Tag Archives: association

Here Are The Things California Water-Wasters Can Now Be Fined For

by JuliannChristma Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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

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

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Are The Things California Water-Wasters Can Now Be Fined For

Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

by Kandace86G Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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

At exactly 10 a.m. on Monday, hundreds of school cafeteria professionals ran hooting and clapping down an escalator into an exhibition hall that looked like a cross between a mall food court and the set of Barney. Pharrell blared over loudspeakers. The Pillsbury Doughboy was on hand for photo ops, as was Chester the Cheetah (the Cheetos mascot) and a dancing corn dog on a stick. Attendees queued up to be contestants in a quiz show called “Do You Eat Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” and flocked toward trays groaning with every kind of kid food one could imagine: tater tots, PB&Js with crusts pre-removed, toaster waffles with built-in syrup, and endless variations on the theme of breaded poultry: chicken tenders, chicken bites, chicken rings, chicken patties, and of course chicken nuggets.

I was at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the professional group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food workers, and the biggest draw of the event—the exhibition hall—had just opened for business. More than 400 vendors vied for the attention of the conference’s 6,500 attendees, who had descended on the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center with one main goal: to find new foods to serve at their schools.

Many of the vendors were household names: Sara Lee, Kraft, Perdue, Uno, and Pizza Hut, to name a few. Among the corporate sponsors who collectively put up about $200,000 to help stage the affair were Domino’s Pizza, PepsiCo, Tyson, General Mills, and AdvancePierre Foods, which bills itself as “the No. 1 provider of fully-cooked protein and assembled sandwiches to school systems across the country.”

The Pizza Hut booth. Kiera Butler

To be sure, you won’t find most of the items on exhibit in supermarkets or restaurants. That’s because they are specially made to conform to the new federal school nutrition standards, some of which took effect July 1. There are new fruit and vegetable requirements; limits on calories, sodium, and saturated fats; and a mandate that more than half of the grains in products be whole grains. The rules—which I’ll cover in more detail in a subsequent post—are contentious, and the SNA opposes some of them. Politico‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reported that after First Lady Michelle Obama spoke out in favor of the rules, organizers told the White House that its senior advisor for nutrition policy, Sam Kass, would not be allowed to speak at the conference.

Politics aside, the vendors were armed with newly formulated products designed to conform to the rules. At the Kraft booth, a rep gushed about the virtues of the company’s new flavored cream cheeses, available in milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and caramel, “with half the calories of Nutella.” She told me they were designed as dips for fruits with the new produce rule in mind. “Nowadays, it’s the only way to get kids to eat anything that’s good for them,” she said.

The Smuckers “Uncrustables” mascot and his disaffected handler.

Indeed, the exhibitors’ guiding principle seemed to be something like: “Whatever you do, don’t tell them it’s healthy.” I watched as a Sara Lee rep promised a cafeteria director from Louisiana that her students wouldn’t be able to detect the whole-grain flour in her company’s chocolate muffin. The PepsiCo booth stocked a flier (below) informing attendees that newly formulated Cheetos fit with the guidelines. When I sampled a vitamin-fortified, low-cal Slush Puppy, the rep asked me, “Doesn’t that taste just as good as a regular slushy?” (It didn’t.) A food service company rep promised me that his funnel cake was “plenty sweet,” even though it fit within the calorie limits. (It was.)

I picked up this flier from the PepsiCo booth.

While the exhibitors were eager to show off their products’ nutritional stats, few offered actual ingredients lists. When I asked the rep at the Uno pizza booth why ingredients weren’t included on his nutrition information sheet, he told me the list wouldn’t fit on the page.

“Don’t the school nutritionists ask you what’s in this?” I asked. Nope, he said. Most of them just wanted to know whether the product met the legal guidelines. He offered to email me the list later. When he did, I learned that Uno’s Whole Grain Low Sodium Sweet Potato Crust Pepperoni Pizza contained nearly 50 ingredients, including sodium nitrite, which has been linked to cancer. I also persuaded the Domino’s rep to email me a list of ingredients in his company’s specially formulated school pizza, SmartSlice. It was also nearly 50 items long, and included silicone dioxide, otherwise known as sand.

