Tag Archives: attra

Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal, Explained

by MaritaMontefior Posted on January 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Update: Gov. Chris Christie has released a statement denying he knew of his staff’s actions before Wednesday. Click here to read his full statement.

Internal emails released Wednesday strongly suggest that a top aide to New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie orchestrated massive traffic problems in Fort Lee, New Jersey, last fall as an act of political retribution against the city’s Democratic mayor. For months, Christie and his administration have denied allegations that road closures in Fort Lee were politically motivated. The emails, released as part of an investigation by Democratic state legislators, could spiral into a major political scandal for Christie, a possible 2016 presidential candidate. Here’s what you need to know.

READ MORE: A Fort Lee official says the Christie lane closures slowed the search for a missing 4-year-old child. Tracie Van Auken/ZUMA

How’d this begin? In mid-September, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unexpectedly closed two access lanes on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, which spans the Hudson River and serves as a major commuter route between the two states. A massive, weeklong traffic jam ensued, clogging the streets of nearby Fort Lee.

Cops and lawmakers in Fort Lee said they were given no warning about the decision to close the lanes, which delayed school buses, first responders, and commuters bound for New York City. The Port Authority justified its decision by saying it was conducting a “traffic study.”

Why is this political? Soon after the traffic jam, rumors emerged that the Port Authority closed the bridge lanes as political retribution against Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, a Democrat who endorsed Gov. Chris Christie’s opponent in the 2013 gubernatorial campaign. As news outlets and New Jersey Democrats dug deeper into the circumstances of the bridge incident, they eventually connected the lane closures to two Port Authority officials with close ties to Christie: Bill Baroni, the deputy executive director of the agency, and David Wildstein, its director of interstate capital projects. Baroni and Wildstein have since resigned, and both men have retained criminal defense attorneys.

All along, the Christie administration had denied any connection to the decision to close the bridge lanes. In September, a Christie spokesman called the retribution claim “crazy.” Christie told reporters at a December press conference that the Fort Lee traffic snarl was “absolutely, unequivocally not” a result of political score-settling.

Continue Reading »

More here:

Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal, Explained

Posted in alo, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal, Explained

Is the coal industry about to wreck the Great Barrier Reef?

by MatthiasA Posted on December 17, 2013

Is the coal industry about to wreck the Great Barrier Reef?

By

Shutterstock

Here’s a conundrum for you: Would it be better to protect Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which is visible from space, attracts more than a million visitors every year, and is home to thousands of species of fish, sharks, and other marine animals? Or would it be better to build one of the world’s largest coal ports near the reef, dredge the area around the port, dump millions of tons of dredged mud and sand into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and then create a coal-shipping superhighway through the reef so thousands of ships each year can ferry coal from Australia to Asia?

The answer is clearly the latter, according to Australia’s conservative government and the coal industry. The government, now under the control of climate-denying Prime Minister Tony Abbott, has just given the coal industry the go-ahead for its proposed project, despite warnings from environmentalists that the coal port and shipping plans threaten the very future of the reef. From The Guardian:

Unfortunately, soon a massively destructive coal port will be built just 50 km north of the magnificent Whitsunday Islands. The port expansion was approved by the Abbott Liberal National government on Wednesday 11 December, and it will become one of the world’s largest coal ports.

The coal export facility is ironically located on Abbot Point. The construction of this port will involve dredging 3 million cubic metres of seabed. The dredge spoil will be dumped into the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.

To give you an idea of the scale of this dredging, if all of the spoil was put into dump trucks, there would be 150,000 of them lined up bumper to bumper from Brisbane to Melbourne.

This expansion is further proof that the Abbott government is hell-bent on turning Australia into a reckless charco-state that solely represents the interests of fossil fuel and coal companies.

Shutterstock

This fish does not approve of coal-port plans.

Here’s more from The Christian Science Monitor:

Greenpeace estimates the number of coal ships passing through the reef will increase from a current level of about 1,700 a year to 10,150 by 2020, significantly increasing the possibility of accidents.

Environmental groups want the main authority overseeing the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to abide by its charter and block the Federal government’s approval of the Abbot Point expansion. A decision is expected next week.

With the coal industry contributing more than $20 billion a year to the government’s coffers and local businesses set to benefit from the new development, environmental groups are in for a tough fight.

This time, however, they have the support of the Queensland’s tourism operators. “There’s so much evidence that sedimentation is impacting the Great Barrier Reef … This is the tipping point,” says Bowen reef tour operator Al Grundy.

He fears the port expansion will threaten a nesting ground for green turtles and a humpback whale gathering area in the waters between Abbot Point and the Whitsunday Islands.

