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Big Coal is freaking out over this latest Obama move

by MalissaHarlow Posted on July 16, 2015

Big Coal is freaking out over this latest Obama move

By on 16 Jul 2015commentsShare

The Obama administration’s less-than-stellar relationship with the coal industry is about to get worse. The Interior Department is rolling out new rules to protect waterways and groundwater from the various toxic messes made by coal mining companies.

The proposed regulations are aimed at the controversial process of mountaintop-removal mining, a way of getting at coal seams by lopping off mountaintops and dumping them into valleys, thereby burying the waterways that run through those valleys. More than 2,000 miles of waterways have been destroyed through the practice, which also leads to substances like selenium, iron, and aluminum showing up in streams and causing significant health problems for humans and wildlife.

The proposed rules would require mining companies to test water quality before they start mining, as they mine, and after they mine, creating a data set showing how their operations affected the area. It would also require the companies to restore streams that were “mined-over,” and replant areas with native trees and vegetation, and to put up bonds to make sure there’s funding for restoration.

Interior’s new proposal has been in the works for years, ever since the department admitted in 2009 that Bush-era rules were flawed. Those rules were struck down in 2014, so the regulations currently in place date from 1983.

The coal industry — which is suing the EPA over the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and recently won a sort-of victory with the Supreme Court’s ruling on the EPA’s mercury regulations — is real upset about all this, and so are its allies in Congress.

“It’s outrageous that less than a month after being rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court for ignoring the costs of its regulations, the administration is doing it again with this job-crushing, anti-coal rule,” said Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso (R). “It’s no secret that this overreaching rule is designed to help put coal country out of business.”

National Mining Association President Hal Quinn hit the same no-jobs line. “This is a rule in search of a problem,” he told The Washington Post. “It has nothing to do with new science and everything to do with an old and troubling agenda for separating more coal miners from their jobs.”

Green groups, meanwhile, welcomed the long-overdue proposed regulations, but said they don’t go far enough to fix this problem, and will in fact weaken existing requirements barring mining activities within 100 feet of a stream.

“Appalachian communities rely on the rivers and streams covered by these protections, and today’s proposal doesn’t adequately safeguard those communities,” said Bruce Nilles of the Sierra Club. “We need the federal government to create thoughtful stream protections that ban valley fills and ensure an end to this destructive practice.”

The rules aren’t a done deal yet. There will be a 60-day public comment period and five public hearings, after which the proposal could be revised. Final rules might be put in place next year.

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Big Coal is freaking out over this latest Obama move

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BREAKING: James Holmes Found Guilty in Aurora Massacre Trial

by ShelliHollars Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

Three years after he killed 12 people and injured 70 more in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, a jury has found James Holmes guilty of first degree murder.

The jury concluded that Holmes was not legally insane at the time he committed the crimes, despite evidence of mental illness. Holmes’ mental state will come into play again in the penalty phase of the trial, in which jurors will hear testimony and decide whether he is eligible for execution.

Which raises the question: How crazy is too crazy to be executed? Here’s how capital defense lawyer and occasional Mother Jones contributor Marc Bookman put it in a remarkable essay with precisely that title:

There is no simple answer to this question. State courts across the country have struggled to define “intellectual disability” (also known as mental retardation) since 2002, when the Supreme Court ruled that retarded people are exempt from capital punishment. The high court has also banned the execution of anyone who was under 18 at the time of his crime, but no court has ruled that severe mental illness makes a person ineligible for the death penalty.

The Supreme Court’s latest foray into the issue involved the case of Scott Louis Panetti, another Texas death row inmate. Panetti, a diagnosed schizophrenic who killed his in-laws, defended himself in court wearing a purple cowboy suit. As if that weren’t enough, he asked to subpoena Jesus, John F. Kennedy, and the pope. While the justices didn’t offer any clear standard on how crazy is too crazy, they suggested that severe mental illness might render someone’s “perception of reality so distorted” that he cannot be constitutionally executed.

As it stands, a person cannot be put to death if he or she is deemed “insane,” but that’s a narrow legal distinction. Whether at trial or on the eve of execution, an insanity defense hinges on a defendant’s inability to connect his crime with the consequences. Absent that connection, neither deterrence nor retribution is served by execution. As the legal scholar Sir William Blackstone put it more than 200 years ago, madness is its own punishment.

Almost every state now utilizes some version of what is known as the M’Naghten Rule. Daniel M’Naghten, an Englishman, was put on trial in 1843 for fatally shooting a civil servant he apparently mistook for the prime minister. He had delusions of persecution, and a number of doctors testified that he was unable to hold himself back. When the prosecution produced no witness to say otherwise, M’Naghten was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent most of the rest of his life at the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum in London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital, which locals pronounced “Bedlam.”

