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John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

by StephaiValazque Posted on March 16, 2016

John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

Ohio Gov. John Kasich won his home state in the GOP presidential primary on Tuesday night, and as Ohio is a winner-take-all state, that means he’s put enough delegates out of Donald Trump’s reach to stall the frontrunner’s march to the nomination, for now. The Kasich campaign hopes this momentum will be enough to help him win a few more states and then force a contested convention, with the full backing of the establishment behind him.

Kasich, then, is the GOP establishment’s last and only choice, now that Marco Rubio has bowed out. He isn’t just a favorite among top party officials. In recent weeks, he’s earned a slew of endorsements from newspapers around the country. A few of these papers have pointed to Kasich as the only moderate Republican, mentioning his views on climate change as one of the things that makes him more mainstream than his opponents.

The Detroit Free Press, for instance, wrote: “Kasich accepts the reality of climate change […] Yet climate change denial is de rigeur among most Republican politicians, a shameful dodge that will pile suffering on our children and grandchildren. Although Kasich favors robust state regulation to control climate change over U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, this is a more significant step than his GOP cohorts are willing to take.” The South Florida Sun Sentinel, meanwhile, said, “On the subject of climate change, to which Florida is especially vulnerable, only Kasich called for policies to reduce carbon emissions.” The Illinois Journal Star noted that by choosing Kasich, Republicans would “get an intelligent man who doesn’t deny the science behind climate change, though he’d prefer private-sector solutions to government ones.”

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Yet the governor is no climate ally; he’s just a bit better than Trump at hiding his brand of denialism. He falls under the “do-nothing” category of politicians who will accept at least some of the science but want to, well, do nothing about it.

Take what Kasich said in the last debate as an example: After Marco Rubio fumbled through an answer on sea-level rise, Kasich’s speech was almost a relief. “I do believe we contribute to climate change,” he began. I say almost a relief, because Kasich in the same answer also spoke in the familiar climate-denier code: “Now, it doesn’t mean because you pursue a policy of being sensitive to the environment, because we don’t know how much humans actually contribute.”

Kasich has repeated that line in campaign stops, including saying at a Vermont event last month that he didn’t know “how much individuals affect the climate.”

His acknowledgement that the climate might be changing does make him seem reasonable compared to the likes of Trump or Ted Cruz. But what matters more are his views on climate policy, and here the governor has shown no more interest in taking action than his competitors. Kasich says he supports renewables but equally alongside coal, natural gas, and oil. He opposes most policies that curb carbon pollution and that encourage wind and solar over dirtier sources. He’s promised to “freeze all federal regulations for one year except for health and safety” — and considers the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate and health regulations as the first that need to go. And he’s criticized the international climate deal the world reached last December, insisting the thousands of climate policy experts that were in Paris for a climate conference should have been there for ISIS: “I think when [Secretary of State John Kerry] went to Paris, he should have gone there to get our allies together to fight ISIS instead.”

In the end, it doesn’t matter much if Kasich manages a “yes” to a question on the science. He is still dangerous. The New York Times, which also endorsed Kasich in January, put it best: “Kasich is no moderate.” They weren’t talking about climate change, but they might as well have been.

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John Kasich is no better than Donald Trump on climate change

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John Oliver Slams Donald Trump and GOP Rivals for Reducing Election to Dick-Measuring Contest

by CandraBeacham Posted on March 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Judging by Donald Trump’s sweeping victories on Super Tuesday, Republican voters have decidedly ignored John Oliver’s plea to #MakeDonaldDrumpfagain and are on track to nominate the “serial liar” for president—at least for the time being.

But that doesn’t mean the “Last Week Tonight” host is done skewering Trump or his GOP rivals, especially after last week’s vulgar debate in Detroit, in which the real estate magnate boasted about the size of his penis on national television.

“That’s right, Donald Trump just talked about his dick during a presidential debate,” Oliver said. “A dick which I presume looks like a Cheeto with the cheese dust rubbed off.”

