling’s penalty is in: a lifetime ban from the NBA and a $2.5 million fine, the maximum league sanction, for the racist audio recording released last week. The NBA will also work to force him to sell the Los Angeles Clippers, the team he’s owned since 1981.

It’s a harsh punishment, no doubt. But let’s not kid ourselves about the $2.5 million. Sterling, after all, is reportedly worth $1.9 billion. According to a 2013 Credit Suisse report on global wealth, the median American is worth $44,911. In other words, a $2.5 million fine for Sterling is like a $59 fine for that middle-of-the-road American.

Also, a reminder: Donald Sterling bought the Clippers for $12.5 million. The team is now worth at least $575 million; some think it’s worth more than $1 billion. We have a feeling he’ll come out of this just fine.

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Donald Sterling’s $2.5 Million Fine Isn’t As Much As You Think It Is

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The NBA Just Hit Donald Sterling With a Lifetime Ban

Mother Jones

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The NBA is no longer OK with awful racist Donald Sterling’s awful racism.

Commissioner Adam Silver just announced that the Los Angeles Clippers owner has been banned from the NBA for life and fined $2.5 million. Sterling will be banned from all basketball operations and from attending any NBA games.

Further, Silver said he will be urging the NBA Board of Governors to force Sterling to sell the franchise.

Two-and-a-half million is the largest fine allowed by under the NBA’s constitution but, as Mother Jones‘ Ian Gordon points out, it’s really just pocket change for him.

“The discipline issued today is based on the Commissioner’s conclusion that Mr. Sterling violated league rules through his expressions of offensive and hurtful views, the impact of which has been widely felt though out the league,” the NBA said in a statement.

The announcement was immediately hailed by league players. The Clippers website right now:

This post has been updated.

This article:  

The NBA Just Hit Donald Sterling With a Lifetime Ban

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This Is the Cast of the New "Star Wars"

Mother Jones

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We still have no idea what the plot of the new Star Wars is about, but we finally know the cast! Original cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hammil, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker will be joined by newcomers John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow.

Episode VII is set to be released December 18, 2015.

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This Is the Cast of the New "Star Wars"

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Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

Mother Jones

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Tonight Oklahoma will continue the nation’s ongoing experiment in executing people with untested drug combinations as it moves forward to kill death row inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner using a new, secretly acquired drug cocktail.

Officials in Oklahoma and other states have resorted to these methods because they can no longer access sodium thiopental, the anesthetic traditionally used in lethal injections, and another drug used to paralyze the condemned. The lone US manufacturer quit producing sodium thiopental in 2011, and international suppliers—â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;particulalry in the European Union, which opposes the death penalty on humanitarian grounds—â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;have stopped exporting both drugs to the United States. This has left states like Oklahoma scrambling to find new pharmaceuticals for killing death row inmates. Some have been reduced to illegally importing the drugs, using untested combinations, or buying from unregulated compounding pharmacies, a number of which have a history of producing contaminated products.

Death row inmates and their lawyers have protested on the grounds that these untested protocols could produce a level of suffering that violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, and they’ve sued for more information about the source and purity of the drugs. In response, several states have passed secrecy laws, allowing them to keep the names of their suppliers, and in some cases the contents of the lethal injection, under wraps. (Oklahoma is so eager to hide the source of its death drugs that it buys them with petty cash so there are no transaction records.) Death row inmates, in turn, have filed suits challenging the constitutionality of these secrecy statutes.

In February, Lockett and Warner prompted a high-profile showdown between Oklahoma officials when they sued the state, asserting that its execution protocol could inflict “severe pain” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. A lower state court found the drug secrecy law patently unconstitutional, and the state Supreme Court ultimately stayed the two men’s executions until the issues were fully litigated. But Republican Gov. Mary Fallin insisted they be executed regardless of the court’s ruling, prompting a political crisis. On April 23, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, whose justices are now being threatened by the Legislature with impeachment, caved and allowed the executions to move forward.

The public knows very little about the drugs that will be used to kill Lockett and Warner who stand convicted of murder. â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;Lockett shot a teenage girl, then buried her alive, while Warner raped and killed his girlfriend’s 11-month-old daughter in 1997. Initially, the state said it would deploy a three-drug cocktail, including the sedative pentobarbital (normally used to euthanize animals); vercuronium bromide, which paralyzes the inmate; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The first drug is supposed to knock out the inmate so he doesn’t feel pain. The second drug paralyzes him so onlookers can’t tell if he’s suffering. But pentobarbital, which states substituted for sodium thiopental after it went off the market, works more slowly than the old drug, and wasn’t tested in advance to make sure it was an appropriate substitute. Also, lawyers argue that it doesn’t prevent pain during an execution. For that reason, injecting it into a conscious animal in California is actually a crime.