Of course, threatening the reef is nothing new for the coal industry. As The Christian Science Monitor points out, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel burning are warming the ocean waters and turning them more acidic, long posing a threat to the colorful reef ecosystem.


Source
Has a natural world wonder just been approved for destruction by the Australian government?, The Guardian
Australia approves coal port near Great Barrier Reef, Christian Science Monitor

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

Original source – 

Is the coal industry about to wreck the Great Barrier Reef?

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, ATTRA, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is the coal industry about to wreck the Great Barrier Reef?

Pushing Poor People to the Suburbs Is Bad for the Environment

by caringk63 Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In recent years, an overhyped counterrevolution has emerged in America. Millennials from the suburbs and their empty-nester parents have been flocking to certain desirable urban neighborhoods. This has led to a lot of chin-pulling about “demographic inversion,”wherein the cities become richer and whiter and the suburbs more non-white and poor. Skeptics note that suburbs are in the aggregate still richer and whiter than central cities and most middle-class families still settle in suburbia.

This sociological debate misses the important environmental question: What will we have achieved if we simply change the demographic complexion of who lives in walkable urban areas and who doesn’t? The answer is nothing. For the urbanist movement to be worthy of its name, the end result has to be that a higher percentage of Americans are actually living in central cities, and that the residents of both cities and suburbs represent the full spectrum of American life.

The evidence suggests that a combination of bad public policies is instead causing poor residents to be priced out of the most popular cities by well-heeled newcomers. Consider Annie Lowrey’s report on low-income renters in Tuesday’s New York Times. They are being squeezed by an economy where all the gains accrue to the top and new housing is built at the high end. Gentrification also brings wealthier renters into poor urban neighborhoods, bidding up the price of existing housing. Writes Lowrey:

The number of renters with very low incomes—less than 30 percent of the local median income, or about $19,000 nationally—surged by 3 million to 11.8 million between 2001 and 2011, according to a report released Monday by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. But the number of affordable rentals available to those households held steady at about 7 million. And by 2011, about 2.6 million of those rentals were occupied by higher-income households.…

Many of the worst shortages are in major cities with healthy local economies, like Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Washington.

Coincidentally, the Times is also running a moving, deeply reported five-part series this week on the life of Dasani, a homeless girl living in a shelter in Brooklyn. Her family lost their housing subsidy in 2010, when the New York state program was canceled for lack of funds. Dasani, her parents, and her seven siblings now crowd into one room in a squalid, vermin-infested building next to the Walt Whitman Houses, a vast public housing project in the swiftly gentrifying Fort Greene neighborhood.

From a housing perspective, three things stand out about Dasani’s family:

They would rather live in the projects than in a shelter. Public housing projects are supposedly a discredited form of big-government liberalism, and the federal government no longer appropriates much money at all for their construction. But in New York City, there are 167,353 families on the waiting list for public housing. (New York also has 123,533 families on the waiting list for Section 8 housing vouchers.)

Their homelessness is the direct result of being ejected from Advantage, a government rental assistance program. “By August 2010, bedbugs had infested the family’s house, just as their rent subsidy once again expired,” writes the Times‘ Andrea Elliot. “The city’s shelters were filling with former Advantage recipients—families who had been homeless before taking the rent subsidy, only to become homeless again.”

Their dream is to move to the Poconos because they could never afford an apartment in New York. The Poconos region in Pennsylvania has long been a rural area best known in New York City as a relatively cheap vacation spot. Now it is filling up with working-class New Yorkers priced out of the five boroughs. In other words, it’s the exurbs.

Living in the Poconos, where driving is a necessity and a commute to New York takes 90 minutes, is not environmentally efficient. If the wealthy in-migration to New York City forces an equal out-migration, there has been no environmental gain.

To provide affordable apartments in thriving inner cities and their inner-ring suburbs, we need to adopt both the conservative free-market and liberal big-government approaches to expanding housing supply. Zoning restrictions on density must be lifted, so that developers can increase supply to meet demand. But we must also realize that the market isn’t providing housing at the price points low-income families need. As Roger K. Lewis notes in The Washington Post, “there is not a single state in the United States where a person working full time and earning minimum wage can afford to rent, at fair-market value, a two-bedroom apartment or home.”

Slate’s Matthew Yglesias makes the point about zoning in reference to Lowrey’s article. Lowrey illustrates her story with a 54-year-old nanny facing skyrocketing rents in Columbia Heights, a neighborhood of Washington, D.C., that was predominantly low-income just a decade ago and is now heavily gentrified. Yglesias writes:

There are two questions unanswered… With demand surging, why doesn’t construction surge enough to keep vacancy rates roughly stable. The other: If builders are always aiming at that high end, why are they building in Columbia Heights rather than in the traditionally fancier and more expensive neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park.

