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In West Virginia, even prison can’t keep a notorious coal baron out of politics

by TommasoBagan16 Posted on May 5, 2016

In West Virginia, even prison can’t keep a notorious coal baron out of politics

By on May 5, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As CEO of Massey Energy, central Appalachia’s largest coal producer, Don Blankenship towered over West Virginia politics for more than a decade by spending millions to bolster Republican candidates and causes. That chapter came to an end in April, when Blankenship was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiring to commit mine safety violations in the period leading up to the deadly 2010 explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine. But even in absentia, he casts a long shadow over state politics. For evidence, look no further than the contentious Democratic primary for governor.

The campaign pits Jim Justice, a billionaire coal operator and high school basketball coach, against two opponents — state Senate Minority Leader Jeff Kessler, and Booth Goodwin, the former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Blankenship. Justice holds a double-digit lead in the polls and (not unlike another billionaire running for office this year) is spending much of his time arguing that his 10-figure net worth will insulate him from special interests. But when he was asked about the Blankenship conviction at a campaign stop earlier this month, he ripped into Goodwin for what he considered to be a sloppy, opportunistic prosecution.

“I think we spent an ungodly amount of money within our state to probably keep Booth Goodwin in the limelight and end up with a misdemeanor charge,” Justice told WOAY TV. “If that’s all we are going to end up with, why did we spend that much money to do that?”

Blankenship originally faced up to 30 years for making false statements to federal regulators, but he was convicted on only the least serious of three counts — the misdemeanor conspiracy charge. In Goodwin’s view (and in the minds of plenty of Blankenship’s critics), his light sentence is the product of weak mine safety laws, not lax prosecution. As he told the Charleston Gazette-Mail, “It is not our fault that violating laws designed to protect workers is punished less harshly than violations of laws designed to protect Wall Street.” (Nor was the Blankenship case a one-time gimmick — prior to that trial, Goodwin also secured the convictions of a handful of Blankenship’s subordinates at Massey.)

Goodwin fired back at Justice in a fundraising email to supporters. He referred to Blankenship as Justice’s “good friend,” alleging that Justice “took him as his personal guest to the 2012 Kentucky Derby two years after the horrific Upper Big Branch mine explosion,” and that he attended a gala that night with Blankenship, hosted by then-Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, “while the families of the UBB miners who were killed were still suffering their loss.” (A Beshear spokesperson told the Louisville Courier-Journal at the time that Blankenship attended Derby Day events as Justice’s guest, which Justice’s campaign denies.) For good measure, he noted that Justice, like Blankenship, had racked up a huge tab of mine safety violation fines, some $2 million of which had gone unpaid and were considered “delinquent” prior to the start of the campaign. (Justice began paying off the fines after an NPR investigation made the total bill public.)

On Monday, Goodwin’s campaign went after Justice again, releasing an ad based on the front-runner’s remarks about the Blankenship prosecution. In the spot, Judy Jones Petersen, the sister of a miner who died at UBB, speaks straight to the camera and suggests that the two coal operators have more in common than Justice would like to admit.

“I don’t really understand why Mr. Justice would step out against the integrity of this incredible prosecution team,” Petersen says. “He of all people as a coal mining operator should understand the plight of coal miners, but I think that unfortunately the plight that he understands best is the plight of Don Blankenship.”

She goes on to call Goodwin a “hero” for prosecuting Blankenship.

Justice, for his part, is running his own ad — touting an endorsement from the United Mine Workers praising him for his record on safety and job creation. The union’s president, Cecil Roberts, previously called the UBB disaster “industrial homicide,” and fought Blankenship over mine safety and workers’ rights for three decades. His message is a not-too-subtle contrast with Blankenship and Massey: “Jim is one of the good coal operators.”

Don’t expect Blankenship’s shadow to shrink as the race heats up. The Democratic primary is set for May 10 — two days before the notorious coal boss reports to federal prison.