Thus was coined a word we associate with chaos—and it was chaos that ensued when M’Naghten was acquitted and the public took the verdict poorly. What emerged amid the outcry was the generally applied law that an insanity defense would only be available to someone who cannot understand the “nature and quality” of his act.

In a more recent piece focusing on the Panetti case, staff reporter Stephanie Mencimer digs deeper into the high court’s thinking, and demonstrates in a followup analysis why it is so difficult, once a case gets to this stage, to reverse momentum toward a verdict of death.

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BREAKING: James Holmes Found Guilty in Aurora Massacre Trial

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Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

by LynwoodDevlin Posted on July 10, 2015

Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

By on 10 Jul 2015 3:26 pmcommentsShare

There’s an increasingly energetic fight brewing in Florida — one that has odd battle lines, bringing Tea Party activists and environmentalists together against monopoly utilities and big-money right-wing groups like Americans for Prosperity, and turning city governments against neighboring city governments.

The issue at stake? Whether state law should be amended to allow organizations other than utilities to sell electricity, which would clear the way for more rooftop solar power.

Florida is one of only five states in the country that actively bars third parties from selling electricity. (Another 20-plus states don’t explicitly bar it, but don’t allow it either — what this means for solar companies is unclear, one group that tracks the issue told PolitiFact.) So Floridian homeowners aren’t allowed to buy energy from companies that install solar panels on their roofs.

The state’s utilities, at the moment, only draw 1 percent of their electricity from solar, despite the fact that the state ranks third in the country in terms of potential to generate solar energy, and despite the fact that solar energy has become cost competitive with fossil fuels and is often a safer investment for utilities.

A growing coalition — including environmentalists, the League of Women Voters, the Christian Coalition, and Tea Party activists who see the ban as meddling in the free market — is pushing to get rid of the third-party electricity ban. They’ve been gathering signatures to put an initiative on the 2016 ballot, called the Solar Choice amendment, that would allow businesses and individuals to sell up to two megawatts of solar power.

The utility companies have asked the Florida Supreme Court to throw out the ballot amendment, even before signature gathering is done. They have found allies in shadowy out-of-state, pro-big-business groups, but also recently won the support of the Florida League of Cities, a group of municipal governments. Last month, the league filed a brief with the Supreme Court in support of the utilities’ position, arguing that member cities would lose tax revenue.

But then a number of members of the league dissented, calling the brief “alarmist, unsupported and speculative” and asking for it be withdrawn. These dissenting city officials wrote:

The substantive arguments in The League’s brief are aggressive, speculative, and some are well outside the League’s scope or expertise. For instance, the brief argues that the amendment might create inequitable rate structures between solar and non-solar customers. When did the League’s interest include utility regulatory ratemaking design and policy?

“There’s a number of city leaders who are pretty disgusted with the league,’’ South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard told The Miami Herald. “It feels like a really parochial organization that’s been co-opted by Florida Power & Light.”

One side effect of all this is that Florida’s utilities, which had seemed content to shrug off the state’s solar potential, are announcing new solar projects. But leaders of the rooftop solar movement told the Tampa Bay Times back in May that this was a cynical move aimed at quieting their rising voices.

The next big development in this saga will come when the state Supreme Court rules on the ballot measure. The court has scheduled a hearing on the issue for Sept. 1.

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Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

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South Carolina Senator Rants Against Gay Marriage During Vote on Confederate Flag Removal

by Melliss69C Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a historic 37-3 vote, members of South Carolina’s Senate just voted to remove the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds. Monday’s vote followed hours of debate, with lawmakers overwhelmingly making the case to do away with the racist symbol once and for all.

Perhaps confused by the subject at hand, Sen. Lee Bright used Monday’s debate as an opportunity to voice his support in keeping the flag and dually attack the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision last month, not to mention the “abomination colors” showcased by the White House to celebrate the court’s decision.

“This nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and they are under assault by men in black robes who were not elected by you,” Bright warned.

“Our governor called us in to deal with the flag that sits out front, let’s deal with the national sin that we face today!” he continued. “We talk about abortion but this gay marriage thing, I believe will be one nation gone under like President Reagan said. If we’re not one nation under God, we’ll be one nation gone under.”

With more biblical references and anti-LGBT ranting, Bright went onto urge his fellow lawmakers to continue flying the battle flag. It was a rare moment of crazy, perhaps even for his two fellow Confederate flag supporters, who likely knew they had only one fight to lose on Monday.

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South Carolina Senator Rants Against Gay Marriage During Vote on Confederate Flag Removal

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Bobby Jindal Really, Really, Really Hates Gay Marriage

by NoelZtvpprmvv Posted on July 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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From The Advocate:

After three courts told him he had to, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal will finally allow his administration to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples today.

