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Biofuel Advocates to EPA: Extend the Blend

by Posted on June 13, 2016

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Biofuel Advocates to EPA: Extend the Blend

Posted 13 June 2016 in

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Advocates from across the nation arrived in Kansas City recently to testify at the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) one and only field hearing on proposed 2017 targets under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Out of about 160 registered speakers, nearly 90 percent urged the EPA to make more ethanol and other biofuels available to consumers in next year’s fuel mix.

Some of the renewable fuel sector’s top champions also hosted a press conference to remind policymakers and the public how the RFS works to protect the environment, preserve America’s energy security, and provide consumers with more affordable options at the fuel pump. Watch the video here

Speaking to a full house of reporters and ethanol supporters, the nation’s biofuel advocates rallied around the RFS. From left to right: Pete Ricketts, governor of Nebraska; Bob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association; Emily Skor, CEO of Growth Energy; Chip Bowling, president of the National Corn Growers Association; Brooke Coleman, executive director of the Advanced Biofuels Business Council; Chris Soules, Iowa farmer and star of The Bachelor; Annette Sweeney, Iowa farmer and former state representative; Brian Sowers, co-host of Crappie Masters TV; Richard Fordyce, Missouri director of agriculture.

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts kicked things off, saying, “A strong RFS means more jobs here at home, greater energy security, and a cleaner environment. The biofuels industry supports more than 852,000 American jobs and creates fuel we need to help our country become energy independent. It also stimulates investments in states like Nebraska, where we are on the forefront of research, development, and infrastructure for first- and second-generation biofuels.”

Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts urges the EPA to increase biofuel targets.

Later in the program, Chip Bowling, president of the National Corn Growers Association, had some fun, noting his own nickname – King Corn – before introducing Iowa farmer Chris Soules, who many called Prince Farming during his stint as The Bachelor on the hit television series.

Chris was quick to capture the crowd, both in the room and on social media:

 

One thing everyone agreed on was that the EPA must increase its 2017 targets. The agency has proposed conventional blending targets at 200 million gallons below statutory levels, as set by Congress.

Bob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, said, “The EPA’s proposed targets would needlessly undermine America’s most successful clean energy program. At a minimum, we must hit the statutory levels set by Congress to slash U.S. dependence on foreign oil, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save consumers money at the pump. From any objective standpoint, the choice should be simple – more clean, American energy and less foreign oil.”

Bob Dinneen, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, calls on the EPA to aim higher during his testimony at the Kansas City field hearing.

To push the EPA in the right direction, biofuel leaders urged supporters, neighbors, and friends to submit comments to the EPA by July 11, when regulators will start writing a final rule.

“Our call to action has never been more important,” said Emily Skor, CEO of Growth Energy. “Ethanol is an earth-friendly biofuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and displaces chemicals in gasoline that form potent carcinogens when burned. Most importantly, ethanol offers consumers affordable options and a choice at the gas pump. It’s vital that the EPA meet the statutory biofuel targets for America’s 2017 fuel mix.”
 

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Biofuel Advocates to EPA: Extend the Blend

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A Brief, Checkered History of Prom in America

by DamianDarden950 Posted on May 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Do you remember how you were asked to your high school prom? (Or how you asked?) Maybe it was some cheesy romantic gesture. Or maybe it was a very informal conversation that took place near your locker between classes. Either way, it probably wasn’t documented and put online to become a viral hit. America’s prom tradition, instead of fizzling over the years, has only grown more sacred with time. From April to June, prom season reigns in high schools nationwide as juniors and seniors pair up, beautify, and ask older siblings to snag them some bottom-shelf booze to pass around at the after-party. But before party buses, $400 dresses, and hotel ballrooms were a thing, prom was just an annual dance that took place in the school gym under the watchful eye of teacher chaperones. With the season upon us, we decided to take a look back at the history of this peculiar institution.

1920s: The “democratic debutante ball” makes its high school debut. In theory, any student can attend a “promenade”—but teens of color are excluded thanks to Jim Crow and unequal access to education.

1930s: With the Depression in full swing, some Chicago principals cancel prom to ensure poor students aren’t “psychologically wounded.”