The answers are “zoning” and “zoning.”…

You have a twofold limitation on supply. On the one hand, the total number of new units is capped so people only want to build luxury. On the other hand, new construction in the fancy neighborhoods is absolutely prohibited.

For example, you might walk up Connecticut Avenue just west of Rock Creek Park in D.C.’s tony Cleveland Park neighborhood and think it is fully built up because there are no empty lots. But why are all the buildings merely six or 10 stories tall? Why not 40, when the prices indicate that the demand is there? This is why D.C. must eliminate its building height restriction. But it’s also a matter of local zoning ordinances. The side streets in Cleveland Park are dominated by low-density single-family homes. If the market could support replacing them with apartment buildings, why shouldn’t developers be allowed to do that? D.C.’s density is only about one-third that of New York’s, and its population is only about three-quarters as high as its peak 50 years ago. So clearly there is room for more development, as there is in other expensive cities such as San Francisco and Boston.

At the same time, it makes no sense to assume the market will provide the poor with housing any more than it will provide them with health insurance. It’s true that massive, isolated housing projects have often bred social ills. But as the demand to live in New York’s projects demonstrates, it is better than forcing people to live in homeless shelters or more than an hour’s drive from the city where their jobs and social networks are located. The projects in New York are so destigmatized that developers are going to build market-rate housing right in their footprint. And housing projects no longer all look like vertical prisons. Innovative design can make subsidized housing green, human-scaled, attractive, and integrated into the streetscape.

Since even some conservatives agree with liberals that Section 8 vouchers, which allow low-income renters to find apartments on the market, are both the most efficient means of providing affordable housing and the best approach to encourage economic integration, we should appropriate more money for them.

Too often, after years of neglect, depopulation, crime, and disinvestment, cities have viewed recruiting richer residents as the essence of successful renewal. But a revival of urban America as a whole means that more people, from all walks of life, should be able to live safely, affordably, and comfortably in our cities.

Read more: 

Pushing Poor People to the Suburbs Is Bad for the Environment

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pushing Poor People to the Suburbs Is Bad for the Environment

The Right’s Obsession With Obama the Flirt

by Amy R. Eddy Posted on December 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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

It is often hard to connect actions to racism—and sometimes it is hard not to. When conservative activists and leaders excitedly contend that the first black American elected president was secretly born overseas and, consequently, is a pretender to the office, it certainly is difficult to ignore racism as a possible contributing motive. (These same people are in no uproar about Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s birth in Canada.) And when President Barack Obama is repeatedly branded a sexed-up flirt, despite the evidence he is a stand-up family guy, a similar query is unavoidable: Is race a factor?

The conservative New York Post this week has done extra duty to promote the idea that the president is a cad (and Michelle Obama is the resentful, jealous, and bossy wife). After photos emerged of Obama taking a selfie with Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt (with British PM David Cameron the third wheel) and the first lady looking displeased, the media was all abuzz, and Rupert Murdoch’s paper led the way with its front-page coverage pitched with this witty headline: “Flirting with Dane-ger.” The next day, Post columnist Andrea Peyser pushed the story—and the already widely spread meme—further. In an article headlined, “Flirty Obama Owes Us an Apology,” she ranted that Obama had “lost his morality, his dignity and his mind, using the solemn occasion of Nelson Mandela’s memorial service Tuesday to act like a hormone-ravaged frat boy on a road trip to a strip bar.” She referred to the Danish leader as a “hellcat” and pegged the needle in sexualizing this story: “Thorning-Schmidt placed her hands dangerously close to Obama’s side. The president’s cackling head moved inches from the Danish tart’s and yards away from his wife’s. Obama then proceeded to absorb body heat from the Dane, which he won’t be feeling at home for a long time.” Meet Obama, the lustful and wild predator who cannot control his urges at a solemn occasion.

Peyser was working with an idea—the president as sexy beast—not the facts. The day before her story appeared, Roberto Schmidt, the German Colombian news photographer who had snapped the shots that had ignited this nonscandal threw a bucket of cold water on the story Peyser and others were peddling:

I captured the scene reflexively. All around me in the stadium, South Africans were dancing, singing and laughing to honour their departed leader. It was more like a carnival atmosphere, not at all morbid. The ceremony had already gone on for two hours and would last another two. The atmosphere was totally relaxed—I didn’t see anything shocking in my viewfinder, president of the US or not. We are in Africa.

I later read on social media that Michelle Obama seemed to be rather peeved on seeing the Danish prime minister take the picture. But photos can lie. In reality, just a few seconds earlier the first lady was herself joking with those around her, Cameron and Schmidt included. Her stern look was captured by chance.

