Tag Archives: california

I Still Don’t Know What Scott Walker Was Talking About on Abortion

by ClevelaZQFJ Posted on August 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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During Thursday’s debate, Scott Walker took the most extreme position of any candidate on abortion. Not only does he oppose exceptions for rape and incest, he even opposes an exception to save the life of the mother. “I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected,” he said, “and there are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother. That’s been consistently proven.”

Huh? What was that supposed to mean? I was stumped then, and I’m stumped now. So I was happy to see Jonathan Allen’s subhead promising to explain it:

What Scott Walker was talking about when he said there are alternatives to abortion when the woman’s life is in danger

Great! So what was Walker talking about?

He essentially subscribes to the “double effect” doctrine, a well-established line of argument that governs how Catholic leaders think about the definition of abortion — and the desire to preserve the life of the mother and the viability of the fetus.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, in its “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” makes a distinction between procedures designed to terminate a pregnancy to preserve the life of the woman and those for which the termination of the pregnancy is an unintended consequence of treating the woman….That is, the bishops believe intent matters.

Well, I’m still stumped. This Catholic doctrine governs what’s allowed and what isn’t, but it doesn’t say anything about there always being a way to protect the life of both the fetus and the mother.

So I’ll open this up to the floor. Does anyone know what Walker was referring to? What are the “many alternatives” that he claims are available to protect the life of an endangered mother? And who has supposedly consistently proven this? If you know, enlighten us in comments.

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I Still Don’t Know What Scott Walker Was Talking About on Abortion

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Is Opposition to Obamacare Finally Dying Down?

by ElkeI96cetn Posted on August 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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I missed this when it first got published the day after the Republican debate, but Sarah Kliff says out loud something that was only percolating in the back of my head at the time:

Ten Republican presidential hopefuls took to the debate stage last night to prove their conservative bona fides. They swore they’d unravel President Barack Obama’s legacy. But there was one place they barely went: repealing Obamacare.

….Last night, candidates mentioned Obamacare exactly six times during the course of a two-hour debate. Only one candidate, Scott Walker, uttered the Republican rallying cry: “Repeal Obamacare.” The near-complete absence of Obama’s health overhaul is remarkable.

The rhetorical shift shows a fundamental change in the calculus of Obamacare: It’s one thing to talk about dismantling a theoretical law. It’s another to take away insurance that tens of millions of Americans now receive. And that’s exactly where Republicans are in 2016. So while Obamacare barely made it onto the stage, it might just be the biggest winner of the night.

Kliff goes on to make the case in more detail that repealing Obamacare is fundamentally less attractive than it was four years ago. Back then, it was an abstraction. Today it’s a real live program with millions of enrollees.

Is this really why Obamacare got so little attention in the debate? Maybe. Or maybe Fox News just didn’t bother giving the candidates much of a chance. After all, if you’re looking for conflict, what’s the point of asking about something that every candidate on the stage agrees about? It’s worth noting that the only question specifically about Obamacare went to Donald Trump, and asked him why he had flip-flopped on single-payer health care. And the only question on Medicaid went to John Kasich, one of the few Republican governors to accept Obamacare funding to expand Medicaid coverage. In both cases there was some potential disagreement between the candidates. So Thursday’s debate might not be much of a bellwether about waning interest in Obamacare among Republicans.

Still, I suspect Kliff is onto something. I agree that an actual program with actual enrollees—and one that’s operating pretty successfully—is a trickier target than one that’s slated for the future. For one thing, you can predict anything you want about a program that hasn’t started up yet, but it’s harder to keep up the meme that Obamacare will destroy the economy when it’s pretty plainly not destroying the economy. For another, even a Republican candidate is going to feel a lot of pushback from constituents who are now using the program and want to know what’s going to happen if it goes away and they can’t get insured anymore.

And there’s another tidbit of evidence on this front. A couple of weeks ago CNN released a poll that asked voters what their most important issue was. Among Republicans, only 14 percent said health care. They’re far more concerned about the economy and the nexus of terrorism and foreign policy. Democrats, conversely, ranked health care very highly. This suggests that Democrats are now more committed to keeping Obamacare than Republicans are to getting rid of it.

I might be reading this wrong, and I wouldn’t want to draw any firm conclusions from a campaign that still has many months to run. Still, my sense is that Obamacare just isn’t getting as much attention from Republicans as it used to. Sure, they all want to repeal it, but their talking points are starting to sound very pro forma. Scott Walker and Jeb Bush mentioned it during the debate, for example, but only as part of a laundry list of stuff they’d do to improve the economy.