He then played audio excerpts of Trump’s ex-wife’s equally cringe-worthy romance novel, read by Morgan Fairchild.

As Oliver declared last night, welcome to “Clowntown Fuck-The-World Shitshow 2016.”

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John Oliver Slams Donald Trump and GOP Rivals for Reducing Election to Dick-Measuring Contest

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Three Numbers That Explain the Modern Political Ecosystem

by Rodger31Y3 Posted on March 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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If you want to understand how politicians manipulate today’s media environment, there are only three numbers you need to know:

Detroit debate viewership (TV plus streaming): 20 million
Daytime cable news viewership: 1-2 million
Print newspaper viewership: 1 million max

The last number is a guesstimate for the number of people who will see Donald Trump’s statement announcing that he’s had a change of heart about ordering the US military to torture prisoners. If anything, it’s generous. A printed statement just isn’t going to make the rounds much. Nor is it going to be a big deal on social media, especially among the Trump demographic.

So here’s what you get:

When Bret Baier asks Trump what would happen if the military refuses his order to torture prisoners, 20 million people hear and see him say, “They won’t refuse….I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
The next day, 2-3 million people read (or hear a network anchor recite) a bloodless statement that says, “I do, however, understand that the United States is bound by laws and treaties and I will not order our military or other officials to violate those laws and will seek their advice on such matters.”

The arithmetic here is pretty simple. There are at least 17 million people who hear Trump insist that he’s going to torture “these animals over in the Middle East” and never see the retraction. For Trump, this is a double win. His base continues to think he’s a tough guy. Elites breathe a small sigh of relief and figure that maybe this means Trump will calm down and listen to his advisors if he wins the presidency.

The exact numbers can vary, but the basic math plays out the same way all the time. Politicians have learned that they can lie without consequence. They tell the lie on television, where lots of people see it, and then count on virtually nobody seeing the earnest fact checks the next day.

Among younger voters, you probably have to factor in social media as well. But you also have to factor in the well-known evidence that fact checks rarely change anyone’s mind. Welcome to 21st century America.

UPDATE: There’s another piece of this that’s worth mentioning. Trump’s retraction was given to the Wall Street Journal, so naturally they’re playing it big on their front page. But I just checked USA Today, Fox, MSNBC, the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and none of them have so much as mentioned this on their home pages. This is not a coincidence. They hate having to acknowledge a competitor, and that causes them to downplay the news.

The one exception is CNN, which has plastered it at the top of their home page and mentioned it repeatedly on air. I don’t quite know why they’re the exception.

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Three Numbers That Explain the Modern Political Ecosystem

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14 debate questions for Sanders and Clinton on climate, justice, and Flint

by MilfordEdgell Posted on March 4, 2016

14 debate questions for Sanders and Clinton on climate, justice, and Flint

By on 4 Mar 2016commentsShare

It’s not that expectations were very high for the Republican debate in Detroit on Thursday night. Even so, the debate hardly paid attention to the city’s troubles with lead poisoning. Aside for brief comments from Marco Rubio (in which he defended Republican Gov. Rick Snyder), the GOP brushed the issue aside, while standing a mere 70 miles from Flint. Instead, we heard about more pressing topics — like presidential penises.

Democrats have their own debate in Flint on Sunday, when environmental justice activists have higher hopes for a substantive discussion on both race and the environment.

“If Flint is not the place that this happens, it probably is not going to happen in a controlled format with two presidential candidates, ever,” Anthony Rogers-Wright, policy and organizing director of Environmental Action, told Grist.

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A coalition of groups partnering with Environmental Action delivered a petition with 85,000 signatures that calls on the Democratic National Committee to focus solely on racial and environmental justice. Sierra Club, the NAACP, and local community leaders are holding their own event Sunday to draw attention to other “Flints” around the country.

Both Environmental Action and Sierra Club gave Grist separate lists of sample questions they’d like to hear answers to — the topics include hydraulic fracturing, the future of fossil fuels, and equitable policy to help communities of color.

