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Black Lawmakers Warn the Senate That Sessions Would “Move This Country Backward”

by SonjaVmncy Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

For a man dogged by allegations of racist comments and actions, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) managed to make it through the first day and a half of confirmation hearings to be the next attorney general without many fireworks. That changed on Wednesday afternoon, when three of Sessions’ African American colleagues in Congress testified against him.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.); Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights icon who nearly died fighting for African American voting rights; and Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, all gave testimony in opposition to Sessions. They told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Sessions’ record on everything from voting rights to mass incarceration made him unfit for the office of attorney general.

It is customary for members of Congress to testify first in congressional hearings, but committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) scheduled the three members for the end of the hearings. That discrepancy was not lost on the three testifying members. “To have a senator, a House member, and a living civil rights legend testify at the end of all of this is the equivalent of being made to go to the back of the bus,” said Richmond, to a smattering of applause.

Booker spoke first of the three, saying that although senators typically support one another, he found that tradition pitted against “what my conscience tells me is best for my country.” In his remarks, Booker said Sessions’ record shows he will not adequately protect the rights of minorities. “Sen. Sessions has not demonstrated a commitment to a central requirement of the job: to aggressively pursue the congressional mandate of civil rights, equal rights, and justice for all,” Booker said, according to prepared remarks. “In fact, at numerous times in his career, he has demonstrated a hostility toward these convictions, and has worked to frustrate attempts to advance these ideals.”

His closing line was a play on a line often used by President Barack Obama, that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. But Booker’s version had a key difference. “The arc of the moral universe does not just naturally curve toward justice,” he said. “We must bend it.” The country needs an attorney general, he said, who would bend it.

Lewis invoked his fight for voting rights in Alabama, where he endured a near-fatal beating on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. He described Alabama’s evolution from a segregated place where he and Sessions both grew up under Jim Crow to ground zero of the successful fight for voting rights. He wondered whether Sessions’ repeated calls for “law and order” today mean what they did before the civil rights movement, when that language represented a regime of segregation and oppression.

“The forces of law and order in Alabama were so strong that to take a stance against this injustice we had to be willing to sacrifice our lives,” Lewis said. When civil rights activists sacrificed themselves physically in Alabama—sometimes with their lives—President Lyndon Johnson and Congress responded by passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he noted. “We made progress, but we are not there yet,” he said. “There are forces that would take us back to another place.”

He added, “We need someone who will stand up, speak up, and speak out for the people that need help.”

The most pointed language came from Richmond. He spoke directly about the choice facing the senators, and particularly the Republican members who appear to have no reservations about confirming Sessions. “Simply put, Sen. Sessions has advanced an agenda that would do great harm to African American citizens and communities,” he said.

Richmond offered a warning to the senators. “If you vote to confirm Sen. Sessions, you take ownership of everything he may do or not do,” he said. “Each and every senator who casts a vote to confirm Sen. Sessions will be permanently marked as a co-conspirator in an effort to move this country backward, toward a darker period in our shared history. So I ask you all, where do you stand?”

The testimony from these three members of Congress was interspersed with input from two pro-Sessions witnesses, both black attorneys who have worked with Sessions. But Booker, Lewis, and Richmond made it clear to the Senate Judiciary Committee that a vote for Sessions is one that virtually every black member of Congress opposes.

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Black Lawmakers Warn the Senate That Sessions Would “Move This Country Backward”

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Cory Booker Takes a Veiled Jab at Bernie Sanders on Prisons

by LeslieWaterfield Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, the only black Democrat in the Senate, took a subtle jab at Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Thursday for ignoring issues affecting African Americans in his own state of Vermont.

Campaigning for Hillary Clinton at a black church in Florence, South Carolina, on Thursday, Booker fired up the crowd with invocations of past violence against African Americas—from “gas and billy clubs” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to the martyred teenager Emmett Till—while framing Clinton as the only candidate in the race voters could trust to fix the criminal justice system. “If you don’t mind all this talk in this campaign about race, I want to get real with y’all for a minute,” Booker said. His support for Clinton, he explained to the church audience, was because “she was here when it wasn’t election time. I’m here because she was supporting criminal justice reform before it was popular to talk about it on the campaign trail.”

In case the contrast he was trying to draw wasn’t clear, Booker got more specific. “This is not just a South Carolina issue,” he said. “I don’t care what state you come from. Heck, Vermont! People told me, ‘Cory, they don’t have black people in Vermont.’ I’m sorry to tell you this, there are 50 states; we got black people in every state! That’s true!”

He continued, “And the problems of racial disparity did not begin in this campaign. They go deep in every state. Vermont has 1 percent African Americans. But their prison population is 11 percent black! You want to speak about injustice—I see campaigns and candidates running all over this country. Don’t you come to my communities, talk about how much you care, talk your passion for criminal justice, and then I don’t hear from you after an election. And I didn’t hear from you before the election!”

Clinton has focused on winning black voters in counties where she lost big to Barack Obama (including Florence County, where Obama beat her by 42 points), emphasizing Sanders’ votes against gun control measures and her friendship with a group of African American women who lost their children to gun violence or in police custody. But her aggressive push on criminal justice is in part defensive; she’s been criticized on the left for supporting, among other things, welfare reform and the 1994 crime bill. At a fundraiser in Charleston on Wednesday night, she was confronted by a young black woman about comments she’d made as First Lady in support of the crime bill, alleging that “super-predators” were threatening urban communities. Clinton said on Thursday, “I shouldn’t have used those words.”

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Cory Booker Takes a Veiled Jab at Bernie Sanders on Prisons

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Here’s the Latest Climate Science "Scandal"

by RaulBrooks Posted on February 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The latest salvo in the War on Reality comes from the UK paper the Telegraph, which is a safe haven for some who would claim—literally despite the evidence—that global warming isn’t real.