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In West Virginia, even prison can’t keep a notorious coal baron out of politics

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Republicans Have a Tough Six Months Ahead of Them

by HarlanBaltzell4 Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Every living Republican president has decided not to endorse Donald Trump:

Bush 41, who enthusiastically endorsed every Republican nominee for the last five election cycles, will stay out of the campaign process this time. He does not have plans to endorse presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, spokesman Jim McGrath told The Texas Tribune.

….Bush 43, meanwhile, “does not plan to participate in or comment on the presidential campaign,” according to his personal aide, Freddy Ford.

I agree that Republicans partly brought Trump on themselves. But only partly. They were hoping for an ideological extremist, and before this year it wasn’t obvious either to them or to liberal critics that they might instead get a demagogic populist extremist. All of us assumed that eventually Republicans would nominate a hardcore conservative, and we were all taken by surprise when Trump stepped in instead.

So the truth is that I feel sorry for them. A lot of conservatives have an agonizing choice to make now: either support Trump or, effectively, support Hillary Clinton, a candidate they loathe. If I had a similar choice—say, between supporting a liberal Trump or supporting Ted Cruz—what would I do? I’d like to think I’d bite the bullet and support Cruz. But honestly? I don’t know. Serious Republicans have a helluva rough six months ahead of them.

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Republicans Have a Tough Six Months Ahead of Them

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Charles Koch finds a lot of things scary — except climate change

by DerickJWCV Posted on May 2, 2016

Politics

Charles Koch finds a lot of things scary — except climate change

By on May 2, 2016Share

Charles Koch finds plenty of things scary. He’s alarmed by “rampant cronyism” in government (a phrase he’s used to veil his jabs at renewable energy) and by what President Obama’s reelection did to the American Dream. He is afraid for what the 2016 election holds in store and believes collectivist thinking will doom us. What the Koch Industries CEO doesn’t find alarming, however, is that humans are causing the planet to burn up.

In a recent interview with ABC News’ Powerhouse Politics podcast, Koch diminishes the impacts of our warming planet. He muses about our fate in a segment flagged by the liberal super PAC American Bridge:

Is the climate changing due to CO2 in a way that’s going to be catastrophic and unmanageable? Or is it changing in a mild and manageable way? I believe the evidence is overwhelming that it’s changing in a mild and manageable way.

These policies that are being introduced in the United States, as a matter of fact, under their own models would have virtually zero impact on the future temperature or other aspects of the climate. And in fact I think they make matters worse, because they get people going after the subsidies rather than innovating.

If this line of thinking sounds familiar, it’s because climate-denying politicians and others in the Koch-funded universe have all used similar talking points. It’s more clever than outright denying that carbon pollution is warming the planet – a fact Koch admits is true.

But Koch adds a key qualifier: Human activity, he says, has “contributed to much less than what [scientific] models projecting catastrophe show.” It’s foolish, he continues, to push policies that “are making people’s lives worse. They’re raising the cost of energy for no benefit and guess who suffers the most – the poorest people used three times the energy as a percentage of income than the average American.”

Never mind that utilities, corporations, and households are increasingly turning toward renewables in order to shave energy costs — alternative energy meets Koch’s criteria of “making people’s lives worse.”

It’s a modification of Koch’s past arguments on climate change, which have ranged from doubting scientific consensus to suggesting the warming will be good for us. With awareness of climate change back on the rise in the United States, it only makes sense that Koch is trying out another message.

The talking points might shuffle, but they serve the same purpose: delay. And like many arguments that came before it, this one is full of problems. Koch ignores that the poor in the United States and around the world are on the front lines of climate change, and are likely to be hardest hit by even the slightest changes in global averages. Indeed, they have already started to feel some dramatic consequences at an average 1-degree warming. Left unchecked, the planet is in for well over 4-degree C warming by the end of the century.

From his corporate headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, the 80-year-old billionaire has little reason to be fearful of climate change.