After wandering through most of the 180,000 square feet of exhibits, I came across an earnest gray-haired woman in the back of the cavernous room selling frozen “pulses”—mostly lentils and chickpeas—to stir into soups and sauces. I was the only one at her booth. Had she noticed that everyone seemed drawn to the big-name foods up front? She responded that she hoped attendees would consider fortifying their name-brand meals with some of her lentils. “If you add a pulse product to a potato salad, it steps up the nutrition,” she offered hopefully.

But the attendees would have to find her first, and that would be a tall order: Corporations such as PepsiCo and General Mills had rented out multiple exhibit spaces ($2,400 to $2,600 a pop) in the high-traffic front and central aisles of the exhibit floor. Some big booths even had café-style seating areas where attendees chatted as they gobbled up samples. “You have to go in the far corners to find the more interesting stuff,” says Steve Marinelli, who runs the food program for a rural Vermont school district and told me he was having trouble locating the wholesome foods he wanted. “Someone was selling this really cool hummus, but you really had to look hard to find it.”

The lentil lady didn’t stand a chance.

Original link: 

Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

by NickolasPaz Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Terry Dunn, a top Alabama utility regulator, is an EPA-bashing, fossil-fuel-boosting, dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Or so he thought. But last year, he tried to convince his colleagues on the three-member Alabama Public Service Commission to discuss lowering customer payments to Alabama Power, the state’s largest utility. Now he is the target of an unprecedented half-million dollar campaign, led by Alabama’s powerful coal lobby, to boot him out of office.

“I’ve been a delegate to the last three Republican presidential conventions,” Dunn says. “I’m about as Republican as my opponent—or more so. ‘Environmentalist’—in Alabama, that’s code to damage me. I’ve been fighting Environment Protection Agency regulation since the day I got into office.”

John Archibald, a political commentator for Al.com, agrees with Dunn’s self-assessment: “Dunn’s a good old boy. He asked hard questions, and kind of got punched for it.”

The energy industry’s chosen candidate is Chris “Chip” Beeker, a Republican challenging Dunn in the GOP primary. And there is no mistaking Beeker for an environmentalist: On his campaign website, Beeker claims the planet is cooling, not warming. “The so-called ‘climate change crisis’ is about as real as unicorns and little green men from Mars,” he says.

Beeker’s backers in Tuesday’s race include Drummond Co., a global coal giant headquartered in Birmingham, which has given him $50,000; R.E.M. Directional, a drilling company near Tuscaloosa that donated $20,000; and ENPAC, a political action committee connected to the Alabama Coal Association that gave him $38,000. Two trade groups, the Alabama Coal Association and Manufacture Alabama, have endorsed Beeker, and big-name Republicans, including former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, have hosted fundraisers for him.

Beeker was the leading vote-getter in the first round of the primary, which was held on June 3, taking 39 percent to Dunn’s 33 percent. A runoff, scheduled for Tuesday, will determine the winner, as there is no Democrat running for the seat.

Dunn’s troubles started in January 2013, when he proposed holding a formal meeting to examine Alabama Power’s rates. The utility, which has a monopoly on the Alabama grid, charges customers more and has larger profit margins than utilities in surrounding states.

“From that point on, Dunn was declared an environmental wacko—and there is a concerted effort to paint him that way,” Archibald says. “But he’s not a tree-hugger. Under normal circumstances, you’d consider him far to the right.”

Dunn had antagonized the coal industry before he called for the meeting, by pushing utilities to increase their use of natural gas, a cheaper alternative to coal, in order to bring down energy prices. But proposing talks about rate reductions escalated the dispute. Coal miners filed ethics complaints against Dunn’s staff, and critics slammed him as a Republican in Name Only and environmentalist. Dunn tells Mother Jones that a man who identified himself as a private investigator—Dunn never found out who employed him—followed his car home from a commission meeting and photographed his chief of staff at home.

Dunn’s colleagues issued fiery, public denunciations of his proposal to consider cutting rates. Twinkle Cavanaugh, the commission president, said talking about rate reductions would allow “environmental extremist groups” to “trot out their fancy San Francisco environmental lawyers and junk science hucksters to make what amounts to a legal, judicial case against coal production within our borders.” She said Dunn’s proposal was orchestrated by environmentalists “hiding behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz.”

The commission eventually held an informal meeting and approved changes to Alabama Power’s rate formula that Dunn denounced as weak.