1950s: During the postwar boom, one advice book offers a warning: “Girls who try to usurp the right of boys to choose their own dates will ruin a good dating career.”

1960s: Despite the repeal of Jim Crow, white-only proms persist in the South.

1969: Jessica McClintock takes over dressmaker Gunne Sax and becomes America’s prom-dress queen, draping two decades of high school girls in “leg o’ mutton” styles—marked by puffy sleeves and corset bodices.

Sissy Spacek will forever be remembered as the telekinetic teen outcast in the movie Carrie, who gets drenched in pig’s blood at prom. MGM/Red Bank Films

1974: In Stephen King’s Carrie, a telekinetic outcast terrorizes her classmates at the prom. Sissy Spacek stars in the 1976 film.

1975: First daughter Susan Ford hosts prom at the White House. “I was told that we had to choose a band that didn’t have any kind of drug charge,” one organizer recalled later. “It was pretty hard.”

Susan Ford’s White House prom. Joseph H. Bailey/NGS/White House Historical Association

1979: Police in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, show up to protect the first openly gay couple in prom history. “Many students came over and congratulated us,” one of the boys said, despite threats to “tar and chicken feather” the pair.

1980: A Rhode Island senior sues his school after his principal rejects his request to bring a male prom date. A federal judge sides with the boy.

1980s: Hollywood goes gaga for prom flicks, with Valley Girl (1983), Footloose (1984), Back to the Future (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986).

Jon Cryer and Molly Ringwald in 1986’s Pretty In Pink (left). Nicholas Cage and Deborah Foreman in 1983’s Valley Girl (right). Paramount Pictures, Valley 9000/Atlantic Releasing

1994: A biracial student in Wedowee, Alabama, sues her principal and school board after they threatened to cancel prom to keep interracial couples from attending.

1997: Actor Morgan Freeman offers to cover the cost of a prom in Charleston, Mississippi, so long as all races can attend. No such luck. The city’s proms remain segregated for 11 more years.

2009: Students at Fairfax High in Los Angeles pass over eight girls to select a gay senior boy as prom queen. “Tears were almost falling down my face,” a jubilant Sergio Garcia tells ABC News.

Amy Poehler, as the obsessive mother of popular girl Regina George (Rachel McAdams) in the 2004 hit Mean Girls, snaps a shot of her daughter. Paramount

2013: A group of girls from Georgia’s Wilcox County High holds an all-inclusive prom, eschewing the segregated affairs. The school makes it official in 2014. “The adults should have done this many, many moons ago,” notes the mother of one of the girls.

2016: #promposal is the hot Instagram meme: One student gets a cop to pull a girl over and hand her a “ticket”—his prom invite. Another takes his girlfriend to a gun range, with “yes” and “no” targets set to go.

I’ve got good aim

Others are more creative in design:

Thank you for the most legendary promposal in the 607â&#157;¤ï¸&#143;

A photo posted by Shayna Will (@shayna_will) on May 11, 2016 at 4:50pm PDT

I guess being pulled over isn’t always a bad thing

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A Brief, Checkered History of Prom in America

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Organic industry sales put Monsanto’s to shame

by ChesterAviles02 Posted on May 19, 2016

Organic industry sales put Monsanto’s to shame

By on May 19, 2016Share

If there was some stock index fund that covered organic food businesses, I’d want to invest my savings in it. In the United States organic food sales have grown steadily at around 10 percent a year since the Great Recession (and at higher rates before that), which puts the stock market to shame.

In 2015 organic product sales revenue grew 11 percent, while the rest of the food market grew at a rate of 3 percent, according to the Organic Trade Association’s annual survey of the industry. Total sales reached $43.3 billion, which makes the organic industry a force to be reckoned with. For comparison, Monsanto brought in just under $15 billion in revenue last year, and Whole Foods brought a little over $15 billion.

When people have the disposable income they’re pretty quick to take a step up the price ladder from commodity food. Organic food still only amounts to five percent of the U.S. market, which suggests that there’s room for more growth.

The term organic doesn’t automatically mean the food is produced with the best environmental practices, or that it’s healthier and tastier, but it often is: The higher prices provide farmers with bigger margins, and that gives them a greater ability to attend to quality and stewardship.