Due to a shortages of pentobarbital and vercuronium bromide, Oklahoma planned to buy the drugs from an unnamed compounding pharmacy. This was problematic because such pharmacies are unregulated, and contaminated pentobarbital can result in excruciatingly painful deaths. (Experts say it can feel as though the insides of a person’s veins are being scraped with sandpaper.) South Dakota used a compounded pentobarbital contaminated with a fungus to execute Eric Robert in 2012. During the execution, he repeatedly opened his eyes—a sign that the drug wasn’t working, some experts said. Oklahoma has had similar problems. In January, it executed another man, Michael Lee Wilson, using pentobarbital from an unidentified compounding pharmacy. During the execution he sputtered, “I feel my whole body burning,” another sign that the drug wasn’t doing its job.

In March, Oklahoma backed away from this approach and said it would instead use one of five possible drug combinations, including a two-drug cocktail of midazolam (a sedative) and hydromorphone (a pain killer). When states first proposed using those drugs in lethal injection mixes last year, defense lawyers and medical experts warned that inmates receiving them would essentially suffocate to death. Brushing aside these concerns, in January Ohio used the drugs to execute Dennis McGuire, who gasped and convulsed horribly for more than 10 minutes before taking a record 26 minutes to die. His family, who watched in horror, is now suing over what they allege was cruel and unusual punishment.

Oklahoma has since shifted course again and announced that it would use a three-drug combo that includes midazolam and pancuronium bromide. According to Madeline Cohen, an assistant federal public defender representing Charles Warner, the state claims that both drugs are being purchased from manufacturers rather than compounding pharmacies but wouldn’t provide any other information. The only known use of this drug combination for executions was in Florida in 2013, but Florida used five times the dose of midazolam that Oklahoma plans to use, meaning Lockett and Warner will essentially be human guinea pigs. “It is an experiment, and I don’t think anybody is absolutely certain what will happen in Oklahoma,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Dieter adds that we’ll never know whether the drugs worked properly or caused needlessly painful deaths because the people who could tell us will be dead.

Original post:  

Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

Who Said It: Donald Sterling or Donald Trump?

Mother Jones

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var quiz = jQuery(‘#quiz_container’).quiz(‘0AuHOPshyxQGGdF9CMUVJeFM2UkJDb0txOUNxemZ6U3c’);
On Fox & Friends today, Donald Trump stood up for fellow aggrieved billionaire Republican Donald Sterling, claiming that the Los Angeles Clippers owner was “set up by a very, very bad girlfriend.” Sterling, of course, is under fire for the recently released audio recording in which he tells onetime girlfriend V. Stiviano to, among other things, stop associating publicly with black people, including Lakers great Magic Johnson. With sponsors rushing to drop the Clippers, it must be a great relief for Sterling to know that he’s got The Donald on his side.

Trump’s comments made us wonder, though: Could you tell the two Donalds apart by the wacky (and creepy) things they’ve said over the years? Try your luck with our Which Donald Is It? quiz below:

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Original post: 

Who Said It: Donald Sterling or Donald Trump?

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Fast Tracks: "Longer Than You’ve Been Alive" by Old 97’s

Mother Jones

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

TRACK 1
“Longer Than You’ve Been Alive”
From Old 97’s’ Most Messed Up
ATO

Liner notes: A master of playing unreliable narrators, frontman Rhett Miller opts for witty sincerity on this spirited celebration of a life in music: “Most of our shows were a triumph of rock/Although some nights I might have been checking the clock.”

Behind the music: Still vital after two decades, the alt-country mainstays scored outlaw-country cred last year via the release of two tracks recorded with Waylon Jennings way back in ’96.

Check it out if you like: Americana wits Robbie Fulks and Bobby Bare, Jr.

Excerpt from: 

Fast Tracks: "Longer Than You’ve Been Alive" by Old 97’s

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fast Tracks: "Longer Than You’ve Been Alive" by Old 97’s

Will Global Warming Produce More Tornadoes?

Mother Jones

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After a remarkably quiet start, the US tornado season exploded into action over the weekend, as a battery of tornadoes in Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma killed 16 people. The Arkansas towns of Mayflower and Vilona were particularly devastated. Based on preliminary assessments, some of the twisters may have reached EF-3 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale, meaning that they had wind gusts of more than 136 miles per hour.