We’ll see. It will certainly get more attention during the general election, when it becomes a serious point of contention. But my guess is that it just doesn’t have the juice it used to. It’s working OK. The economy hasn’t collapsed. The budget hasn’t exploded. It’s helping actual people. And although they’ll never admit it publicly, most Republicans candidates know that repealing it takes more than the stroke of a pen. It’s a lot harder than they make it sound.

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Is Opposition to Obamacare Finally Dying Down?

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle on College Tuition Plan

by BryceRftuxmc Posted on August 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton plans to offer a major proposal to deal with skyrocketing student debt:

With Americans shouldering $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, and about eight million of them in default, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will propose major new spending by the federal government that would help undergraduates pay tuition at public colleges without needing loans.

….Under the plan, which was outlined by Clinton advisers on Sunday, about $175 billion in grants would go to states that guarantee that students would not have to take out loans to cover tuition at four-year public colleges and universities. In return for the money, states would have to end budget cuts to increase spending over time on higher education, while also working to slow the growth of tuition, though the plan does not require states to cap it.

….Her plan does not go as far as some liberal advocacy groups would like, because she still expects families to make a “realistic” contribution to cover some tuition costs — through savings or loans — while students would contribute based on wages from 10 hours of work per week. In contrast Mr. O’Malley proposed “an aggressive goal — to give every student and their family the opportunity to go to college debt-free,” said Lis Smith, his deputy campaign manager.

Hillary is Hillary, so I’m sure when this is announced it will be accompanied by a detailed policy paper that makes a very good case for how it can work. My initial reaction is that it sounds kind of complicated, and I wonder if this kind of incentive can really keep states from finding ways to spend less and less on higher education. Will tuition costs go down only to be replaced by ever-increasing “fees”?

At the same time, this is pretty carefully crafted to appeal to multiple constituencies. It will appeal to middle-class voters by guaranteeing that tuition costs at state universities will be kept to a reasonable level. But it will also appeal to low-income voters with little chance of sending their kids to college. They probably wonder why taxpayers should subsidize a free education for mostly middle-income kids who are going to use that education to make more money after they graduate. Clinton has threaded this needle by insisting that families still have to contribute and students should work at least part-time.

I doubt this will become a major campaign issue. However, it will cost $350 billion over ten years, and Democrats have to be careful about how many programs like this they propose. Once you put a price tag on them, Republicans can start adding up the damages and asking where the money will come from. In this case, Clinton says it will come from effectively raising taxes on the rich, but that can only go so far. If she has very many more of these programs to announce, eventually middle-class families will have to shoulder some of the bill. That’s catnip for Republicans.

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle on College Tuition Plan

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One City Tried Something Radical to Stop Gun Violence. This Report Suggests It’s Working.

by MckinleGain Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year I told you about a radical new approach to reducing gun violence in Richmond, California, a city that had suffered for years under the toll of one of the nation’s highest homicide rates. The city threw money and police at the problem, but the rate of fatal (and non-fatal) shootings remained. The human toll was staggering. In 2007, the low point, there were 45 homicides involving a firearm in the city of 106,000. Finally, it decided to try something entirely new:

Richmond hired consultants to come up with ideas, and in turn, the consultants approached Devone Boggan. It was obvious that heavy-handed tactics like police sweeps weren’t the solution. More than anything, Boggan, who’d been working to keep teen offenders out of prison, was struck by the pettiness of it all. The things that could get someone shot in Richmond were as trivial as stepping out to buy a bag of chips at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Boggan wondered: What if we identified the most likely perpetrators and paid them to stay out of trouble?

In late 2007, Boggan launched the Office of Neighborhood Safety, an experimental public-private partnership that’s introduced the “Richmond model” for rolling back street violence. It has done it with a mix of data mining and mentoring, and by crossing lines that other anti-crime initiatives have only tiptoed around. Four times a year, the program’s street team sifts through police records and its own intelligence to determine, with actuarial detachment, the 50 people in Richmond most likely to shoot someone and to be shot themselves. ONS tracks them and approaches the most lethal (and vulnerable) on the list, offering them a spot in a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around. While ONS is city-funded and has the blessing of the chief of police, it resolutely does not share information with the cops. “It’s the only agency where you’re required to have a criminal background to be an employee,” Boggan jokes.

