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These Are the States That Might Legalize Pot Next

by donlink237 Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Talk of legal marijuana is growing across the US like a—well, you get it.

This November, voters in five states where some form of medical marijuana is already legal will decide whether to authorize recreational use: Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada.

Another four states, Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota, will vote on legalizing medical marijuana. Michigan, Missouri, and Oklahoma may also vote on medical marijuana, but advocates are still working to get their initiatives on the ballot.

With the presidential election likely to boost voter turnout and polls showing as many as 54 percent of Americans in favor of legalization, pot supporters are feeling confident, says Mason Tvert, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project.

While opponents warn of unknown health effects and the possibility of spawning a “big marijuana” industry, Tvert argues that “life has gone on as usual” in states where marijuana has already been legalized—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, along with the District of Columbia.

All five of this fall’s state legalization campaigns have adopted the same slogan, “Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol.” The measures would allow anyone 21 or over to use the drug, and establish legal cultivation and retail markets, alongside taxation and regulatory regimes.

Here’s a rundown on where voters could choose to legalize this November:

Arizona

Supporters of Proposition 205, the legalization measure, withstood a challenge this summer from a collection of business groups and individuals who sued claiming that backers didn’t have enough valid signatures to get on the ballot. Upon review, the secretary of state found the campaign had well over the necessary 150,642 signatures.

But opponents of the bill, including Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk, are still trying to knock the question off the ballot. They’re among the backers of another suit filed last week aiming to have the measure tossed, arguing the proposed law is flawed, and that the brief summary of the law that voters will read on election day fails to effectively explain what all the bill would do.

Latest poll: 52 percent oppose legalization (O.H. Predictive Insights, July)

California

After an attempt to legalize recreational marijuana in California failed in 2010, both supporters and opponents of legal weed see the state as a key battleground.

As of early August, the pro-legalization camp had raised nearly $7 million. ($2.5 million came from Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker.)

While the opposition campaign in the state had only raised $125,000 at that time, at least one national organization has signaled it’s intentions to fight the measure: Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), a group which includes former Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) and former George W. Bush administration official David Frum, has put up $2 million to fight legalization efforts in November.

SAM president Kevin Sabet, a former advisor in the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the Los Angeles Times he expects a lot of the group’s resources will go to the Golden State.

“If there is one thing we agree on with legalization advocates,” Sabet said, “it’s that California is important.”

Latest poll: 60 percent support legalization (Public Policy Institute of California, May)

Maine

Early opponents feared Maine’s Question 1 could allow large companies to push out the state’s already established and thriving medical marijuana industry, which has nearly tripled in size since 2011. But the measure would reserve 40 percent of business licenses for small-scale growers.

Last fall, the MPP-backed Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol campaign joined forces with a local organization, Legalize Maine, in order to avoid having competing ballot measures. The pro-legalization campaign raised $1 million in June and July.

Latest poll: 53.8 percent support legalization (Maine People’s Resource Center, May)

Massachusetts

Polls over the past two years have been close, and the state’s contest may shape up to be the tightest of the five.

The opposition has some big names on their side, including Republican Governor Charlie Baker and Attorney General Maura Healey and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, both Democrats.

But the pro-campaign claims support from Democratic Boston City Council President Michelle Wu, who has said “it just seems ridiculous that kids at Harvard can smoke pot and have incredibly successful careers while blacks and Latinos, particularly boys and men, who are using the same substance are sent to jail.”

Latest poll: 51 percent oppose legalization (Gravis Marketing, July)

Nevada

Not long ago, legalization supporters had the backing of the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the largest paper in the state. But after Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate and Republican megadonor, purchased the paper late last year, the editorial board published an piece predicting that the new owner would enforce a “complete reversal” on marijuana legalization.

In June, the paper ran an editorial with a simple takeaway: “Voters should ‘just say no’ to legalizing recreational marijuana on Election Day.”

Supporters of the initiative include several state legislators, including Nevada State Sen. Richard Segerblom, a major proponent of the state’s medical marijuana system. (A local dispensary has named a sativa strain, “Segerblom Haze,” in his honor.)

The state’s most prominent Democrat, Senator Harry Reid isn’t so supportive. “If I had to vote on it now, I wouldn’t vote for it,” Reid said Tuesday. “That’s something we need to look at quite a bit longer. I think it’s something that we have to be very careful with.”