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Charles Koch finds a lot of things scary — except climate change

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Science Says This Centuries-Old Discovery Will Save the Planet

by AnnetteGalindo Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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The United States leads the world in the number of electric vehicles on the road, but the count is still tiny: about 350,000. That’s less than 1 percent of all passenger cars and trucks in the country. Recent market research suggests that number will climb steadily over the next several decades. But will it climb fast enough? When it comes to fighting climate change, that could turn out to be one of the most important questions of the next few years.

On April 22, world leaders gathered in New York City to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change, in which they vowed to keep global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a limit the world is already more than halfway toward exceeding. Meanwhile, energy experts have begun to map out the fine-grain details of what meeting that goal would actually require. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that electric vehicles have a indispensable role to play.

It turns out that one of the most immediate societal changes for average Americans in a climate-savvy future would likely be the electrification of just about everything. In other words, the hope of the planet could like in a force—electricity—we’ve known about for hundreds of years.

That might sound strange, given that electricity production is the number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Coal- and gas-burning power plants are still our main sources of electricity, and in some parts of the country the power grid is so dirty that electric vehicles might actually cause more pollution than traditional gas-guzzlers.

But thanks to the explosive growth of solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies, electricity is getting cleaner all the time. Over the last decade, the share of total US electricity production from renewables (including hydroelectric dams) rose from about 9.5 percent to more than 14 percent, with year-to-year growth getting faster all the time. So there’s a good case to be made for phasing out the other types of fossil fuel use in our daily lives—particularly gasoline for cars and oil and gas for heating buildings. We should be using electricity instead—even if that means using more electricity overall.

That’s a key finding of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, an international consortium of energy researchers that produced a detailed technical study of how to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2050—the change necessary if Americans hope to do their part to stay within the two-degree limit. The report found that it’s technically possible for the US to meet that target, at an annual cost of about 1 percent of GDP, without sacrificing any “energy services.” That is, the report assumes we’ll still drive and have houses and operate factories the same as we do today. But to do so will require a major boost in electrification—which will in turn require that the US produce about twice as much electricity as it currently does—while reducing the carbon emissions per unit of energy down to just 3 to 10 percent of their current levels. In other words, at the same time we’re electrifying everything, we need to continue to clean up the electric grid and double down on energy efficiency, especially in buildings.

“You can’t get to a level of emissions that’s compatible with 2C or less unless you do all three of those things,” said Jim Williams, one of the report’s lead authors and chief scientist at the private research firm Energy and Environmental Economics.

We get energy from fossil fuels in two basic ways: Either burning it in a power plant to create electricity that gets used elsewhere, or by burning it directly where it’s needed—i.e., your car’s internal combustion engine or a gas-fueled stove. Williams’ basic idea—which has also been advanced by other leading energy economists, particularly Stanford’s Mark Jacobson—is to axe that second category as much as possible, while simultaneously “decarbonizing” the electric grid by replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and other renewables.

Williams’ model doesn’t assume that all fossil fuel consumption goes completely to zero. A small portion of electricity could still come from natural gas plants; some oil and gas could still be used for manufacturing and industrial purposes; and airplanes, freight trains, and ocean liners may still rely mainly on petroleum. But by the middle of the century, the total “budget” for fossil fuels will become so small that they need to be limited only to uses that are absolutely unavoidable. Everything that can run on electricity needs to do so. Cars and buildings are low-hanging fruit. And despite gradual fuel efficiency improvements in cars over the last few decades, Williams said, there’s ultimately no way to make an oil-burning internal combustion car engine efficient enough to fit in the tiny fossil fuel “budget.”

“At some point you can’t continue to do direct combustion of fossil fuels, even if it’s efficient,” he said. “There is a point where you have to get out of direct fossil fuel combustion to the maximum extent.”

Ending direct combustion of fossil fuels would take a massive bite out of greenhouse gas emissions: Put together, buildings, transportation, and industrial uses account for more than half of the country’s carbon footprint.

