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Chart of the Day: America is More Liberal Than Politicians Think

by XiomaraRPOC Posted on May 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s a fascinating tidbit of research. A pair of grad students surveyed 2,000 state legislators and asked them what they thought their constituents believed on several hot button issues. They then compared the results to actual estimates from each district derived from national surveys.

The chart on the right is typical of what they found: Everyone—both liberal and conservative legislators—thought their districts were more conservative than they really were. For example, in districts where 60 percent of the constituents supported universal health care, liberal legislators estimated the number at about 50 percent. Conservative legislators were even further off: they estimated the number at about 35 percent.

Why is this so? The authors don’t really try to guess, though they do note that legislators don’t seem to learn anything from elections. The original survey had been conducted in August, and a follow-up survey conducted after elections in November produced the same result.

My own guess would be that conservatives and conservatism simply have a higher profile these days. Between Fox News and the rise of the tea party and (in the case of universal health care) the relentless jihad of Washington conservatives, it’s only natural to think that America—as well as one’s own district—is more conservative than it really is. But that’s just a guess. What’s yours?

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Chart of the Day: America is More Liberal Than Politicians Think

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Chart: America Is More Liberal Than Politicians Think

by ConcettMonti Posted on May 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s a fascinating tidbit of research. A pair of grad students surveyed 2,000 state legislators and asked them what they thought their constituents believed on several hot button issues. They then compared the results to actual estimates from each district derived from national surveys.

The chart on the right is typical of what they found: Everyone—both liberal and conservative legislators—thought their districts were more conservative than they really were. For example, in districts where 60 percent of the constituents supported universal health care, liberal legislators estimated the number at about 50 percent. Conservative legislators were even further off: They estimated the number at about 35 percent.

Why is this so? The authors don’t really try to guess, though they do note that legislators don’t seem to learn anything from elections. The original survey had been conducted in August, and a follow-up survey conducted after elections in November produced the same result.

My own guess would be that conservatives and conservatism simply have a higher profile these days. Between Fox News and the rise of the tea party and (in the case of universal health care) the relentless jihad of Washington conservatives, it’s only natural to think that America—as well as one’s own district—is more conservative than it really is. But that’s just a guess. What’s yours?

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Chart: America Is More Liberal Than Politicians Think

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Climate change is melting Arctic archaeological sites

by BudLionsxdip Posted on April 29, 2015

sod it all

Climate change is melting Arctic archaeological sites

By on 29 Apr 2015commentsShare

If you think about it — bear with us here — the Arctic is basically a huge freezer full of history’s leftovers. There’s a millennium worth of crusty villages, a bunch of gnawed-on beluga bones, and don’t forget the last of that takeout mammoth wayyyy at the back.

What’s even grosser than that delightful mental image is the fact that, as the Arctic heats up, all that old stuff formerly frozen in permafrost is thawing out — i.e. your leftovers are starting to rot — threatening the integrity of archaeological sites around the Arctic. Here’s the story from Motherboard:

[With] global climates heating up, the Arctic’s active layer [the top layer of permafrost that melts and refreezes every year] extends deeper every summer, and one of the largest contributing factors to the destruction of arctic sites is thawing permafrost. This great thaw is leaving organic artifacts to rot — or, in some cases, wash into the ocean — forcing arctic archaeologists to survey and excavate the most important sites before they’re gone.

Those organic artifacts include entire centuries-old Inuit sod-houses, perfectly preserved in their deep-freeze … until now. Since they’re too big to be moved, archaeologists are trying to map digitally before they melt like so much ice cream left out on the counter.

One of the team’s excavation sites, what was once the village of Kuukpak, is a classic area for large scale beluga whale hunting in historic Inuit culture. The site is in an ecotone — an area where multiple ecozones overlap — making it an incredibly rich environment with over 50 species of mammals as well as numerous fish and bird species. Such generous conditions made Kuukpak home to some of the largest Inuit villages ever to have existed.

“This site had probably about 500 people, compared to an average [site] of about 150, this site is really a massive site by Northern standards,” [team leader] Dr. Friesen said.

Along with a wealth of artifacts, like animal bones and hunting tools, Dr. Friesen’s team excavated the first fully uncovered sod house, a traditional Inuit lodging that would have housed between 15 to 30 people in the 1400s.

…

But Kuukpak won’t last long. Like so many other rich arctic archaeological sites it is being destroyed by erosion at an alarming rate.

