Tag Archives: first-amendment

Trump’s new attorney general hates those climate change investigations

by LynneKirton Posted on November 8, 2018

Subscribe to The Beacon

President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday. Oops, sorry, Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned at Trump’s request on Wednesday. Session’s resignation letter doesn’t have a date on it, so Trump probably could have dumped this news on us at any time.

Are we surprised that he picked the day after a landmark midterm election to do it? Hell no! Here’s a little-known fact, though. The new acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, has a vendetta against those climate investigations into ExxonMobil. State attorneys general have been looking into oil companies and their attempts to cover up and deny climate change. And Whitaker has been looking into those state AGs as a result.

The climate investigations began in earnest in March 2016, when a bunch of state AGs, led by New York, Massachusetts, and the Virgin Islands, started scrutinizing whether Big Oil lied to investors and the public about climate change. Immediately, Exxon and co. hit back with a narrative of their own: The investigations, and then later the slew of climate lawsuits, were part of an “orchestrated campaign” to punish oil companies and cheat them out of their First Amendment rights.

That’s the narrative parroted by Whitaker in a 2016 op-ed. In a Morning Consult piece titled, “The Environmental Left’s Double Standard Game,” he called the investigations “unconstitutional and unethical.” He accused the state AGs of bullying ExxonMobil (yes, he uses the word “bullied”), and labeled the probes an “outright assault on the First Amendment.”

Whitaker promised that the organization he led at the time, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, would “continue to press its investigation into these 17 attorneys general for more information and answers regarding the true motivation and the real agenda behind this reprehensible campaign.” His organization was funded through a secretive website frequently used by conservatives like Charles Koch to make anonymous donations.

So, is the climate fraud investigation screwed with Whitaker in office? Can the biggest AG in the land crush the smaller state AGs?

“The U.S. Department of Justice does not have jurisdiction to stop state attorneys general from investigating things. They’re separate,” says Sean Hecht, who co-directs the Emmet Climate Change Institute at UCLA’s law school.

But that doesn’t mean the U.S. attorney general doesn’t have any effect on the way state AGs operate. “It’s pretty clear from this and some of [Whitaker’s] other statements on climate that he sees government officials who are trying to address climate change as some kind of enemy,” Hecht says. “Having somebody like Whitaker in that position seems likely to chill federal enforcement efforts on a host of environmental problems,” he adds.

And apart from the potential Whitaker effect on federal enforcement, there’s something else worth knowing about the acting attorney general: He’s a climate skeptic. “You know, I think that I’m not a climate denier,” he said in an interview with a publication called Caffeinated Thoughts in 2014). “It may be warming, I think the evidence is inconclusive.” And then he added: “I don’t believe in big government solutions to a problem that doesn’t appear to be that significant or quite possibly isn’t man made.”

More:  

Trump’s new attorney general hates those climate change investigations

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, Landmark, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s new attorney general hates those climate change investigations

Al Franken had to explain the scientific method to Rick Perry.

by FatimaAbigail Posted on June 23, 2017

The nation’s largest privately owned coal company, Murray Energy, just filed a lawsuit against the Last Week Tonight host over the show’s recent segment. Oliver had criticized the company’s CEO, Robert Murray, for acting carelessly toward miners’ safety.

Murray Energy’s complaint stated that the segment was a “meticulously planned attempt to assassinate the character and reputation” of Murray by broadcasting “false, injurious, and defamatory comments.”

Oliver shouldn’t be too concerned, according to Ken White, a First Amendment litigator at Los Angeles firm, who told the Daily Beast that the complaint was “frivolous and vexatious.”

The lawsuit is hardly a shocking development. Before the show aired, Oliver received a cease-and-desist letter from the company. He noted that Murray has a history of filing defamation suits against news outlets (most recently, the New York Times).

Oliver said in the episode, “I know that you are probably going to sue me, but you know what, I stand by everything I said.”

Excerpt from: 

Al Franken had to explain the scientific method to Rick Perry.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Ringer, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Al Franken had to explain the scientific method to Rick Perry.

EPA science adviser says clearing board of experts leaves “huge void.”

by EWMJewell57520 Posted on June 23, 2017

The nation’s largest privately owned coal company, Murray Energy, just filed a lawsuit against the Last Week Tonight host over the show’s recent segment. Oliver had criticized the company’s CEO, Robert Murray, for acting carelessly toward miners’ safety.

Murray Energy’s complaint stated that the segment was a “meticulously planned attempt to assassinate the character and reputation” of Murray by broadcasting “false, injurious, and defamatory comments.”

Oliver shouldn’t be too concerned, according to Ken White, a First Amendment litigator at Los Angeles firm, who told the Daily Beast that the complaint was “frivolous and vexatious.”

The lawsuit is hardly a shocking development. Before the show aired, Oliver received a cease-and-desist letter from the company. He noted that Murray has a history of filing defamation suits against news outlets (most recently, the New York Times).

Oliver said in the episode, “I know that you are probably going to sue me, but you know what, I stand by everything I said.”

Original post – 

EPA science adviser says clearing board of experts leaves “huge void.”

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Ringer, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on EPA science adviser says clearing board of experts leaves “huge void.”

A Federal Judge Just Blocked Trump’s Revised Travel Ban Nationwide

by LetaFranklyn Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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

US District Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii has blocked the latest version of the Trump administration’s travel ban, saying it likely violates First Amendment protections.

The judge issued a nationwide temporary restraining order against President Donald Trump’s revised executive order, which was due to go into effect Thursday. The ban would have halted the US refugee program and prevented people from six countries—Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, and Yemen—from traveling to the United States. The ban has been criticized for targeting immigrants from countries with Muslim-majority populations.

In their lawsuit challenging this new version of the ban, plaintiffs Ismail Elshikh and the state of Hawaii argued that “the notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed.”

This is a breaking news story. We will update the post when we have more information.

View original post here:  

A Federal Judge Just Blocked Trump’s Revised Travel Ban Nationwide

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Federal Judge Just Blocked Trump’s Revised Travel Ban Nationwide

Three Things I Don’t Care About

by RuthieHemmant Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

There are lots of topics I don’t write about (or write very little about), and normally nobody notices. Or, if they do, they don’t know why I haven’t written about any particular one of them. Maybe it’s just uninteresting to me. Maybe I’ve gotten temporarily bored by it. Maybe I don’t know enough about it. Maybe I can’t think of anything interesting to say that hasn’t already been said. Could be lots of reasons.

That said, here are three things I haven’t written about, and probably won’t:

Should we call Dylann Roof a terrorist? In the dim past, back when we used to blog earnestly about such things, I always argued that this was a silly distraction. You can call members of Al-Qaeda terrorists or extremists or militants or whatever. For Republicans, this eventually became some kind of weird litmus test designed to show that Democrats were appeasers, and it was ridiculous. Ditto today, coming from the Democratic side. Call Roof a terrorist if you want, or call him a madman or a racist psychopath. I don’t care.

The pope on climate change. I’m not Catholic. I’m not even Christian. Pope Francis seems like a relatively good guy as popes go, but I don’t care what he thinks about much of anything. I’m certainly not going to opportunistically start now just because he happens to be saying something I agree with.

Donald Trump. Oh please.

That’s it. We’ll soon be back to our regularly scheduled program of stuff I do write about.

IMPORTANT NOTE! I almost forget to add a caveat that’s critical in the blogosphere: this is just me. Everyone else should feel free to write about all these things. This post should not be taken as a personal condemnation of anyone who chooses to do so. First Amendment. De gustibus. Etc.

Excerpt from: 

Three Things I Don’t Care About

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Three Things I Don’t Care About

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