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Ted Cruz Endorses Trump After Calling Him a "Sniveling Coward"

by Elizabeth4028 Posted on September 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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For months, Ted Cruz has refused to endorse Donald Trump, making Cruz a hero to some Republicans who remain opposed to Trump. But that ended on Friday when Cruz announced he would support his former rival.

“After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump,” Cruz wrote in a Facebook post.

At the Republican National Convention in July, rather than endorse Trump, Cruz urged Republicans to “vote your conscience,” drawing shouts and boos from the audience. On Friday, he said his own conscience told him to support Trump. “If Clinton wins, we know—with 100% certainty—that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country,” he wrote. “My conscience tells me I must do whatever I can to stop that.”

Cruz had some good reasons not to endorse Trump, stemming from the nasty primary battle between them. Trump has repeatedly attacked members of Cruz’s family. In February, Trump went after Cruz’s wife, Heidi, threatening in a tweet to “spill the beans” about her. Trump then retweeted an unflattering photo of Heidi next to a better one of his own wife, Melania.

Cruz’s response: “Donald, you’re a sniveling coward. Leave Heidi the hell alone.”

But Trump wasn’t done going after Cruz’s family. Toward the end of the primary, Trump suggested that Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When Cruz refused to endorse Trump at the convention this summer, Trump promptly revived this accusation.

Cruz cited these attacks to defend his decision not to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention in July. “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” he said at the time. Now his habits appear to have changed.

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Ted Cruz Endorses Trump After Calling Him a "Sniveling Coward"

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North American tribes forge an alliance to fight oil projects.

by JacquieFwb Posted on September 23, 2016

This week, cities mark World Car-Free Day, an annual event to promote biking, walking, mass transit, and other ways to get around sans motor vehicles (Solowheel, anyone?).

Technically, World Car-Free Day was Thursday, September 22, but participating cities are taking the “eh, close enough” approach to get their car-free kicks in on the weekend. Said cities include Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Brussels, Bogotá, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Paris, where nearly half the city center will be closed to vehicle traffic on Sunday.

But going car-free, municipally speaking, is becoming more of a regular trend than an annual affair: Mexico City closes 35 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday; the Oslo city government proposed a ban on private vehicles in the city center after 2019; and in Paris, the government is allowed to limit vehicles if air pollution rises above health-threatening levels.

But even if your city isn’t officially participating in World Car-Free Day, you can be the change you want to see in your own metropolis. And by that, we mean: Just leave your keys at home. Horrible, no good things happen in cars.

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North American tribes forge an alliance to fight oil projects.

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Debate moderators say climate questions don’t make good TV

by vezimeciurilive Posted on September 23, 2016

The Great Unmentionable

Debate moderators say climate questions don’t make good TV

By on Sep 23, 2016 2:02 pmShare

Four years ago, CNN’s Candy Crowley had the perfect opportunity to ask President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney what they would do about climate change. An audience question on gas prices sparked a heated debate about energy policy and oil drilling. But when neither candidate mentioned global warming, Crowley quickly moved on.

Climate hawks squawked with outrage. “Where is global warming in this debate?” tweeted former Vice President Al Gore. “Climate change is an urgent foreign policy issue.” The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert called climate “the debate’s great unmentionable.”

“I had that question for all of you climate change people,” Crowley would later respond to critics. But she skipped it, choosing to stick with the economy instead.

The 2012 cycle would turn out to be the first since 1988 in which climate went unmentioned in either a presidential or vice presidential debate — although to be honest, it’s hardly ever a popular topic with moderators. The advocacy group Media Matters for America analyzed the 1,477 questions asked during the first 20 debates of this year’s primary season and found that only 22, or 1.5 percent, covered climate.

“That is really malfeasance on the part of our fourth estate,” says Shawn Otto, a cofounder of ScienceDebate, which pushes for more discussion of scientific issues from candidates.

Because so few moderators have chosen to ask about climate over the years, Grist turned the tables and asked moderators to answer for themselves. Most declined, including Crowley, but those who spoke up said a good debate question includes two elements:

  1. It exposes differences for undecided voters.
  2. It makes for dramatic TV.

“The exercise was always trying to draw out differences,” says Scott Spradling, a former anchor of New Hampshire’s WMUR, who participated in four 2008 primary debates. “Allow there to be opportunities to clearly state positions by the candidates, but to also draw distinctions so voters can be educated on where they differ.”

Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus, who moderated primary debates in 2000 and 2008, said: “The second big goal, to put it as crassly as possible, is to produce a good television show.” Climate, apparently, gets poor ratings — a conclusion you can also draw from the scant amount of coverage it receives on the nightly network news.