….Jindal’s administration argued it’s possible the Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t apply to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where Louisiana had been defending its statewide ban….On Wednesday, the circuit court actually went through the motion of confirming the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over it.

….But Jindal’s administration jumped on that as reason to delay even further. The Fifth Circuit technically sent the case back to the lower, district court where its earlier ruling in favor of the state had to be corrected. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that Jindal’s spokesman said no same-sex couple would be recognized until the district court formally reversed itself. And so it did that today.”

I’ve seen several people wondering why Jindal wasted time with this, since he knew perfectly well what the outcome would be. The answer is obvious: He’s trying to position himself as the most tea-partyish, most anti-Obama, most combative conservative in the Republican field. So this is basically brand marketing. Republican voters now know that no one will stand up for traditional values as strongly as Bobby Jindal. Message sent and received.

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Bobby Jindal Really, Really, Really Hates Gay Marriage

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Ted Cruz Wants to Subject Supreme Court Justices to Political Elections

by NatishaSisco Posted on June 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week was a tough one for conservatives. In the course of two days, the US Supreme Court upheld a major part of the Affordable Care Act and effectively legalized same-sex marriage. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called it “some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history,” and he’s not going to take it lying down. The presidential candidate and former Supreme Court clerk says he is proposing a constitutional amendment that would force Supreme Court justices to face retention elections.

“Sadly, the Court’s hubris and thirst for power have reached unprecedented levels. And that calls for meaningful action, lest Congress be guilty of acquiescing to this assault on the rule of law,” Cruz wrote in the National Review after the court’s Friday ruling on same-sex marriage. “And if Congress will not act, passing the constitutional amendments needed to correct this lawlessness, then the movement from the people for an Article V Convention of the States—to propose the amendments directly—will grow stronger and stronger.”

Cruz’s plan calls for the justices to face retention elections beginning with the second national election after their appointment, and every eight years after that. “Those justices deemed unfit for retention by both a majority of the American people as a whole and by majorities of the electorates in at least half of the 50 states will be removed from office and disqualified from future service on the Court,” Cruz wrote.

In defending his plan, Cruz wrote that 20 states already have judicial retention elections. What he didn’t mention was that many of those states have taken steps to compensate for a major problem that tends to arise when judges’ jobs get politicized. Of the 39 states that have some form of judicial elections (whether retention or otherwise), 30 have bans on judges personally soliciting donors for money to avoid conflicts of interest. Those bans were recently upheld by the Supreme Court itself, which ruled in April in Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar that states can legally prohibit judicial candidates from directly soliciting money. Why?

“Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s 5-4 majority opinion in Yulee.

And there’s a good reason for Roberts’ reluctance to lump judges in with other politicians. In writing about the Yulee decision in April, Mother Jones reported:

Judicial elections have quietly become a major battleground in American politics over the last decade. State judicial candidates raised a combined $83 million in the 1990s, a total that was surpassed by roughly $30 million in the 2011-12 election cycle. More than $200 million has been donated to state supreme court candidates since 2000, and independent (and often unaccountable) spending on state judicial races has increased nearly sevenfold in that same time. Sue Bell Cobb, the retired chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, recently likened judicial elections to “legalized extortion.”

A major problem with all of this money is that more and more of it is independent and unaccountable spending, some of which comes from people who appear before the very judges they’re donating to. Even when judges don’t actively fundraise, outside groups pour funds into attack ads, putting money at the center of what was once a fairly sleepy and restrained electoral process. And that’s just on the state level. Imagine the national campaigns to retain (or unseat) Antonin Scalia or Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“If the justices themselves couldn’t raise the money, who would step forward to run campaign contributions?” asks Liz Seaton, the campaign deputy executive director of judicial watchdog group Justice at Stake. “Why? And to what end?”

Seaton says that political attacks on the Supreme Court after controversial decisions aren’t new, and that the founding fathers gave federal judges lifetime tenure to protect them from exactly the kind of political pressure Cruz is hoping to apply.

“What kind of political campaigning and spending would there be if such a system would be put in place?” Seaton asks. “It’s just hard to imagine just how much that would blow the system out of the water.”

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Ted Cruz Wants to Subject Supreme Court Justices to Political Elections

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In a Few Years, Gay Marriage Will Be About as Threatening as Cell Phones

by KirbyFelton Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Bernstein gets it right on same-sex marriage:

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Supreme Court’s decision today in Obergefell, which recognizes marriage as a basic right, is that it’s not going to be very controversial.

….How do I know? Because we’ve seen it in state after state in which marriage equality was enacted. There’s no controversy remaining in Massachusetts; for that matter, there’s little or no controversy remaining in Iowa, which had court-imposed marriage equality in 2009. On a related issue, conflict over gays and lesbians serving in the military ended immediately after “don’t ask don’t tell” was replaced four years ago. In practice, extending full citizenship and human rights to all regardless of sexual orientation and identity is actually not all that controversial — at least not after the fact.