Schmidt noted that he spotted nothing improper. Obama had not been a wild man who had prompted a wifely rebuke. Still, that did not prevent Peyser from day-threeing this event with lasciviousness: “Michelle frowned and looked as if she wanted to spit acid at the man she married, a good-time guy who humiliated her in front of their friends, the world and a blonde bimbo who hadn’t the sense to cover up and keep it clean.”

Why is it that Obama repeatedly draws this sort of attack? In 2009, the Drudge Report and Fox News played up a photo from the G8 summit that supposedly showed the president leering at a teenage girl’s rump. The Drudge headline: “Second Stimulus Package.” Fox Nation went with “Busted?” And the fact that the target of his roving eyes was 17 years old was played to much salacious effect. Examiner.com reported—presumably mistakenly—that the subject of Obama’s less-than-honorable attention was only 16 years old. The New York Post exclaimed, “The leader of the free world and his French counterpart were caught sneaking a peek at a the pink-satin-draped booty of a 17-year-old junior G-8 delegate just moments before the summit’s official group photo was snapped in Italy yesterday. Obama wasn’t the only head of state getting Yankee Doodle randy.” And Fox & Friends dug up another photo from the summit that appeared to show Obama staring at the rear end of a different woman.

You know the rest of the story. When the full video of the event emerged, it was clear that Obama had not gazed with ill intent at the young woman. (The video, though, hardly cleared French President Nicholas Sarkozy.) But the point had been made: this guy cannot help himself.

A year ago, the Daily Mail advanced this plot line with a report that Obama repeatedly flirted with Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra while on a trip to Thailand. The article—”Obama gets flirty as he schmoozes with Thai prime minister”—was accompanied by several photos that appeared to show Obama and the “attractive” Shinawatra exchanging “playful glances.” (The perhaps sexist implication here—as with Peyser’s column—is that female heads of state melt into a puddle whenever O is near.)

This sort of coverage might well happen to a good-looking white guy who was president. But remember when George W. Bush gave German Prime Minister Angela Merkel an impromptu back rub at a G8 meeting in 2006? The video went viral, and the episode launched a flood of jokes and spoofs. Yet, there wasn’t much talk of Bush being an impulsive flirter driven by sexual temptation. A Google search turned up no indication that Andrea Peyser rushed to her keyboard to pronounce Bush a moral failure and embarrassment to the nation. At least, Bill Clinton gave people a reason to wonder about his behavior. (During the 1992 campaign, cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers publicly claimed she had a 12-year affair with Clinton; years later, Clinton, in a deposition, countered that he had only one sexual dalliance with her.)

What is it about Obama that causes conservative critics to question his legitimacy as a citizen and his ability to control his sex drive? (In something of a twist, right-wing agitator Jerome Corsi, a leader of the birthers, has in the last year been pushing a different Obama sex story: The president is secretly gay and once upon a time was actively part of Chicago’s wild gay bar and bathhouse scene.) It is not too far a stretch, when pondering all this, to recall how racists in the past depicted black men as licentious and a danger to women—that is, white women. Is a remnant of that in play when Obama is cast as a lecherous or flirtatious scalawag? There’s probably no definitive answer to be reached here. (Can you—do you want to—peer into the soul of Andrea Peyser?) But the question is real enough that it ought to give commentators and columnists (and their editors) pause before they again revive this Obama Unchained narrative.

Read More:  

The Right’s Obsession With Obama the Flirt

Posted in alo, ATTRA, Casio, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Right’s Obsession With Obama the Flirt

This Hedge Fund Has Made a Killing on Bushmaster Assault Rifles

by AnitraSteadham Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Last December, four days after Adam Lanza murdered 20 first graders and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., Cerberus Capital Management pledged to sell the Freedom Group, the company that manufactured the Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle that Lanza used. The announcement helped tamp down a rising PR disaster for the Manhattan private equity firm, placating major investors such as the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS), which had said it was “examining” its $750 million stake in Cerberus after the massacre. The New York Times described the move as “a rare instance of a Wall Street firm bending to concerns about an investment’s societal impact.”

A year after the Newtown tragedy, however, Cerberus has not sold Freedom Group (also known as Remington Outdoor Company Inc.), the nation’s largest firearms and ammunition conglomerate. After buyers failed to materialize early this year, Cerberus CEO Stephen Feinberg announced he and a small group of individuals would seek to buy the company, which also owns brands such as Remington, Marlin, and Dakota Arms. But in July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Feinberg was dropping his bid amid increasingly attractive offers from outside investors. “Cerberus initially planned to seek around $1 billion for the company,” the Journal reported, citing an anonymous source, “but now wants more.”