It was a crazy idea. But since ONS was established, the city’s murder rate has plunged steadily. In 2013, it dropped to 15 homicides per 100,000 residents—a 33 year low. In 2014, it dropped again. Boggan and his staff maintained that their program was responsible for a lot of that drop-off by keeping the highest-risk young men alive—and out of prison. Now they have a study to back them up.

Read our 2014 story on Richmond’s ambitious plan to bring down its homicide rate. Photograph by Brian L. Frank

On Monday, researchers from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a non-profit, published a process evaluation of ONS, studying its impact seven years in. The conclusion was positive: “While a number of factors including policy changes, policing efforts, an improving economic climate, and an overall decline in crime may have helped to facilitate this shift, many individuals interviewed for this evaluation cite the work of the ONS, which began in late 2007, as a strong contributing factor in a collaborative effort to decrease violence in Richmond.”

As evidence, the study cites the life-changing effect on fellows. Ninety-four percent of fellows are still alive. And perhaps just as remarkable, 79 percent have not been arrested or charged with gun-related offenses during that time period.

“While replication of the Fellowship itself may be more arduous because of the dynamic leadership associated with the current model, the framework of the Fellowship could be used to improve outcomes for communities across the country,” the study’s authors wrote. “The steps taken to craft programming developed with clients in mind, and being responsive to their needs and the needs of the community, can serve as a model.”

Read the full report here.

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One City Tried Something Radical to Stop Gun Violence. This Report Suggests It’s Working.

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Study: Juvenile Detention Not a Great Place to Deal With Mental Health Issues

by ChasityLizotte Posted on July 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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If you land in the hospital as an incarcerated teen, it’s more likely for mental health reasons—psychiatric illnesses, substance abuse, depression, or disruptive disorders—than for any other factor, says a new study.

Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine examined nearly 2 million hospitalizations in California of boys and girls between the ages of 11 and 18 over a 15-year period. They found that mental health diagnoses accounted for 63 percent of hospital stays by kids in the justice system, compared with 19 percent of stays by kids who weren’t incarcerated, according to their study published Tuesday in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Arash Anoshiravani, said it seems likely that many locked-up kids developed mental health problems as a result of earlier stressful events during their childhoods, such as being abused or witnessing other acts of violence. “We are arresting kids who have mental health problems probably related to their experiences as children,” he said in a statement. “Is that the way we should be dealing with this, or should we be getting them into treatment earlier, before they start getting caught up in the justice system?”

Even if someone enters detention without a major mental health problem, she has a good chance of developing one once she’s there. The World Health Organization cites many factors in prison life as detrimental to mental stability, including overcrowding, physical or sexual violence, isolation, a lack of privacy, and inadequate health services. And the problem is obviously not just limited to juvenile offenders: Earlier this year, a study by the Urban Institute found that more than half of all inmates in jails and state prisons across the country have a mental illness of some kind.

In the California study, kids in detention and hospitalized were disproportionately black and from larger metropolitan counties like Los Angeles, Alameda, and San Diego. Among children and teens in the justice system, girls were more likely than boys to experience severe mental health problems, with 74 percent of their hospitalizations related to mental illness, compared with 57 percent of boys’ hospitalizations. (Boys, on the other hand, were five times more likely to be hospitalized for trauma.)

Earlier mental health interventions could lead to major savings, the researchers added: Detained youth in their study had longer hospital stays than kids outside the justice system, and a majority of them were publicly insured.

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Study: Juvenile Detention Not a Great Place to Deal With Mental Health Issues

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This Chart Shows How Many People in Your State Are Eating Enough Fruits and Vegetables

by Felipa6408 Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bring out the carrots! According to a new report from the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 13 percent of Americans eat enough fruit, and 9 percent eat enough vegetables.

Researchers analyzed data from a 2013 study of nearly 400,000 adults across the country, and compared their answers to the US Department of Agriculture’s daily intake recommendations. The guidelines suggest that adults who work out less than 30 minutes per day eat about 1.5 to 2 cups of fruit per day and 2 to 3 cups of vegetables. (A cup of fruit is equivalent to a small apple, a cup of vegetables is about a dozen baby carrots.)

The vast majority of Americans didn’t make the cut, though answers did vary state by state. States in the South tended to have the lowest level of consumption, with only 5.5 percent of adults in Mississippi meeting veggie recommendations and 7.5 percent of adults in Tennessee eating enough fruits. States on the coast fared slightly better, with California topping both lists.