I get the fact that gay marriage seems creepy and unnatural to some people. I don’t like this attitude, and I don’t feel it myself, but I get it.

But you know what? Bernstein is right. For a while it will continue to be a political football, but not for long. Even the opponents will quickly realize that same-sex marriage changes….nothing. Life goes on normally. The gay couples in town still live and hang out together just like they always have, and a few marriage ceremonies didn’t change that. In their own houses, everything stays the same. The actual impact is zero. No one is trying to recruit their kids to the cause. Their churches continue to marry whoever they want to marry. After a few months or a few years, they just forget about it. After all, the lawn needs mowing and the kids have to get ferried to soccer practice and Chinese sounds good for dinner—and that gay couple who run the Jade Palace over on 4th sure make a mean Kung Pao Chicken. And that’s it.

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In a Few Years, Gay Marriage Will Be About as Threatening as Cell Phones

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Here Are the Instant Reactions From Every Diva Every Gay Has Ever Loved

by AbrahamHartz Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Gay icons—those public figures embraced by the LGBT community for their ridiculousness, heroism, mastery of transformation, advocacy, or pop genius—have been posting their reactions to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision to clear the way for marriage equality across the country. Here are some of our favorites. We’ll add more as our divas share their thoughts. (No word yet from Cher, Madonna, Elton… Martha Stewart… Anna Wintour…)

Retweeted by RuPaul:

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Here Are the Instant Reactions From Every Diva Every Gay Has Ever Loved

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John Roberts Now Officially the Fourth Conservative Sellout on the Supreme Court

by LorrieThomson Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Quin Hillyer at National Review:

With today’s Obamacare decision, John Roberts confirms that he has completely jettisoned all pretense of textualism. He is a results-oriented judge, period, ruling on big cases based on what he thinks the policy result should be or what the political stakes are for the court itself. He is a disgrace. That is all.

So there you have it. Roberts has now joined a long line of conservative sellouts, from Harry Blackmun to John Paul Stevens to David Souter. After Souter, Republicans swore this would never happen again and insisted on nominating only hardline conservatives with a long paper trail: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Sam Alito. But now Roberts has let them down. It turns out that the ability to hold onto conservative principles while serving under Ronald Reagan is insignificant next to the power of the Washington DC cocktail party circuit.

Still, at least Republicans can now end their embarrassing charade of pretending to have a plan to fix things up if the court had ended Obamacare subsidies in states without their own exchanges. I think it’s pretty safe to say that even the pretense of “working on” a plan to replace Obamacare will now be dumped quietly on the ash heap of history—until Republicans have a presidential nominee in hand, at which point the charade will have to start all over. But I think we already know what their bold new plan it will contain. There are few surprises in the land of conservative ideas.

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John Roberts Now Officially the Fourth Conservative Sellout on the Supreme Court

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John Roberts Just Saved the Republican Party From Itself

by TristanFrank Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that upheld a core tenet of the Affordable Care Act is good news for the millions of Americans whose health insurance was on the line. But it’s also, in a strange way, good news for a completely different group: the Republican politicians who have all but called for Obamacare to be shot into space on a rocket.

Had the court gone the other way, gutting federal subsidies while leaving the shell of the law on the books, congressional Republicans, as well as GOP governors such as Scott Walker and Chris Christie, would have been put in the uncomfortable position they’ve managed to avoid since Obamacare was signed into law—having to fix it. The Associated Press outlined Walker’s dilemma neatly on Wednesday:

About 183,000 people in Wisconsin purchase their insurance through the exchange and nine out of 10 of them are receiving a federal subsidy, according to an analysis of state data by Wisconsin Children and Families. The average tax credit they receive is $315 a month.

Health care advocates who have been critical of Walker for not taking federal money to pay for expanding Medicaid coverage have also called on the Republican second-term governor to prepare for the subsidies to be taken away.

And many of those Wisconsonites enrolled in the federal exchange are there because Walker put them there. As Bloomberg’s Joshua Green noted in a prescient piece in March, Walker booted 83,000 people from the state’s Medicaid program and put them on the federal exchange instead. That’s not the kind of crisis you want to be dealing with in the middle of a presidential campaign—or ever.

Conservatives would have been thrilled with a ruling in their favor on Thursday. But Roberts’ decision spares Walker and his colleagues from what would have come next, and frees them to continue lobbing rhetorical bombs at the law they’re now stuck with. As previous generations of Washington Republicans can advise, it’s much easier to go to war if you don’t need a plan for how to end it.

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John Roberts Just Saved the Republican Party From Itself

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