Here’s what Environmental Action wants answers on:

1. Robert Bullard, known as the “father” of environmental justice in America, has said that climate change impacts communities of color “first and worst.” As president, what specific steps would you take to make sure your policies to fight global warming better protect communities of color on the front lines of this global crisis?

2. Secretary Clinton, you just released a bulletin that calls for more use of natural gas as well as carbon capture and sequestration. But wouldn’t this plan mean increased fracking across the country and the potential for drinking water sources to be tainted as it is right here in Flint? Is there a safe way to frack, and if so, what steps would you take to ensure safety and minimize disproportionate impacts to communities of color?

3. Last December, nearly 200 world leaders signed an agreement you both support to cap global warming at 1.5-2 degrees Celsius. To accomplish that goal, scientists tell us we must leave 80 percent of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground. As president, what specific policies would you implement to limit new oil, gas, and coal development and keep America under this “carbon budget”? Secretary Clinton, will you support Sen. Sanders’ plan to ban drilling and mining on public lands and waters, the so-called “Keep It In The Ground” act?

4. Sen. Sanders, how will you enforce a ban on fossil fuel extraction without the support of Congress — which has voted in favor of the Keystone pipeline, oil exports, gas exports, and other fossil fuel extraction in the last six months?

5. Solutions to climate change such as electric cars and efficient lightbulbs are predicated on economic resources that are unavailable to many low-wealth communities of color. What climate change strategies would each of you implement to ensure that people of all income levels can take part in and benefit from living sustainably?

6. Policies like President Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 12898, created to address environmental racism, have been never been ratified or implemented as a national law. If elected, how would you overcome political obstacles that stand in the way of equitable and efficient environmental policy?

7. Secretary Clinton, your past statements, referring to men of color as “super-predators,” and past polices that you supported that resulted in the mass incarceration of largely Latino and African American [men] have caused some to question your commitment to racial justice. Do you regret your previous statement and support of that policy, and how would you correct it as president?

8. The GI Bill, New Deal, and favorable housing policies created generational wealth for white Americans. These programs were largely not made available to people of color, which in part contributes to the vast wealth disparity between white people and people of color. What are some specific policies you would implement to not only increase incomes for people of color, but also allow them to generate similar generational wealth as their white counterparts?

9. Native Americans who live on sovereign land have seen treaties broken time and time again, which has exposed them to toxic air and water as well as unequal protection and due process. As president, what commitment will you make to ensure tribal sovereignty and that treaties are respected and maintained?

10. Free trade agreements like NAFTA have not only contributed to increased carbon emissions, but they have also had significant impacts on jobs in communities like Flint, Detroit, Cleveland, and others. Some studies have shown that communities of color were hit the hardest from jobs shipped overseas as a result of these agreements. Where do each of you stand on free trade agreements, and if you advocate for them, how will you ensure they have environmental standards and do not result in the loss of American jobs essential to maintaining the middle class?

11. Should immigration enforcement should be suspended until the 1,000+ undocumented people in Flint get the services and help they need, should the Border Patrol should continue setting up in and around the city while this crisis is ongoing?

Sierra Club added three questions of its own that its members on the ground in Michigan want answered:

12. Do you think emergency manager laws, like the one in Michigan, are compatible with democratic ideals?

13. How should the government ensure that rebuilding after a disaster like Flint provides good paying local jobs that help lift up the community?

14. How should the federal government get involved when a crisis like Flint occurs?

Hold out some hope that CNN, which is moderating the debate, is listening. Rogers-Wright spoke to a network representative earlier this week about the questions the network should ask on Sunday, so a couple of these may indeed get prime-time attention.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders hopefully won’t need too much prompting, though: Ahead of Michigan’s primary next week, Clinton has drawn attention to Flint’s problems as a main focus of her campaign, and Sanders has also called on Snyder to resign.

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14 debate questions for Sanders and Clinton on climate, justice, and Flint

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I Will Be Live-Blogging Tonight’s Republican Debate

by ElliottRundle Posted on March 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Republican presidential candidates are holding yet another debate tonight. However, there’s a silver lining: this time around, the moderators can ignore Ben Carson without feeling guilty about it.