Latest poll: 50 percent support legalization (KTNV-TV/Rasmussen, July)

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These Are the States That Might Legalize Pot Next

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Here’s the latest community to crack down on fossil fuel shipments

by HaiOdumndtizix Posted on August 11, 2016

Thanks, but no tanks

Here’s the latest community to crack down on fossil fuel shipments

By on Aug 11, 2016Share

Whatcom County, Washington, a mostly rural area in the upper northwest corner of the country, has become the latest community to crack down on fossil fuel shipments.

On Tuesday, the county council unanimously voted to impose a 60-day moratorium on permit approvals for new projects that would export crude oil or other unrefined fossil fuels. The council noted the public safety risks posed by increased fossil fuel shipments.

Whatcom County was the site of a battle earlier this year between a developer that wanted to build a coal export terminal and the Lummi Nation, which argued that the terminal would infringe on its tribal fishing rights. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sided with the Lummi in May and denied a permit for the project, which would have processed up to 54 million metric tons of exports to Asia each year, most of it coal.

The county isn’t alone in fighting against fossil fuel shipments. The cities of Spokane and Vancouver in Washington and Oakland in California have also taken or are considering steps to limit the movement of dirty fuels within their borders, citing risks to both residents and the environment.

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Here’s the latest community to crack down on fossil fuel shipments

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Here’s What’s Happening in the Battle for Voting Rights

by AlfredoBML Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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The courts have recently transformed the voting rights debate.

Last Friday, a panel of judges struck down a sweeping set of voting restrictions enacted by North Carolina Republicans in 2013 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s gutting of a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. Later that day, a federal district court killed a series of voting restrictions in Wisconsin, including rules that banned students from using expired student IDs, a residency requirement aimed at limiting college students’ right to vote, and some restrictions on early in-person voting. And in Kansas, a state district court judge ruled that the state’s two-tier system of voting—proof of citizenship required for state local elections but not federal elections—would disenfranchise too many citizens, and ordered the state to count the ballots at all levels.

The following Monday, a federal judge blocked a North Dakota voter ID law that he said posed an undue burden on the voting rights of Native Americans. And all these decisions come less than two weeks after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a voter ID law in Texas, and a federal judge weakened that state’s voter ID law.

“It has been a string of victories for voting rights advocates, and we’ll have to see whether or not they stick, or they all stick, but it is an impressive string of victories for now,” said elections expert Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science from the University of California Irvine.

The court battles have played out during a period when a number of restrictive voting laws have been passed across the country. Since 2010, 22 states have added new restrictions related to voting, according to the Brennan Center. After the court decisions relating to North Carolina and North Dakota, new restrictions will be in place in 15 states for the first time in a presidential election year.

As promising as these recent court victories have been for voting rights advocates, some states have already vowed to appeal the rulings. Other states continue to have restrictive laws that could jeopardize the ability of minority voters to cast ballots this November. Here is an overview of the voting rights landscape:

North Carolina: In 2013, a US Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, cleared the way for states that previously had to have all voting-law and procedural changes reviewed by the US Department of Justice or a federal judge to enact any voting changes they wished. The next day, North Carolina Republicans passed one of the most sweeping pieces of legislation that restricted access to voting, eliminated same-day voter registration, reduced early voting, instituted a strict photo ID requirement, and ended a program that preregistered 16- and 17-year-olds to vote. That law was struck down July 29 in a scathing 83-page opinion that exposed the extent of the law’s racial bias. Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, writing for the majority on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, noted that the law’s provisions “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision,” by using race data in the decision-making process.

“In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with discriminatory intent, the district court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees,” Gribbon Motz wrote. “This failure of perspective led the court to ignore critical facts bearing on legislative intent, including the inextricable link between race and politics in North Carolina.”

State Republicans and Gov. Pat McCrory have said they will appeal the case to the US Supreme Court. “Photo IDs are required to purchase Sudafed, cash a check, board an airplane or enter a federal court room,” the governor said in a statement on Friday. “Yet three Democratic judges are undermining the integrity of our elections while also maligning our state. We will immediately appeal and also review other potential options.”