To call Dunn’s proposal an attack on coal is preposterous, Archibald says—Alabama Power isn’t strictly a coal utility, and it imports a lot of coal from out-of-state. “But it seemed to work in getting the industry riled up,” he says. Utilities, such as Alabama Power, can’t spend money in Public Service Commission races. But energy wholesalers, including the companies lined up against Dunn, face no such restriction.

Dunn tells E & E News that some donors who previously supported him have abandoned him out of fear of industry backlash. He has not exactly made things easy on them: In February, he called for a bill to ban coal, gas, and electricity companies from donating to Public Service Commission candidates in future elections. The bill failed.

Alabama Power did not reply to requests for comment, but a spokesman previously told AL.com that the company had not become involved in the race. Beeker did not reply to messages left with his campaign and Beeker Catfish & Cattle Farms. Twinkle Cavanaugh, Drummond Company, Manufacture Alabama, and the Alabama Coal Association did not reply to requests for comment.

Originally posted here:  

This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis

by JannNQLGzck Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

As part of his proposal for dealing with the crisis of child migrants crossing the border, President Obama has asked Congress for $3.7 billion in funding that would be used for, among other things, hiring more judges for the nation’s 59 immigration courts. Those courts have been overwhelmed by the influx of kids coming to the United States without parents or other relatives. But they were overwhelmed even before the children started showing up, in large part because of Republicans’ unwillingness to fund and staff them like other federal courts.

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


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


“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”


Mexican Government: Freight Trains Are Now Off-Limits to Central American Migrants

For years, since the second Bush administration radically stepped up, and Obama continued, deportation efforts targeted at undocumented immigrants, advocates have been begging Congress to beef up the funding for the courts that must process those new cases. As far back as 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recognized that the immigration courts were woefully understaffed to process a backlog of cases that back then stood at 169,000. Gonzales called for more funding to increase resources for the courts, including adding more 40 judges.

But then his office proceeded to attempt to fill those jobs (and others at the Department of Justice) with political hacks who couldn’t make it through the Senate confirmation process to land on a regular federal court. (Immigration courts fall under the jurisdiction of the DOJ, and their judges don’t require Senate confirmation.) One example: Carey Holliday, a Louisiana delegate to the 2004 GOP convention who made headlines for trash-talking former Mother Jones editor Michael Moore, who was at the convention filing dispatches for USA Today.

Other Bush appointees had a distinctly pro-government bias. One judge, Thomas Roepke, appointed to a court in El Paso, Texas, in 2005, denied fully 96.3 percent of all asylum cases that came before him between 2007 and 2012, according to records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

Before he got very far with the immigration judge hiring spree, Gonzales resigned under fire for politicizing hiring at the DOJ, and by 2008, the immigration courts had eight fewer judges than when Gonzales launched his clarion call.

Meanwhile, while guys like Holliday were taking slots on the immigration bench, poor working conditions, crushing caseloads, and the overly politicized nature of the appointment process left the courts hemorrhaging other judges during the Bush administration. By the time Obama took office, immigration courts had a vacancy rate that reached 1 in 6 judgeships. The new Obama administration began hiring judges furiously, eventually adding an additional 44 new bodies to the immigration bench. Even so, his concurrent move to step up border enforcement meant that the deportation caseloads were growing even faster:

Immigration judges can expect to handle 1,500 cases at any given time. By comparison, Article I federal district judges handle about 440 cases, and they get several law clerks to help manage the load. Immigration judges have to share a single clerk with two or three other judges. (For more, see Casey Miner’s “Judges on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” from our November/December 2010 issue.) The lack of staffing creates an irony that seems to be lost on the current Congress: Too few judges means that people with strong cases languish for years waiting for them to get resolved, while people with weak cases who should probably be sent home quickly get to stay in the United States a few years waiting for a decision.

That dynamic is only getting compounded with the recent influx of unaccompanied juveniles, who usually don’t have lawyers to represent them in court. “It’s ironic and counterintuitive that we should not give enough money to the system to allow it to work more quickly,” says Dana Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

In 2010, the American Bar Association called on Congress and the White House to immediately initiate the hiring of at least 100 new judges to help relieve the existing crisis in the courts. Instead, Congress failed to deal with the budget of any agency, sequestration happened, and the Justice Department started a hiring freeze that didn’t end until December 2013, even though at least 100 sitting immigration judges are eligible to retire this year. Meanwhile, the comprehensive immigration bill passed in the Senate last year would have added 225 new judges to the immigration courts over three years (along with clerks and support staff), but Republicans killed the bill in the House.