In places like Kuukpak, the coastline is moving inland 15 feet every year, as sea level rises and permafrost subsides into muck. Friesen explained that all that erosion can add up fast: “When you think of an average early Inuvialuit site that might be 100 metres by 30 metres, that means you can lose an entire site in a decade.”

To give my admittedly overstretched metaphor of the thawing freezer one last reach: I guess that means we better start digging into our leftovers — but in this case, literally digging.

Source:
The Great Arctic Thaw Is Seriously Worrying Archaeologists

, Motherboard.

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Climate change is melting Arctic archaeological sites

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As a Private Lawyer, Ted Cruz Defended Companies Found Guilty of Wrongdoing

by EmmanueGoff Posted on April 9, 2015

Mother Jones

In his bio on his presidential campaign website, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) boasts of what he did as Texas solicitor general to defend the Second Amendment, the Pledge of Allegiance, and US sovereignty—all conservative causes. But Cruz does not detail another important chapter in his legal career: his work as a well-paid private attorney who helped corporations found guilty of wrongdoing.

After serving over five years as the state of Texas’ top lawyer, Cruz in 2008 joined the Houston office of the high-powered international law firm Morgan Lewis to lead its Supreme Court and national appellate practice. He stepped down as a partner in the firm after being elected a US senator in 2012. During his stint at Morgan Lewis, Cruz, who casts himself as a politician who stands on principle, handled several cases that cut against his political stances. He twice worked on cases in New Mexico to secure $50-million-plus jury awards (though, as a politician, he has called for tort reform that would prevent these sorts of awards). He assisted a lawsuit filed by a man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and nearly executed (though, as a politician, he has insisted the criminal-justice system functions just fine when it comes to capital punishment). And in one case, he filed a brief supporting President Barack Obama’s stimulus (though, as a politician, Cruz has slammed this Obama initiative).

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As a Private Lawyer, Ted Cruz Defended Companies Found Guilty of Wrongdoing

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Feds Say Georgia’s Treatment of Transgender Prisoners Is Unconstitutional

by ErnaKPDfqnkrhes Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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For three years, the Georgia Department of Corrections allegedly has denied transgender inmate Ashley Diamond medical treatment for gender dysphoria, causing her such distress that she has attempted on multiple occasions to castrate herself, cut off her penis, and kill herself. In February, Diamond filed a lawsuit against GDC officials, and on Friday the Department of Justice dealt the GDC a major blow, claiming that the state’s failure to adequately treat inmates with gender dysphoria “constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.”

The DOJ weighed in on Diamond’s case via a statement of interest, which offers recommendations for how the district court in Georgia should rule in the case. It focused on Georgia’s so-called freeze-frame policy, which prevents inmates from receiving hormone therapy for gender dysphoria if they were not identified as transgender and referred for treatment immediately during the prison intake process. “Freeze-frame policies and other policies that apply blanket prohibitions to such treatment are facially unconstitutional because they fail to provide individualized assessment and treatment of a serious medical need,” DOJ officials wrote, adding that similar policies have been previously struck down in Wisconsin and New York.

Chinyere Ezie, Diamond’s lead attorney, says the defense has until next Friday to submit briefs in response to the complaint, which may include a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The first hearing for the case is scheduled for April 13. You can read the DOJ’s entire statement below, and check out our earlier coverage of Diamond’s case.

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Diamond Statement of Interest (PDF)

Diamond Statement of Interest (Text)

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Feds Say Georgia’s Treatment of Transgender Prisoners Is Unconstitutional

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The NYPD Is Editing the Wikipedia Pages of Eric Garner, Sean Bell

by HildegaHarms Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Edits to the Wikipedia entries of several high-profile police brutality cases, including those of Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, and Sean Bell, trace back to the headquarters of the New York Police Department, Capital New York reports this morning. The pages have been edited to cast the NYPD in a more favorable light and lessen allegations of police misconduct. The edits are currently the subject of an NYPD internal review.

In the case of Garner, who died while placed in a chokehold by a NYPD officer last summer, the word “chokehold” was swapped for “respiratory distress” and the line “Garner, who was considerably larger than any of the officers, continued to struggle with them” was added. The changes ostensibly suggest Garner’s death was his own fault.

Such modifications echo the views of NYPD supporters, including Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) who adamantly declared Garner would not have died had he not been so “obese.” In August, the city’s medical examiner officially ruled Garner’s death a homicide due to the chokehold.

The Wikipedia activity brewing at 1 Police Plaza took a distinctly more bizarre turn with edits to the pages “Ice Cream Soda,” “Who Moved My Cheese?” “Chumbawamba,” and “Stone Cold Steve Austin.”