Ohio: On May 24, a federal district court ruled that a state law passed in 2014 that eliminated the state’s so-called “Golden Week”—a period of time during which voters could register and vote at the same time—violated the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits “voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups.” Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, has appealed the ruling, but for now the restoration of Golden Week will be in place for the November 2016 election.

The elimination of Golden Week was part of a broader election bill pushed by state Republicans and signed into law in 2014 by Republican Gov. John Kasich. It also included provisions that limited the number of early-voting sites in each county and the distribution of certain voting machines in each county. The judge let those provisions stand.

Husted is also dealing with a lawsuit over his plan to purge voters from the rolls if they haven’t voted in two consecutive federal elections. A district court judge sided with Husted on June 29, but the appeal (which is joined by the US Department of Justice) is ongoing.

Wisconsin: According to Hasen in his Election Law Blog, a federal district court “struck a host of Wisconsin voting rules” on Friday, blocking a law that required citizenship information to be included in dormitory forms as proof of residence, that created narrow requirements for valid ID, and that made it illegal to vote if you’d moved into the state 28 days before an election.

“The Wisconsin experience demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities,” wrote US District Judge James Peterson. He bolstered his assertion that the rules were discriminatory by pointing to Milwaukee specifically. “I reach this conclusion because I am persuaded that this law was specifically targeted to curtail voting in Milwaukee without any other legitimate purpose,” he wrote, speaking of rules to limit early voting. “The Legislature’s immediate goal was to achieve a partisan objective, but the means of achieving that objective was to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans.”

The decision came less than two weeks after a separate federal judge ruled that voters can cast ballots in November without IDs if they submit affidavits at the polls saying they couldn’t easily get IDs. Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel said he would appeal the court’s decision.

Texas: A majority of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled July 20 that a Texas voter ID law passed in 2011 violated the Voting Rights Act and discriminated against African American and Hispanic voters. The law required many residents to show ID before their ballots would be counted. The ruling didn’t stop the law; it only forced a lower court to come up with a remedy that would do a better job of getting all eligible citizens proper ID. Experts estimate that several hundred thousand people in the state currently lack proper ID.

The law was originally passed in 2011 and signed into law by Republican Gov. Rick Perry, but under the Voting Rights Act at that time, the state had to have all changes to election law reviewed by the Department of Justice or a federal judge. Before the pre-clearance decision was made, Perry sued the federal government in hopes of speeding up the process. That case became moot in 2013 when the Supreme Court decision removed the mechanism for determining which states should seek federal review for voting law changes. At that point the Texas law came into effect, but it has faced legal challenges and has racked up at least $3.5 million in legal fees along the way. The July 20 ruling was the result of one of the most recent of those cases.

Now a federal judge in Texas is tasked with fixing the law and plans to hold a hearing August 17.

Virginia: On April 22, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, signed an executive order granting voting rights restoration for more than 200,000 felons in the state. State Republicans cried foul, claiming that McAuliffe, a longtime confidante of Bill and Hillary Clinton, was trying to throw a key swing state toward Clinton for the November election. Besides, they argued, McAuliffe only had the right to restore felon rights on an individual basis, and they threatened to sue. They followed through with that threat about a month later.

On July 22, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the Republicans were right, and McAuliffe couldn’t give a blanket restoration, wiping out 11,000 voter registrations that had taken place under the governor’s executive order. McAuliffe said after the ruling that he would sign about 13,000 individual orders “expeditiously” and then “continue to sign orders until I have completed restoration for all 200,000 Virginians.”

In May, the US Supreme Court sided with state Democrats who had challenged the way state Republicans had redrawn congressional districts. The Democrats charged that Republicans redrew the districts in 2013 to pack African American voters into one district. A district court panel of judges agreed and redrew the districts. Three Virginia Republicans appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which left the lower court’s ruling in place, opening the door for a new black congressional hopeful from Virginia to run this fall.

Kansas: On Friday, a state judge temporarily blocked Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s attempt to disqualify 17,500 state voters who, under a 2013 state law, didn’t provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The voters are eligible to participate in federal elections, but the state law would have prevented their votes in local and state races from counting. The judge’s order temporarily blocked that rule and, if it’s still in place in November, could affect about 50,000 people. The judge’s ruling expires shortly after the November election.

