Tag Archives: court

Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

by OliverSheets Posted on April 29, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Tonight Oklahoma will continue the nation’s ongoing experiment in executing people with untested drug combinations as it moves forward to kill death row inmates Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner using a new, secretly acquired drug cocktail.

Officials in Oklahoma and other states have resorted to these methods because they can no longer access sodium thiopental, the anesthetic traditionally used in lethal injections, and another drug used to paralyze the condemned. The lone US manufacturer quit producing sodium thiopental in 2011, and international suppliers—â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;particulalry in the European Union, which opposes the death penalty on humanitarian grounds—â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;have stopped exporting both drugs to the United States. This has left states like Oklahoma scrambling to find new pharmaceuticals for killing death row inmates. Some have been reduced to illegally importing the drugs, using untested combinations, or buying from unregulated compounding pharmacies, a number of which have a history of producing contaminated products.

Death row inmates and their lawyers have protested on the grounds that these untested protocols could produce a level of suffering that violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, and they’ve sued for more information about the source and purity of the drugs. In response, several states have passed secrecy laws, allowing them to keep the names of their suppliers, and in some cases the contents of the lethal injection, under wraps. (Oklahoma is so eager to hide the source of its death drugs that it buys them with petty cash so there are no transaction records.) Death row inmates, in turn, have filed suits challenging the constitutionality of these secrecy statutes.

In February, Lockett and Warner prompted a high-profile showdown between Oklahoma officials when they sued the state, asserting that its execution protocol could inflict “severe pain” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. A lower state court found the drug secrecy law patently unconstitutional, and the state Supreme Court ultimately stayed the two men’s executions until the issues were fully litigated. But Republican Gov. Mary Fallin insisted they be executed regardless of the court’s ruling, prompting a political crisis. On April 23, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, whose justices are now being threatened by the Legislature with impeachment, caved and allowed the executions to move forward.

The public knows very little about the drugs that will be used to kill Lockett and Warner who stand convicted of murder. â&#128;&#139;â&#128;&#139;Lockett shot a teenage girl, then buried her alive, while Warner raped and killed his girlfriend’s 11-month-old daughter in 1997. Initially, the state said it would deploy a three-drug cocktail, including the sedative pentobarbital (normally used to euthanize animals); vercuronium bromide, which paralyzes the inmate; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The first drug is supposed to knock out the inmate so he doesn’t feel pain. The second drug paralyzes him so onlookers can’t tell if he’s suffering. But pentobarbital, which states substituted for sodium thiopental after it went off the market, works more slowly than the old drug, and wasn’t tested in advance to make sure it was an appropriate substitute. Also, lawyers argue that it doesn’t prevent pain during an execution. For that reason, injecting it into a conscious animal in California is actually a crime.

Due to a shortages of pentobarbital and vercuronium bromide, Oklahoma planned to buy the drugs from an unnamed compounding pharmacy. This was problematic because such pharmacies are unregulated, and contaminated pentobarbital can result in excruciatingly painful deaths. (Experts say it can feel as though the insides of a person’s veins are being scraped with sandpaper.) South Dakota used a compounded pentobarbital contaminated with a fungus to execute Eric Robert in 2012. During the execution, he repeatedly opened his eyes—a sign that the drug wasn’t working, some experts said. Oklahoma has had similar problems. In January, it executed another man, Michael Lee Wilson, using pentobarbital from an unidentified compounding pharmacy. During the execution he sputtered, “I feel my whole body burning,” another sign that the drug wasn’t doing its job.

In March, Oklahoma backed away from this approach and said it would instead use one of five possible drug combinations, including a two-drug cocktail of midazolam (a sedative) and hydromorphone (a pain killer). When states first proposed using those drugs in lethal injection mixes last year, defense lawyers and medical experts warned that inmates receiving them would essentially suffocate to death. Brushing aside these concerns, in January Ohio used the drugs to execute Dennis McGuire, who gasped and convulsed horribly for more than 10 minutes before taking a record 26 minutes to die. His family, who watched in horror, is now suing over what they allege was cruel and unusual punishment.