It all amounts to quite the burst of weather whiplash. Just days ago, after all, USA Today could be found calling 2014 the “safest start to tornado season in a century.” April 2014 was certainly looking nothing like April 2011, which featured a staggering 753 tornadoes in the United States, a new all-time record. So what’s up with this sharp variation in the behavior of tornadoes, these extraordinarily powerful storms that afflict the US more than any other part of the world? And could global warming have something to do with the matter?

Until pretty recently, scientists really felt that they couldn’t say much about that question. “The issue of global warming and severe thunderstorms which often result in tornadoes has been an outstanding challenge for the scientific community,” explains Noah Diffenbaugh, an Earth scientist at Stanford University who has focused on the question. For instance, a recent consensus report on extreme storms and climate change, published early last year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, found that there was “little confidence” of any trend in tornado occurrence, and also concluded that there were no clear changes in the environments in which these storms form.

In recent months, though, this consensus—that we really don’t know what’s happening with global warming and tornadoes—has been challenged by some interesting new research. To understand why, it helps to first grasp some basics on how tornadoes form, a crucial first step toward determining whether global warming may change them.

Tornadoes emerge in some, but not all, severe thunderstorms, powerful explosions of atmospheric energy that also frequently feature lightning, hail, strong winds, and intense rainfall. Scientific research has determined that while a variety of environmental and atmospheric conditions support severe thunderstorm development, two in particular are crucial. The first is that there have to be high levels of so-called “convective available potential energy,” or CAPE, which denotes the instability of the atmosphere, and thus how friendly it is to thunderstorm updrafts. The second condition is that there must be strong wind shear, defined as the difference in speed or direction of winds as one ascends from the surface higher into the atmosphere.

Based on this knowledge, researchers have turned to global climate models in order to predict how global warming could change the relationship between CAPE and shear in the the future. And for a long time, the two factors were basically expected to offset each other. Or as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tornado researcher Harold Brooks put it in a 2013 paper summarizing the consensus: “Climate model simulations suggest that CAPE will increase in the future and the wind shear will decrease.” So even though higher overall heat might lead to the potential for more explosive storms, the expected decrease in shear meant that potential might not get realized. In other words, it was basically looking like a wash.

The environments in which tornadoes form are changing, according to the latest research. NOAA/Wikimedia Commons

That conclusion fell into question late last year, though, with a paper by Diffenbaugh and two colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a suite of the most state-of-the-art climate models, the researchers found, once again, that wind shear decreases under global warming. However, they also found that that didn’t really matter, because the number of days with both high CAPE and high shear nonetheless increased. “We find that in fact, at the monthly or seasonal scale, that decrease in shear does occur over the US,” Diffenbaugh says, “but it’s concentrated in these days with very low CAPE.” That means that the net number of days with high CAPE and high shear was still projected to increase in the future.

That means more favorable environments for severe thunderstorms in general, but what about the subset of those storms that produce tornadoes? For tornado occurrence, Diffenbaugh explains, wind shear very close to the surface appears to be particularly important. In their new modeling study, Diffenbaugh and his colleagues looked at this parameter too, and they found an “increase in the fraction of severe thunderstorm environments that have high CAPE and high low-level shear,” as Diffenbaugh puts it. As the authors wrote, this result is suggestive “of a possible increase in the number of days supportive of tornadic storms.”

The paper by Diffenbaugh and his colleagues represents “the first significant evidence that we might expect to see a change in tornadoes,” says NOAA’s Brooks.

Meanwhile, Brooks thinks he might have found a trend in a different area: actual tornado statistics.

In general, the scientific consensus has been that our tornado data just isn’t good enough to support the idea of any clear, historic trend in tornadic activity. But in his latest research, Brooks thinks he has detected a “pretty strong signal that there’s been an increase in the variability of tornado occurrence on a national scale.” What does that mean? Basically, an increase in erratic behavior: periods with little or no activity, followed by intense bursts of activity.

There’s been “a decrease over the last 40 years in the number of days per year with at least one F1 tornado occurring somewhere in the US,” says Brooks. “At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of days with at least 30 F1 tornadoes.”

As noted above, recent tornado behavior has certainly seemed pretty up and down. According to Brooks, in recent years we’ve seen records for the most tornadoes ever in a 12-month period, as well as for the fewest in a 12-month period. And Brooks says we are also seeing increasing variability in terms of when the tornado season actually starts. (Note: The relationship between Diffenbaugh’s research, and Brooks’ new finding, isn’t clear at this point.)

In summary, then, it would be very premature to say that scientists know precisely what will happen to tornadoes as global warming progresses. However, they have come up with some interesting new results, which point to potentially alarming changes. More generally, the upshot of this research is that tornadoes must change as a result of climate change, because the environments in which they form are changing.

