Tag Archives: frank

California’s Snow is Finally Back—But the Drought Is Far From Over

by KLTAugusta Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ninety miles east of Sacramento in the Sierra Nevada mountains, snow surveyors plunged aluminum rods into the snow on Wednesday morning and recorded quite a different number than they did the year before: 58.4 inches.

The March 30 measurement is welcome news for drought stricken Californians, and a stark contrast from 2015’s record low of zero inches, the lowest number the Sierra had seen since measuring began in the 1940’s. This year’s snow pack is just about equal to the annual average—but that still won’t provide enough melt water to say the drought is over.

Snowpack in March 2015, the lowest ever recorded LA Times

Snowpack in March 2016, recorded at nearly 60 inches. LA Times

“This was a dry, dusty field last year, so it’s a big improvement but not what we had hoped for,” Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, said just after taking the measurement. “This is going to improve conditions for both reservoir storage as well as stream flow, but there’s still going to be some ongoing effects from the past years of…way-below-average snow pack.”

Frank Gehrke, Gov. Brown, and DWR Director Mark Cowin address the media after 2015’s dire snow survey. Florence Low/Department of Water Resources

Throughout the winter months, snow surveys are taken at various points in the Sierra Nevada. The measurement near the first of April is the most significant historically and hydrologically, because it’s the time of year when snowfall typically begins to melt, providing 30 percent of the state’s water.

In addition to the traditional aluminum pole method, surveyors from the state’s Department of Water Resources conducted aerial surveys and analyzed data from snow pillows, flat sensors put on the ground that measure the weight of accumulated snow.

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California’s Snow is Finally Back—But the Drought Is Far From Over

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Iggy Pop’s Menacing "Post Pop Depression"

by AraceliOster Posted on March 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Iggy Pop
Post Pop Depression
Rekords Rekords/Loma Vista/Caroline International

Nasty Little Man

Rightly credited as one of punk’s founding fathers, the force of nature known as Iggy Pop is also a superior crooner, capable of channeling Frank Sinatra or Jim Morrison with un-ironic verve. That gift is on full display in Post Pop Depression, a collaboration with Queens of the Stone Age leader Josh Homme that proves to be a perfect fit. Iggy’s knack for brooding balladry meshes surprisingly well with the Queens’ style of epic melodies on such gems as the ominous “Break Into Your Heart,” a love song doused in menace, and the jumpy “Gardenia,” which echoes his classic late-’70s albums with David Bowie. As usual, Iggy muses on the meaning of life and his looming mortality muttering, “Death is a pill that’s hard to swallow,” in “American Valhalla,” a blunt reflection given extra poignancy by his friend’s recent passing. Now in his late 60s, Iggy periodically insists that he’s going to quit rock’n’roll, but if Post Pop Depression proves to be his parting shot, he’s leaving on a high note.

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Iggy Pop’s Menacing "Post Pop Depression"

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Newt Gingrich Says Elizabeth Warren’s Signature Program Is "Dictatorial." This Is What It Really Has Done.

by TyreeKruse Posted on December 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is so far outside the historic American model of constitutionally limited government and the rule of law that it is the perfect case study of the pathologies that infect our bureaucracies at the federal level,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich solemnly intoned in his opening statement as an expert witness at a congressional hearing on December 16. “It is dictatorial. It is unaccountable. It is practically unrestrained in expanding on its already expansive mandate from Congress. And it is contemptuous of the rights, values, and preferences of ordinary Americans.”

Republicans and outside conservative groups spent much of 2015 attacking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—the federal financial regulator that opened in 2011, conceived and launched by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) after it was included in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.

This month’s hearing, where conservatives on the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee lambasted the CFPB for collecting data on credit card usage, was just the latest in a string of attacks against the consumer agency. Gingrich is a paid adviser to a corporate-funded group, the US Consumer Coalition, that doesn’t disclose the identities of its donors and was founded by a PR firm to attack the agency. In November, a conservative group ran an ad during Republican debates attacking the CFPB and Warren as Soviet operators trying to shut down regular borrowers. Republicans in Congress have consistently introduced bills that would hamper the CFPB’s ability to function by restricting its budget or weighing down its decision-making process with extra bureaucratic layers. Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas and Republican presidential candidate, has gone even further, introducing legislation to eradicate the agency.