Here’s our explainer on what organic signifies.

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Organic industry sales put Monsanto’s to shame

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North Carolina’s anti-trans governor is dangerously cozy with major polluter

by BelindaStowers Posted on May 17, 2016

North Carolina’s anti-trans governor is dangerously cozy with major polluter

By on May 17, 2016 1:00 pmShare

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) has been in the news lately thanks to HB2, a bill he signed into law in March that forces transgender folks to use the bathroom of the gender on their birth certificates. The backlash for McCrory — who is up for reelection this year — was swift. Along with a myriad of businesses who have threatened to pull out of the state, North Carolina residents themselves are protesting in creative ways: An “air horn orchestra” regularly performs outside the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, a Durham-based advertising firm is giving away toilet paper printed with the text of HB2, and activists delivered a porta-potty to McCrory’s lawn.

But HB2 isn’t the only issue that could have North Carolina voters reconsidering McCrory when they go to the polls this November: There’s also the governor’s cozy ties to Duke Energy and allegations that his administration let the company off easy after serious pollution violations.

A fine reduced

The story goes back to 2014, when Duke Energy — McCrory’s employer for nearly three decades — was responsible for a spill that dumped 40,000 tons of toxic coal ash and 27 million gallons of wastewater into the Dan River, one of the largest coal ash spills in the nation’s history.

Initially, Duke was fined $25 million by the state, but in a retreat that many residents found disappointing — and fishy — the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) later privately negotiated the fine down to just $7 million. When the deal was announced in September 2015, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center called it “a total surrender and collapse by DEQ.”

An investigation by TV station WRAL later found that McCrory and DEQ officials secretly met with Duke Energy leaders, including company CEO Lynn Good, at the governor’s mansion in Raleigh a few months before the fine was lowered.

Duke, as it happens, donated $3 million to the Republican Governors Association soon after the 2014 coal ash spill. The association, which contributed to McCrory’s campaign in 2012, is expected to be a big backer of his reelection effort this year.

Dirty drinking water

But the low fine wasn’t the only favor that the McCrory administration appears to have done for Duke Energy.

After the Dan River spill, investigations found that Duke had more than a dozen coal ash storage sites across the state, many of which were leaching a carcinogen called hexavalent chromium into the water table. After this was discovered, 240 households located near coal ash sites were told not to drink from their wells. Duke Energy started supplying bottled water to those households in April 2015, as WBTV reports.

But a year later, the DEQ and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reversed the do-not-drink order. Residents were told their water was just as safe as water coming from public utilities.

That wasn’t true, WBTV reports. Some of the wells near Duke’s facilities were found to have levels of hexavalent chromium hundreds of times higher than the average level in the state’s public water systems.

So why the about-face by the state agencies? Duke Energy, it turns out, lobbied the state to reverse the do-not-drink order, according to the TV station. When state epidemiologist Megan Davies was deposed by a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, she said that she and her boss questioned the reversal. She also said that McCrory’s office intervened in the wording of initial do-not-drink letters sent out in April 2015.

Still, the Department of Health and Human Services insists that the water contamination is nothing to worry about. “The water in these wells meets the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act,” Kendra Gerlach, communications director for the agency, said in a statement. “Allowing the affected residents to return to drinking their water is within federal and state guidelines and is consistent with safe drinking water practices across the country.”

For those who live near Duke’s coal ash sites, however, the state’s position doesn’t bring much comfort. In the year between the do-not-drink order and its reversal, nothing has changed. The coal ash sites weren’t cleaned up and the carcinogen didn’t go away. In fact, one thing has arguably gotten worse: In March, McCrory shut down the commission charged with overseeing the cleanup of Duke’s coal ash sites across the state.

“The water isn’t any different,” said Tad Helmstettler, an environmental health supervisor in Rowan County, one of the areas affected by the order. “If you were worried about the water before, you should be worried about it now.”

If polls are to be believed, McCrory has his own reasons to be worried: His approval rating is at an all-time low, and he’s in a tight race with Democratic challenger Roy Cooper. And as the spotlight shines brighter on HB2, as well as the governor’s ties to Duke Energy, McCrory’s prospects may only get darker.