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Will Global Warming Produce More Tornadoes?

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WATCH: Cliven Bundy’s Anti-Government Beliefs, Animated Fiore Cartoon

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Cliven Bundy’s Anti-Government Beliefs, Animated Fiore Cartoon

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Mississippi May Become the First State Since Roe v. Wade to Be Without a Single Abortion Provider

Mother Jones

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Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has been on the brink of closure since 2012, when state legislators passed a law specifically designed to shut it down. On Monday, abortion rights advocates will argue before a federal court in a final attempt to block the law and keep Mississippi from becoming the first state in 41 years—since Roe v. Wade—to be without a single legal abortion provider.

And the odds don’t look good.

The law, HB 1390, requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital or face criminal penalties. Obtaining admitting privileges, however, poses an impossible burden, since most of Mississippi’s providers travel to Jackson from out of state and local hospitals have all refused to be associated with abortion.

Abortion rights advocates have managed to keep the doors of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization open since 2012 through a series of court battles. In summer 2012, a judge blocked the law’s penalties from going into effect while providers begged local hospitals to give them admitting privileges. In April 2013, after all seven local hospitals turned the clinic’s doctors down, a federal judge blocked the relevant part of the law, saying that it would “result in a patchwork system where constitutional rights are available in some states but not others.”

But the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is hearing arguments from lawyers for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is likely the end of the line. Short of intervention from the US Supreme Court, a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit will have the final word on whether Mississippi’s law will take effect.

And the court has not been friendly to abortion rights in the past. The Fifth Circuit is the same venue where a three-judge panel upheld a very similar Texas law, made infamous by state Sen. Wendy Davis’s filibuster, in March. Appeals courts in the Fourth and Eighth Circuits have upheld admitting privilege laws, too.

In the years since HB 1390 passed, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization did not fail to get admitting privileges for lack of trying. (The health clinic already had a patient-transfer agreement with an area hospital for rare cases in which a patient required hospitalization.) As Mother Jones detailed in 2012:

The doctors’ applications have been rejected by every hospital they’ve approached. Two hospitals wouldn’t let them apply at all. Five others denied the applications for “administrative” reasons, before even completely reviewing the doctors’ qualifications. Their rejection letters cited their policies regarding abortion and “concern about disruption to the hospital’s business within the community.” The clinic wrote follow-up letters to make sure the hospitals understood that the doctors were only seeking privileges to comply with the new law and wouldn’t actually be providing abortions at the hospital, but no dice.

The problem isn’t just that hospitals don’t want to become targets for anti-abortion protests. Abortion clinics simply don’t admit enough women to hospitals to meet the usual requirements for admitting privileges.

“Women across the state will be plunged back into the dark days of back-alley procedures that Roe was supposed to end” if HB 1390 goes into effect, Julie Rikelman, the attorney for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, said Monday. “The devastating impact of this unconstitutional law couldn’t be clearer.”

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Mississippi May Become the First State Since Roe v. Wade to Be Without a Single Abortion Provider

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What Did We Learn from Abu Ghraib?

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It’s mind-boggling. Torture is still up for grabs in America. No one questions anymore whether the CIA waterboarded one individual 83 times or another 186 times. The basic facts are no longer in dispute either by those who champion torture or those who, like myself, despise the very idea of it. No one questions whether some individuals died being tortured in American custody. (They did.) No one questions that it was a national policy devised by those at the very highest levels of government. (It was.) But many, it seems, still believe that the torture policy, politely renamed in its heyday “the enhanced interrogation program,” was a good thing for the country.

Now, the nation awaits the newest chapter in the torture debate without having any idea whether it will close the book on American torture or open a path of pain and shame into the distant future. No one yet knows whether we will be allowed to awake from the nightmarish and unacceptable world of illegality and obfuscation into which torture and the network of offshore prisons, or “black sites,” plunged us all.

April 28th marks the tenth anniversary of the moment that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were made public in this country. On that day a decade ago, the TV news magazine “60 Minutes II” broadcast the first photographs from that American-run prison in “liberated” Iraq. They showed US military personnel humiliating, hurting, and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave a thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.

Thus began America’s public odyssey with torture, a story in many chapters and still missing an ending. As the Abu Ghraib anniversary nears and the White House, the CIA, and various senators still battle over the release of a summary of a 6,300-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Bush-era torture policies, it’s worth considering the strange journey we’ve taken and wondering just where we as a nation mired in the legacy of torture might be headed.

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What Did We Learn from Abu Ghraib?

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