But amid the attacks, it’s been easy to lose sight of what the CFPB has actually been up to. Earlier this month, the CFPB released a report examining how one part of its financial regulation has unfolded. The CARD Act, passed in 2010 and overseen by the CFPB, aimed to clean up the credit card industry by eliminating hidden fees that hurt consumers.

According to the CFPB, the CARD Act’s changes saved consumers from $16 billion in these sorts of hidden fees between 2011 and 2014. Most of those savings have been paid for with higher upfront interest rates. Still, the total cost of credit cards declined in the first few years after the law’s enactment and has held steady since then at about 2 percent less than before the CARD Act.

The banking industry has argued that further regulations along these lines would constrict the availability of credit, since companies might decide it is no longer worth offering cards when they won’t reap as much profit off their customers. But the CFPB found that, in fact, approval rates for credit cards are rising, with lines of credit growing as well.

The CFPB plays a broad watchdog role, keeping an eye on financial institutions to see if they’re ripping off consumers. When the for-profit school group Corinthian Colleges closed this year, the CFPB set up $480 million in loan forgiveness for indebted students. In March, the agency issued a set of proposed rules to place new checks on payday lending. (The rules have yet to be finalized.) The agency has also been looking to tackle subprime auto loans and the prevalence of arbitration clauses in contracts in order to make it easier for consumers to file class action lawsuits.

Are these actions against the “preferences of ordinary Americans,” as Gingrich said? It’s hard to say, since most people have little knowledge of the CFPB. When two liberal-leaning groups—Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending—explained what the CFPB was up to while polling people, they found that 75 percent of respondents supported the agency. Even when the US Consumer Coalition, the industry group Gingrich advises, ran a poll on the CFPB, it found that people generally have a favorable view. Only 19 percent of respondents could identify the CFPB, but of those who were familiar with it, 31 percent had a favorable view, compared with 14 percent who viewed it negatively.

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Newt Gingrich Says Elizabeth Warren’s Signature Program Is "Dictatorial." This Is What It Really Has Done.

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Trump Calls for Banning Muslims From Entering the Country

by GretaMcCutcheon Posted on December 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican front-runner Donald Trump is calling for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” according to a statement his campaign sent to reporters on Monday.

Trump cites a poll finding that “25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad.” That poll, a survey of 600 Muslims, came from the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a Washington-based think tank run by former Ronald Reagan official Frank Gaffney (who once said that CIA Director David Petraeus was a slave to Islamic Shariah law). Shortly after it was published, the integrity of the poll was debunked by the Huffington Post, which critiqued its loaded questions and exaggerated conclusions.

Trump, who has recently supported the profiling and tracking of Muslim citizens, doubled down in his statement on Monday.

“Without looking at the various polling data, it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension,” Trump wrote. “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”

According to Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, the ban would apply to everyone, including tourists.

Shortly after issuing the release, Trump tweeted that the United States must be “vigilant” about the “extraordinary influx of hatred and danger” entering the country.

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Trump Calls for Banning Muslims From Entering the Country

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The Craziest Thing About This Supreme Court Case Isn’t That One Plaintiff Believes Unicorns Are Real

by SharronMacartney Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will examine the bedrock principle of “one person, one vote” in a major case that could yield the Republican Party a critical advantage in future elections. In Evenwel v. Abbott, the court is being asked to change how states draw legislative districts in a way that would boost the electoral power of white, rural voters, who lean Republican, at the expense of Latinos and African Americans, who tend to vote Democratic. The plaintiffs behind this high-stakes legal challenge are an unusual pair. One is a Texas tea party activist who has promoted a conspiratorial film suggesting President Barack Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a supposed propagandist for the Communist Party. The other is a security guard and religious fundamentalist who believes the Earth doesn’t revolve around the sun and that unicorns were real.

Texas residents Sue Evenwel and Ed Pfenninger want the court to create a uniform national standard for drawing legislative districts based on the total number of eligible voters in them, as opposed to the total number of people, which is the standard that Texas and many other states use now. Such a change would effectively diminish the political clout of urban areas, which have large populations of people who can’t vote, such as felons, children and noncitizens.