Business has boomed for Freedom Group in the year since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Between January and the end of September, the company raked in $94 million in profits on more than $1 billion in gun and ammo sales, compared with just $500,000 in net profits during the same period in 2012. For the full year ending December 31, Freedom Group estimates that its net sales will be up 34 percent to $1.25 billion, according to a financial disclosure (PDF) released Monday. Though Freedom Group doesn’t release sales figures specifically for the Busmaster XM-15 assault rifle, that weapon and similar models reportedly flew off retailers’ shelves in the weeks after Sandy Hook, snatched up by firearms enthusiasts who feared the guns would soon be outlawed.

According to the Freedom Group’s third quarter report, this year’s earnings spike came primarily from a $42 million bump in sales of “centerfire rifles,” a category which includes the XM-15. The report further notes that Freedom Group’s leading sellers were “modern sporting rifles”—the firearms industry’s euphemism for assault weapons. “Consumer concern over more restrictive governmental regulation on the federal, state, and local levels has contributed to this increase in demand,” the report says. The company would have sold even more guns, the report adds, if not for “sales demand being greater than our current production capacity in many categories.”

“We wish that this anniversary were not coming and that we were not holding Freedom Group,” said Mike Sicilia, a spokesman for CalSTRS, adding that the teachers pension fund is prohibited by its investment contract with Cerberus from discussing financial details. “It’s difficult on all of us because we represent the futures of teachers. Teachers were killed at Sandy Hook, and that gun was made by a company that we partially own. We all feel that.”

Continue Reading »

See more here: 

This Hedge Fund Has Made a Killing on Bushmaster Assault Rifles

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Hedge Fund Has Made a Killing on Bushmaster Assault Rifles

Could This New "Church" Make Atheism Cool?

by Cindy Lin Posted on November 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Last Tuesday in the basement of a bar in San Francisco’s Financial District, more than 50 people united to celebrate the universe’s godlessness. The group—mostly white, mostly hipster, and one kilt-wearer—congregated over drinks as pop-electronica played in the background. It was San Francisco’s first-ever gathering of the Sunday Assembly, a recently formed organization of atheists who want to participate in “all the best bits of church” but without the believing in God part, according to the Assembly’s co-founder and event facilitator, British comedian Sanderson Jones.

The only prayers to be heard at the event were during a karaoke-style sing-along to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Later in the evening came a YouTube viewing of Carl Sagan’s atheist anthem, “Pale Blue Dot.”

The Assembly was the idea of Jones, who wore a plaid shirt, a long, scruffy beard and and thick-framed black aviator glasses to the meeting, and his friend and fellow British comic, Pippa Evans, who wasn’t in attendance. The two founded the Assembly to create a global community based on the belief that “we are born from nothing and go to nothing,” according to the group’s website. The Assembly—which has been called by Salon and Time an ‘atheist mega-church’—is currently traveling around the world on its road show. The meetings have already attracted hundreds of attendees and a barrage of media coverage.

Sanderson says that the group has already gotten some flack from “fundamentalist, evangelical” atheists, as he put it, who’ve told him “the way we don’t believe in God is not the right way to not believe in God.” There is some evidence that atheism is becoming slightly more popular in the United States: In 2012 an estimated 2.4 percent of Americans said they were atheists, up from 1.6 percent in 2007. However, according to the Pew Research Center, the meaning of the word atheist is a source of confusion: Although ‘atheist’ is defined as a person who does not believe in God, “14 percent of those who call themselves atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit.”

Although San Francisco’s Sunday Assembly did have some serious moments—including a speech by Pixar’s Daniel McCoy about how, like science, storytelling can reveal truth—the overall tone was light and tailored to the crowd, with plenty of Twitter and tech jokes. Sanderson and Evans believe that Sunday Assembly’s tongue-in-cheek tone is part of what will attract followers. At one point during their crowd-funding campaign video, the duo assures viewers that Kool-Aid will not be involved and that “It’s not a cult!” Though, they admit while wearing togas and carrying large glasses of wine, “That’s exactly what we’d say if it were a cult.”

Visit site:

Could This New "Church" Make Atheism Cool?

Posted in alo, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Could This New "Church" Make Atheism Cool?

In Virginia, the Business Community Abandons the Tea Party

by hedsdfx Posted on November 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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

I don’t know enough about Virginia (or New Jersey or New York City) to have much to say about their elections yesterday. So I was hoping that one of my Virginia friends would come through with a long, thoughtful email about the McAuliffe-Cuccinelli race, which I considered by far the most interesting of last night’s races.

In that race, Terry McAuliffe won a close victory even though the polls had him well ahead.1 Does this bode ill for Democrats? Sure, maybe. On the other hand, McAuliffe was an unusually unsympathetic candidate, and Republicans still couldn’t beat him in a state that looks increasingly like the country at large. On balance, then, this really seems like bad news for Republicans no matter how they try to spin things.