Latetia Moore, the lead author, says that in order to improve the rates, fruits and vegetables must be more affordable and convenient to buy. “Fruits and vegetables need to be competitively priced, strategically placed, and creatively promoted wherever we obtain our food,” she wrote in an email. Particularly important to target, she said, are child care facilities, schools, and work sites.

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This Chart Shows How Many People in Your State Are Eating Enough Fruits and Vegetables

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California Just Issued Its First Fine for Using Too Much Water

by Chun85Q30997584 Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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California’s Water Resources Control Board proposed a $1.5 million fine today for a farming district’s unauthorized use of water—the first such fine in the state’s four-year drought. The Board alleged that the Byron-Bethany Irrigation District, a region serving 160 farmers just east of San Francisco, illegally diverted nearly 700 million gallons of water over the course of two weeks in June.

Byron-Bethany is one of about 5,000 water-rights holders notified this year that there isn’t enough water to pump from lakes and rivers, and it’s illegal to divert water after receiving such notifications. In response, several water users, including Byron-Bethany, have sued the state for cutting off its water supply.

“We will vigorously defend our rights,” said Rick Gilmore, general manager of the district, to the San Jose Mercury News last month. “All our sweet corn and tomatoes—they won’t make it to harvest. Almonds and cherries will suffer damage,” he said. “They’ll lose the water they need for July and August.”

The proposed fine, which the district will likely contest in a coming hearing, is the first fine sought by the Board under a new structure in which water rights holders can be penalized for past unauthorized use of water, even if they have stopped diverting since. But Byron-Bethany probably isn’t alone; Andrew Tauriainen, a lawyer for the state’s Division of Water Rights, says, “It’s highly likely that additional enforcement actions will follow in weeks and months ahead.”

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California Just Issued Its First Fine for Using Too Much Water

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Climate change is making wildfires worse and wildfires are making climate change worse

by ElishaGetty076 Posted on July 16, 2015

Climate change is making wildfires worse and wildfires are making climate change worse

By on 16 Jul 2015commentsShare

It’s the season when wildfires rage, and this year they’re raging particularly hard: In June alone, Alaska saw 1.1 million acres go up in flames. In California, firefighters had responded to 3,381 wildfires by July 11, “1,000 more than the average over the previous five years,” The New York Times reports in a big feature on wildfires in the state.

And that’s likely not a coincidence. A study published this week in Nature Communications connects worsening wildfire seasons to climate change, and suggests the trend will continue in the years ahead as climate change rolls forward. “Wildfires occur at the intersection of dry weather, available fuel and ignition sources,” the study’s authors write. Of those factors, “weather is the most variable.”

The study also suggests that wildfires will themselves play a role in driving climate change, creating a nasty feedback loop.

After combing through decades of data, the report’s authors show that, globally, wildfire seasons on average became 18.7 percent longer between 1979 and 2013. Some regions, of course, have it far worse: In parts of South America, wildfire season has increased by roughly 33 days over the last 35 years.

“We may be moving into a new normal. If these trends persist, we are on track to see more fire activity and more burned area,” lead author W. Matt Jolly told ClimateWire.

This map highlights areas where the length of the fire season has changed significantly since 1979, with the red areas seeing the most increase.

Click map to embiggen.

Nature

Longer fire seasons take a heavy economic toll. From the study:

Over the last decade, annual wildfire suppression costs on US federal lands exceeded $1.7B US dollars and $1B US dollars in Canada. When all components are considered, including preparedness/suppression costs and economic losses, these total costs are substantially higher. In Australia in 2005, total wildfire costs were estimated at nearly $9.4B US dollars or 1.3% of their Gross Domestic Product.

The fires, worsened by climate change, then hasten climate change by spewing carbon into the atmosphere in amounts that can be more than half of what we humans generate by burning fossil fuels.

That leads to the most worrying theory posited in the paper: That the world’s forests will become less able to take CO2 out of the atmosphere as climate change advances, in part because climate change–driven wildfires are killing them off. That means wildfires would be functioning as what climate scientists call a positive feedback mechanism, a phenomenon that is made worse by global warming and, as it gets worse, also drives warming — a vicious cycle that it might be too late to break.

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Climate change is making wildfires worse and wildfires are making climate change worse

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Rah Rah Rah! California Just Passed a Law Protecting Cheerleaders

by ArlethaRichter Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s a reason to cheer: Today, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that guarantees better pay and working conditions for professional cheerleaders. Introduced by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the new law was inspired by a series of recent lawsuits in which NFL cheerleaders, including the Oakland Raiderettes, alleged that they received less than minimum wage, had to make unpaid appearances, and were fined for things like bringing the wrong pom-poms to practice. (For more on these degrading working conditions, check out our coverage of NFL cheerleaders and NHL ice girls—which Gonzalez says was “essential” for gaining support for her bill.)