In practical terms, the most important element of that transition would be bringing electric vehicles off the sidelines and into the mainstream. The charts below, from the report, illustrate what that transformation would look like. It’s important to note that these charts are not a projection of what the authors think will happen, but rather a prescription for what they think should happen. In the left chart, you can see that starting in the mid-2020s, sales of gas-powered cars (blue) fall off dramatically in favor of hybrids (red) and fully electric vehicles (gold). On the right, you see that by the mid-2030s, there are more electric cars and hybrids on the road than gas-powered cars:

DDPP

At the same time as this transformation is happening on the road, your gas stove will be swapped for an electric one; ditto the gas furnace in your basement. Gas stations will close and be replaced by charging stations. Machinery in factories that uses oil and gas will be largely replaced with electric equipment. Your propane or charcoal grill could be replaced by a George Foreman…you get the idea.

These are big shifts, but Williams said they probably won’t actually be very noticeable to most people. How much do you really know about what’s under your hood? Would you really notice if your basement held an electric heat pump instead of a gas furnace?

“The carbon aspect is in the guts of it that people don’t really look at,” he said. “The good news is that even if we continue to live like we’re living, we have the technology, we have what it takes to quit emitting so much CO2 to the atmosphere.”

Still, we’re not yet on pace to meet the goals laid out in the DDPP report. In a recent market forecast from Bloomberg New Energy Finance of global electric vehicle sales—a realistic picture of what the future actually holds, given current policies—global sales of electric and hybrid vehicles in 2040 are still only 35 percent of total car sales, instead of close to 100 percent in Williams’ model.

How do we get on track? Williams argues that policymakers need to start spending less energy worrying about fuel efficiency for oil-powered cars and focus instead on speeding up the transition to electric vehicles. That’s something the Obama administration has only scratched the surface of, so it could be an area of focus for the next president. Power grid operators, too, need to start planning for a future in which there could be major demand for electricity in sectors (i.e., electric cars, home heating, etc.) that are small now.

“We’re not used to having a whole lot of our electricity being used by sectors that currently don’t exist,” Williams said. “We need to already be thinking about that. If we don’t start planning now, we’ll run into dead ends.”

Have more questions about electricity? We’ve got your answers in this special podcast episode with our engagement editor Ben Dreyfuss:

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Science Says This Centuries-Old Discovery Will Save the Planet

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3 Green Energy Bars You Can Feel Good About

by JonnieMckinney Posted on May 2, 2016

Lets be honestnot all of us love spending hours in the kitchen on a beautiful Sunday, preparing tasty treats to enjoy throughout the week. While you may have pinned countless tasty-looking energy bar recipes on Pinterest, your baking sheet has yet to peek its head out fromthe depths of your cupboard. But, you want to keep your environmental footprint light, even though you simply do not have the time to whip up Instagram-worthy homemade energy bars every week.

What do you do? Luckily, there are a handful of companies that exclusively use quality, real ingredients while upping the sustainability game. Check out these three good-natured energy bar brands:

ReGrained: Innovative, nutritious and sustainable, ReGrained is making food out of what is often disposed aswaste. Specifically, they harness waste from the beer brewing process in the way of spent grain. In reality, the grain is anything but spent. ReGrained recovers the high quality spent grain from local craft breweries and puts it in their energy bars. Itis still highly nutritious, beinghigh in protein (comparable withalmonds), high infiber (with three times more than oats) and low on the glycemic index.

When you think about it, spent grain seems like the perfect ingredient for an energy bar. ReGrained bars, filledwith spent grain, honey, almond, egg whites and flax, are anutritionally and sustainably unique addition tothe energy bar market.

Exo: If you haven’t heard about cricket protein bars, it’s time to hop on the wagon. Crickets are a powerhouse of nutrition and sustainability.According to Exo, cricket flour has two times more protein content than beef, 2.2 times more iron than spinach and produces 100 times less greenhouse gases than cows. Crickets also take only one gallon of water to produce one pound of crickets, while cows require almost 2,000 gallons to produce one pound of beef.