Following Capital New York’s story on Friday, the Twitter account “NYPD Edits” was created to keep tabs on any future changes authored by the NYPD.

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The NYPD Is Editing the Wikipedia Pages of Eric Garner, Sean Bell

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A Zombie From the 90s Makes the Case For Demanding Strong Encryption

by NOQJulieta Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Companies like Apple and Google have announced recently that they will start providing their customers with encryption that even Apple and Google don’t have the keys for. This means that even if law enforcement officers get a subpoena for data held by the companies, it won’t do any good. They couldn’t turn over decrypted data even if they wanted to.

This has led to calls from the FBI and elsewhere to provide “backdoors” of some kind for use by law enforcement. This would be a kind of master key available only under court order. But security experts argue that this makes encryption fundamentally useless. If you deliberately build in a weakness, you simply can never guarantee that it won’t be exploited by hackers. Encryption is either secure or it’s not, full stop.

Over at The Switch, Craig Timberg provides an interesting recent example of this. Back in the 90s, we were fighting this same fight, and one temporary result was the government’s mandate that only a weak form of encryption could be exported outside the U.S. This mandate didn’t last long, but it lasted long enough to get incorporated into quite a few products. Still, that was 20 years ago. What harm could it be doing today?

The weaker encryption got baked into widely used software that proliferated around the world and back into the United States, apparently unnoticed until this year.

Researchers discovered in recent weeks that they could force browsers to use the old export-grade encryption then crack it over the course of just a few hours. Once cracked, hackers could steal passwords and other personal information and potentially launch a broader attack on the Web sites themselves by taking over elements on a page, such as a Facebook “Like” button.

….The existence of the problem with export-grade encryption amazed the researchers, who have dubbed the flaw “FREAK” for Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys….Nadia Heninger, a University of Pennsylvania cryptographer, said, “This is basically a zombie from the ‘90s… I don’t think anybody really realized anybody was still supporting these export suites.”

For vulnerable sites, Heninger found that she could crack the export-grade encryption key in about seven hours, using computers on Amazon Web services….More than one third of encrypted Web sites — including those bearing the “lock” icon that signifies a connection secured by SSL technology — proved vulnerable to attack in recent tests conducted by University of Michigan researchers J. Alex Halderman and Zakir Durumeric. The list includes news organizations, retailers and financial services sites such as americanexpress.com. Of the 14 million Web sites worldwide that offer encryption, more than 5 million remained vulnerable as of Tuesday morning, Halderman said.

This is an object lesson in deliberately building vulnerabilities into encryption technology. Maybe you think you’ve done it perfectly. Maybe you think nobody but the proper authorities can ever exploit the vulnerability. But the chances are good that you’re wrong. In the case of FREAK, we were wrong for nearly 20 years before we figured out what was going on. There’s no telling how long we might be wrong if we deliberately do this again.

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A Zombie From the 90s Makes the Case For Demanding Strong Encryption

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One of the Anti-Obamacare Plaintiffs Finally Appears in Public

by EstelleGariepy Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

During the run-up to the Supreme Court oral arguments in King v. Burwell, the latest legal assault on Obamacare, the four people named as plaintiffs in the case were mysteriously absent from public view. They never made any public statements. They never appeared at any conferences. These four Virginia residents who were supposed to be victims of Obamacare were essentially invisible in the highly politicized case. And their lawyers had good reason to keep them under wraps: It’s unclear if any of them have been injured by Obamacare and truly have standing to sue. One of the four, Brenda Levy, even told Mother Jones she didn’t want the lawsuit to end up stripping millions of Americans of their health insurance, which is what will likely happen should the plaintiffs prevail.

But finally, today, after oral arguments in the case, one of the plaintiffs, Doug Hurst, appeared outside the Supreme Court with his lead counsel, Michael Carvin, and lawyers from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that has propelled this lawsuit. CEI had promised that Hurst would speak. But he said nothing. He took no questions. Rather, his wife, Pam Trainor Hurst, read a prepared statement to the assembled reporters. Her comments were largely drowned out by protesters with bullhorns—anti-Obamacare protesters. But soon after, CEI released her statement.

She said:

Decisions made here in Washington directly affect middle-class families like ours, and we believe it’s time for those who have been hurt by Washington to take a stand—that’s why Doug joined the case. We never imagined we would end up at the Supreme Court, but that just shows how important this case is, not just for us, but for so many others around the country who are hurt by Obamacare.