Anyway, it’s in Detroit, and it will be aired on Fox at 9 p.m. Eastern. Join me here for real-time comment, fact-checking, and all-around mockery.

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I Will Be Live-Blogging Tonight’s Republican Debate

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Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else

by ElbaKuester Posted on January 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Marcy Wheeler comments today on the lead disaster in Flint: “Think about how effects of lead poisoning feeds the stereotypes about race and class used to disdain the poor.”

Yep. Lead poisoning is equally bad for everyone, but certain groups were far more exposed to lead poisoning than others. Here’s a chart showing the percentage of children who displayed elevated blood lead levels over the past four decades. The data is taken from various studies over the years that have reported data from the CDC’s long-running NHANES program:

All the rest of the data on lead poisoning is exactly what you’d expect. Not only is it higher among blacks than whites, but it’s higher in inner cities and it’s higher among low-income families. And of course, this is on top of all the social problems these kids already have from being black, poor, and living in rundown neighborhoods.

Needless to say, lead didn’t cause institutional racism. But lead sure made it worse. White children were severely affected by the postwar lead epidemic, but it produced nothing less than carnage among black kids. Before we finally got it under control in the late 80s, lead poisoning had created nearly an entire generation of black teenagers with lower IQs, more behavioral problems in school, and higher rates of violent behavior—which, as Wheeler says, feeds into already vicious stereotypes of African-Americans and the poor. The only good news is that as lead poisoning has declined, it’s declined in blacks more than among whites. The difference today between black and white kids is fairly modest.

But what about Flint? The big problem with lead is that it does its damage in children, and once the damage is done the brain never recovers. We’re seeing lower levels of violent crime today because most crime is committed between the ages of 17-25—and that age cohort was all born after 1990, when atmospheric lead had dropped close to zero. But the effects of lead continue to dog people in their 40s and 50s. Once it’s there, it’s there.

This is what makes Flint so scary: if elevated lead levels damage young children, they’ll be damaged forever. So how much damage was actually done? And how much damage is still being done?

Those are hard questions to answer for two reasons. First, we don’t have as much hard data as we’d like. Second, lead is a horror show. Nobody wants to say anything that quantifies the damage and runs the risk of minimizing it. Public health experts are dead serious when they say the only safe level of lead is zero. Because of this, they simply don’t want to publicly declare that any specific rise in elevated blood lead levels is…is…anything. I don’t want to say it either. It’s just bad, full stop, and it needs to be fixed.

That means I was surprised to see this in the New York Times today:

“Our kids are already rattled by every kind of toxic stress you can think of,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said….She emphasized, however, that not every child exposed to lead would suffer ill effects. Kim Dietrich, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, said that based partly on the blood lead levels of children in Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s study, he did not think serious long-term health problems would be widespread.

I’ve spoken with Dietrich, and he’s not a guy who takes the effects of lead lightly. If he says the long-term effects in Flint are likely to be modest, I’d pay attention to him.

But why would the effects be modest? Three reasons. First, lead levels in Flint were elevated for about 18 months. That’s a long time, but it’s a lot less than having elevated levels for your entire childhood up to age five. Second, the use of filters and bottled water helped reduce the lead levels in the drinking water. And that in turn means that, third, the rise in kids with blood lead levels above 10 m/d was less than one percentage point—and the rise was less than three percentage points even if you use the more conservative level of 5 m/d. As recently as 2008, the levels seen during the Flint water crisis would have been cause for celebration.

And what about now? Data here is frustratingly hard to get. Marc Edwards, the water-treatment expert who first blew the whistle on Flint’s water supply, says that (a) Flint’s pipes are probably back in satisfactory shape now that water has been coming from Detroit for the past three months and is being properly treated, (b) the water is “much, much better than it was last August,” and (c) there’s a 50-50 chance it could even pass a full-bore federal testing regime. Beyond that, preliminary state data suggests that blood lead levels in children are now down to about where they were before the water crisis. That’s good news, but it’s tentative.