Exo’sbars are soy, dairy, grain and gluten-free. They area friend to both Paleo eaters as well as the environment. Each bar contains around 40 crickets. Dont worry, you cant taste or see them, the crickets are ground up into a nutty roasted flour. Satisfyingand slightly sweet, Exo bars are making crickets look and taste great.

Kits Organic (CLIF Bar): CLIF, as a company, has been on the block for a while, but you cant deny their continuingefforts in sustainability. Over the years, CLIF has reduced their packaging by 10 percent, switched to operate their trucks on biodiesel, set the barto get 50 of their supply chain facilities operating on 50 percent green energy by 2020, and are on the fast track to go completely Zero Waste at their headquarters and supply chain facilities. Even though their brand is already highly successful,CLIFis relentlesslyfocused on recycling and developing more ways totransition over to renewable energy.

The great thing about theirKits Organic barsis that they aremade entirely with whole, organic foods (like dates, walnuts, unsweetened chocolate, almonds, sea salt and vanilla beans in the Dark Chocolate+Walnut bar). Plus, its nice to see a snack at a gas station rest area that you’ll actually feel good about putting into your mouth.

While making your own bars athome can be fun and may be the most environmentally-friendly option, these three energy bar companies are really upping the ante when it comes to store-bought energy bars. Give them a try if you’re on the run, and feel good about supporting brands that have you and the planet’s best interests in mind.

Related:

What Happens When You Stop Exercising
5 Healthier Ways to Deal with Stress and Anxiety
9 Cool Apps for the Environmentally Conscious

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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3 Green Energy Bars You Can Feel Good About

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America’s Most Notorious Coal Baron Is Going to Prison. But He Still Haunts West Virginia Politics

by AdalbertoCocker Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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As CEO of Massey Energy, central Appalachia’s largest coal producer, Don Blankenship towered over West Virginia politics for more than a decade by spending millions to bolster Republican candidates and causes. That chapter came to an end in April, when Blankenship was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiring to commit mine safety violations in the period leading up to the deadly 2010 explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine. But even in absentia, he casts a long shadow over state politics. For evidence, look no further than the contentious Democratic primary for governor.

The campaign pits Jim Justice, a billionaire coal operator and high school basketball coach, against two opponents—state senator minority leader Jeff Kessler, and Booth Goodwin, the former US attorney who prosecuted Blankenship. Justice holds a double-digit lead in the polls and (not unlike another billionaire running for office this year) is spending much of his time arguing that his 10-figure net worth will insulate him from special interests. But when he was asked about the Blankenship conviction at a campaign stop earlier this month, he ripped into Goodwin for what he considered to be a sloppy, opportunistic prosecution.

“I think we spent an ungodly amount of money within our state to probably keep Booth Goodwin in the limelight and end up with a misdemeanor charge,” Justice told WOAY TV. “If that’s all we are going to end up with, why did we spend that much money to do that?”

Blankenship originally faced up to 30 years for making false statements to federal regulators, but he was only convicted on only the least serious of three counts—the misdemeanor conspiracy charge. In Goodwin’s view (and in the minds of plenty of Blankenship’s critics), his light sentence is the product of weak mine safety laws, not lax prosecution. As he told the Charleston Gazette-Mail, “It is not our fault that violating laws designed to protect workers is punished less harshly than violations of laws designed to protect Wall Street.” (Nor was the Blankenship case a one-time gimmick—prior to that trial, Goodwin also secured the convictions of a handful of Blankenship’s subordinates at Massey.)