Today, there are 243 judges—just 13 more than in 2006 and 21 fewer than at the end of 2012—and more than 30 vacancies the government is trying to fill. All this despite the fact that the immigration court backlog has increased nearly 120 percent since 2006. And that was before the kids started coming. Last week, TRAC reported that the official immigration court backlog in June hit 375,503, up by 50,000 since the start of 2013. Among the languishing cases: more than 12,000 kids each from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. All told, more than 40,000 cases in the current court backlog involve children, and the numbers are growing. The average time an immigration case has been pending is now up to 587 days:

Marks says the long-running court crisis has hindered judges’ ability to respond to what’s happening with the onslaught of unaccompanied kids. “The whole problem with this surge,” she says, “is that it has occurred on top of a crisis in the court that no one was talking about.”

Obama is trying to change that equation. His budget request would add 40 new judges to the 35 he has already requested for next year, with the goal of creating enough capacity to handle an additional 55,000 to 75,000 cases a year. But the disconnect between what the country spends apprehending and detaining undocumented immigrants and what it spends processing them is still stark. While Obama has requested an additional $64 million to fund the immigration courts, that figure is dwarfed by the $1.5 billion he requested for border security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In the end, the extra enforcement funding is likely to generate so many new cases that any judges added to the court will be just as backlogged as the ones there now, offering little hope of speeding up the process for all those kids currently languishing in border detention centers.

For more of Mother Jones‘ reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

Taken from: 

Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis

Will the U.S. keep spending taxpayer money on dirty coal plants abroad?

by gammak Posted on July 7, 2014

Will the U.S. keep spending taxpayer money on dirty coal plants abroad?

By

Shutterstock

Congress could get in the way of Obama’s efforts to clean up power plants — not just here at home, but abroad.

A year ago, when President Obama unveiled his Climate Action Plan, he declared that the U.S. would stop funding most coal projects in other countries. “I’m calling for an end to public financing for new coal plants overseas unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies, or there’s no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity,” Obama said in his big climate speech. In December, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which helps American firms access markets abroad, changed its lending guidelines to conform with Obama’s edict.

But now pro-coal members of Congress are moving to block the new guidelines. The Hill reports:

Both of the working proposals in the House and Senate to renew the bank’s charter would reverse Ex-Im guidelines that prevent financing for overseas power plants that decline to adopt greener technology. …

Up until now, coal-state Democrats such as Sen. [Joe] Manchin (D-W.Va.) have lacked political leverage to fight back.

But that’s changing thanks to the looming Sept. 30 deadline to reauthorize the 80-year-old bank. Opponents of the power plant guidelines are seizing on the time crunch to win concessions.

There’s ongoing debate in Congress over whether the Ex-Im Bank should exist at all. Last year, 80 percent of the bank’s funds were used to support purchases from large corporations, such as Boeing and General Electric. Some conservatives say that’s corporate welfare and want to do away with the bank entirely, and right-wing groups like Club for Growth are putting pressure on lawmakers to vote against the bank’s reauthorization.

Meanwhile, President Obama and most Democrats are aligned with business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers in pushing to renew the bank and increase its funding. They note that the bank actually generated more than $1 billion for the treasury last year.

But that isn’t such a good deal if the money comes at the expense of the climate. As The New Republic reports, “Ex-Im’s fossil fuel investments in 2012 accounted for $7.2 billion of $32 billion in spending, the second-largest share of the bank’s portfolio. … If Congress passes this exemption for foreign plants, it will reinforce America’s role as one of the world’s biggest public financers of coal, even as organizations like the World Bank have cut funding for such projects.”


Source
Coal poised for rare win over Obama, The Hill
Small business owners: Closing Export-Import bank would cripple our companies, The Washington Post
Political Battle Over Export Bank Heats Up, The Wall Street Journal
Congress Can’t Stop Obama’s Coal Regulations at Home, So It’s Helping Dirty Plants Abroad, The New Republic

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Jump to original: 

Will the U.S. keep spending taxpayer money on dirty coal plants abroad?

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, organic, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will the U.S. keep spending taxpayer money on dirty coal plants abroad?

