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We have no words. Just watch:
(via Digg)
Excerpt from:
Stuart Scott’s Deeply Moving ESPYs Speech About Beating Cancer Will Leave You Speechless
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Ever since unaccompanied child migrants became a national news story six weeks ago, many people have started asking: Is this an immigration crisis, or is it a refugee crisis? In response, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said last week it hopes to designate many of the Central Americans fleeing regional violence and gang extortion as refugees.
The announcement comes amid mounting evidence of the horrific conditions causing so many people to flee Honduras, El Salvador, and parts of Guatemala: kids escaping rape, gang recruitment, and murder all around them, as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sonia Nazario detailed in a chilling op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times. With this new designation, the UNHCR hopes to pressure the United States to give more immigrants, including many of the 70,000-plus unaccompanied minors likely to arrive at the US border this year, political asylum.
70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?
What’s Next for the Children We Deport?
Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing
Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis
GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination
But if the UNHCR were to make such a move, it still would have no legal significance for the United States. So is it really that important? Yes and no, says Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission. Brané and I talked about what a “refugee” designation could mean, and other ways the US can help ease the pain for immigrants—particularly those who’ve experienced targeted violence. Here are nine key takeaways from our conversation:
1. Casting this as a “refugee situation” isn’t necessarily the important part.
“This population contains within it many children and mothers and parents bringing their children who qualify for refugee protection or for protection under international law. Whether you formally call it a ‘refugee situation’—that to me is less relevant than acknowledging that this is a population that is being driven out of their country. And their government is not willing or able to protect them.”
2. It’s not just general violence and unrest that’s causing people to flee Central America and Mexico.
“It’s true that general conditions of war or of danger are not sufficient to qualify for asylum. But the UN agency of refugees, in interviewing 400 of these children, for over an hour each, they found that 58 percent expressed a targeted fear. Not just, ‘I was scared because my neighborhood was dangerous.’ Fifty-eight percent of the kids said, ‘I received a death threat.’ Or, ‘I had a body cut up in a plastic bag left on my doorstep as a warning.’ One hundred percent come from a dangerous place. That we know. But 58 percent were targeted. That’s the piece that people are not getting.”
3. Using gang violence as grounds for international protection is not a novel idea.
“The UN committee for refugees has recognized for many years now that gang violence absolutely qualifies, depending on the circumstances, as persecution and as qualifying for status under the refugee commission. And the US has granted many claims. People talk about this being difficult to do. It is difficult, especially if you don’t have an attorney. But children with attorneys requesting asylum are winning those cases. It’s absolutely a grounds that has been accepted in the US. It’s not something revolutionary.”
4. Yes, this is a crisis—but we shouldn’t throw our hands up.
“The numbers are small if you compare them to refugee situations worldwide. Like look at Syria. There’s over a million Syrian refugees in Turkey. There’s over 2 million Syrian refugees in Jordan. Those countries are tiny compared to the US, and the numbers are much bigger. It’s absolutely our responsibility as the United States to manage this and handle it in a way that does not roll back protections. We have been the ones to stand up there and say to Turkey:’ You’ve got to take these refugees’. For us to say, because of this small number, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll reconsider,’ is crazy. It’s absolutely manageable.”
5. Very few migrants are faking persecution in order to get to stay in the United States.
“The US has excellent asylum screening procedures. The problem is, you need to beef up the system in order to accommodate these numbers. But that’s something we need to do anyway. I know there’s been a lot of allegations and concern that it’s a system that can easily be gamed, and you can fake it—but it actually it’s quite a rigorous process. There’s several screening hurdles you have to get over, and then you have to go in front of a judge, and then there’s security clearance.”
6. And many of them migrate for multiple reasons.
“When people say they have family here, yes, that’s true. But that’s not what made them come entirely. Why are they coming now? A smuggler offered them passage to the US. Is the smuggler the reason you left? Part of it. But really, the reason you were looking for a way to come, again, goes back to the violence. Poverty, also. The majority of the kids coming also are experiencing poverty in their home country. Is that the main reason? Maybe, maybe not. It’s combined.
“One interesting Vanderbilt study found that people who’d been victim of a crime were more likely to migrate than those who had not. It also found that people who feel their government is not responsive to their needs were much more likely to migrate than someone who’s government didn’t protect them. When you combine those two factors—both been a victim of a crime and felt their government couldn’t protect them—they’re exponentially more likely to migrate. It’s always a combination of factors.”
7. Requiring international protection, or refugee designation, for more migrants is the right start—but the US can’t solve this crisis alone.