Oklahoma has since shifted course again and announced that it would use a three-drug combo that includes midazolam and pancuronium bromide. According to Madeline Cohen, an assistant federal public defender representing Charles Warner, the state claims that both drugs are being purchased from manufacturers rather than compounding pharmacies but wouldn’t provide any other information. The only known use of this drug combination for executions was in Florida in 2013, but Florida used five times the dose of midazolam that Oklahoma plans to use, meaning Lockett and Warner will essentially be human guinea pigs. “It is an experiment, and I don’t think anybody is absolutely certain what will happen in Oklahoma,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Dieter adds that we’ll never know whether the drugs worked properly or caused needlessly painful deaths because the people who could tell us will be dead.

Original post:  

Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Does This Secret Drug Cocktail Work To Execute People? Oklahoma Will Find Out Tonight.

This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

by UteBelairmt Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Michael Mann, the perennially embattled climate scientist best known for his “hockey-stick” temperature graph, came out victorious yesterday in a court battle against a Virginia legislator and a conservative think tank that had sought to obtain thousands of Mann’s emails and research documents from his time as a University of Virginia professor.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that unpublished scientific research can be exempted from the state’s Freedom of Information Act requirements, because disclosing such information would cut into the university’s competitive advantage over other universities. As a result, some 12,000 of Mann’s emails and papers won’t be released to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (formerly known as the American Tradition Institute) and Virginia Delegate Robert Marshall (R-Prince William), who had requested the documents in 2011.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Mann called the decision “a victory for science, public university faculty, and academic freedom.”

Back in 2012, a lower Virginia court ruled that the documents in question were considered “proprietary,” and thus shielded from FOIA requests. ATI appealed the decision, and the case landed with the state’s Supreme Court last October. The main question was whether research-related documents should get the same kind of protection as trade secrets and other information that could cause financial harm if released. ATI argued that Mann’s emails didn’t merit such protection, while Mann and U-Va. maintained that scientists should be able to hammer out their work behind closed doors before presenting a finished product to the public.

In a brief filed with the Supreme Court late last year, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued that in protecting Mann’s research, the lower court had actually set the scope too wide, leaving open the possibility that a university could claim virtually any document to be proprietary. But yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling revised the exemption criteria so that non-research-related documents—things like budgets and communications between administrators—could still be accessed with a FOIA, said Emily Grannis, the Reporters Committee staffer who authored the brief.

Of course, Grannis said, the ruling is only binding in the state of Virginia, but it could serve as a model for how other states set limits for what qualifies as proprietary if similar cases arise elsewhere.

Continue Reading »

Visit site: 

This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Climate Scientist Just Won Another Victory in Court

Lawsuit: Texas Hospital Caved to Anti-Abortion Activists’ Demands

by MichaleClaudio Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Two abortion providers sued a Dallas hospital on Thursday, after the hospital revoked their admitting privileges. Because Texas law now requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, the revocation would mean that these doctors could no longer legally perform abortions. In a letter to the doctors, Chuck Schuetz, CEO of University General Hospital–Dallas, said they were disrupting the hospital’s “business and the reputation” by providing abortions at their own facilities miles away. The lawsuit filed by the doctors, Lamar Robinson and Jasbir Ahluwalia, contends that the hospital discriminated against them because they perform abortions.

Last month, anti-abortion rights activists announced plans to hold a demonstration outside the hospital to protest its association with Robinson. But on March 31, the day before the protest was to take place, Schuetz canceled the doctors’ admitting privileges. “Your practice of voluntary interruption of pregnancies…creates significant exposure and damages to UGHD’s reputation within the community,” Schuetz wrote to Robinson and and Ahluwalia. In the letter, Schuetz characterized providing abortions as “disruptive behavior.” He claimed that the hospital was not equipped to treat complications related to abortion and that the doctors were increasing “the probability of malpractice.” Robinson and Ahluwalia allege that Schuetz yielded to pressure from anti-abortion rights activists, promising them the hospital would be “pro-life” and not associate with abortion doctors.