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North Carolina’s anti-trans governor is dangerously cozy with major polluter

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North Carolina’s anti-trans governor is cozy with major polluter

by Panchito Zirman Posted on May 17, 2016

North Carolina’s anti-trans governor is cozy with major polluter

By on May 17, 2016Share

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) has been in the news lately thanks to HB2, a bill he signed into law in March that forces transgender folks to use the bathroom of the gender on their birth certificates. The backlash for McCrory — who is up for reelection this year — was swift. Along with a myriad of businesses who have threatened to pull out of the state, North Carolina residents themselves are protesting in creative ways: An “air horn orchestra” regularly performs outside the governor’s mansion in Raleigh, a Durham-based advertising firm is giving away toilet paper printed with the text of HB2, and activists delivered a porta-potty to McCrory’s lawn.

But HB2 isn’t the only issue that has North Carolina media outlets asking questions about McCrory, who is up for re-election this November. There’s also the governor’s cozy ties to Duke Energy and allegations that his administration let the company off easy after serious pollution violations.

A fine reduced

The story goes back to 2014, when Duke Energy — McCrory’s employer for nearly three decades — was responsible for a spill that dumped 40,000 tons of toxic coal ash and 27 million gallons of wastewater into the Dan River, one of the largest coal ash spills in the nation’s history.

Initially, Duke was fined $25 million by the state, but in a retreat that many residents found disappointing — and fishy — the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) later privately negotiated the fine down to just $7 million. When the deal was announced in September 2015, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center called it “a total surrender and collapse by DEQ.”

An investigation by TV station WRAL later found that McCrory and DEQ officials secretly met with Duke Energy leaders, including company CEO Lynn Good, at the governor’s mansion in Raleigh a few months before the fine was lowered.

Duke, as it happens, donated $3 million to the Republican Governors Association soon after the 2014 coal ash spill. The association, which contributed to McCrory’s campaign in 2012, is expected to be a big backer of his reelection effort this year.

Dirty drinking water

But the low fine wasn’t the only favor that the McCrory administration appears to have done for Duke Energy.

After the Dan River spill, investigations found that Duke had more than a dozen coal ash storage sites across the state, many of which were leaching a carcinogen called hexavalent chromium into the water table. After this was discovered, 240 households located near coal ash sites were told not to drink from their wells. Duke Energy started supplying bottled water to those households in April 2015, as WBTV reports.

But a year later, the DEQ and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reversed the do-not-drink order. Residents were told their water was just as safe as water coming from public utilities.

That wasn’t true, WBTV reports. Some of the wells near Duke’s facilities were found to have levels of hexavalent chromium hundreds of times higher than the average level in the state’s public water systems.

So why the about-face by the state agencies? Duke Energy, it turns out, lobbied the state to reverse the do-not-drink order, according to the TV station. When state epidemiologist Megan Davies was deposed by a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, she said that she and her boss questioned the reversal. She also said that McCrory’s office intervened in the wording of initial do-not-drink letters sent out in April 2015.

Still, the Department of Health and Human Services insists that the water contamination is nothing to worry about. “The water in these wells meets the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act,” Kendra Gerlach, communications director for the agency, said in a statement. “Allowing the affected residents to return to drinking their water is within federal and state guidelines and is consistent with safe drinking water practices across the country.”

For those who live near Duke’s coal ash sites, however, the state’s position doesn’t bring much comfort. In the year between the do-not-drink order and its reversal, nothing has changed. The coal ash sites weren’t cleaned up and the carcinogen didn’t go away. In fact, one thing has arguably gotten worse: In March, McCrory shut down the commission charged with overseeing the cleanup of Duke’s coal ash sites across the state.

“The water isn’t any different,” said Tad Helmstettler, an environmental health supervisor in Rowan County, one of the areas affected by the order. “If you were worried about the water before, you should be worried about it now.”

If polls are to be believed, McCrory has his own reasons to be worried: His approval rating is at an all-time low, and he’s in a tight race with Democratic challenger Roy Cooper. And as the spotlight shines brighter on HB2, as well as the governor’s ties to Duke Energy, McCrory’s prospects may only get darker.