“Mexico also has to acknowledge that many of these children need protection. Mexico also has very good asylum laws on the books. What they don’t have is the resources and the infrastructure to support implementing those policies. Frankly, I think one of the things the US should be doing, and could do if they talk about this in the context of a refugee crisis, is to provide support regionally, not just to Mexico but also to Belize, to Costa Rica, to Panama, all of the countries that are also seeing influxes of these children. Provide them with the support to implement their protection policies consistent with international law. And not all of these kids have to come to the US, right? The burden can sort of be shared in the region.”
8. We don’t have to wait to act until migrants get to our borders—we could process them before they leave their country.
“We’ve done that before: with the Vietnamese in the past, with Haitians, and with Cubans. The first thing that needs to happen is you have to set up what the criteria are going to be; who qualifies to be sort of preprocessed. You could limit it to kids with strong family connection to the US, who have been targeted and pass some sort of criteria. It can be done administratively. You do not need legislation to do that. And in doing it you basically cut out the smugglers. If you process the kids internally, they can get on a plane for $300 and fly over here—they don’t have to pay $3,000 to a criminal organization. It really undercuts the smugglers and trafficking operation in a huge way.
“If children see there’s a legal way that’s safer to come—without taking this horrible journey—maybe they’ll wait a little bit. And at the same time, you’re building up the child welfare system and funding safehouses and anti-corruption campaigns. Maybe they’ll see things get a little bit better; I can wait, I don’t have to leave today. You slow the flow at that end. Not just by deporting people summarily, without a hearing. If you do that, and that’s all you do, they’re going to turn right around and come back.”
9. Even if Obama’s request for emergency supplemental funding to deal with this crisis isn’t perfect, it’s better than nothing.
“While we may not agree with all the details of where some of the money is going to—it’s sort of heavy on enforcement, in my view—there’s no question that they desperately need this money in order to be able manage the situation and get a handle on it. Frankly, it needs to go through. Blocking it will make the situation worse. They won’t have any place to hold these kids while they process them, they won’t have money to process them and deport them, and they won’t have money to put them on planes and send them back. So it’s crazy that there’s discussion about blocking it.”
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Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin were steeped in the production of a documentary on the influence of money in politics, but it wasn’t until funding for their project was unceremoniously yanked last year that the power of big donors truly hit home.
The pair had received a $150,000 commitment from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), a Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded organization that bankrolls projects aired on PBS. They would later learn that their film, Citizen Koch, which explores the post-Citizen United political landscape and the rise of the tea party, had touched a nerve among public television officials worried about angering a generous benefactor, David Koch, who served on the boards of Boston’s WGBH and New York City’s WNET. In the fall of 2012, PBS had aired Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, which featured a highly unflattering portrait of the billionaire, including an interview with a former doorman at Koch’s elite Manhattan apartment building who singled him out as its most miserly resident. Public television officials were sensitive about offending Koch again.
More here:
How "Citizen Koch" Saw the Light of Day After Public TV Snubbed It
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Previously: Every Obama Conspiracy Theory Ever
Impeachment is having another moment. On Wednesday, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) became the latest conservative politician to suggest that Republicans may attempt to oust President Obama from office if they take control of the Senate next fall, citing “mounting frustration that a lot of people are getting to.” For conservative activists, it’s no longer of issue of whether the president should be impeached, but what for. Since 2010, the Obama’s haters have floated more than two dozen reasons for filing articles of impeachment. They would like to oust the president for, among other things…
Anything at all: “It needs to happen,” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), an early adopter, said in 2011.
Benghazi “jihadi-coddling”: “This president was forced to see signs from people reminding them that they will not forget the seven hours of hell that the murdered Americans went through before they perished in Benghazi!,” said Michelle Malkin. (Steven Seagal agrees.)
The birth certificate: “The Executive has an awful lot of power to keep from showing certain things unless the courts will stand up to him, or unless Congress in majority will stand up, up to and including impeachment,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) admonished in 2010, before calling for a select committee of talk-radio hosts, members of Congress, and a single Supreme Court justice to examine the president’s birth certificate.
The border crisis (2010): “Recent reports of contacts between Hezbollah and Mexican drug cartels make it all but certain that terrorists intent on destroying us will come across our southwestern border,” said former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), blaming Obama for the continued existence of illegal immigration.
The border crisis (2014): In July, reality TV star Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed for Breitbart.com stating that the “unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘No mas.'”
Bowe Bergdahl: According to former Florida Rep. Allen West (of course), “Barack Hussein Obama’s unilateral negotiations with terrorists and the ensuing release of their key leadership without consult—mandated by law—with the US Congress represents high crimes and misdemeanors, an impeachable offense.”