Arizona: On March 22, Arizona held its presidential primary election and totally bungled it. Thousands of people waited for hours to cast ballots in the state’s largest county, Maricopa County. Local officials blamed the large number of unaffiliated voters trying to cast ballots as the main culprit, but critics charged that it most likely had to do with the county’s decision to reduce its number of polling places from 200 to just 60, which worked out to about one polling place for every 20,833 eligible voters. The state’s biggest paper called the situation an “outrage” and the Republican governor called it “unacceptable.”

The Democratic National Committee, along with the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona and Maricopa County on April 14. The suit is seeking to restore federal review of Arizona election procedures, something state and local officials had to deal with before the 2013 Supreme Court Shelby County v. Holder decision. Additionally, the suit seeks to block officials from not counting provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, and to halt a law that prevents people from turning in others’ absentee ballots. That case is working its way through federal court.

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Here’s What’s Happening in the Battle for Voting Rights

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Four Reasons Why the Freddie Gray Case Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

by SalvatoreForrest Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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In late July, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby dropped all remaining charges against two officers awaiting trial in the Freddie Gray case and decided not to retry a third, after a judge acquitted three other officers on all counts related to Gray’s death. The decision closed a chapter on a case that was a focal point for the Black Lives Matter movement. But although the criminal case is over, both the state’s attorney’s office and Baltimore police officers are still grappling with the consequences of the failed prosecution. Here’s how:

The six officers charged in Gray’s death will now face an internal affairs review. Led by the Montgomery County Police Department, the reviews—which can move forward now that the criminal cases have been concluded—will determine whether the officers’ actions violated department policy, and whether the officers can return to patrol duty. Such reviews can take several months to complete, however, and an analysis of cases by the Baltimore Sun found that nine of ten misconduct allegations investigated by Montgomery County Police Department do not result in officers being reprimanded. The officers will remain on paid administrative duty until the reviews are complete.

Several officers have sued Mosby for defamation and false arrest. At least five of six officers charged in Gray’s death have filed civil lawsuits against Mosby and Major Sam Cogen, the Baltimore sheriff’s commander who signed the charging documents in the case. Collectively the lawsuits seek more than $3.5 million in damages for charges including defamation, false arrest, false imprisonment, and federal civil rights violations—among their allegations is that Mosby charged the officers in order to appease Black Lives Matter protesters. They also allege that Mosby did not investigate the case as thoroughly as she had initially claimed, and that she deliberately made false statements about officers’ culpability at the press conference where she announced the charges. (Legal observers have said the chances of the suits succeeding are slim because prosecutors generally enjoy immunity from being sued, and the bar the officers’ attorneys would have to meet—showing that Mosby acted with malice—is high.)

Some people want Mosby banned from practicing law in the state of Maryland. At least two complaints have been filed against Mosby with the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission in an effort to have her disbarred. Ralph Jaffe, who ran for a Maryland democratic US senate seat earlier this year, wrote in a recent Baltimore Sun Op-Ed that he filed a complaint last May because Mosby’s decision to “placate the liberal agitators” reflected “recklessness and a lack of judicial responsibility” and had strained the relationship between the Baltimore police department and the state’s attorney’s office. (A George Washington University law professor who filed a separate complaint against Mosby in June was previously involved in a successful effort to have a North Carolina district attorney disbarred after the failed prosecution of three Duke University athletes in a 2006 rape case.)

The Baltimore police union nearly doubled its membership dues this year to cover legal expenses for the officers charged in Gray’s death. The local Fraternal Order of Police spent around $800,000 last year on legal fees—the vast majority on the Gray case—and was “quickly becoming insolvent” as a result, FOP president Gene Ryan said. Although charges have been dropped and related expenses are expected to fall sharply, according to Ryan the union will continue collecting the increased dues as a precaution against future “malicious prosecution” of other officers by Mosby’s office.

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Four Reasons Why the Freddie Gray Case Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

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Prosecutors Drop All Remaining Charges Against Officers in Freddie Gray Case

by AOZSilkepxfuwi Posted on July 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Maryland prosecutors announced Wednesday morning that they are dropping all charges against three officers still awaiting trial for their involvement in the death of Freddie Gray, bringing to an unsuccessful close a legal saga that has become a focal point for the Black Lives Matter movement. The decision comes after a judge acquitted three other officers of all charges and the trial of a fourth officer ended in a mistrial. Gray died after suffering a spinal cord injury during a ride in the back of a police van last April.