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Donald Trump’s Newest Delegate Is a Kinder, Gentler White Nationalist

by CecilaMcKenzie Posted on May 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Meet the chairman of the American Freedom Party:

William D. Johnson, J.D., is an international corporate lawyer practicing in Los Angeles….As Chairman of the American Third Position, he serves the purpose of speaking on behalf of the party, and championing its sensible and just policies before the American people. He is also, more than any other, responsible for safeguarding the course, values, and program of the party.

And now, meet the American Freedom Party:

White Americans should push back! Change your party allegiance to the American Freedom Party. A Nationalist party that shares the customs and heritage of the European American people….Return to Americans their traditional right of freedom of association, including freedom in racial matters, along with the abolishment of all forms of government- and corporate-mandated racial discrimination and racial preferences, such as affirmative action, quotas, and all forms of “sensitivity training.”

Finally, courtesy of MoJo‘s own Josh Harkinson, meet Donald Trump’s newest delegate from the great state of California:

Trump’s slate includes William Johnson, one of the country’s most prominent white nationalists….”I just hope to show how I can be mainstream and have these views,” Johnson tells Mother Jones. “I can be a white nationalist and be a strong supporter of Donald Trump and be a good example to everybody.”

….Armed with cash from affluent donors and staffed by what the movement considers to be its top thinkers, AFP now dedicates most of its resources to supporting Trump. Johnson claims that AFP’s pro-Trump robocalls, which have delivered Johnson’s personal cellphone number to voters in seven states, have helped the party find hundreds of new members. “Trump is allowing us to talk about things we’ve not been able to talk about,” Johnson says. “So even if he is not elected, he has achieved great things.”

….Johnson also now finds it easier to be himself: “For many, many years, when I would say these things, other white people would call me names: ‘Oh, you’re a hatemonger, you’re a Nazi, you’re like Hitler,'” he confessed. “Now they come in and say, ‘Oh, you’re like Donald Trump.'”

See? Donald Trump is already making America great again.

UPDATE: No worries, folks. This was all just a big misunderstanding: “A database error led to the inclusion of a potential delegate that had been rejected and removed from the campaign’s list in February 2016.” OK then.

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Donald Trump’s Newest Delegate Is a Kinder, Gentler White Nationalist

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Top Gun Lobbyist Calls Hundreds of Child Gun Deaths "Occasional Mishaps"

by TameraGillis Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an in-depth investigation in 2013, Mother Jones found that guns kill hundreds of children per year in the United States. Many die in homicides, and many others die in accidents—mostly when children themselves pull the trigger. The kids shooting themselves or others have often been as young as two or three years old. Invariably these “tragedies” result from adults leaving unsecured firearms lying around in their homes or, in some cases, in their cars.

Since our investigation, the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety has collected additional data confirming the scope of the problem. As the New York Times reported on Thursday, during one week in April four toddlers around the country killed themselves with guns, and a mother was fatally shot by her two-year-old while driving, after the child apparently picked up a weapon that slid out from under the driver’s seat. The data remains stark: “In 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of young children and teenagers, according to Everytown’s database,” the Times reported. “A child who accidentally pulls the trigger is most likely to be 3 years old, the statistics show.”

Equally stark is the response from the gun lobby. There has been growing debate about laws aimed at reducing the problem, which, as our investigation showed, has long gone underreported. Larry Pratt, a leading figure among hardline pro-gun activists, argues that tighter gun regulations are not the answer. In comments to the Times, Pratt called the hundreds of child gun deaths that occur each year “occasional mishaps”:

“It’s clearly a tragedy, but it’s not something that’s widespread,” said Larry Pratt, a spokesman and former executive director of Gun Owners of America. “To base public policy on occasional mishaps would be a grave mistake.”