More recently, the US Public Health Service announced that 26 out of 4,000 water samples in Flint had lead levels above 150 parts per billion. This is important because above that level it’s possible that filters won’t work effectively. But it doesn’t really tell us much about current lead levels in Flint’s water. We can say that 99.4 percent of homes have levels below 150 ppb and are probably safe if the water is filtered. But how many are below the EPA “action level” of 15 ppb? And what’s the “90th percentile” lead level, the standard way of measuring lead in tap water? We don’t know any of that, even though 4,000 samples is enough to give us a pretty good idea. Overall, Flint’s water is obviously much improved, but it’s hard to say precisely how good or bad it still is.

Put this all together and what do we get? Several educated guesses:

At a public services level, the Flint water crisis was an unbelievable fiasco.
The long-term damage to Flint’s kids is very real, but probably not catastrophic.
The water today appears to be safe in nearly all homes that use a filter.
However, there are also a small number of homes with astronomical lead levels in their water. It’s unclear why, but these homes need to be the target of immediate crash remediation.

If anything positive comes out of the Flint debacle, it will be a better understanding of the dangers of lead. Ironically, though, it’s not lead pipes that are really the biggest problem nationwide. Thousands of towns and cities have old lead pipes, and they generally don’t cause any problems except when some bonehead decides to stop treating the water properly and the scale inside the pipes corrodes away. Rather, the biggest problems now are lead paint and lead in soil. Everyone knows about lead paint, and abatement programs are widely available. But lead in soil, the product of decades of leaded gasoline settling to the ground, just sits around forever and gets kicked back into the air every summer when the soil dries up. It remains a serious problem, and not surprisingly, it’s most serious in heavily black, urban neighborhoods that had the highest levels of lead poisoning in the first place. You can read more about this in my piece about lead and crime (scroll to the bottom) or in this recent Vox piece by Matt Yglesias specifically about lead in soil.

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Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else

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What Flint’s Dirty Water and Detroit’s Angry Teachers Have in Common

by TawnyaSherwood Posted on January 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Michigan is having a rough year, to put it mildly. Flint is reeling from the news that its water supply was contaminated with lead for 17 months. In Detroit, teacher “sick-outs” have been shutting down schools; 88 of the city’s 104 schools were closed on January 21. These two seemingly unrelated episodes are joined by a common policy: Both Detroit’s school system and Flint’s water system have been under the control of emergency managers, unelected officials who are empowered to make sweeping decisions and override local policies in the name of balancing budgets.

What’s an emergency manager? Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was elected in 2010 on a platform of fiscal austerity. Snyder, the former head of Gateway computers and a darling of the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, promised to run the state like a company, complete with “outcomes” and “deliverables.” In 2011, he introduced a signature piece of legislation, Public Act 4, which expanded the state’s authority to take over financially troubled cities and school districts. Similar laws exist in about 20 states, but Michigan’s is the most expansive: Emergency managers picked by the governor have the power to renegotiate or cancel city contracts, unilaterally draft policy, privatize public services, sell off city property, and even fire elected officials.

Since 2011, 17 municipalities or school districts in Michigan have been assigned emergency managers. The majority of them are in poor, predominantly African-American communities that have been hit hard by depressed economies and shrinking populations. Some EMs have worked with communities to generate local buy-in, but their outsider status, lack of accountability, and propensity for cutting public services to save money have generated harsh criticism. As Michael Steinberg, the legal director for the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said a recent statement, “Flint is Exhibit A for what happens when a state suspends democracy and installs unaccountable bean counters to run a city.”

So what does this have to do with Flint? Flint was one of the the first cities to be assigned an emergency manager, in 2011; it would have four EMs in as many years. In 2013, its city council voted to build a pipeline to Lake Huron that would free the city of its dependence on Detroit’s water system by 2017. Ed Kurtz, the then-emergency manager, signed off on the plan, and the question became where Flint would source its water in the intervening years. According to a recent Daily Beast investigation, Kurtz rejected the idea of using Flint River water based on conversations with Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality. Longtime Flint residents were also skeptical of the idea: General Motors, which calls Flint home, had used the river as a dumping ground for years.