Defense of Marriage Act: Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) told Think Progress in 2011 that he’d “absolutely” vote for impeachment “If it could gain the collective support.”
Egypt: According to talk-radio host Tammy Bruce, “If it is found that Obama secretly facilitated or ‘encouraged’ an Islamist takeover of Egypt, an ally, he should be impeached.”
EPA power-plant regulations: According to the South Dakota Republican Party, “The Constitution and Declaration of Independence are very clear on the authority of the President and the Federal Government”—and the president’s environmental regulations could not be tolerated.
Fast and Furious: Gun Owners of America president Larry Pratt, most recently seen encouraging the use of force against elected officials, said last March that, “if this isn’t the time when you can get him both politically and legally, I don’t know when.”
Fort Hood: “These days, what brain-functional person believes what officials, even those in high positions of responsibility, say about events like this?” asked one-time presidential hopeful Alan Keyes.
Health coverage for undocumented residents: “We clearly have a president who is dedicated to the well being of people who are here in our country illegally and instead of watching out for the interests of the American people,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) said in March.
Hypothetical executive orders: Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) sought to preempt any actions by President Obama to reduce gun violence by threatening impeachment: “If the president is allowed to suspend constitutional rights on his own personal whims, our free republic has effectively ceased to exist,” he said last January.
Hypothetical raising of the debt ceiling: “This president is looking to usurp congressional oversight to find a way to get it done without us,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said in 2011.
Hypothetically defaulting on the debt: “Obama would be impeached if he blocked debt payments,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), warned in an otherwise undecipherable tweet.
“If you like your plan, you can keep it”: “He had to tell that lie in order to get Obamacare passed,” Ann Coulter said in January, although she conceded that impeachment is unlikely.
IRS scandal: “Nixon only dreamed about doing what Lois Lerner has done,” Rush Limbaugh told his Dittoheads.
ISIS: “If Obama allows the world’s first pure terror state to emerge on his watch, my God, if that’s not grounds for impeachment, I don’t know what is,” Ret. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters told Newsmax in June.
Libya no-fly zone: “If we’re going to be a government of laws, and not descend into empire, this is Caesar crossing the Rubicon,” said Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein, explaining why he was drafting a sample order of impeachment.
Not extending the Bush tax cuts: It was a simple proposition for Grover Norquist: “Obama can sit there and let all the tax cuts lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach.”
NSA data collection: “In Watergate, Richard Nixon faced impeachment for breaking into the offices of the chairman of the Democratic National Party—Obama has broken into the homes of 300 million Americans,” conservative lawyer Larry Klayman explained last December.
Obama’s legacy: At least Glenn Beck is honest in his reasoning: “Obama needs to have the stain on his record that they cannot remove.”
Recess appointments: When asked about the Supreme Court’s decision in July knocking down the president’s power of appointment, Senate candidate Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) floated impeachment, before quickly backtracking.
The stimulus: WorldNetDaily‘s Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliot argued that “Questions should already be raised about how the former employer of Obama’s Commerce secretary received the Energy Department’s biggest loan guarantee.”
The Veterans Affairs scandal: “I and Liberty Counsel Action are calling on the House of Representatives, the people’s house, to draft Articles of Impeachment against President Barack H. Obama for high crimes and misdemeanors,” Liberty University law school dean Mathew Staver announced in May.
See original article here:
Mother Jones
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We now have a response to Russia’s latest military provocations in eastern Ukraine:
President Obama is ratcheting up pressure on Russia with new sanctions aimed at large banks and defense firms in what administration officials say is the most significant crackdown on Russian individuals and businesses since the crisis in Ukraine began.
….The new penalties come in coordination with European leaders now meeting in Brussels to contemplate their own sanctions against Russia. Those efforts are expected to center on obstructing loans to Russian interests from European development banks.
I’ll be curious to see what the Europeans decide to do. For all the opportunistic griping from Republicans about Obama being too soft on Putin and inviting a new Cold War blah blah blah, it’s always been European leaders who have been the obstacle to harsher sanctions against Russia. And since Russia does very little business with the US but does lots of business with Europe, American sanctions just don’t matter that much unless the Europeans join in. Obama’s hands are tied.
Of course, the very fact that Europe does lots of business with Russia means that sanctions hurt them a lot more than they hurt us. It’s easy for Americans to be blustery and hawkish, safe in the knowledge that Russian retaliation can’t really hurt us much. It’s a lot less easy for Europeans.
That said, the fact is that Obama has been trying to take the lead on this for months. European leaders now need to decide if they’re willing to join in. The ball’s in their court.
Continued –
Obama Levies New Sanctions Against Russia. Europe Ponders Whether to Follow Suit.