“It doesn’t grab viewers the same way other stuff does: bombing in New York, terror, immigration,” says Tom Fahey, a former New Hampshire Union Leader reporter who worked two presidential primary debates. “I’m just talking about Joe Sixpack.”

Despite that, Fahey asked one of the most straightforward questions on climate in recent debate history: “Is science wrong on global warming?” he queried GOP hopefuls in 2007. “And what, if any, steps would you take as president to address the issue of climate change?”

Environmentalists say the focus on other issues is an industry problem. “The media themselves think of climate change as an environmental issue, and they have niche reporters on it,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. “They’re not the reporters who moderate debates. Their questions tend to go more to what’s in the news that week or some of the political attacks, some of the partisan stuff, some of the issues that they consider more immediate — and even silly things.”

Juliet Eilperin, the Washington Post’s White House bureau chief (and a former environmental reporter), says debate moderators rarely have environmental expertise. “While I think it’s most notable in terms of the moderators, you also see that on the trail itself. The candidates may not be asked about this as much because the people who are with them day in and day out have not been immersed in these issues.”

Will this year be different? Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will meet in New York on Monday night for their first debate, and climate change shows signs of becoming a more salient election issue. This year’s Paris Climate Accord, a string of temperature records, and Clinton primary challenger Bernie Sanders have made the issue increasingly central in 2016.

An August poll showed 65 percent of adults want the U.S. government to act on climate change domestically and abroad. And a July analysis from Yale and George Mason showed the highest percentage of Americans alarmed about climate change since 2008 — but also the deepest gulf between climate voters and deniers since that same year.

“Climate change began as an issue that was obscure and little known and poorly understood,” says McManus, the L.A. Times columnist. “It is now one of the signal issues that divides the two parties.”

With political pressure building for climate action, advocates are also pushing for more airtime on climate during the debates. Several environmental organizations, including 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), and Climate Truth, have created petitions, mobilized their hundreds of thousands of members, and lobbied via social media to challenge moderators on climate. For the upcoming debates, LCV, Media Matters, the NRDC Action Fund, and others have collaborated on a petition calling for climate questions, which now has over 100,000 signatures. An effort spearheaded by the same coalition has pushed out more than 90,000 emails to moderators of the September 26 debate.

Sometimes pressure works. During the Republican primary, Climate Truth worked with a group of 21 Florida mayors on letters to moderators that helped get airtime for two climate questions.

“Numbers matter,” says Spradling, the WMUR anchor. “The more people are asking that question, the more likely that question gets asked in higher-profile debates.”

McManus calls Trump’s claim that climate change is a hoax “catnip for a debate question.” In other words: good TV.

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Debate moderators say climate questions don’t make good TV

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Trump Ohio Deputy’s Racial Remarks Reveal a Hidden Reason for His Rust Belt Success

by AlvaroUnp7246036 Posted on September 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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People across America reacted with shock Thursday to a video of racially charged comments by Donald Trump’s campaign chairwoman for Ohio’s Mahoning County, who denied that racism existed there before Barack Obama became president—remarks that quickly led her to resign. But one group was probably less surprised to hear this kind of racially divisive language: the black residents of Mahoning County.

Mahoning County, in the heart of the Rust Belt, has received outsize attention this year for the exodus of once-loyal blue-collar Democratic voters into the Trump camp. The overwhelming focus of this attention has been economic: In this poster child of industrial decline, the prevailing narrative goes, residents opposed to free trade have flocked to Trump and his promise to restore the Rust Belt to better times. But the comments by Kathy Miller, Trump’s Mahoning chairwoman, reveal a different story that African American residents have been telling all along—one of political shifts driven by issues of race and racism.

“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected,” Miller, a real estate agent, told the Guardian recently a video-taped interview posted Thursday. “Now, you know, with the people with the guns and shooting up neighborhoods and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.”

Miller continued, to the wide-eyed astonishment of the reporter, “And if you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you.”

Mahoning County is ground zero for Trump’s rise. It’s the home of Youngstown, famous for its decline from a booming steel town in the first half of the 20th century to a downtrodden playground for the mob in the second half. Now Youngstown is a struggling, down-and-out city where signs of rehabilitation are dwarfed by the lingering effects of the economic collapse and the poverty of many of the city’s black residents. Following white flight to the suburbs, Youngstown is nearly half black. Thanks to the strong influence of labor unions, for decades the region has been a Democratic stronghold. But in the Ohio Republican primary in March, Trump won the region handily, with the help of many Democratic voters who switched parties to support Trump.