However, one of my liberal Virginia pals had an interesting take on why Cuccinelli lost:

I agree with Erickson and First Read regarding a lot of the race-specific reasons for Cuccinelli’s loss. But, to me, the biggest mistake that Cuccinelli made was his initial tentative step toward making this a Tea Party campaign that downplayed economic messages in favor of his hot buttons — which, by the way, far and away most animated him on the stump (reminiscent of Santorum, almost).

This just doesn’t fly with the NoVa business interests. They’ll support any right wing crank as long as there is no daylight between them on business interests, taxes, etc. But Cuccinelli had the unnerving tendency to go headlong and unapologetically into his crusades at the expense of all else (e.g., massive and expensive witch hunt against UVA professor for climate change views, unqualified support for anti-abortion and contraception laws, and, of course, leading the doomed Obamacare challenges). In none of his crusades would business benefit in any significant way if he were successful. At the end of the day, he was spending significant resources to prove ideological points. Further, his attempted course corrections at trying to put his economic message front and center just lacked authenticity — more pro forma than passion. The business lobby wants the Governor out there selling Virginia, attracting business and jobs. Cuccinelli just seemed to be the worst salesman for this.

This speaks to all the recent chatter about whether the business wing of the GOP is finally fed up with the tea party and willing to do something about it. The message here isn’t that Cuccinelli was anti-business, but simply that he was so plainly animated by crusades on social issues that the business community didn’t trust him. They were afraid that at worst he might actively scare away business, and at best he’d never put any real energy into attracting it. McAuliffe, by contrast, is all about attracting business to Virginia. So the usual business-tea party partnership broke down.

I just thought I’d share this. Cuccinelli might be a bit of a unique character, but he’s not that unique. The business community might have fired a shot across the tea party bow last night.

1Will this be a boon for the folks who are convinced that mainstream polls are all skewed against conservatives? Maybe!

Link:  

In Virginia, the Business Community Abandons the Tea Party

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on In Virginia, the Business Community Abandons the Tea Party

“Rate Shock” is a Middle-Class Problem, So It Gets Lots of Attention

by DunlapXE6NqJSf@hotmail.com Posted on November 5, 2013

Mother Jones

The media has entered a feeding frenzy of coverage about people who are facing “rate shock” from Obamacare. It’s a real story, even if a lot of the reporting has been sloppy and credulous, but the level of media attention has nonetheless been pretty stunning. Jon Chait says this is partly because the press has a natural attraction to bad news over good. But that’s not all:

There’s also an economic bias at work. Victims of rate shock are middle-class, and their travails, in general, tend to attract far more lavish coverage than the problems of the poor. (Did you know that on November 1, millions of Americans suffered painful cuts to nutritional assistance? Not a single Sunday-morning talk-show mentioned it.)

Yep. It’s the same reason that air traffic controllers got funded so quickly during the sequester while food aid didn’t. In addition, I can only assume that writing about the people who are benefiting from Obamacare would strike DC reporters as a little too much like shilling for the Obama administration. Can’t have that, can we?

In addition to the obvious agenda-setting power of Fox and Drudge, I suspect there’s also one other factor at work here: a news drought. Just as the debt ceiling crisis helped Obama in early October by sucking up all the media oxygen and taking attention away from the disastrous rollout of the website, Obama has been hurt by a news cycle that’s been unusually slow lately. There’s just not much to talk about aside from Obamacare. I suspect that the White House must be wishing for a huge hurricane or something right about now to provide the cable nets with something else to obsess over.

See the original article here: 

“Rate Shock” is a Middle-Class Problem, So It Gets Lots of Attention

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on “Rate Shock” is a Middle-Class Problem, So It Gets Lots of Attention

WATCH: Ted Cruz’s Dad Calls US a "Christian Nation," Says Obama Should Go "Back to Kenya"

by 85138uz Posted on October 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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

In April, Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), spoke to the tea party of Hood County, which is southwest of Fort Worth, and made a bold declaration: The United States is a “Christian nation.” The septuagenarian businessman turned evangelical pastor did not choose to use the more inclusive formulation “Judeo-Christian nation.” Insisting that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution “were signed on the knees of the framers” and were a “divine revelation from God,” he went on to say, “yet our president has the gall to tell us that this is not a Christian nation…The United States of America was formed to honor the word of God.” Seven months earlier, Rafael Cruz, speaking to the North Texas Tea Party on behalf of his son, who was then running for Senate, called President Barack Obama an “outright Marxist” who “seeks to destroy all concept of God,” and he urged the crowd to send Obama “back to Kenya.”