Prosecutors announced the decision in a pre-trial hearing for Baltimore police officer Garrett Miller, who would have been the fourth of six officers to stand trial on charges related to Gray’s death. The case that ended in a mistrial in December, against officer William Porter, was due for another hearing, and charges were also pending against Sergeant Alicia White. Charges against all three are being dropped.

Judge Barry Williams acquitted officers Edward Nero, Caesar Goodson, and Brian Rice in May, June, and July, respectively. Several officers have sued Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby for defamation, claiming she damaged their reputations by prosecuting officers in the case on what they say is little evidence.

Legal experts had speculated that the prosecution would be a tough one for Mosby, and her decision to bring charges against all six officers involved in Gray’s arrest and transport last April was seen as a bold move. She received criticism for what some observers called an apparent bias against the officers. “I hear your calls for ‘no justice, no peace,'” she told Black Lives Matter protesters at a press conference announcing charges against the six officers last May. At the Republican National Convention last week, audience members cheered as Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke criticized the “malicious prosecution of activist State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby.”

Throughout the earlier trials, prosecutors argued that officers had acted negligently and ignored their training by failing to buckle Gray’s seatbelt after placing him in the back of a police van, handcuffed and shackled at the legs—a situation that ultimately resulted in his death. In explaining his rulings, Judge Williams repeatedly said prosecutors had failed to present sufficient evidence that officers intentionally sought to harm Gray. The decision to drop charges would appear to be a concession by prosecutors that their evidence would likely not have produced convictions had these three remaining cases gone to trial.

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Prosecutors Drop All Remaining Charges Against Officers in Freddie Gray Case

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California’s Wildfires Just Tripled in Size

by kurtponinski Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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When it comes to forest fires, California can’t seem to catch a break.

Last year was a hellacious one for uncontrolled burns, and 2016 is looking just as bad. In the past week, the number of acres scorched by wildfire has tripled from around 32,000 to more than 98,000, according to the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The number of fires the department, known simply as Cal Fire, has responded to is slightly above the seasonal five year average. But it’s early in the fire season. (California’s 2013 Rim Fire, the largest ever recorded in the Sierra Nevada, began in early August and blazed on into October, torching more than 257,000 acres.)

Local, state, and federal firefighters have already dealt with more than 2,400 wildfires so far this season, say’s Daniel Berlant, Cal Fire’s information officer. Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for Southern California’s Kern County, where the largest of those conflagrations still rages; the Eskrine fire covers more than 45,000 acres and is only 40 percent contained. It has killed two people so far, destroying 150 homes and damaging 75.

In recent years, drought conditions have fueled fires across the state. El Niño conditions brought badly needed rain this past winter, but the wetter conditions also begat a bumper crop of grasses that are now reduced to dry fuel. “The rain is always a blessing and a curse,” Berlant says.

In addition, thanks to prolonged drought and hungry bark beetles, California has more than 66 million dead trees, the US Forest Service estimates—more than double last year’s count. In short, the state is a tinderbox.

Ahead of the July 4 weekend, Cal Fire officials warn that they’ll be confiscating illegal fireworks. They’re also urging residents to keep fireworks away from dry, flammable materials. Which should be pretty obvious, but sadly…

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California’s Wildfires Just Tripled in Size

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California’s latest oil spill almost drained right into the Pacific

by ArronKruger Posted on June 23, 2016

Crews clean up after a massive oil spill on the Californian coast in May 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Alcorn

spill, baby, spill

California’s latest oil spill almost drained right into the Pacific

By on Jun 23, 2016Share

A pipeline leak discovered Thursday morning spilled as many as 700 barrels, or nearly 30,000 gallons, of crude oil in California’s Prince Barranca valley.

Emergency crews scrambled to halt the oil’s progress before it reached the Pacific Ocean and, fortunately, it looks like they were successful. According to Ventura County firefighter Marisol Rodriguez, the workers are now in “cleanup mode.”

“The pump has been shut down.” Rodriguez told the Los Angeles Times. “There’s no way it can get to the ocean.”

Knight Lab

Next time there’s a larger spill, we might not be so lucky.

Last year, more than 100,000 gallons of crude oil spilled onto Santa Barbara’s Refugio State Beach, closing the beach for two months and fouling the area with thick black crude. Tarballs from that spill appeared as far as 100 miles south.