I visited Youngstown in June. Most of the people I spoke with traced Trump’s appeal to the economy and particularly to the issue of trade. Union officials worried that if Hillary Clinton didn’t match Trump’s zeal in opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, she would lose Democratic votes in the region, and with them the state of Ohio. And that is essentially the story I wrote.

But a few people voiced a different view of Trump’s appeal in Youngstown. For them, Miller’s comments reflect what they’ve long said: that Trump’s popularity in Youngstown has a lot to do with race. Unsurprisingly, those people were black.

“I have some other strong personal feelings about this that nobody wants to talk about,” Jaladah Aslam, a former public sector union employee and former local Democratic Party official, told me this summer. “This whole racist rhetoric plays well with some people here.”

Aslam recalled footage she had seen of a clash between supporters and protesters at a Trump rally. “I saw a man screaming at this one guy, ‘Go back to Africa,’ and I’m like, ‘Really? We’re talking like that again?'” she said. “That means that people never gave up that thinking.” When it comes to Youngstown and its environs, Aslam believes nasty rhetoric toward African Americans never went away; it just went out of sight.

Aslam was born and raised in Youngstown. In the late 1990s, she left the city limits and bought a house in the suburb of Austintown Township. Her first summer in the neighborhood, she was in her backyard when she overheard a visitor at her neighbor’s house a few yards over. “I don’t believe this shit,” her neighbor’s friend said. “The nigger has the new pool in the neighborhood.” The incident alerted her to the way some locals think and talk about black people when they don’t think black people are listening: “In their mind, why should somebody of color have anything nice?”

Trump’s rise reminded Aslam of that summer day nearly two decades ago. “It comes back to me in the moment of Trump because it reminds me of that thought process, it reminds me people feel that way,” she said. “And unfortunately, there are a lot of people who feel that way in Youngstown. There are a lot of people who are comfortable with what Trump says about Hispanics and Muslims.”

Aslam’s hunches are borne out by academic research. Last year, a doctoral student at Cleveland State University found that the American metropolitan area where the N-word showed up most frequently as an internet search term was Youngstown. He published his findings in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, noting that research out of Harvard shows that search data “does actually correlate with other measures of racism” and that “the private use of coarse racial terminology is the first stage of prejudice.”

Youngstown might not be an obvious epicenter of American racism, but its history helps explain its racial tensions. There’s academic research demonstrating that support for far-right nationalist political parties in Europe correlates with a perceived loss of power at the hands of immigrants or other ethnic groups—a fact that helps explain Trump’s rise in Youngstown and the dynamic Aslam sensed for years. At 45 percent black and 9 percent Latino, Youngstown is a majority-minority city.

“The Trump phenomenon is basically a middle-class white movement because they feel disenfranchised, they feel like they are losing out,” Rufus Hudson, an African American former Youngstown city council member who serves on the local Democratic Party’s executive committee, told me when I visited. “I think there’s that quiet undertone that after eight years of Barack Obama, there’s people that think, ‘We’re falling behind, we’re not getting our fair share.'” With Miller’s remarks this week, all of a sudden it wasn’t so quiet anymore.

“Growing up in this community, there has always been a racist undertone here,” Hudson said. “I actually didn’t realize that until I moved away. When I moved to Houston, and I lived down there for 10 years and then I come back, and it’s like, wow, I mean, it’s like kind of in your face.” He nodded toward the car he drives, a Lexus. As a black man driving a nice car, he said he had been pulled over 17 times in the area but had never been issued a citation.

By Thursday evening, the Trump campaign had found a new Mahoning County chair, a black state GOP official from Youngstown named Tracey Winbush. Upon joining the campaign, she immediately deleted her entire Twitter history of about 17,000 tweets. Many of them had been critical of Trump. In February, following Trump’s first win of the Republican primary campaign, she tweeted out an article bearing the headline, “A Racist, Sexist Demagogue Just Won The New Hampshire Primary.”

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Trump Ohio Deputy’s Racial Remarks Reveal a Hidden Reason for His Rust Belt Success

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Alaska Native youth view warmer weather as the norm.

by YvonneDanielson Posted on September 22, 2016

In interviews with members of four indigenous communities in Alaska’s Yukon River Basin, U.S. Geological Service researchers found differences in how older and younger generations experienced climatic change. Younger generations noticed change in their landscape, but viewed the warm winters, little snow, and other seasonal shifts as normal, “likely because that is all they have ever known,” according to the study.