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This story was originally published in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Here’s a list of things that could now get you fined up to $500 a day in California, where a multi-year drought is sucking reservoirs and snowpacks dry:
Spraying so much water on your lawn or garden that excess water flows onto non-planted areas, walkways, parking lots, or neighboring property.
Washing your car with a hose that doesn’t have an automatic shut-off device.
Spraying water on a driveway, a sidewalk, asphalt, or any other hard surface.
Using fresh water in a water fountain—unless the water recirculates.
Those stern emergency regulations were adopted Tuesday by a unanimous vote of the State Water Resources Control Board – part of an effort to crack down on the profligate use of water during critically lean times.
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) asked the state’s residents to voluntarily conserve water in January, but they didn’t. Rather, as the San Jose Mercury News reports, “a new state survey released Tuesday showed that water use in May rose by 1 percent this year, compared with a 2011-2013 May average.”
Californians use more water on their gardens and lawns than they use inside their homes, as shown in the following chart from a document prepared for the board members ahead of Tuesday’s vote. So the new rules focus on outdoor use.
Extreme drought is now affecting 80 percent of the Golden State. Some 400,000 acres of farmland could be fallowed due to water shortages, and water customers in the hardest-hit communities are having their daily water supplies capped at less than 50 gallons per person.
The California Landscape Contractors Association sees an upside, though. It expects that the threats of fines could convince Californians to hire its members to replace thirsty nonnative plants in their gardens with drought-hardy alternatives. “If the runoff prohibition is enforced at the local level, we expect it to result in a multitude of landscape retrofits in the coming months,” association executive Larry Rohlfes told the water board in a letter dated Monday, one of a large stack of letters sent by various groups and residents in support of the new rules. “The water efficient landscapes that result will help the state’s long-term conservation efforts—in addition to helping the state deal with a hopefully short-term drought emergency.”
More:
Here Are The Things California Water-Wasters Can Now Be Fined For
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Now that billionaire eccentric Tim Draper has gotten enough signatures to qualify his “Six Californias” initiative for the ballot in 2016, I can no longer imperiously demand that the media stop paying attention to him. If this is going to be a ballot measure then it’s obviously a legitimate news story.
So a friend emailed this morning to ask what Draper’s deal is. Beats me. Officially, his motivation is a belief that California is simply too big to govern. As plausible as this is, it’s hardly a sufficient explanation. So what is it that’s really eating him? Well, Draper is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, so a few months ago Time asked him about that particular sixth of California:
How would you like to see things done differently in Silicon Valley, if it had its own government?
The issues of Silicon Valley are things like when Napster came out. No one knew how the law should be handled. It was a new technology. And no one quite knew whether it had some violation of copyright or not … And the people who were making those decisions were very distant, and not familiar with what Napster was. Now we have Bitcoin. We have very uncertain laws around Bitcoin. I believe if there were a government closer to Silicon Valley, it would be more in touch with those technologies and the need for making appropriate laws around them. Silicon Valley is seeing great frustration. They see how creative and efficient and exciting life can be in a place where innovation thrives, and then they see a government that is a little lost.
This makes no sense, since both copyright law and monetary policy are set in Washington DC, not Sacramento. But let’s accept that Draper was just burbling a bit here, and not hold him to specifics. What’s his beef? Basically, he appears to be retailing a strain of techno-libertarian utopianism or something. Information wants to be free! Technology will save us all! Just get government out of the way!
Or something. I don’t know, really. The whole thing is crazy, and it’s yet another example of how easy it is for billionaires to get publicity. Paying a signature-gathering firm to get something on the ballot in California is pretty trivial if you have a lot of money, and it automatically gets you a ton of exposure. So now Draper has that. But what’s the end game? Even if his initiative passes, he knows perfectly well it’s going nowhere since Congress will never approve it. So either (a) he’s just a crackpot or (b) he has some clever reason for doing this that’s going to make him even richer. It’s a mystery.
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Paul Light has gotten a lot of attention for his recent study showing that “government failures” are on the rise. I’ve seen several criticisms of his study, but it seems to me that basic methodology is really the main problem with it. First off, his dataset is a list of “41 important past government failures (between 2001 – 2014) from a search of news stories listed in the Pew Research Center’s News Interest Index.” Is that really a good way of determining the frequency of government failures? A list of headlines might be a good way of determining public interest, but it hardly seems like even a remotely good proxy for cataloging government failure in general.
For example, 2007 appears to be an epically bad year for government failure. But among the failures are “wounded soldiers,” “food safety recalls,” and “consumer product recalls.” Those all seem a bit amorphous to count as distinct failures.