Even International Quidditch Has a Concussion Problem

by Chet50Nwhxnry Posted on July 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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

If you want to make it as a snitch in the fast-growing sport of Muggle Quidditch, there are a few simple rules to live by. Keep the two people with yellow headbands in your sight at all times. Call fouls when you see them. Don’t let your showboating get in the way of your performance. And keep your booty shaking. “You gotta do a little duck waddle—stick your butt out,” advises Austin Nuckols, a lanky University of Richmond student with curly hair in a Spiderman-inspired Quidditch jersey. “That’s right, get a little twerk going,” he says. “Work on your twerk!”

Nuckols in offering a tutorial in snitching in a back room at a convention center in downtown DC for the second day of the third annual QuidCon, the only convention focused on the nuts and bolts of starting or managing a Quidditch team. Conceived eight years ago by a small group of students at Middlebury College in Vermont, the International Quidditch Association now boasts 225 official teams in at least 13 countries, in addition to wheelchair Quidditch and several varieties of “kidditch.” Even as the Harry Potter books and movies that first popularized it fade from view, the sport has begun to find its legs.

But like angsty, teenage Harry Potter in book five, competitive Quidditch is finding that its new powers come with some growing pains—in the most literal sense. Muggle Quidditch has a concussion problem.

Continue Reading »

Originally posted here: 

Even International Quidditch Has a Concussion Problem

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Even International Quidditch Has a Concussion Problem

There’s a Pitched Battle Being Fought Over the Phrase “Added Sugars”

by HarrietCooke Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

What do the following organizations have in common?

American Bakers Association
American Beverage Association
American Frozen Foods Institute
Corn Refiners Association
National Confectioners Association
American Frozen Food Institute
Sugar Association
International Dairy Foods Association

Answer: they are all furiously opposed to an FDA proposal that would add a line to the standard nutrition facts label for “Added Sugars.” Big surprise, eh? Roberto Ferdman explains here why it’s probably a good idea anyway.

Visit source:

There’s a Pitched Battle Being Fought Over the Phrase “Added Sugars”

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There’s a Pitched Battle Being Fought Over the Phrase “Added Sugars”

4 Key Takeaways About Scott Walker’s Alleged "Criminal Scheme"

by OTHLeannez Posted on June 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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

On Thursday, a federal judge unsealed a batch of documents shedding light on a secret investigation that has dogged Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and some of his conservative allies since the summer of 2012.

Prosecutors are probing whether Walker and two of his aides illegally coordinated with outside groups—including the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity—to fend off a wave of recall elections in 2011 and 2012. This kind of probe, conducted in secret, is known in Wisconsin as a “John Doe.” It is spearheaded by Francis Schmitz, a former federal prosecutor who was on George W. Bush’s shortlist to be US attorney in Wisconsin’s Eastern District. The investigation was initiated by the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office, which is led by Democrats.

Here are four key takeaways from the newly released documents:

1) Walker and two aides allegedly ran a “criminal scheme”

Prosecutors allege in the documents that Walker, his campaign committee, and two close aides, RJ Johnson and Deborah Jordahl, ran a “criminal scheme” using dark-money nonprofit groups to evade state election laws. Their goal: Defend Walker and a group of state lawmakers facing recall elections in 2011 and ’12.

The documents describe a web of 12 nonprofit groups that closely coordinated their fundraising and spending. Prosecutors say Walker, Johnson, and Jordahl presided over this web of groups. The documents quote a May 2011 email sent by Walker to GOP operative Karl Rove about the coordination plans: “Bottom-line: RJ Johnson helps keep in place a team that is wildly successful in Wisconsin. We are running 9 recall elections and it will be like 9 congressional markets in every market in the state (and Twin Cities).”

In a statement, Walker said: “The accusation of any wrongdoing written in the complaint by the office of a partisan Democrat district attorney by me or by my campaign is categorically false. This is nothing more than a partisan investigation with no basis in state law.”

2) A conservative leader voiced concerns about coordination between outside groups and Walker

The documents show that the Wisconsin Club for Growth acted as a conduit for funneling dark money to pro-Walker and pro-GOP groups. It also ran its own ads defending Walker and his policy agenda, which included a controversial budget-repair bill that limited bargaining rights for public-sector workers.