The oil company responsible, Plains All American Pipeline, was indicted on 46 criminal counts and charged with $3 million in fines. The company expected the total price tag for cleanup to be far greater than the fine, at $257 million.

Crimson, which owns the ruptured pipeline from the recent spill, controls over 1,000 miles of pipeline in the state.

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California’s latest oil spill almost drained right into the Pacific

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After mega-heatwave, Los Angeles faces mega-wildfire

by CandidaFulkerson Posted on June 22, 2016

A Los Angeles County fire helicopter makes a night drop while battling the Fish Fire. REUTERS/Gene Blevins

After mega-heatwave, Los Angeles faces mega-wildfire

By on Jun 22, 2016Share

Two fires erupted just a few miles apart near Southern California’s Angeles National Forest on Monday, prompting the evacuation of hundreds of Los Angeles County residents. The fires, collectively dubbed the San Gabriel Complex Fire, raged unchecked across more than 5,000 acres of parched canyons and foothills throughout Monday night and Tuesday.

The first of the twin blazes, named the Reservoir Fire, was ignited on Monday morning around 11 a.m., when a car went off the road and plummeted to the bottom of a canyon near the Morris Reservoir, where it ignited. The second fire, the Fish Fire, erupted about an hour later a few miles away, cause unknown.

As of Wednesday morning, 48 hours after the first fire erupted, the San Gabriel Complex Fire has been just 10 percent contained, local news sources report. Smoke from the San Gabriel Complex Fire was visible across Los Angeles, as far as south L.A. Local authorities issued air pollution warnings throughout the San Gabriel and San Bernadino areas.

Meanwhile, two hours north of L.A., firefighters continued battling a weeklong, 8,000-acre wildfire near Santa Barbara. To the south, San Diego’s Border Fire is entering its fourth day. Years of drought and a scorching heatwave throughout the region early this week created a veritable tinderbox for the blazes, and climate change is only making things worse. In total, Cal Fire reported on Tuesday that 4,700 firefighters were battling six wildfires across the state.

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After mega-heatwave, Los Angeles faces mega-wildfire

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Nestlé’s bright idea: a water bottling plant in the desert

by TamikaCsi5 Posted on May 27, 2016

Nestlé’s bright idea: a water bottling plant in the desert

By on May 27, 2016Share

The world’s biggest water bottler is entering new territory: bone-dry Phoenix, Ariz., in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. The Arizona Republic reports that Nestlé plans to open a $35 million water bottling plant in the city that would produce 264 million half-liter bottles of water per year.

This news comes around the same time that Lake Mead (which supplies water to 25 million people in Arizona, California, and Nevada) just hit its lowest levels ever. Phoenix officials insist that the city has more water than it needs at the moment thanks to its supply from the Colorado River. No matter that the river is slowly emptying due to climate change!

That’s just one part of Nestlé’s water problems in the West. Last week, Oregon voters approved the nation’s first ban on commercial water bottling in Hood River County, effectively shutting down the corporation’s proposal to open its first bottling facility in the Pacific Northwest. And in California, Nestlé is currently under investigation for bottling water from a national forest, despite claiming that its water rights there date back to the 1800s.

You wouldn’t know it from the company’s actions, but Nestlé’s execs are actually pretty freaked out about water shortages. A 2009 leaked cable revealed that Nestlé predicted one-third of people worldwide would be affected by water scarcity by 2025, noting that water problems would be particularly severe in the western United States.

In the face of drought and dwindling freshwater resources, the irony of bottling water in a desert is … almost too much to be believed. But crazier shit has definitely happened!

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Nestlé’s bright idea: a water bottling plant in the desert

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The Supreme Court Just Sent a Strong Message About Racism in the Justice System

by EarleApple Posted on May 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Nonsense.” That’s how Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. described the contention that Georgia prosecutors had not been motivated by race when they weeded out every potential black juror from a 1987 death penalty trial. Roberts penned the majority opinion in Foster v. Chatman, which reversed a decision by the Georgia Supreme Court that overlooked new evidence of racial discrimination in the trial of Timothy Foster, an African American man, which was a factor leading to his death sentence by an all-white jury.