Yet in 2014, under emergency manager Darnell Earley, the city switched water sources to the Flint River. It remains unclear what led authorities to believe that Flint River water was safe to drink; Earley maintains the decision was supported in a vote by the city council, though there is no record of such a vote. Howard Croft, the former director of public works for Flint, told the ACLU that the decision was financial, had been reviewed by state authorities, and went “all the way to the governor’s office.”

In March of 2015, after months of residents reporting unusual health symptoms and foul-smelling, tainted water coming from their taps, the Flint City Council voted to “do all things necessary” to switch back to Detroit’s water system. Then-acting emergency manager Jerry Ambrose nixed the vote, calling it “incomprehensible.”

And what about Detroit? For the past few weeks, Detroit teachers have been protesting with coordinated sick days that have caused dozens of temporary school closures. The sick-outs, the teachers say, are in response to disgraceful school conditions, from black mold and dead rodents in classrooms to class sizes of more than 40 students.

The Detroit Public School system has been under the authority of an emergency manager since 2009, when the beleaguered system of roughly 100,000 students was mired in debt. Today, after six years under four emergency managers, the number of students has shrunk by about 50 percent while the system’s debt has ballooned to $515 million. It risks going bankrupt by April. Over the past five years, every public school employee has taken a 10 percent wage cut.

“Emergency management is not working,” Ivy Bailey, the president of Detroit Federation of Teachers, told CNN. “If the goal was to destroy DPS, emergency management has done an excellent job.”

Governor Snyder’s latest pick for DPS emergency manager was Darnell Earley, the same official who oversaw Flint’s transition to corrosive river water. On January 21, the day 88 schools were shut down, the school system filed a restraining order against the protesting teachers meant to stop them from calling in sick. The motion was denied. On January 23, Earley posted new rules requiring teachers to submit a written report to him if they learn about their fellow employees organizing a strike. “Failure to immediately comply with this order may be grounds for discipline up to and including termination,” the rules read. Earley’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

What’s next for Michigan’s emergency managers?

There are currently no Michigan cities with emergency managers, though three school districts still them. But they remain unpopular with many Michiganders. Democratic legislators say they will introduce a bill to repeal the EM law. Voters already overturned the EM law in a November 2012 referendum, but a month later, the Republican-led state legislature passed a nearly identical law attached to an appropriations bill that is immune to voter referendum.

“Appointing an emergency manager is the last thing I ever want to do,” wrote Snyder in a 2012 blog post entitled “Why Michigan Needs Its Emergency Manager Law,” written just before the voter referendum. “But if worse comes to worse, the state has a responsibility to protect the health, welfare and safety of its citizens. We can’t stand by and watch schools fail, water shut off, or police protection disappear.”

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What Flint’s Dirty Water and Detroit’s Angry Teachers Have in Common

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Meet 5 Everyday Heroes of Flint’s Water Crisis

by CyrusZkeafejh Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Long before Flint’s water crisis made national headlines, there were plenty of people raising hell about the tainted water or working to lessen its burden in this impoverished, majority-black city of nearly 100,000 people.

Also read:
1. Meet the mom who helped expose Flint’s toxic water nightmare
2. A toxic timeline of Flint’s water fiasco

The saga began in April 2014, when the city’s water source was switched from Detroit’s water system (whose source is Lake Huron) to the Flint River. For more than a year, government officials assured residents their water was safe, despite evidence to the contrary. After more than a year, state leaders finally conceded that the city had a serious public health crisis, and in October 2015 Gov. Rick Snyder announced that Flint would go back to using Detroit’s water.