Wisconsin Club for Growth’s activities had at least one conservative leader worried. “Notably, prior to the 2011 Wisconsin Senate recall elections, the national Club for Growth organization raised concerns about coordination or interaction with Wisconsin Club for Growth and Friends of Scott Walker as early as 2009.”

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1201720-john-doe-ii-docs/annotations/163747.js’);

The documents cite a comment by the national Club for Growth’s then-director, David Keating, who said he had “legal concerns” about Wisconsin Club for Growth ads that featured Walker.

3) Walker’s alleged coordination scheme was an expansive, all-hands-on-deck effort

A quick bit of history: In early 2011, Walker introduced Act 10, the anti-union bill that curbed workers’ rights. Democrats and labor unions reacted by organizing massive protests, then sought retribution by recalling state lawmakers who’d voted for the bill.

The documents reveal, in the clearest detail yet, the extent to which Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and a slew of dark-money nonprofit groups rallied to fend off those recall efforts. RJ Johnson, a Walker confidant and a central player in the coordination probe, used the Wisconsin Club for Growth to coordinate with the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, the national Club for Growth, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, the Republican State Leadership Committee, and the Republican Governors Association. It was a murder’s row of conservative players who all pitched in to help preserve the GOP majorities in the Wisconsin legislature and to keep Walker, a rising GOP star, in office.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1201720-john-doe-ii-docs/annotations/163833.js’);

4) All of this information may be for naught

Something to remember amidst the frenzy surrounding the release of the new documents: The John Doe probe into Walker and his allies is almost dead.

The pushback has been led by Eric O’Keefe, a director with Wisconsin Club for Growth who has fought the probe every step of the way, selectively leaking documents to the Wall Street Journal editorial board and suing in court to halt the investigation. And he’s having success: The probe is temporarily on hold while a federal judge studies his lawsuit. O’Keefe say their activities zeroed in on by prosecutors weren’t illegal because the groups in question coordinated on issue-based activities, not expressly political work. He also argues that the John Doe probe violates his First Amendment rights to free speech.

So far, a state judge and a federal judge have sympathized with O’Keefe’s argument, saying that prosecutors have failed to make the case for illegal coordination. The investigation of Walker and his allies is still alive, but its prospects don’t look good.

Read the documents:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1201720-john-doe-ii-docs.js”,
width: 630,
height: 700,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1201720-john-doe-ii-docs”
);

Visit site: 

4 Key Takeaways About Scott Walker’s Alleged "Criminal Scheme"

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 4 Key Takeaways About Scott Walker’s Alleged "Criminal Scheme"

Most Soccer-Related Brain Trauma Isn’t From Heading the Ball

by Gwenda Bischof Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Since February, when a New York Times article linked heading soccer balls to the possibility of brain injury, the media—eager for a new angle on the 2014 World Cup—has fixated on the dangers of headers. The Boston Globe, Slate, and Fox News have all warned of that heading the ball might cause serious damage to players’ brains.

Scientific studies have shown that rates of concussions and head injury in soccer are comparable to football, ice hockey, lacrosse, and rugby. But news stories that focus on the danger of heading have it all wrong. It’s not the ball that soccer players should be worried about—it’s everything else. Player-to-player, player-to-ground, and player-to-goalpost collisions are soccer’s biggest dangers, explains Robert Cantu, a professor at Boston University who has researched the issue. An opponent’s head, foot, or elbow is much more dangerous than a one-pound soccer ball. It’s true that “the single most risky activity in soccer is heading the ball,” Cantu says—but that’s because contact with other players, the goalposts, or the ground is so much more likely when a player goes up for a header.

Government data supports the idea that contact with other players is a much bigger problem than contact with the ball. Most of the 24,184 reported cases of traumatic brain injury in soccer reported in a 2011 Consumer Products Safety Commission study resulted from player-to-player contact; just 12.6 percent resulted from contact with a ball. Head-to-head, head-to-ground, and head-to-goalpost injuries are all more common than head-to-ball injuries in US youth leagues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Recent speculation about the damage done by headers on the brain has centered on the case of Patrick Grange, a 29-year-old forward for the Chicago Fire‘s development league team who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2012. Scientists who studied Grange’s brain after his death found evidence of chronic trauma encephalopathy, a disease previously found only in the brains of deceased boxers, NFL players, and military veterans. CTE, which some researchers believe is linked to repetitive head trauma, can cause memory loss, dementia, aggression, confusion, and depression. But often, symptoms don’t show up for years after the initial brain trauma, and for now, doctors can only diagnose it after death.