Understandings of environmental change can be passed through generations. But community interviews showed a difference in how young and older generations perceived climate change. While over 50 percent of elder interviewees described statements from their parents and grandparents about the environment changing, none of the youngest interviewees brought up the environmental observations of elders.

“[T]hose younger than us, they don’t hear these stories anymore,” said one Chevak resident, from the 30-49 age group. “It’s like a fairy tale, they might know it’s real, but it doesn’t hit them as the way it got to us.”

Climate change is not an abstract future in Alaska. Physical and cultural impacts like erosion, ice melt, fish availability, and uprooted communities have already left scars. The state has seen twice the warming of the rest of the country. As one anonymous elder in Kotlik put it: “The world is getting thin.”

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Alaska Native youth view warmer weather as the norm.

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Big business is diving into the fight over the Dakota Access pipeline.

by GabrielMcGowen Posted on September 22, 2016

In interviews with members of four indigenous communities in Alaska’s Yukon River Basin, U.S. Geological Service researchers found differences in how older and younger generations experienced climatic change. Younger generations noticed change in their landscape, but viewed the warm winters, little snow, and other seasonal shifts as normal, “likely because that is all they have ever known,” according to the study.

Understandings of environmental change can be passed through generations. But community interviews showed a difference in how young and older generations perceived climate change. While over 50 percent of elder interviewees described statements from their parents and grandparents about the environment changing, none of the youngest interviewees brought up the environmental observations of elders.

“[T]hose younger than us, they don’t hear these stories anymore,” said one Chevak resident, from the 30-49 age group. “It’s like a fairy tale, they might know it’s real, but it doesn’t hit them as the way it got to us.”

Climate change is not an abstract future in Alaska. Physical and cultural impacts like erosion, ice melt, fish availability, and uprooted communities have already left scars. The state has seen twice the warming of the rest of the country. As one anonymous elder in Kotlik put it: “The world is getting thin.”

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Big business is diving into the fight over the Dakota Access pipeline.

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Farmworkers demand ban on a toxic pesticide.

by SteviePillinger Posted on September 22, 2016

This week, cities mark World Car-Free Day, an annual event to promote biking, walking, mass transit, and other ways to get around sans motor vehicles (Solowheel, anyone?).

Technically, World Car-Free Day was Thursday, September 22, but participating cities are taking the “eh, close enough” approach to get their car-free kicks in on the weekend. Said cities include Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Brussels, Bogotá, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Paris, where nearly half the city center will be closed to vehicle traffic on Sunday.

But going car-free, municipally speaking, is becoming more of a regular trend than an annual affair: Mexico City closes 35 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday; the Oslo city government proposed a ban on private vehicles in the city center after 2019; and in Paris, the government is allowed to limit vehicles if air pollution rises above health-threatening levels.

But even if your city isn’t officially participating in World Car-Free Day, you can be the change you want to see in your own metropolis. And by that, we mean: Just leave your keys at home. Horrible, no good things happen in cars.

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Farmworkers demand ban on a toxic pesticide.

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US Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia Will Continue, Despite Allegations of War Crimes

by FelipaCajigas6 Posted on September 22, 2016

Mother Jones

“The United States is at war in Yemen today,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) during a Senate debate this morning over a bipartisan resolution seeking to block a $1.15 billion arms deal that would supply Saudi Arabia with Abrams tanks and an assortment other weaponry.

While the resolution was voted down, 71 to 21, it marked the first time that members of Congress have publicly debated the wisdom of the United States’ role in a conflict that’s left thousands of civilians dead and millions on the verge of starvation. “There is a US imprint on every civilian death inside Yemen, which is radicalizing the people of Yemen against the United States,” Murphy said in support of the resolution. “There really is no way this bombing campaign could happen without United States participation…And this Congress has not debated this engagement.”

For the past year and a half, a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf States has been bombing Yemen, supposedly targeting the Houthi rebels who ousted Yemen’s president in March 2015. But more than a third of the airstrikes have hit civilian targets, including hospitals, schools, and places of worship. The United States has been providing the Saudis with bombs, intelligence, and aerial refueling for its jets.

Senators who opposed the resolution focused more on Iran than Saudi Arabia or Yemen. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued that the recent US-Iranian nuclear deal enhanced Iran’s status as regional power, and that the resolution would “further damage our alliance and our partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) played up the relationship between the Yemeni rebels and Iran and glossed over Saudi Arabia’s actions in Yemen (which include allegations of war crimes) as “imperfect.” “If we say no to the Saudis, not only will that be seen as a slight by the Saudis, they’ll buy the arms somewhere else,” he warned.