As the Times piece notes, 27 states now have laws that hold adults responsible for letting unsupervised children get their hands on guns. Gun safety advocates have increasingly pushed for tougher laws requiring owners to use trigger locks, gun safes, or other measures for safe storage and use. Another potential solution that’s been gaining new interest is smart-gun technology. But gun lobbying groups including Gun Owners of America and the National Rifle Association have long opposed these policies across the board, claiming that they threaten Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

Even in states with laws on the books, the contentious politics tends to quash appetite among prosecutors for holding adults accountable when young children accidentally kill. Here, the data goes from stark to perhaps stunning: In 2013 we documented 52 cases where adults had left their guns unsecured—but we could only find four people who were held criminally liable for the children’s deaths.

The following year I covered this problem in more detail, in a story chronicling the rise of a new advocacy group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Particularly in more rural communities, a prevailing theme has been that parents—including a few who accidentally shot their own children—have already suffered enough and shouldn’t be punished:

Last Christmas Eve in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a man who’d been “messing with” a 9 mm handgun unintentionally shot and killed his two-month-old daughter as she slept in her glider. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, yet local law enforcement officials said they were undecided about pursuing criminal charges. Typically that might’ve been the end of it, but Moms Demand Action voiced outrage via social media and the local press. Within two weeks the DA announced plans to prosecute. (He said no outside group influenced his decision.)

“While we fully support the father being held accountable for this crime, we also acknowledge the horrific grief this family is experiencing,” Moms Demand Action said after the charges were announced. “We hope their tragedy can serve as an example that encourages others to be more responsible with their firearms.” The father later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment, which could have brought up to 15 years in prison. He got six years’ probation and no jail time.

Moms also drew attention to a case in February in North Carolina, where a three-year-old boy wounded his 17-month-old sister after finding a handgun that their father—who wrote a parenting advice column in a local paper—had left unsecured. (The infant recovered.) “The parents have been punished more than any criminal justice system can do to them,” a captain from the county sheriff’s department said soon after the shooting. After Moms swung into action, the father was charged with failure to secure his firearm to protect a minor; his case is pending.

“All too often DAs are loath to get involved, saying a family has suffered enough,” Watts says, “especially in states where laws are inadequate…This idea of ‘accidental’ gun deaths, when something is truly negligence, has to be remedied.”

For its part, the gun lobby prefers to keep the focus on other fears. On Thursday, the NRA made no reference to the latest data on child gun deaths. On its blog, a post—topped by an image of a toddler biking—offered “10 Tips That Could Save Your Life.” The “home” segment of the list made no mention of safely storing firearms, but instead focused on the specter of a home invasion. “To deal with this possibility,” it said, “be prepared by making a home defense plan and setting up a safe room with your family.” The room should be equipped with a phone for calling 911, it said, and a “personal protection device” such as “mace, batons, Tasers, stun guns, or firearm.”

The NRA’s Twitter feed otherwise attended to politics, denouncing an apparent conspiracy by the Social Security Administration to conduct “the largest gun grab in American history,” and firing away at “Hillary Clinton’s 6-part plan to disarm citizens — and rip apart the #2A.”

This article – 

Top Gun Lobbyist Calls Hundreds of Child Gun Deaths "Occasional Mishaps"

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This Bill Could Make More Kids Obese—and No One Is Talking About It

by DarrenLashbrook Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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You probably haven’t heard much about it with the presidential election sucking up all the oxygen, but US lawmakers are mulling one of the nation’s most important and influential pieces of food legislation: a once-every-five-years bill that sets the budget and rules for school meals. And it hasn’t been a very appetizing process.

In a recent episode of Bite—the new podcast I host with colleagues Kiera Butler and Maddie Oatman—the excellent school lunch analyst and blogger Bettina Elias Siegel lamented that there’s no push to increase our miserly annual outlay on the lunch program, which serves about 30.5 million kids each school day. Currently, we spend about $13 billion in federal dollars on it each year—equal to about 2 percent of annual defense spending. That leaves cafeteria administrators with a bit more than a dollar per meal to spend on ingredients, leading to generally dismal-quality food, often served reheated from a box.

Instead of pushing for more resources, advocates are having to play defense, fighting to preserve reforms made in the previous Child Nutrition Reauthorization (as the bill is known). That act, passed in 2010, included a tiny per-meal budget increase but also required cafeterias to serve more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and to cut back on sugar, fat, and salt. It also limited the amount of junk food that can be served in a la carte lines—restricting a practice that has been linked to higher obesity rates. And it adopted a program to allow schools in high-poverty areas to automatically offer all students free lunches—a provision widely praised in anti-hunger circles.