Goodwin fired back at Justice in a fundraising email to supporters. He referred to Blankenship as Justice’s “good friend,” alleging that Justice “took him as his personal guest to the 2012 Kentucky Derby two years after the horrific UBB mine explosion,” and attended a gala that night with Blankenship hosted by then-Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, “while the families of the UBB miners who were killed were still suffering their loss.” (A Beshear spokesman told the Louisville Courier-Journal at the time that Blankenship attended Derby Day events as Justice’s guest, which Justice’s campaign denies.) For good measure he noted that Justice, like Blankenship, had racked up a huge tab of mine safety violation fines, some $2 million of which had gone unpaid and were considered “delinquent” prior to the start of the campaign. (Justice began paying off the fines after an NPR investigation made the total bill public.)

On Monday, Goodwin’s campaign went after Justice again, releasing an ad based on the front-runner’s remarks about the Blankenship prosecution. In the spot, Judy Jones Petersen, the sister of a miner who died at UBB, speaks straight to the camera and suggests that the two coal operators have more in common than Justice would like to admit.

“I don’t really understand why Mr. Justice would step out against the integrity of this incredible prosecution team,” Petersen says. “He of all people as a coal mining operator should understand the plight of coal miners, but I think that unfortunately the plight that he understands best is the plight of Don Blankenship.”

She goes on to call Goodwin a “hero” for prosecuting Blankenship.

Justice, for his part, is running his own ad—touting an endorsement from the United Mine Workers praising him for his record on safety and job creation. The union’s president, Cecil Roberts, previously called the Upper Big Branch disaster “industrial homicide,” and fought Blankenship over mine-safety and worker rights for three decades. His message is a not-too-subtle contrast with Blankenship and Massey: “Jim is one of the good coal operators.”

Don’t expect Blankenship’s shadow to shrink as the race heats up. The Democratic primary is set for May 10—two days before the notorious coal boss reports to federal prison.

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America’s Most Notorious Coal Baron Is Going to Prison. But He Still Haunts West Virginia Politics

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Wait, What’s That Noise? Cicadas, the New Batch, to Sound Siren Song in 5 States

by Myrna Posted on April 27, 2016

Everything you need to know about the insects set to ascend from the ground after 17 years and seek mates with singing that sounds like a tiny maraca. More here –  Wait, What’s That Noise? Cicadas, the New Batch, to Sound Siren Song in 5 States ; ; ;

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Wait, What’s That Noise? Cicadas, the New Batch, to Sound Siren Song in 5 States

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Earth Week Daily Action: Change 5 Light Bulbs to LEDs

by p555nf Posted on April 18, 2016

One of the simplest steps you can take during Earth Week is to change out some lightbulbs. In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends you switch out bulbs in the 5 lights you use the most. Usually, that means the lights in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom and on your porch.

Until recently, EPA mostly recommended that you shift from incandescents to compact fluorescents, or CFLS. CFLS are much more efficient than old-fashioned incandescents, but the downside is that they contain a minuscule amount of mercury. The only way this would be a problem would be if you broke one of the bulbs, and even then, vacuuming up the debris minimizes the risk (and you’re exposed to far more mercury inthe pollution that comes from coal-fired power plants).

Still, with LEDs, there’s no mercury involved. Plus LEDs last much longer than CFLs. That’s because LEDs don’t actually burn out or fail. Instead,they experience something called “lumen depreciation,” in which the amount of light produced decreases over time. Fortunately, this time period can be ten years or more. This is particularly advantageous for bulbs in hard-to-reach places like ceiling lights.

Another benefit of LEDs is that they don’t radiate heat the way incandescents or halogen bulbs do. In fact, about 90 percent of the energy an incandescent bulb uses is radiated in heat, which is one of the reasons why it’s so wasteful.

How to Buy the Right LEDs

Most lighting fixtures can easily use an LED in place of an incandescent. However, if you’re planning to use an LED in a fixture that operates on a dimmer switch, make sure to choose an LED designed specifically for dimmers.