Continue Reading »

Original source: 

Lawsuit: Texas Hospital Caved to Anti-Abortion Activists’ Demands

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lawsuit: Texas Hospital Caved to Anti-Abortion Activists’ Demands

Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

by BrandieRitz Posted on April 16, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over at 538, Benjamin Morris asks “Just How Bad Were the Bad Boys?” The bad boys in question are the Detroit Pistons basketball team of the late 80s, who had a reputation for being unusually aggressive on the court. Did they deserve their reputation? To test this, Morris looks at how many technical fouls they racked up, a good measure of unsportsmanlike conduct. In fact, he takes a look at the total number of technical fouls for the entire league, and finds that the number rose steadily until 1995 and then started a long-term decline.

I promise this is just for fun, but I’ve overlaid another line against Morris’s chart. Not a perfect fit, granted, but not too far off, either. I’m sure a few of you can guess what it is, can’t you?

Source article: 

Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

The Lawyer Behind the Supreme Court’s Latest Campaign Finance Decision Has a New Cause: Sarah Palin for Senate

by ImogeneSchafer Posted on April 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When the Supreme Court recently demolished yet another chunk of the nation’s campaign finance laws, Dan Backer arguably cheered louder than anyone. It was Backer, a Washington, DC-area attorney active in conservative politics, who had convinced an Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon to challenge the government’s limit on the number of candidates, party committees, and political action committees an individual can contribute to in a single election cycle. (The basic limits on how much money that donor can give to each candidate, party, or PAC remain intact.) Backer, who represented McCutcheon, responded to the news of the Supreme Court’s decision by tweeting (in apparent reference to William Wallace in Braveheart): “FREEEEDOMMMMM!!!!”

Backer’s victory is shining some light on another high-profile cause of his: Convincing Sarah Palin to run for US Senate.

In an email headlined “Palin for Senate” recently blasted out by a PAC called the Tea Party Leadership Fund, Backer writes, “Sarah’s the proven leader we need.” He goes on, “She has a better grasp on world politics, and she knows what it means to cherish and protect our American freedoms far better than THE MAN WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE LEADING THE FREE WORLD.” Backer slams incumbent Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) for spending “too much time in Washington, DC, begging the Obama administration for favors rather than representing the good people of Alaska.” Palin supporters need to act quick, Backer warns: The window for her to get into the race “has almost closed.” And so Backer asks recipients to sign a petition and gather enough signatures to “to push Sarah Palin over the top in a critical run for Alaska’s Senate seat in 2014.”

In an interview, Backer said almost 100,000 people had signed the Palin for Senate petition. If Palin did enter the race,he said the Tea Party Leadership PAC would bolster her candidacy with direct mail and radio ads. “Nobody’s going to be a greater agent for change than Sarah Palin from Alaska,” Backer told me. “She will bring something to the race and she will disrupt the Senate. And disruption is good.”

Read the email:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1112091-backer-palin-senate-email.js”,
width: 630,
height: 500,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1112091-backer-palin-senate-email”
);

Backer’s plea isn’t entirely out of left field. Palin has made noises about running for Senate in Alaska. Last summer, she said on Sean Hannity’s radio show that she was considering a run. “I’ve considered it because people have requested me considering it,” she said. “But I’m still waiting to see what the lineup will be and hoping that…there will be some new blood, new energy, not just kind of picking from the same old politicians in the state.” But this email comes when it’s getting late for a possible Palin campaign. (The filing deadline is six weeks away.) Right now, the much-watched Alaska Senate race pits Begich against Republican Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell. Most polling shows Begich in the lead, but the seat is considered a toss-up Senate race that could determine which party ends up controlling the upper chamber.

Backer’s email asks for more than just a signature; it includes a plea to donate $5 or more to the Tea Party Leadership Fund PAC. (Backer is the PAC’s treasurer.) A cynical political observer might wonder if this “Palin for Senate” effort could be more of a fundraising ploy than a realistic attempt to get Palin into the race. Campaign records show that the Tea Party Leadership Fund has so far raked in $3.8 million in the 2013-14 election cycle, and most of that money—almost $9 of every $10—has gone to fundraising, legal fees (to Backer’s own firm), consulting, and other related expenses.

But Backer says the Tea Party Leadership PAC has spent so much non-electoral money because it was building its donor lists during 2013, an off year. This year, he says, the PAC plans to be a counterweight to the outside money from corporations and trade associations backing establishment Republican candidates. “We knew this was going to be a tough cycle and a tough year,” he said. “You need resources you can put on the ground when you need them.”