The 2010 reforms have largely proven a success, Steven Czinn, the chair of the department of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, recently showed in a Washington Post op-ed. While the new rules got off to a rough start in some districts, things have improved, and tales of rejected lunches and fresh fruit piling up in cafeteria trash cans are overblown, he wrote.

Even so, those healthier food provisions provoked a furious backlash from tea-party-associated Republicans. In a notorious 2014 rant on the House floor, US Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) thundered against what he called “nanny-state lunches.” Then there’s the School Nutrition Association, a group that represents cafeteria administrators but gets about half its $10 million budget from the food industry. As Politico‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reported in 2014, the group initially fought for the changes, but suddenly, in 2014, it began “standing shoulder to shoulder with House Republicans” in an effort to gut them.

In January, the Senate Agriculture Committee cobbled together a bill that preserved the 2010 reforms. But now its counterpart in the House, the Education and Workforce Committee, is pushing a bill that would ease restrictions of sales of junk like chips and cookies in cafeterias. “Children as young as five could go from having cookies or fries with their lunches once in a while to buying and eating them every day,” writes Jessica Donze Black, who directs the the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

More egregiously, the proposed House bill would undermine universal free-lunch programs for many high-poverty schools. Under the 2010 bill, when at least 40 percent of students in a school qualify for free lunches, the school can claim “community eligibility”—meaning all students automatically have access to free lunches. The program eases the administrative burden for these financially strapped schools, allowing them to “shift resources from paperwork to higher-quality meals or other educational priorities,” writes Zoë Neuberger of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It also eliminates the “stigma that sometimes accompanies free meals” and increased meal participation, which, in turn, “improves student achievement, diets, and behavior,” she adds.

The House bill would raise the threshold from 40 to 60 percent. If it becomes law, Neuberger writes, more than 7,000 schools—with nearly 3.4 million students—”would have to reinstate applications and return to monitoring eligibility in the lunch line within two years.”

Happily, none of these rollbacks are likely anytime soon, said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a veteran of the school food wars. That’s because first lady Michelle Obama pushed hard for the 2010 reforms, and her husband will veto any school lunch reauthorization bill that attempts to roll them back. Until a new bill passes, the 2010 reforms hold sway, she said. “For once, the status quo is on the side” of people pushing to widen access to free lunch and remove junk food from the cafeteria, she added.

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This Bill Could Make More Kids Obese—and No One Is Talking About It

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Why We’re Tough on The Candidates You Like

by PorterTeeple273 Posted on April 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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For the last couple of months, we’ve been taking flak from some of our readers over our election coverage. Here’s a sample of Facebook comments from a recent story, headlined “Sanders Extends His Lead in Wyoming.”

“You hate Bernie.” “Boy the media hates her!”

Journalists like us typically shrug off this kind of criticism. When we make people on both sides mad, we must be doing something right…right?

But Mother Jones is not your typical news organization, this isn’t your typical election season, and we’ve never been too much into doing things the way they’ve always been done. So we wanted to take a different tack this time and address these concerns with you, head-on.

We won’t be coy: This is about building a relationship, and we’re going to ask for money.

Mother Jones is a reader-supported nonprofit, and that means we rely on donations and magazine subscriptions for 70 percent of our annual budget. It also means that by April 30, we need to raise $175,000 from readers like you to stay on track.

So the easiest thing to do, in some ways, would be taking it easy on our election coverage so as not to upset any of you while we’re asking for your support—we know Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appeal to a lot of our readers. But taking it easy on anything is not in our DNA; in fact, it’s exactly the opposite of what (we think) you want us to do.

We’ll explain why we believe that—but if you don’t need to read more, please make your tax-deducible donation to help fund our reporting right now. (You can use PayPal, too, which could be easier if you’re reading this on your phone.)

Here’s one big thing about being supported by readers: No one tells us what to cover, or how. That means we’re free to do what good journalism has always done: Offend some of the people, all of the time.