Comments uttered by a politician’s parent may have little relevance in assessing an elected official. But it’s appropriate to take Rafael Cruz into account when evaluating his son the senator. Ted Cruz, the tea party champion who almost single-handedly spurred the recent government shutdown, has often deployed his father as a political asset. He routinely cites his Cuban-born father, who emigrated from the island nation in 1957, when he discusses immigration and justifies his opposition to the bipartisan reform bill that passed in the Senate. (Ted Cruz hails his father as a symbol of the “American dream” who came to the United States legally—though Rafael Cruz began his career in the oil industry in Canada, where Ted was born.) Moreover, Ted Cruz campaigns with his father; he had him in tow on a recent trip to Iowa (where the evangelical vote is crucial in GOP presidential primaries). Rafael Cruz regularly speaks to tea party and Republican groups in Texas as a surrogate for his son; during Ted Cruz’s 2012 Senate campaign, his father was dispatched to events and rallies across the state to whip up support. And thanks to Ted Cruz’s political rise, Rafael has become a conservative star in his own right. He has been prominently featured—and praised—at events held by prominent right-wing outfits, such as FreedomWorks and Heritage Action. What Rafael Cruz says—especially when he is speaking for his son—matters.

The elder Cruz is a pastor affiliated with the Purifying Fire ministry, a Christian evangelical outfit that seeks to “gain back territory from the Kingdom of Darkness” and that was founded by Suzanne Hinn, the wife of controversial televangelist and self-proclaimed miracle-healer Benny Hinn. Rafael Cruz’s inflammatory remarks and fundamentalist views have recently started to attract increased media attention. A few weeks ago, he sparked headlines when he told a gathering of Republicans in Colorado that Obama has vowed to “side with the Muslims,” that Obamacare mandates “suicide counseling” for the elderly, and that gay marriage is a plot to make “government your god.”

A sermon Rafael Cruz delivered in August 2012 at an Irving, Texas, mega-church has also come under scrutiny. At that event, he asserted that Christian true believers are “anointed” by God to “take dominion” of the world in “every area: society, education, government, and economics.” He was preaching a particular form of evangelical Christianity known as Dominionism (a.k.a. Christian Reconstructionism) that holds that these “anointed” Christians are destined to take over the government and create in practice, if not in official terms, a theocracy. Rafael Cruz also endorsed the evangelical belief known as the “end-time transfer of wealth“—that is, as a prelude to the second coming of Christ, God will seize the wealth of the wicked and redistribute it to believers. But, Cruz told the flock, don’t expect to benefit from this unless you tithe mightily. Introducing Cruz at this service, Christian Zionist pastor Larry Huch offered this bottom line: In the coming year, he predicted, “God will begin to rule and reign. Not Wall Street, not Washington, God’s people and his kingdom will begin to rule and reign. I know that’s why God got Rafael’s son elected, Ted Cruz, the next senator.” (In July, several prominent Dominionist pastors at a ceremony in Iowa blessed and anointed Ted Cruz, rendering him, in their view, a “king” who would help usher in the kingdom of Christ.)

During his sermon at this church, Rafael Cruz preached that men, not women, are the spiritual leaders of their families: “As God commands us men to teach your wife, to teach your children—to be the spiritual leader of your family—you’re acting as a priest. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately, in too many Christian homes, the role of the priest is assumed by the wife. Why? Because the man had abdicated his responsibility as priest to his family…So the wife has taken up that banner, but that’s not her responsibility. And if I’m stepping on toes, just say, ‘Ouch.'”

As Rafael Cruz recounted at the Hood County tea party event, he had a powerful role in shaping his son, introducing Ted, when he was in middle school, to the Free Enterprise Education Center, where the young Cruz was flooded with Austrian School libertarian economics and archly conservative interpretations of US history. Cruz excelled in this setting and went on to become part of a traveling road show of teens called the Constitutional Corroborators. They appeared at Rotary Club luncheons across the state to extol the wonders of the free market and the US Constitution. While the Rotarians ate lunch, the whiz kids transcribed from memory the articles of the Constitution on easels placed at the front of the room.

At the Hood County gathering, Rafael Cruz, in full sync with his son’s political stance, attacked RINOs—Republicans In Name Only. He noted that the “wicked” were now ruling the United States. He insisted that “those death panels are in Obamacare,” and that the US government wants “to take all of your money” and confiscate “our fortunes.” He asserted that the Democratic Party promotes “everything that is contrary to the word of God.” He also exclaimed, “Social justice is a cancer. Social justice means you are ruled by whatever the mob does. What social justice does is destroy individual responsibility.”