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The Craziest Thing About This Supreme Court Case Isn’t That One Plaintiff Believes Unicorns Are Real

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Another Report Suggests the Cop Who Killed Tamir Rice May Not be Charged

by XNWBenjami Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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A newly released report examining the actions of the Cleveland police officers involved in the November 2014 shooting death of Tamir Rice concludes that the call taker who handled a 911 call about Rice failed to relay significant details to the officers about the 12-year-old boy. The report also offers new information on why the officers pulled their car to within 10 feet of Rice, just seconds before he was fatally shot. And similar to two other reports made public from the ongoing grand jury investigation, it reaches a conclusion sure to continue stoking controversy about the case—that officer Timothy Loehmann, who fired the fatal shots, made “the only objectively reasonable decision” possible in gunning down Rice point-blank.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad


Why No One Really Knows a Better Way to Train Cops


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police


Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad

The independent analysis, released on Thursday afternoon by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office, is part of ongoing grand jury deliberations on whether Loehmann should face criminal charges. It was authored by W. Ken Katsaris, a Florida police officer and training instructor tapped by the prosecutor’s office.

“The dispatcher should have provided additional information to the officers, including details that the ‘guy with the gun’ is ‘probably a juvenile,'” wrote Katsaris. He added that while the caller described the weapon as “‘probably a fake,’ he also clearly reported ‘I don’t know if it’s real or not.'” Yet Katsaris also notes that the call taker “did gather sufficient information from the caller and handled the call appropriately.”

The county sheriff’s investigation revealed in June that a call taker at the Cleveland police dispatch center entered the 911 caller’s information into a computer system and assigned it a “code one,” the highest priority emergency. But, as Mother Jones first reported in June, that call taker never entered the additional details about Rice probably being a juvenile and the uncertainty about his gun, and that information was not relayed by another dispatcher to the officers headed to the scene.

Katsaris says that while these additional details should have been provided to the officers, they “would not be very helpful to the officers in terms of decision making,” because they do not “in any way diminish the threat potential, and the statements about the firearm are far too ambiguous to be taken as relevant unless the circumstances were clearly different than this situation unfolded.” He concludes, “the only objectively reasonable decision to be made by Loehmann was to utilize deadly force and deploy his firearm.”

The report also focuses on the actions of officer Frank Garmback, who drove the squad car directly up to Rice: “It appears that the officers were heading for the area of the swings, where the ‘guy with the gun’ was last reported being seen.” When the officers instead spotted Rice under a nearby gazebo, this sighting “was not expected,” according to Katsaris, “causing Officer Garmback to apply the brakes suddenly, and hard, skidding for forty feet and ten inches.” Katsaris adds that “it is obvious to me, from the totality of the circumstances, that the vehicle stop position was not by choice, but by necessity.”

Policing experts including former officers have told Mother Jones that the officers’ actions leading up to the shooting of Rice was “a use of horrible tactics” and that they warrant further investigation.

Katsaris’s report marks the fourth one made public by county prosecutor McGinty. The release of various analysis ahead of a grand jury decision suggesting that the officers may not be charged has drawn criticism and prompted Rice’s family and supporters to demand a special prosecutor.

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Another Report Suggests the Cop Who Killed Tamir Rice May Not be Charged

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The Chinese Are Coming….To Syria

by ShelbyNorthcott Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a typical election, candidates move from the extreme to the middle as the campaign progresses. If you’re a Republican, for example, you start out as a fire-breathing conservative in order to win the early primaries, and then slowly move to the center to win the later primaries and the general election.

Donald Trump has flipped the script, though. Now, you start out outrageous in order to get some attention, and then slowly become more sober-minded in order to appear more plausibly presidential. Will it work? Wait and find out! But it sure looks like Ben Carson has been taking lessons from the master. In Tuesday’s debate he seemed to suggest that China had troops in Syria. Today, his business manager and all-around campaign major-domo, Armstrong Williams, took away any possible doubt:

When MSNBC’s Tamron Hall told Williams on Wednesday that the Chinese are not in Syria, Williams remained steadfast.

“From your perspective and what most people know, maybe that is inaccurate,” Williams told MSNBC….”Just because the mainstream media and other experts don’t want to see any credibility to it, does not mean some way down the line in the next few days that that story will come out and will be reinforced and given credibility by others,” Williams said. “But as far as our intelligence and the briefings that Dr. Carson’s been in and I’ve certainly been in with him, we’ve certainly been told the Chinese are there.”