Unlike some publications, we don’t endorse or support candidates. As a nonprofit, we’re legally prohibited from doing that, and, just as importantly, it would be counter to what we stand for journalistically. We’re not about telling you how to make up your mind. You do just fine on your own. What we are about is giving you the facts you need to do it—even when they are uncomfortable.

That often means going to extra lengths: Unlike a lot of “news” you read online, what we write goes through a real fact-checking process. (Read a great description of it, by one of our ace former researchers, here.)

And it means digging in places where others aren’t. Back in 2012, pundits insisted that voters didn’t really care about the 0.01 percent and their disproportionate influence in politics—until we revealed how Mitt Romney had told his big-ticket donors that 47 percent of Americans were moochers. Two years ago, when few were talking about Clinton’s links to the fossil fuel industry, we did a major investigative feature on her support for fracking as secretary of state; now her links to the fossil fuel industry are a big issue. Last summer, we ran the first in-depth piece on Sanders’ political evolution (and put an illustration of him on Mount Rushmore on the cover of our magazine); it took months for other major outlets to take him seriously. Since then, we’ve both covered the breaking news in the race and dug deeper on the strong points and weak points of both candidates—because that’s the job you want us to do.

Stories that make some of our readers uncomfortable don’t just happen during a presidential election. The increase in mass shootings and the influence of the National Rifle Association, the neuroscience behind racism, the incredible amount of water it takes to grow a single almond—we’ve gotten pushback from a lot of people about these stories, too, but they’ve also turned into mainstays of the public debate.

And that’s what we’re aiming for: substantive reporting that challenges conventional wisdom. There are plenty of places that serve up content to affirm what their readers already believe. But we think you deserve better.

Do we expect our biggest critics to open up their wallets to support us after reading this? Nope. But being a reader-supported nonprofit means building a real relationship with our audience, and that starts with trust. We hope there are enough of you who trust us to provide information you won’t find anywhere else—even if, especially if, it challenges your own preconceptions.

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Why We’re Tough on The Candidates You Like

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Donald Trump Is Very Easily Disgusted

by FletchePyh Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Consider the following five anecdotes about Donald Trump:

On Hillary Clinton’s late return from a debate break in December: “I know where she went — it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting.”
On Megyn Kelly’s tough questioning during a debate in August: “She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
On Elizabeth Beck’s request to take a breast pump break during a deposition in 2011: “He got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me and he screamed, ‘You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,’ and he ran out of there.”
On his well-known germaphobia: “Trump doesn’t even like to push a ground floor elevator button because it’s been tapped by so many people….Trump especially avoids shaking hands with teachers, since they are likely to be have been ‘in touch’ with too many germy kids. Trump has what he calls a borderline case of germaphobia — aka msyophobia — that the American Psychological Association defines as one of the more common forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
On his one-time friendship with notorious lawyer Roy Cohn: “By virtually all accounts, one of Trump’s closest friends early in his career was Roy Cohn….When Cohn was facing disbarment in the mid-’80s, Trump testified on his friend’s behalf as a character witness. For a while, according to Vanity Fair, the two men spoke ’15 or 20 times a day.’ Then Trump found out Cohn was HIV-positive. He moved swiftly to cut ties with his mentor, seeking out new attorneys and transferring his legal business to them. The sudden rejection stunned Cohn.”

This brings to mind Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral foundations, which suggests that although liberals and conservatives share a set of five innate moral roots, they prioritize them quite differently. Conservatives, for example, are especially sensitive to moral foundation #5:

Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination….It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants.

I wonder how strongly Donald Trump scores on this particular moral foundation? Pretty strongly, I’d guess. I wonder how much it explains his approach to politics? And I wonder how much it explains his popularity with a certain subset of conservatives?

It’s just a thought. But perhaps one of the things that unites so many of Trump’s longtime obsessions (immigrants, crime, kicking out protesters, anything to do with foreigners) is a fear of growing impurity in the body of the country. It might explain a lot.

UPDATE: I see that Alexander Hurst got here first. His take on Haidt’s moral foundations and Trump’s sensitivity to disgust is here.

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Donald Trump Is Very Easily Disgusted

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