Source: 

The Lawyer Behind the Supreme Court’s Latest Campaign Finance Decision Has a New Cause: Sarah Palin for Senate

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Lawyer Behind the Supreme Court’s Latest Campaign Finance Decision Has a New Cause: Sarah Palin for Senate

Lawsuit Alleges Cruel and Unusual Conditions for Mentally Ill in Montana Prison

by ShannonKortig Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A disability rights advocacy group sued Montana officials this week in federal court for allegedly placing mentally ill prisoners in extreme forms of solitary confinement for months and years at a time, often because the prisoners displayed symptoms of their illness or expressed suicidal thoughts. The prison’s psychiatrist also accused prisoners with well-documented mental illnesses of using their symptoms to get attention and ceased giving them medication, according to the lawsuit.

Disability Rights Montana, a federally mandated civil rights protection and advocacy group says that Montana State Prison’s treatment of prisoners amounts to “cruel and unusual punishment” and is unconstitutional. The group filed the lawsuit after conducting a year-long investigation with the ACLU of Montana. According to the Associated Press, the groups hope that the matter can be resolved through negotiations with the state, not through legal action. Prison officials are “taking the allegations seriously” according to the AP. Judy Beck, a spokeswoman for the Montana Department of Corrections, told Mother Jones that the state would file its response within 60 days and could not comment.

According to the lawsuit, prisoners are subject to solitary confinement in spaces that sometimes have blacked-out windows, as well as “behavior management plans”—whereby a prisoner is put in 24-hour solitary confinement with only a mattress, blanket, a suicide smock, and nutraloaf, a tasteless, controversial food product that civil rights groups have alleged is unconstitutional. (In 2003, the Montana Supreme Court also ruled that certain behavior management plans are illegal.) “One prisoner with serious mental illness explained that being placed in solitary confinement makes him feel like a young child locked in a closet with nothing to do and, as a result, he spreads feces on the walls of his cell to keep bad spirits away,” the complaint reads.

In a case outlined in the lawsuit, a 50-year-old prisoner sentenced “guilty but mentally ill” in 2006, was placed in a state hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. At the state hospital, staff allegedly described him as “polite, friendly, cooperative, and socializing appropriately with staff and peers.” But after he was suspected of stealing another patient’s jewelry, he was transferred to prison and placed in solitary confinement. In 2012, the prison’s doctor allegedly discontinued the prisoner’s antipsychotic medication, because he believed the man was “malingering.” The prisoner told mental health staff that he wanted to cry when placed in “the hole” because he did not “do hole time well,” according to the lawsuit.

In another case outlined in the lawsuit, a 43-year-old prisoner with a very low IQ score of 78, was transferred to prison from a community group home. There, he was placed in solitary confinement for more than three years for acts that the plaintiffs allege were related to his mental illness, such as “banging his head until it bled on his cell door while asking for real food instead of nutraloaf, crying and saying people on the floor were talking to him, and attempting suicide,” according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs claim that the doctor also stopped giving the prisoner medication, on the basis that he was “simply malingering,” and “laughed at” the prisoner after he complained about losing his medication.

In 2011, a United Nations specialist on torture said that solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days should be abolished. He also said it shouldn’t be used at all on people with mental disabilities. According to the ACLU, “Isolation creates and exacerbates symptoms of mental illness in prisoners, undermining successful re-entry into society and jeopardizing public safety.”

A 33-year-old prisoner—with a long history of self-harm—who was mentioned in the lawsuit was transferred from the state hospital to prison, allegedly to keep him from harming himself. There, he was placed in solitary confinement for “significant periods of time.” In July 2011, he told mental health staff that he had “been in locked housing for way too long” and was worried about doing “something stupid.” In August, when he was taken out of solitary, he murdered another prisoner and was sentenced to life without parole.

About five years earlier, prior to being placed in extended solitary confinement, he filled out a “treatment planning worksheet” on how staff could help him get better at the prison’s Mental Health Treatment Unit, the plaintiffs claim. The prisoner wrote: “Groups with homework. Give me stuff to do so I can keep myself and my mind busy” and “be there to talk to me when I’m having problems.”