Under the new law, professional sports teams will be required to pay cheerleaders minimum wage as well as provide paid overtime and workers’ comp. It protects professional mascots as well, though most mascots, most of whom are male, are already granted basic employee rights. (According to Gonzalez, the average mascot makes about $30,000 per year.)

A former college cheerleader, Gonzalez describes the law as a “no-brainer” that addresses basic gaps in equality and pay. “We would never tolerate shortchanging of women workers at any other workplace,” she said in a statement. “An NFL game should be no differentâ&#128;&#139;.” Gonzalez hopes the law will inspire national change; earlier this year, New York lawmakers introduced a similar bill.

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Rah Rah Rah! California Just Passed a Law Protecting Cheerleaders

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Sorry, Foodies: We’re About to Ruin Kale

by AnnieQ01jltz Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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How hipster is kale? For $28, Urban Outfitters will sell you a kale t-shirt. To prep for a big blizzard in early 2015, residents of a trendy Brooklyn section cleaned out the kale bins of their neighborhood Whole Foods. And what would the juicing craze be without it?

But today’s kale-fixated juice-heads may doing themselves a disservice.

That’s a possibility raised by an article in Craftsmanship magazine by Todd Oppenheimer. The piece doesn’t establish a definitive link between heavy kale consumption and any health problem, but it does raise the question of whether too much of even a highly nutritious food like kale can have unhappy side effects.

The article focuses on an alt-medicine researcher and molecular biologist named Ernie Hubbard, who began to notice an odd trend among some of his clinic’s clients in California’s Marin County, a place known for its organic farms, health-food stores, and yoga studios. Extremely health-conscious people were coming into to complain of “persistent but elusive problems”: “Chronic fatigue. Skin and hair issues. Arrhythmias and other neurological disorders. Foggy thinking. Gluten sensitivity and other digestive troubles. Sometimes even the possibility of Lyme Disease.”

Hubbard began to find detectable levels of a toxic heavy metal called thallium in patients’ blood samples—at higher-than-normal leves—as well as in kale leaves from the region. Meanwhile, “over and over,” he found that patients complaining of symptoms associated with low-level thallium poisoning—fatigue, brain fog, etc.—would also be heavy eaters of kale and related vegetables, like cabbage.

And he found, in the form of this 2006 peer-reviewed paper by Czech researchers, evidence that kale is really good at taking up thallium from soil. The paper concluded that kale’s ability to accumulate soil-borne thallium is “very high and can be a serious danger for food chains.” And here’s a peer-reviewed 2013 paper from Chinese researchers finding similar results with green cabbage; a 2015 Chinese study finding green cabbage is so good at extracting thallium from soil that it can be used for “phytoremediation”—i.e., purifying soil of a toxin—and a 2001 one from a New Zealand team finding formidible thallium-scrounging powers in three other members of the brassica family: watercress, radishes, and turnips.

Now, just because kale and other brassicas can effectively take up thallium from soil doesn’t mean that they always contain thallium. The metal has to find its way into soil first. It exists at low levels in the Earth’s crust, and the main way it gets concentrated at high enough levels to cause worry is through “nearby cement plants, oil drilling, smelting, and, most of all, in the ash that results from coal burning,” Oppenheimer reports. The researcher he profiled, Hubbard, has so far not succeeded in nailing down the source of the thallium that he found in his kale samples.

And there’s also the question of quantity. One of Hubbard’s patients with heightened thallium levels in her urine and mild symptoms of thallium poisoning ate so much cabbage over the years that she called herself the “cabbage queen.” When she “cut way back” on her favorite vegetable, she tells Oppenheimer, her thallium levels dropped, and her symptoms improved.

Where does all of this evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, leave us—beyond the need of much more research on US-grown kale? There’s nothing here that makes me want to stop eating brassicas, probably my favorite vegetable genus and one undeniably loaded with many valuable nutrients.

But it does make me wary of downing brassicas daily at great quantities over extended periods, the way some people may be doing as part of the juice craze. This recipe for “mean green juice,” for example, calls for six to eight kale leaves in a single serving—much more than most of us would consume in a side dish of sautéed kale. In all great things—wine, butter, ice cream, even kale—moderation makes sense.

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Sorry, Foodies: We’re About to Ruin Kale

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