Now, as Flint residents fret about potential long-term effects of lead—especially on the thousands of young children exposed—accusations are flying over who knew what, and when. But let’s not forget the heroes of Flint, those who donated time and money and muscle to assist others—not to mention the residents, researchers, and even one “rogue” EPA employee who helped bring the crisis to the world’s attention. Here are five notables.

William Archie/Detroit Free Press/ZUMA

The mom: In the summer of 2014, LeeAnne Walters, a stay-at-home mother of four, saw firsthand the effects of the state’s decision to switch water sources, as her toddlers developed weird rashes and family members’ hair fell out. Over the next few months, she joined a cavalcade of Flint residents complaining to city leaders of foul-smelling brown tap water and health effects ranging from hair loss to vision and memory problems. Lots of people protested, but Walters also raised hell with the Environmental Protection Agency, leading health researchers to investigate further. “Without her, we would be nowhere,” says Mona Hanna-Attisha, a local doctor (see below). To read more about Walters’ personal battle, click here.

Jake May/The Flint Journal-MLive.com/AP

The pastor: Though he was hardly the only church leader offering aid in the middle of Flint’s man-made disaster, Pastor Bobby Jackson has been distributing clean water to locals since September 2014. Jackson, who runs an independent homeless shelter called Mission of Hope, stores donated bottled water at five sites in his Flint hometown, and his volunteers estimate they distribute to at least 200 families daily. “We’re looking at maybe a couple of years before we drink tap water again,” Jackson told ThinkProgress. “We want to make sure that we can do the best we can until help arrives.”

Screenshot: ABC News

The EPA guy: In February 2015, Miguel Del Toral, a manager for the EPA’s Midwest water division, received a call from LeeAnne Walters (see above). Scouring city documents, Walters noticed the city wasn’t treating its water with standard corrosion control chemicals used to prevent old pipes from leaching lead into the water. Del Toral confirmed her suspicions and relayed his concerns to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. The next month, he visited Walters’ house to collect samples. In a June memo later leaked to the American Civil Liberties Union, Del Toral warned his bosses that the Flint River water had not been properly treated, and he called the lack of corrosion controls “a major concern.” (EPA division chief Susan Hedman, who dismissed Del Toral’s report as premature, would later resign.) But it wasn’t until after much bureaucratic wrangling that the state admitted it had made a mistake. “I never imagined that this would happen in the first place,” Del Toral told ABC News.

HashtagFlint/YouTube

The prof: Last spring, Marc Edwards, a professor of environmental engineering at Virginia Tech University and a former MacArthur Foundation genius grant recipient, also got a call from Walters, courtesy of the EPA’s Del Toral. More than a decade earlier, Edwards had helped uncover lead in Washington, DC, drinking water and corroded pipes in its sewer system. But after testing Walters’ water, Edwards was “shocked” to discover lead levels more than twice what the EPA qualified as hazardous waste. Accompanied by a team of student researchers, Edwards traveled to Flint and conducted more tests, shelling out $150,000 of his own money. His results, released in September, were key: He determined that Flint’s tap water was 19 times more corrosive than Detroit’s—Flint’s original source—and estimated that one in six Flint households had lead exposure levels higher than the threshold required for the EPA to take official action.

Ryan Garza/Detroit Free Press/ZUMA

The doctor: Last August, after hearing rumors of lead contamination in the water, Mona Hanna-Attisha, head of the pediatric residency program at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, began looking at the blood lead levels of children in Flint before and after the city switched its supply from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River. As a control, she looked at children who lived elsewhere in Genesee County. It turned out the rate of elevated lead concentrations in the blood of Flint kids under five years old had doubled—and in some areas, tripled—since the switchover. When Hanna-Attisha released her findings, state officials dismissed the results as “unfortunate,” and that was tough to take—”How can you not second-guess yourself?” she told the New York Times. But within a month, the state changed its tune. Gov. Snyder has since praised her efforts.