Keep in mind you’re purchasing a bulb based on its lumens, not its watts. Most packages will give you the lumen equivalent so you can get the right amount of lighting to meet your needs. For example, if you want to replace a 60-watt incandescent, you’d buy a bulb that generates between 500 and 800 lumens and would only use 8-12 watts. Consumer Reports offers a good guide to choosing the right LED here.

You’ll also want to choose your light depending on whether you want bright light that is more like daylight, or “soft” or warm light, which is yellowish, like an incandescent.

One strong recommendation is to purchase LED bulbs and lights that are ENERGY STAR certified. ENERGY STAR sets standards to ensure that manufacturers produce products of high quality and performance, with long-term testing to evaluate the products over time and in ways that are similar to how you would use them.

Be prepared to pay a little more for LEDs upfront. The package will tell you how much money you will save on your electricity bill over timeusually it’s many times the cost of the bulb.

Some utility companies offer rebates to help their customers pay for the bulbs. Ace Hardware stores often send out coupons that discount LED purchases. If you have a home energy audit done, the auditors may install LEDs as well.

RELATED
CFL vs. LED: What’s the Best Lightbulb Type?
What to Look for When You Make the Switch to LEDs

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Earth Week Daily Action: Change 5 Light Bulbs to LEDs

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Friday Fundraising and Catblogging – 8 April 2016

by JeramyGfylqg Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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April is an important fundraising month here at Mother Jones, and my colleague David Corn—you may remember him as the guy responsible for Valerie Plame and Mitt Romney’s 47 percent snafu—wrote a pitch called “Trump, the Media, and You,” explaining how our model of reader-supported journalism allows MoJo to report on substantive issues (like actual policy proposals and digging into candidates’ pasts!) that are largely missing from this year’s election coverage. Here’s David:

IN A WORLD OF RATINGS AND CLICKS, financially pressed media outlets frequently zero in on the shining objects of the here and now. Merely covering Trump’s outrageous remarks—did you see his latest tweet?!—has become its own beat. Even the best reporting that does happen can become lost in the never-ending flood of blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and stories that appear in increasingly shorter news cycles.

At Mother Jones, we try each day to sort out what to cover—and where to concentrate our reporting in order to make a difference. Yes, we need to follow the daily twists and turns. But we recognize it’s important for journalists to get off the spinning hamster wheel and dig where others do not.

Hmmm. It kinda sounds like I’m MoJo’s resident hamster. It’s a tough job, but I guess someone has to do it. After all, with me on the hamster wheel, David and the rest of our reporters can focus their work on the in-depth, investigative journalism that might not make us rich in advertising dollars, but that voters and our democratic process desperately need.

If you’re reading this, I’d bet that you like both—coverage of the circus, and smart, probing journalism. They both matter. If you agree, I hope you’ll pitch in a couple bucks during our fundraising drive—and since we’re a nonprofit, your contributions are tax-deductible. You can give by credit card, or PayPal.

Still, hamster though I may be, we all know that Friday afternoon is reserved for cats. And I know what you’re thinking: That pod I bought last week looks lovely and comfy, but it only has room for one cat. What’s up with that?

Pshaw. There is always room for another cat. It’s the magic of cat physics, far more astounding than black holes or quantum mechanics. No matter how many cats you have, somehow you can always squeeze in one more.

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Friday Fundraising and Catblogging – 8 April 2016

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Benghazi Committee Passes 700-Day Milestone

by CharoletteBeltra Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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House Democrats pointed out today that the Select Committee on Benghazi has now been cranking along for 700 days. Steve Benen comments:

To put this in context, the 9/11 Commission, investigating every possible angle to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the country, worked for 604 days and created a bipartisan report endorsed by each of the commission’s members….Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-S.C.) Benghazi panel has also lasted longer than the investigations into the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Iran-Contra scandal, Church Committee, and the Watergate probe.

What Steve fails to acknowledge, of course, is that Benghazi is far more important than any of these other events. So naturally it’s going to take longer. I’m guessing that 914 days should just about do the trick.

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Benghazi Committee Passes 700-Day Milestone

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