The case had been pending in the high court for an unusually long time, after being argued in November, suggesting that the justices were torn over how to decide it, particularly after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. But in the end, the eight-member court ruled 7-1 that Georgia prosecutors had unconstitutionally rejected jurors from Foster’s trial based on their race. The lone dissenter was the court’s only African American justice, Clarence Thomas, who sided firmly with state of Georgia.

The case had presented stark evidence of the kind of racial discrimination that pervades the criminal justice system. In 2006, defense lawyers for Foster, who was convicted of murdering a white woman in Butts County, Georgia, pried out of the prosecutors’ office a remarkable file full of documents showing how they had gone about picking a jury for the case.

In notes, prosecutors had highlighted the African Americans on several different lists of potential jurors. On one list, under the heading “Definite NOs,” prosecutors listed six potential jurors, all but one of whom were black. The prosecutors ranked the prospective black jurors in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.”

As Foster’s lawyer Stephen Bright said after the decision was released on Monday, “this discrimination became apparent only because we obtained the prosecution’s notes which revealed their intent to discriminate. Usually that does not happen. The practice of discriminating in striking juries continues in courtrooms across the country. Usually courts ignore patterns of race discrimination and accept false reasons for the strikes. Even after the undeniable evidence of discrimination was presented in this case, the Georgia courts ignored it and upheld Foster’s conviction and death sentence.”

Foster’s 1987 conviction came just months after the US Supreme Court had issued a decision in Batson v. Kentucky that was supposed to ban racial discrimination in jury selection during what are known as “peremptory strikes.” That’s the mechanism for lawyers in a trial to exclude jurors for no reason. Such strikes have been used extensively to keep minority citizens off juries.

Batson, though, has failed to halt the cherry-picking of all-white juries in criminal cases against black men. That’s largely because prosecutors, when challenged, have learned to justify a decision to kick someone off a jury in “race-neutral” terms, and courts have accepted them. Foster was no exception. Notes in the prosecutors’ file indicated that they focused on the race of the jurors from the outset, as Roberts points out in his opinion. They justified excluding black jurors in his case for such nebulous reasons as “failure to make eye contact” or being defiant. (One of the rejected black jurors, Marilyn Garrett, told me last year that if she wasn’t making eye contact or was defiant with the prosecutors while they were questioning her, it was because “they really were nasty to me.” She said the prosecutors had treated her “like I was a criminal.”)

Roberts didn’t buy the prosecutors’ rationale for ejecting two black jurors in particular, and he methodically ripped holes in their arguments before sending the case back to the lower courts for further proceedings. “Two peremptory strikes on the basis of race are two more than the Constitution allows,” he concluded.

The decision is a forceful blow against racism in the courts, and somewhat unusual coming from the same chief justice who has made a name for himself for helping to dismantle the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action. The Foster decision isn’t going to help Roberts’ reputation among tea partiers, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who have decided the former conservative darling of a chief justice has become a liberal traitor.

Tea partiers should be much happier with the lone dissenter in the case, Thomas. As he often does in death penalty cases, he opened his opinion by focusing from the outset on the victim—in this case, 79-year-old Queen Madge White, whom Thomas noted was sexually assaulted by Foster with a bottle of salad dressing. Far from acknowledging the racist motives in the jury selection, Thomas lambasted the majority ruling for perpetuating a criminal justice system in which “finality” means nothing, and any criminal case can be appealed ad nauseam.

His opinion avoids any acknowledgement of the stark failures of the justice system in recent years, injustices that would have largely remained hidden if the courts had taken Thomas’ strict view of unwavering procedural rules that until recently protected prosecutors in Georgia in Foster’s case from any accountability for their racial discrimination.

The decision in Foster won’t put an end to racial discrimination in jury selection. But it is certainly vindication for the potential jurors, including Marilyn Garrett, who weren’t allowed to fulfill their civic duty all those years ago because of their race. As for Foster, his future is still in limbo. Monday’s decision entitles him to a new trial, with a jury of his peers that hasn’t been tainted by racial discrimination. But that doesn’t guarantee a different outcome. The new Georgia jury may come to the same conclusion as the old one. But if nothing else, his date with the death chamber has likely been put off for many years to come. In the world of death penalty litigation, that counts as a win.

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The Supreme Court Just Sent a Strong Message About Racism in the Justice System

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