Some observers don’t find those arguments very compelling. “It’s discouraging that the arguments are more about Iran than Saudi Arabia,” says Cole Bockenfeld, the deputy director for policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy. “A lot of this is tied to reassuring the Gulf countries after the Iran deal.” Scott Paul, Oxfam’s senior humanitarian policy advisor, says it’s not accurate to see Yemen’s Houthi rebels as proxies for Iran. “They’re unique to Yemen and have uniquely Yemeni ambitions and grievances,” he says. “They’re doing so in an incredibly problematic way, but they are not under the command or control of Tehran by any stretch of the imagination.”

Sources: Congressional Research Service, Department of Defense Fiscal Year Series, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Defense Security Cooperation Agency

McConnell also said that shutting off the Saudis from American arms would send them looking elsewhere for weaponry. “They don’t have to buy this equipment from us; they can buy it from somebody else,” he said. He added that there’s no evidence that the Saudis have used tanks on the ground in Yemen. However, the Saudis have hinted that they’re prepared to launch a ground attack on the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Plus, the Saudis can’t easily turn to the Russians, Chinese, or European countries to buy these types of weapons systems. “Almost all of their equipment is US-manufactured,” says Bockenfeld. “For them to transition over to an entirely different kind of weapon from a different country would take several years and billions of dollars—a massive undertaking. Beyond the costs, frankly the US equipment is sought after not just to please and maintain the alliance, but also because it’s the best.”

Graham insisted that such arms transfers—Washington and Riyadh have inked weapons deals worth more than $100 billion since the beginning of the Obama administration—help Saudi Arabia attack Al Qaeda and ISIS. Yet, as Murphy observed, “None of the Saudi bombs are dropping on AQAP Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; they are all dropping on Houthi targets and civilian targets.”

Despite the resolution’s failure, lawmakers and observers maintain that the vote sent a strong message: that the longstanding US-Saudi relationship is under more scrutiny than ever before. But for now, the flow of arms will not be interrupted.

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US Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia Will Continue, Despite Allegations of War Crimes

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There was another brutal attack on an indigenous environmental activist.

by AshleeStricklin Posted on September 21, 2016

This weekend, Máxima Acuña, winner of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, was assaulted on her property in Peru. Since 2011, Acuña has resisted the development of the Conga gold mine by U.S.-based Newmont Mining by refusing to vacate her home — and, for that, has faced both legal prosecution and physical intimidation.

As a result of the attack, allegedly perpetrated by agents of Minera Yanacocha (Newmont’s Peruvian subsidiary), Acuña is now in the hospital and her family’s crops are destroyed, according to Amnesty International.

Nor, tragically, is this attack an isolated instance of violence against indigenous women protecting their land. Earlier this year, Berta Cáceres — winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts in blocking hydroelectric developments on Lenca land in Honduras — was murdered at home, allegedly by employees of DESA, the developer behind the proposed dams.

When we spoke to Acuña in April, she told us, with eerie foresight: “Because these businesses are very powerful, I don’t know what awaits me when I get back [home]. But this isn’t a cause of fear for me – it’s not a motive for us to stop fighting, to stop defending.”

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There was another brutal attack on an indigenous environmental activist.

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Cyclists and walkers are building their own bike lanes and crosswalks.

by MadisonIliff Posted on September 21, 2016

This weekend, Máxima Acuña, winner of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, was assaulted on her property in Peru. Since 2011, Acuña has resisted the development of the Conga gold mine by U.S.-based Newmont Mining by refusing to vacate her home — and, for that, has faced both legal prosecution and physical intimidation.

As a result of the attack, allegedly perpetrated by agents of Minera Yanacocha (Newmont’s Peruvian subsidiary), Acuña is now in the hospital and her family’s crops are destroyed, according to Amnesty International.

Nor, tragically, is this attack an isolated instance of violence against indigenous women protecting their land. Earlier this year, Berta Cáceres — winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts in blocking hydroelectric developments on Lenca land in Honduras — was murdered at home, allegedly by employees of DESA, the developer behind the proposed dams.

When we spoke to Acuña in April, she told us, with eerie foresight: “Because these businesses are very powerful, I don’t know what awaits me when I get back [home]. But this isn’t a cause of fear for me – it’s not a motive for us to stop fighting, to stop defending.”

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Cyclists and walkers are building their own bike lanes and crosswalks.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cyclists and walkers are building their own bike lanes and crosswalks.