This methodology also mushes up timeframes. Fast & Furious is counted as a government failure in 2011, but that’s just the year it made headlines. The operation itself ran from 2006-11. Likewise, the “postal service financing crisis” is hardly unique to 2011. It’s been ongoing for years.
Some of the items don’t even appear to be proper government failures. Was the Gulf oil spill in 2010 a government failure? Or the Southwest airline groundings? In both cases, you can argue—as Light does—that they exposed lax government oversight. But this basically puts you in the position of arguing that any failure in a regulated industry is a government failure. I’m not sure I buy that.
Finally, on the flip side, there are the things that don’t show up. The government shutdown in 2013? The fiscal cliff? The debt ceiling standoffs? The collapse of the Copenhagen conference? Allowing Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora? The scandalous demotion of Pluto to non-planet status?
Maybe I’m just picking nits here. But given the weakness of the core methodology; the small number of incidents; the problems of categorization; and the overall vagueness of what “failure” means, I’m just not sure this study tells us much. I’d take it with a big shaker of salt for the moment. It seems more like clickbait than a serious analysis of how well or poorly government has done over the past decade.
More here –
Government Failures On the Rise? Take It With a Grain of Salt.
Mother Jones
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California, the producer of nearly half of the nation’s fruits, veggies, and nuts, plus export crops—four-fifths of the world’s almonds, for example—is entering its third driest year on record. Nearly 80 percent of the state is experiencing “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. In addition to affecting agricultural production the drought will cost the state billions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and a whole lot of groundwater, according to a new report prepared for the California Department of Food and Agriculture by scientists at UC-Davis. The authors used current water data, agricultural models, satellite data, and other methods to predict the economic and environmental toll of the drought through 2016.
Here are four key takeaways:
The drought will cost the state $2.2 billion this year: Of these losses, $810 million will come from lower crop revenues, $203 million will come from livestock and dairy losses, and $454 million will come from the cost of pumping additional groundwater. Up to 17,100 seasonal and part-time jobs will be lost.
California is experiencing the “greatest absolute reduction in water availability” ever seen: In a normal year, about one-third of California’s irrigation water is drawn from wells that tap into the groundwater supply. The rest is “surface water” from streams, rivers, and reservoirs. This year, the state is losing about one-third of its surface water supply. The hardest hit area is the Central Valley, a normally fertile inland region. Because groundwater isn’t as easily pumped in the Valley as it is on the coasts, and the Colorado River supplies aren’t as accessible as they are in the south, the Valley has lost 410,000 acres to fallowing, an area about 10 times the size of Washington, DC.
Farmers are pumping enough groundwater to immerse Rhode Island in 17 feet of it: To make up for the loss of surface water, farmers are pumping 62 percent more groundwater than usual. They are projected to pump 13 million acre-feet this year, enough to put Rhode Island 17 feet under.
“We’re acting like the super-rich:” California is technically in its third year of drought, and regardless of the effects of El Niño, 2015 is likely to be a dry year too. As the dry years accumulate, it becomes harder and harder to pump water from the ground, adding to the crop and revenue losses. California is the only western state without groundwater regulation or measurement of major groundwater use. If you can drill down to water, it’s all yours. (Journalist McKenzie Funk describes this arcane system in an excerpt from his fascinating recent book, Windfall.) “A well-managed basin is used like a reserve bank account,” said Richard Howitt, a UC-Davis water scientist and co-author of the report. “We’re acting like the super-rich, who have so much money they don’t need to balance their checkbook.”
Continued:
California Farms Are Sucking Up Enough Groundwater to Put Rhode Island 17 Feet Under
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After writing about a common misconception regarding a particular scene in Julius Caesar, Mark Kleiman offers a footnote:
Like many Boomers, I had to read Julius Caesar in the 10th grade; not really one of the Bard’s better efforts, but full of quotable passages and reasonably easy to follow. (As You Like It, by contrast, if read rather than watched, makes absolutely no sense to a sixt Shakespeare wrote great musicals.) This would have been a perfect scene to use as an example of dramatic irony. But I doubt my teacher had any actual idea what the passage was about, and the lit-crit we read as “secondary sources” disdained anything as straightforward as explaining what the play was supposed to mean or how the poet used dramatic techniques to express that meaning.
This was my experience too, but in college. I remember enrolling in a Shakespeare class and looking forward to it. In my case, I actually had a fairly good high school English teacher, but still, Shakespeare is tough for high schoolers. This would be my chance to really learn and appreciate what Shakespeare was doing.
Alas, no. I got an A in the class, but learned barely anything. It was a huge disappointment. To this day, I don’t understand why Shakespeare seems to be so difficult to teach. Was I just unlucky?
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