There are millions of Americans who have lost their plans or their doctors. Or who, like Doug and I, are forced by the Internal Revenue Service to either buy insurance we don’t want or face a tax penalty. We want Americans to have options. We believe there is a better way to take care of the people who need help. But there is no reason to force millions of us to pay tax penalties if we don’t join a government program.

It seemed odd that Trainor Hurst was speaking, given she was not a party to the lawsuit. Where were the other plaintiffs? On this big day for the anti-Obamacare crusaders, it seemed, CEI was sticking to its strategy: Keep the plaintiffs out of sight.

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One of the Anti-Obamacare Plaintiffs Finally Appears in Public

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In Anti-Obamacare Case, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Questions the Foundation of the Lawsuit

by ImogeneEnright Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

During the Supreme Court oral arguments Wednesday morning in King v. Burwell, the case that threatens to destroy Obamacare, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wasted no time in grilling the attorney seeking to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act about a significant technical matter that could blow up his case. As soon as Michael Carvin, the Jones Day partner representing the four plaintiffs named in the anti-Obamacare suit, started his opening statement, Ginsburg interrupted him with a slew of questions about whether his plaintiffs had a recognizable injury that would allow the case to proceed. A plaintiff, she declared, “has to have a concrete stake in the question…you would have to prove the standing if this gets beyond the opening door.”

With these queries, Ginsburg was picking up on a critical issue highlighted last month when Mother Jones broke the news that the four plaintiffs may have dubious claims of standing in this case. According to legal filings in the case, two of the plaintiffs were likely not adversely affected by Obamacare because they could claim an exemption from the law’s requirement to purchase health insurance due to their low income levels and high health care costs. The other two plaintiffs, Doug Hurst and Brenda Levy, would have benefited substantially from the Affordable Care Act had they obtained insurance through an Obamacare health exchange. (Levy said she was paying $1,500 a month for non-Obamacare insurance, which she could have bought on the federal health care exchange for $148 a month. Hurst, according to bankruptcy filings, had been paying more than $600 a month for his insurance in 2010. The ACA would have provided him insurance for $62 a month.)

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In Anti-Obamacare Case, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Questions the Foundation of the Lawsuit

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Alaskan tribes given tiny amount of cash for climate change resilience

by Teofil1vo Posted on February 20, 2015

Alaskan tribes given tiny amount of cash for climate change resilience

By on 19 Feb 2015commentsShare

Alaskan Native American communities are soon to be the happy(ish?) recipients of $8 million from the U.S. Department of the Interior in order to encourage climate resilience. If you think that $8 million sounds like chump change when it comes to federal disaster relief funds, and particularly piddling when you consider that the money will go to an area deeply in need of repair and protection in the midst of a climate-induced crisis — well, you are right!

The Office of the Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs issued a press release on Tuesday announcing that U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell plans to make the money available for promoting “climate change adaptation and ocean and coastal management planning.” The press release also states that the Interior “must act to protect these communities” — because, we assume, Alaskan tribal communities are losing access to basic needs like food, water, and adequate shelter due to the effects of climate change.

That money isn’t, however, intended for rebuilding purposes. The Department of Interior notes that of these funds, $4 million will be available for “climate adaptation planning” and the other half for “ocean/coastal management planning” — essentially, it will all go to educate, train, and plan for climate adaptation. More funds could come from President Obama’s FY16 budget proposal, which included $50 million to support resilience projects in coastal areas.

A little background, now: Native American tribes occupy about 4 percent of U.S. land, and make up about 1 percent of the population — and for the part of that 1 percent living in Alaska, climate change is a significant health hazard. For the tribes that still practice traditional lifestyles, 80 percent of their diets are foods gathered from the immediate surrounding — but they can’t gather like they used to, because climate-change provoked coastal erosion is making food harder to come by. Other scary, climate-induced effects include aquatic changes, ecosystem shifts, and increased flooding due to melting ice shelves.

Native Americans have been making their case for relocation money for years. One coastal Alaskan town, Shishmaref, has sought funding since 2002. Homes lack running water and plumbing, beaches are shrinking, and houses are literally falling into the sea. How much would it cost to save the town by moving it inland? That’s estimated at a cool $179 million.

So, you get it: $8 million isn’t nearly enough to prepare Alaskan villages for rising seas and a warmer climate. With this federal money, tribal members will be sitting in on technical workshops about “long-term climate resilience” while they watch their homes slowly tilt towards the shore.

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Interior Department Will Provide Millions To Help Native Americans Adapt To Climate Change

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Alaskan tribes given tiny amount of cash for climate change resilience

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