The article, written by Christopher Booker (who flat out denies human-induced global warming), is somewhat subtly titled “The Fiddling With Temperature Data Is the Biggest Science Scandal Ever.” In it, Booker claims that climate scientists have adjusted temperature readings from thermometers in Paraguay to make it look like the temperature is increasing, when the measurements off the detectors actually show the opposite. The theme of the article is that scientists “manipulated” the data on purpose to exaggerate global warming.

This is nonsense. The claim is wrong. The scientists didn’t manipulate the data, they processed it. That’s a very different thing. And the reason they do it isn’t hard to understand.

Imagine you want to measure the daily temperature in a field near a town. You want to make sure the measurements you get aren’t affected by whether it’s cloudy or sunny—direct sunlight on the thermometer will increase the temperature you measure—so you set it up in a reflective box. Look: Right away you’ve adjusted the temperature, even before you’ve taken a measurement! You’ve made sure an outside influence doesn’t affect your data adversely. That’s a good thing.

So you start reading the data, but over time someone buys the property near the field, and builds houses there. Driveways, roads, houses leaking heat…this all affects your thermometer. Perhaps a building is erected that casts a shadow over your location. Whatever: You have to account for all these effects.

That’s what scientists do. That’s what scientists did. They examined the data from these thermometers all over the world, and tried to minimize the impact of outside influences. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to trust the data.

How you correct the data is important, of course, and this is where the second claim comes in: Scientists manipulated the data specifically to make it look like global warming is stronger than it really is.

Ah, but we know that’s not true! A few years ago, an independent group at Berkeley Earth took that same temperature data and re-examined it, processing it in a different way. Guess what they found?

Yup. The planet’s warming up, and pretty much just as the other scientists had said. You can read more about this in an excellent article by Neville Nicholls, who is an expert in how meteorological measurements need to be adjusted in this way. There’s more at the “…and then there’s Physics” blog and at Real Sceptic, and Skeptical Science has an article debunking this as well.

A graph is worth a thousand words. Here are the results of the Berkeley research compared with various other groups:

The recalibrated temperatures by the Berkeley group (black) versus various other groups. In the past, measurements are less certain, but in modern times they converge and all trend the same way. Berkeley Earth

As you can see, there’s virtually no difference. As long as the measurements are processed properly they show what we know, what we’ve known, for quite some time: The world is warming up, and it’s warming up rapidly.

So, far from being “the biggest science scandal ever,” this isn’t even a scandal at all, and is in fact how science works. You can’t just take raw data off a detector and claim it’s real; if you do so, then at best you’d be fooling yourself, and at worst you’d be trying to fool others. And that’s certainly not how science works.

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Here’s the Latest Climate Science "Scandal"

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Democrats Blast Obama’s Plan to Allow Oil Drilling Off the East Coast

by LKCWilliams Posted on January 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A group of Senate Democrats from the Northeast is pushing back on the Obama administration’s proposal to open new areas of the Atlantic Ocean to oil and gas drilling.

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker called the move “absolutely unacceptable” in a press conference Tuesday afternoon. Joining in the press conference were fellow Democrats Ed Markey (Mass.), Robert Menendez (N.J.) and Ben Cardin (Md.).

“If drilling is allowed off the east coast of the United States, it puts our beaches, our fisherman, and our environment in the crosshairs for an oil spill that could devastate our shores,” said Markey. “We’re going to make it clear we’re very unhappy with this plan…You’re looking at the beginning of an alliance to put pressure on this administration to withdraw this proposal.”

The Obama administration on Tuesday released a draft of its five-year plan to open up drilling, including sales in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The plan, which would not begin until 2017, can still be revised.

The Democrats said they would seek to get the administration to change the proposal before it issues its final plan, asking for the removal of all areas on the east coast.

While there are no proposed sales off Maryland, New Jersey or Massachusetts included in the plan, the legislators said a potential spill to the south could imperial their coasts as the oil circulates. They cited billion-dollar coastal industries like tourism and fishing as potentially at risk in the event of a spill. “All of the risk is put on the backs of our shore communities, and all the reward goes to big oil,” said Menendez.

The group also criticized Congress for failing to put in place tougher regulations on offshore drilling in the wake of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. While changes were proposed after that spill, they never passed the Senate, even though Democrats were in the majority at that time.

Cardin said that the reserves off the Atlantic Coast “are minimal compared to the risk.” The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) estimated last year that there are 4.72 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 37.51 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Outer Continental Shelf off the entire east coast. The Gulf of Mexico, in contrast, contains an estimated 48.4 billion barrels.

The senators cited a recent report from the environmental group Oceana, which found that offshore wind development has the potential to create twice as many jobs and energy as oil and gas development on the Atlantic coast.

Booker also criticized the plan from a climate change standpoint, arguing that further development of oil and gas would contribute more planet-warming emissions.

“Scientists are clearly telling us we need to leave more than 50 percent of the already known fossil fuel reserves in the ground,” said Booker. “To purse this strategy not only threatens New Jersey…but it also flies in the face of the urgent need for us to have a more comprehensive vision for an energy policy that will make sure we don’t cross that line.”

Virginia’s Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine have both supported drilling off the coast of their state. In a joint statement Tuesday, they expressed support for the proposal’s goals, but said they want Virginia to be able to share in the revenue the drilling generates. The legislators said they intend to introduce legislation to that effect.

North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia each have two Republican senators who support offshore drilling.

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Democrats Blast Obama’s Plan to Allow Oil Drilling Off the East Coast

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