View original article: 

Lawsuit Alleges Cruel and Unusual Conditions for Mentally Ill in Montana Prison

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lawsuit Alleges Cruel and Unusual Conditions for Mentally Ill in Montana Prison

Obama admin sued for dragging feet on studies of climate impacts

by ColemanPermewan Posted on April 4, 2014

Obama admin sued for dragging feet on studies of climate impacts

By

Shutterstock

Just over a year ago, we told you that the Obama administration would soon start requiring federal agencies to consider climate change when analyzing the environmental impacts of major projects that need federal approval. Bloomberg reported in March of last year that the new guidelines would “be issued in the coming weeks.”

But many weeks have come and gone and the guidelines still haven’t been released, so now activists are suing the administration to hurry things along.

The lawsuit revolves around the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to study the environmental impacts of projects they oversee and to develop strategies for reducing those impacts. Since passage of the landmark law in 1969, NEPA assessments have covered a variety of potential environmental impacts. In early 2008, major environmental groups petitioned the George W. Bush administration to include climate impacts among them. After Obama came into office, his administration said it would broaden the scope of NEPA studies to cover climate change, and in 2010, it issued draft guidelines to this effect, but they’ve been bottled up at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) ever since.

This week, frustrated after years of inaction, the Center for Food Safety filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court seeking to force Obama’s CEQ to finalize the new rules. From the lawsuit:

With the effects of climate change becoming more and more evident, prompt action is necessary to ensure that climate change analysis is integrated into all levels of federal agencies’ planning. Full analysis and meaningful consideration of these impacts before federal government decisions are made will strongly affect the extent to which climate change and its consequential dangers are limited or avoided in the coming century.

“The Obama Administration has repeatedly promised to take action on climate, but talk is cheap. Its delay here is unlawful, as well as inexplicable and irresponsible,” said George Kimbrell, a senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety. “This unlawful delay is the opposite of the Obama Administration’s repeated promises to address climate change. CEQ action is a perfect example of something the administration can do unilaterally, without requiring congressional efforts. Yet the CEQ process has mysteriously gone into a black hole.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Visit site: 

Obama admin sued for dragging feet on studies of climate impacts

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama admin sued for dragging feet on studies of climate impacts

Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy: The Company’s Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

by FMTTillyxk Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

When Obamacare compelled businesses to include emergency contraception in employee health care plans, Hobby Lobby, a national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. The Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the company’s owners argued, forced them to violate their religious beliefs. But while it was suing the government, Hobby Lobby spent millions of dollars on an employee retirement plan that invested in the manufacturers of the same contraceptive products the firm’s owners cite in their lawsuit.

Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).

Several of the mutual funds in Hobby Lobby’s retirement plan have holdings in companies that manufacture the specific drugs and devices that the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is fighting to keep out of Hobby Lobby’s health care policies: the emergency contraceptive pills Plan B and Ella, and copper and hormonal intrauterine devices.

Continue Reading »

See the original post:  

Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy: The Company’s Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy: The Company’s Retirement Plan Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

Christie’s new woe: Court rules he illegally dumped climate protections

by IonaMartinelli Posted on March 26, 2014

Christie’s new woe: Court rules he illegally dumped climate protections

By

Gage Skidmore

As if New Jersey governor Chris Christie didn’t have enough problems!

A three-judge panel ruled Tuesday that Christie’s administration broke state law in 2011 when it withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

That’s because it didn’t bother going through any formal rulemaking procedures before pulling out of the carbon-cutting program. Instead, administration officials stated on a government website that the state wouldn’t participate in the program — and then argued in court that the online statement was sufficient public outreach under state law.

“The Christie administration sidestepped the public process required by law,” said Doug O’Malley of Environment New Jersey, one of two nonprofits that sued the government over its hasty withdrawal from RGGI, following Tuesday’s Superior Court ruling. “New Jerseyans support action to reduce the impacts of global warming. We hope that today’s ruling will help their voices be heard.”