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Meet 5 Everyday Heroes of Flint’s Water Crisis

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Should Bernie Sanders Support Reparations?

by OlenMcgehee Posted on January 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, someone asked Bernie Sanders if he supported the payment of reparations to African-Americans. He said he didn’t—and then, as with every other subject he’s asked about, used it as a springboard to talk about the “real issue” of poverty and income inequality. Ta-Nehisi Coates was pretty unimpressed:

Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is “nil,” a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform….Sanders is a lot of things, many of them good. But he is not the candidate of moderation and unification, so much as the candidate of partisanship and radicalism….Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy.

Coates is unhappy that Sanders is so reticent about reparations, but this strikes me as an odd criticism. A couple of years ago Coates famously wrote an Atlantic article titled “The Case for Reparations,” and after reading it I concluded that he was reticent about reparations too. He certainly made the case that black labor and wealth had been plundered by whites for centuries—something that few people deny anymore—but when it came time to talk about concrete restitution for this, he tap danced gingerly. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”

….Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued…$34 billion….Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.

….Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely….What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

If you say “reparations,” an ordinary person will almost certainly understand it in a very specific way: A disbursement of money to blacks to atone for slavery and its aftermath. But despite the provocative title of his piece, Coates never squarely endorses this. Instead, he suggests we pass a bill that would study slavery. He writes approvingly of Ogletree’s proposal for job training and public works. And he wants a “full acceptance” of our past along with a “national reckoning” about its consequences.

I’m not being coy when I say that after I read this, I couldn’t tell whether or not Coates supported reparations in the sense that most people understand them. And since I’m sure that’s the sense in which Bernie Sanders was answering the question, I’m not quite sure what Coates is criticizing here. To my ear, Sanders sounded a lot like Ogletree, who Coates seems to have no problem with. So what’s his problem with Sanders?

POSTSCRIPT: Since someone is bound to ask, I don’t support reparations myself because I don’t think they would do any good. But maybe I’m wrong. I can be convinced otherwise.

And if I am wrong, I’ve never thought that practical considerations are an insurmountable obstacle. A simple solution is to try to roughly equalize black and white net worth, which would require payment of about $50,000 to every black person in the country. That would be expensive but affordable over a course of 10 or 20 years. Nor would the supposedly sticky subject of “who’s black?” be all that difficult. About 95 percent of the cases would be easy, and the rest would go to an arbitration panel of some kind. The arbitration might be messy, but it would hardly be the first time we’ve done something like this.

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Should Bernie Sanders Support Reparations?

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Are Conservatives Really Going All-In on Ben Carson?

by CarrieGottshall Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Wow. I gather that conservatives are making a big U-turn on Ben Carson. This morning most of them were wringing their hands over Carson’s deception about being accepted at West Point. Now they’re defending him and blaming the whole thing on Politico and its typical liberal media hatred of conservatives. Their basic defense seems to be that Carson never said he “applied” to West Point, or even that he was “accepted” at West Point. All he said is that he was offered a scholarship to go there.

Well, here’s what he said in August:

I was the highest student ROTC member in Detroit and was thrilled to get an offer from West Point. But I knew medicine is what I wanted to do.

Come on, folks. “An offer from West Point” is the same as “being accepted at West Point.” It’s obvious what he was saying here, and it’s equally obvious it isn’t true. Here is Carson’s defense:

In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Carson said: “I don’t remember all the specific details. Because I had done so extraordinarily well you know I was told that someone like me — they could get a scholarship to West Point. But I made it clear I was going to pursue a career in medicine.”

“It was, you know, an informal ‘with a record like yours we could easily get you a scholarship to West Point.’”

That might have happened—though no one would have used the word “scholarship” since West Point is free to begin with. But for the past two decades it’s not what Carson has said. It’s not even close. There’s a world of difference between (a) someone telling you that you could probably get into West Point and (b) actually getting into West Point.

Carson is a nutcase, a policy buffoon, and at the very least, a serial personal embellisher. With a guy like that, you just know more stuff is going to come out. Conservatives should quit while they’re behind and dump the guy. If they stick with him, eventually he’s going to make them all look like dopes.

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Are Conservatives Really Going All-In on Ben Carson?

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