Pastor Cruz is a fiery speaker whose rhetorical red meat is well-received by hardcore Republican and tea party audiences. He regularly has compared Obama to Fidel Castro and routinely echoes the no-surrender calls of his son. At a “freedom rally” at the Alamo in 2012, he vowed, “We’ve had enough compromise…enough of Establishment Republicans that don’t stand for anything.” Speaking to Houston Republicans in September, he decried John McCain and Mitt Romney, blasting both of the former presidential candidates for having “played dead” when challenging Obama. He blasted McCain for refusing to slam Obama regarding the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He asserted that the elderly would be harmed by Obamacare, claiming that “everywhere in the world when socialized medicine has been instituted it takes 12 to 18 months to get any kind of medical proceeding.” (That is not the case with Medicare, a form of socialized health care.) He also declared, “I haven’t heard Obama ask us for our consent when he’s trying to ram Obamacare down our throats”—without noting that Congress voted for the Affordable Care Act. At the Hood County event, Rafael Cruz, a fervent foe of gay rights, vowed that he would be speaking “across this country to support constitutional conservatives to retake the Senate.”

Whether he’s at a prayer breakfast or a tea party rally, Rafael Cruz easily and enthusiastically mixes religion and politics. At an event hosted by the National Federation of Republican Assemblies in September, he contended that after the 2012 election, God told him, “If we could blame one group of people for what happened in the last election, it is the pastors.” By that he meant that, for decades, too many Christian leaders have remained on the political sidelines, declining to do combat with liberals and Democrats. Consequently, he explained, prayer has been removed from schools, legalized abortion has continued, and gay marriage has come to pass in several states. He insisted that the advancement of Christianity (his fundamentalist version of it) depends on political battle, noting the need not just for a “spiritual savior” but a “political savior.” (The idea of states’ rights, he said, was based in the bible.) Obama, Cruz proclaimed, believes “government is your god.” When Cruz was a keynote speaker at a tax day rally hosted by Texas tea partiers in April, he told the crowd that conservative Christians need to take over “every school board in this nation.” At a Texas tea party rally in September 2012, he claimed that Obama has “a clear agenda…to destroy American exceptionalism”—and “to achieve a “worldwide redistribution of wealth” and “make us subject to the United Nations.”

The United States as a “Christian nation”; death panels; social justice a cancer; gay rights a conspiracy; the “wicked” in charge in Washington; women inferior to men as spiritual leaders; Obama a Muslim-favoring, God-hating, Marxist Kenyan; End Times; a UN worldwide dictatorship; states’ rights; free markets over all—Rafael Cruz blends the far reaches of extreme conservatism and Christian fundamentalism. He embodies the full synthesis of the tea party and the religious right. In fact, he has noted that the rise of the religious right in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign “was the precursor of the tea party.” Rafael Cruz may well be key to understanding the ideas, desires, and long-term aims that drive Ted Cruz—a politician who is exerting an outsized influence on the GOP.

At the least, Cruz ought to have to explain whether he shares the more extreme views of his No. 1 surrogate. Asked to comment on Rafael Cruz’s remarks—particularly his statement that the United States is a “Christian nation” and his call for Obama to be shipped back to Kenya—Sen. Cruz’s office requested citations for these quotes. After receiving the citations, Sean Rushton, a spokesperson for Cruz, replied, “These selective quotes, taken out of context, mischaracterize the substance of Pastor Cruz’s message. Like many Americans, he feels America is on the wrong track.” Rushton added, “Pastor Cruz does not speak for the senator.”

“People here are trying to figure out Ted Cruz,” a Democratic senator recently told me. “And a lot of them are saying, ‘He went to Princeton, Harvard Law—he doesn’t really believe what he says.’ But I think he does. All you have to do is look at his father. So much of our life is mirroring. And Ted Cruz is mirroring his father.”

View the original here:  

WATCH: Ted Cruz’s Dad Calls US a "Christian Nation," Says Obama Should Go "Back to Kenya"

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on WATCH: Ted Cruz’s Dad Calls US a "Christian Nation," Says Obama Should Go "Back to Kenya"

How Does a Tick Do Its Dirty Work? Research Video Offers a Clue

by Myrna Posted on October 29, 2013

Just in time for Halloween — a video made by researchers shows how ticks that carry Lyme disease cut into skin and hang on for days. Read original article:  How Does a Tick Do Its Dirty Work? Research Video Offers a Clue ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: Will Sandy’s Lessons Fade as a Sleepy Atlantic Storm Season Ends?Image of Hindenburg Haunts Hydrogen TechnologyU.S. Says It Won’t Back New International Coal-Fired Power Plants ;

Continued here:  

How Does a Tick Do Its Dirty Work? Research Video Offers a Clue

Posted in ALPHA, ATTRA, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, PUR, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Does a Tick Do Its Dirty Work? Research Video Offers a Clue