The RGGI is a carbon-trading program that caps greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. The RGGI has sold about $1 billion worth of carbon pollution permits since 2009, reinvesting much of that money in clean energy and energy efficiency initiatives, resulting in estimated lifelong energy savings of about $2 billion — all the while cutting carbon pollution.

The ruling doesn’t automatically push New Jersey back into the RGGI, and it remains to be seen whether the state rejoins of the program.

“The court gave the administration 60 days to initiate a public process around any changes to the climate change pollution rules,” said attorney Susan Kraham, who represented the environmental groups. “Neither Governor Christie nor the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection can simply repeal state laws by fiat.”

Perhaps Christie could take a couple hours to quietly mull his anti-environmentalism, his opposition to the RGGI, and his faltering presidential aspirations during a leisurely drive in a Tesla over the George Washington Bridge.


Source
NJ Court: Gov. Christie Illegally Repealed Climate Change Pollution Rules, NRDC
Tuesday’s court ruling, Superior Court

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Continued – 

Christie’s new woe: Court rules he illegally dumped climate protections

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Keurig, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Christie’s new woe: Court rules he illegally dumped climate protections

The Hobby Lobby Case Probably Doesn’t Depend Much on What the Law Says

by ncf01r Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

So the Hobby Lobby case was heard today, the latest in a long string of challenges to Obamacare. (Next up: whether the law allows subsidies only for policies bought on state exchanges, not on the federal exchange.) In short, the question in this case is whether Obamacare’s requirement that insurance policies cover contraception is legal.

I haven’t written about it before because I’m frankly not sure what to say. As with so many other recent cases, the law seems pretty clear to me. There’s no precedent for corporations having rights of religious freedom in the first place, and that alone seems like enough to toss the case out. But even if they do, the plaintiffs have to show that the contraception requirement imposes a “substantial burden” on them. Their argument is that if they don’t comply, they’ll get hit by substantial penalties. But that’s ridiculous. The question is whether complying with the law is a substantial burden. In other words, does insurance coverage that includes contraception cost them more than insurance coverage without it? The evidence on this is fuzzy, but it seems to be fuzzy only on the question of whether there’s any cost at all. Even if there is, it appears to be small. There’s simply no serious evidence that the cost of complying with the law is large in financial terms, and it’s obviously not large in operational terms since Hobby Lobby literally has to do nothing except continue buying insurance from the same carrier they’ve always bought it from.1

So that’s where we stand. There’s no precedent in the past two centuries that gives corporations First Amendment religious freedom rights. And as near as I can tell, the contraception mandate imposes, at most, only a tiny burden on Hobby Lobby.

But none of that seems to matter. It doesn’t matter that I’m not a lawyer and might be wrong about all this. Others with the intellectual chops to know this stuff have made similar arguments in much more detail. And anyway, I thought the same thing about the original Obamacare case. It simply didn’t seem legally tenable. But it almost carried the day. A frail argument, invented a couple of years earlier and with exactly zero precedent behind it, came within a whisker of getting five votes on the Supreme Court.

This sure seems to be a similar case. The law doesn’t really matter. Four justices just don’t like the Obamacare mandate and will vote anywhere and at anytime to strike it down. Four justices will vote to uphold the mandate. Anthony Kennedy will provide the swing vote. It’s also possible, I suppose, that John Roberts will vote to uphold the mandate, simply on the principle that having upheld Obamacare once before on a slim technicality, he’s not going to relitigate it over and over on increasingly trivial details.

So….I don’t know. In cases like this, the legal arguments seem like little more than window dressing. Everyone knows the outcome they want, and they tailor their opinions to produce those outcomes. Maybe that’s too cynical. I guess we’ll find out next June.

1Oddly enough, I don’t really buy the contention that the burden is small because, after all, Hobby Lobby can simply choose not to provide health insurance at all. Technically, this might be a good argument, but it doesn’t really feel right to me. If the price of complying with the law is eliminating health insurance for Hobby Lobby’s entire employee base, that sure seems pretty substantial to me, even if the federal government isn’t directly coercing its choices one way or the other.

Continue reading here: 

The Hobby Lobby Case Probably Doesn’t Depend Much on What the Law Says

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Hobby Lobby Case Probably Doesn’t Depend Much on What the Law Says