Christopher Nowinski, the author of Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis from the NFL to Youth Leagues, which focuses on head trauma in football, has linked Grange’s death to heading the ball, calling him a “prolific header.” But scientists do not fully understand the link between brain injuries and concussions and the act of heading a soccer ball. Current studies of soccer, heading, and brain trauma have small sample sizes; many don’t account for dementia, mental-health issues, previous concussions, or other brain injuries or diseases, such as Grange’s ALS.

The New York Times, for example, reported that Grange’s parents said he had suffered several concussions in his youth, including a fall as a toddler, as well as concussions playing soccer before advancing to the Fire’s developmental team. The more concussions a person suffers, the more likely he is to sustain future, more severe brain injuries. The science suggests that headers have something to do with brain injury in some cases, but the connection is not clear yet.

What is clear from the science, however, is that collisions with players, goalposts, or the ground can be extremely dangerous. Take Thursday’s Uruguay-England World Cup match, for example. Fighting for the ball, Uruguayan defender Álvaro Pereira took a knee to the head and was knocked out on the pitch. Still, Pereira immediately returned to play, going directly against last year’s recommendations from the American Academy of Neurology: “If in doubt, sit it out.” (FIFA, international soccer’s main organizing body, has a similar suggestion on its website but has no hard rules regarding concussions and required time off the pitch.)

Uruguayan defender Álvaro Pereira takes a knee to the head. Juan Carlos Colin/Vine

Goalkeepers, who spend their games diving into the ground and colliding with other players, are arguably the most vulnerable to brain injury. Their risk for injury to the head and cervical spine is comparable to that of skydivers and pole vaulters, according to a 2000 study Cantu coauthored. FIFA has published an article on its website warning that goalkeepers are constantly “subjected to direct trauma” resulting from contact with the ground, the goalposts, and other players.

In April 2010, Briana Scurry, who played goalkeeper for United States Olympic and World Cup teams, was in her second season with DC’s Washington Freedom when she collided head-on with a striker. Scurry began getting severe headaches and feeling depressed—symptoms she later attributed to a concussion and neck injury. “All my career, my success has been based on my mentality. It all starts with my mind,” Scurry said later. “And so, for me, my brain was broken.”

Xi Shui/ZUMA

Scurry isn’t alone—goalkeepers have fallen victim to traumatic brain injuries for decades. In 1933, Jon Kristbjornsson, a goalkeeper for the Icelandic soccer team Valur Reykjavik, died of brain trauma after colliding with another player. The rule in soccer forbidding players from kicking the ball once the goalkeeper has possession was the result of the death of keeper Jimmy Thorpe, who perished after being kicked in the head and chest in a game in 1936. In 2006, Petr Cech, the goalkeeper for Chelsea, needed skull decompression surgery after colliding with a midfielder in the penalty box. He now wears safety headgear when he plays. Last year, Boubacar Barry, an Ivorian keeper, hit the goalpost while making a save and fell unconscious, missing the rest of the season. In April, a keeper from Gabon died because a striker accidentally stepped on his head after he saved a shot and was lying on the ground.

Soccer headbands and headgear may offer a partial solution. A study published in 2003 by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association in coordination with the National Institutes of Health found a significant reduction in peak force of impact on soccer players’ heads with three different marketed headbands, and a 2006 McGill University study that tracked 278 adolescent soccer players over a season found that using headgear was associated with cutting concussion risk in half. Players who didn’t wear headgear were twice as likely to get concussions. Despite these and similar findings, FIFA does not require or recommend the use of headgear for soccer players—including goalkeepers—at any age level.

More:

Most Soccer-Related Brain Trauma Isn’t From Heading the Ball

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Most Soccer-Related Brain Trauma Isn’t From Heading the Ball

Watch: How to Take Over the Middle East in a Few Easy Steps Fiore Cartoon

by NevilleGipson Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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

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.

Continue at source – 

Watch: How to Take Over the Middle East in a Few Easy Steps Fiore Cartoon

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch: How to Take Over the Middle East in a Few Easy Steps Fiore Cartoon