Carson—or Williams—really ought to tell us who these experts are that keep briefing the campaign on foreign policy issues. Are these the same guys who told him that seizing the Anbar oil fields in Iraq could be done “fairly easily” and that ISIS could then be destroyed in short order? I mean, I like the can-do attitude here, but I’m still a little curious about what the exact battle plan would be. Maybe Carson will share that with us in the next debate.

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The Chinese Are Coming….To Syria

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Ben Carson: Medical Fraud is Bad, Unless One of My Friends Does It

by AugustuDow Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ben Carson really, really hates medical fraud. Seriously: “There would be some very stiff penalties for this kind of fraud,” he wrote a few years ago, “such as loss of one’s medical license for life, no less than ten years in prison, and loss of all of one’s personal possessions.”

Unless, that is, the fraudster happens to be Carson’s best and oldest friend. In that case, you write a letter to the judge saying, “there is no one on this planet that I trust more than Al Costa.” And it worked. Costa was a dentist who pleaded guilty to billing insurance companies for procedures he didn’t perform, but in the end the judge sentenced him only to a year of house arrest in his 8,300-square-foot mansion.

AP has the story here. But if you want some serious details about this whole case, Russ Choma has them right here at MoJo. Carson, needless to say, insists that Costa was innocent all along and was railroaded by the justice system. That’s how things work in Carsonworld. There’s the good guys and the bad guys, and Carson knows in his heart exactly who they are. As for facts, I guess they’re just chaff thrown out by secular progressives to destroy good Christians.

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Ben Carson: Medical Fraud is Bad, Unless One of My Friends Does It

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Here’s Why Other Candidates Are Giving Ben Carson a Pass

by LupitaPrior Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Why didn’t any of the other candidates go after Ben Carson last night? He’s a frontrunner, isn’t he?

Yeah, he is. Here’s my guess: when you see a guy digging himself into a hole, why get in the way? More and more, as the stress of the campaign gets to him, Carson is freely exposing himself as an honest-to-God crackpot. Not just a hardcore conservative like Ted Cruz or an ego-driven windbag like Donald Trump, but a true Glenn Beck/Michele Bachmann/Alex Jones type who really and truly believes in fever swamp conspiracy theories. Criticize his past and he goes full frontal on every bit of listserv crankery about Barack Obama—and he does it pretty fluently, too. He obviously knows this stuff cold. Push him on his odd world view and he starts spouting off about how “secular progressives” are destroying America and probably trying to kill him. Ask him about his theory that the pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain, and he doesn’t blink. Sure he still believes that. Put him in a friendly setting and he’ll give you the full nine yards about how political correctness is responsible for everything from drug addiction to persecution of Christians to Marxist tyranny and gun confiscation.

This is a guy who’s set to implode all by himself, so why waste energy attacking him? Eventually he’ll suggest that the pope is actually Satan or something, and then he’ll be forced to slink back to the rubber-chicken circuit—with a higher speaking fee to soothe his pain. In the meantime, better to worry about the folks who might actually pose a real threat.

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Here’s Why Other Candidates Are Giving Ben Carson a Pass

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Chart of the Day: Republican Tax Plans for the Middle Class

by DeanaMoeller Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Of the five leading candidates, four have released semi-detailed tax plans. We’re still waiting on Ben Carson’s tithe-based plan. Still, I thought everyone ought to get a look at how their plans affect the middle class vs. the rich. After all, we liberals keep nattering on about how these guys all want to “cut taxes on the rich,” so let’s see the evidence.

Well, the Tax Foundation is a right-leaning outfit, so you have to figure they’re going to give Republican plans a fair shake. And their distributional analysis of Rubio, Bush, Trump, and Cruz shows that their tax plans are all pretty similar: tiny gains for middle-income workers and huge gains for the top 1 percent. I’ve used the static analysis, since it’s the most tethered to reality, but even if you use the magic dynamic estimates you get roughly the same result: the rich make out a whole lot better than the middle class.

That said, you really have to give Ted Cruz credit. When it comes to giving huge handouts to the rich, he’s the true Republican leader.

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Chart of the Day: Republican Tax Plans for the Middle Class

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