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Toxic water flooded Houston homes after Harvey, tests show

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

Last month, Hurricane Harvey dropped an unprecedented 50 inches of rain in Houston and across southeast Texas causing deadly floods and environmental disasters, such as chemical plant explosions and flooded toxic sites. Now, residents have another problem to worry about.

According to tests organized by the New York Times and conducted by a team from Baylor Medical College and Rice University, the floodwaters in two Houston neighborhoods have been contaminated with toxins and bacteria that can make people sick. It’s unclear where else these toxins might have spread, but 40 of 1,219 waste treatment plants are not functioning:

The results of The Times’s testing were troubling. Water flowing down Briarhills Parkway in the Houston Energy Corridor contained Escherichia coli, a measure of fecal contamination, at a level more than four times that considered safe.

In the Clayton Homes public housing development downtown, along the Buffalo Bayou, scientists found what they considered astonishingly high levels of E. coli in standing water in one family’s living room — levels 135 times those considered safe — as well as elevated levels of lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals in sediment from the floodwaters in the kitchen.

“There’s pretty clearly sewage contamination, and it’s more concentrated inside the home than outside the home,” said Lauren Stadler, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University who participated in The Times’s research.

Houston residents who have returned to survey their homes and salvage belongings reported a stench in the air and feeling sick afterwards:

Brad Greer, 49, developed two scabby infections on each of his legs where rain boots had irritated his skin. He took antibiotics, but on Saturday, he said, he started feeling light-headed and weak as he and his brother-in-law tried to move possessions from Mr. Greer’s flooded home.

He went to the emergency room at Houston Methodist, where he was put on an intravenous drip and given another antibiotic prescription. Mr. Greer said swimming pools around his neighborhood are rank.

“All the pools are just giant toilets you’re unable to flush,” he said.

The medical team that tested the water is concerned about residents wading through the toxic waters. “If people have bad headaches, respiratory problems, swelling of a limb, or a bad rash, go see a doctor right away,” Winifred Hamilton, the environmental health service director at Baylor College of Medicine, told the New York Times. “Don’t assume it will go away on its own.”

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Toxic water flooded Houston homes after Harvey, tests show

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Steven Mnuchin Just Doesn’t Understand

Mother Jones

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This is adorable:

When Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, was asked about tax reform in his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, he took things in a surprising direction: He suggested that the IRS needed a larger staff.

“I was particularly surprised, looking at the IRS numbers, that the IRS headcount has gone down quite dramatically, almost 30 percent over the last number of years,” Mnuchin said in response to a question from Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican….“Now perhaps the IRS just started with way too many people,” Mnuchin added. But he suggested that “staffing of the IRS is an important part of fixing the tax gap.”

That’s, um, surprising, all right. Yessir, Mr. Mnuchin. Very surprising indeed.

For those of you who don’t get the joke, this is sort of like Mnuchin testifying in front of a bunch of mafia dons and expressing surprise that they charge such high interest rates in their lending operation. Maybe with lower rates you gentlemen could expand into the suburban market and gain a share of the home equity business? Lotta kitchen remodels out there.

Basically, Mnuchin looked at the IRS numbers like a normal person and was surprised to see that they weren’t trying to maximize tax collections. He apparently didn’t realize that the Republicans he was testifying in front of have been very deliberately slashing the IRS budget for years precisely so they can’t maximize tax collections. The last thing Republicans want is an IRS that audits rich people more closely.

Mnuchin will learn. After all, Donald Trump did. Remember when Trump suggested that women who get abortions should be punished? He had no idea what he was talking about, and just assumed that since Republicans consider abortion bad, the maximal anti-abortion position must be good. He didn’t realize that jailing middle-class teenagers is a position unpopular enough to jeopardize GOP reelection prospects, and as a result Republicans have long insisted that even if they manage to make abortion illegal, they will always consider women who get abortions to be “victims” of unscrupulous butchers, not lawbreakers. That’s the party line, anyway, and everyone is expected to know it.

Before long, I’m sure Mnuchin will learn to listen respectfully to harangues about the gold standard and fiat money and ending the Fed. It’s a small price to pay for the opportunity to occupy the position once held by Alexander Hamilton.

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Steven Mnuchin Just Doesn’t Understand

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What Is Bernie Sanders’ Role in the Democratic Party?

Mother Jones

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As Democrats point fingers in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s surprise win last week, Bernie Sanders is taking aim at one culprit: the Democratic Party. “One of the reasons that he won is, in my view, a failure of the Democratic Party that must be rectified,” Sanders told a cheering crowd at a Thursday rally on Capitol Hill convened by his political action committee and a coalition of progressive advocacy groups.

Sanders, though, is opting to try to change the party from without rather than within. Although the self-identified democratic socialist just secured a leadership post in the party, as its outreach director, he will continue to serve in the Senate as an independent. “The real action to transform America won’t take place on Capitol Hill,” Sanders said Thursday morning at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, according to The Hill. “It will be in the grassroots America among millions struggling economically and young people.”

He added, “I initially understand my role to be to get those people into the political process to demand the US Congress and government and president represent all of the people and not just those on top. I’m excited about it, but how we go about it, I don’t know.”

Sanders’ party affiliation didn’t seem to matter much to supporters at the rally. “Is he an independent?” said Greg Hamilton, 23, who works for a group advocating criminal sentencing reform for youth offenders. “Is he a Democrat? Like, I could care less. I know that he represents what I want.” Hamilton voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary but for Clinton last week. “She would’ve been a whole heckuva lot better than Trump,” he said.

Sanders and Trump actually shared some populist messages on the campaign trail, including their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that Clinton initially backed. But Lynette Raudner, a 31-year-old attendee of the rally, wasn’t impressed. “Do you really know where Donald Trump stands on trade?” asked Raudner, who volunteered for the Clinton campaign but could not vote because she was born in South Africa and is awaiting her citizenship. “If his message is to not have the TPP, then yeah, I’m glad that we have something in common, but I don’t know if that’s really the case.”

So where do Sanders and his movement go from here? His supporters who have responded to his message have no intention of giving up. Randle Edwards, 82, a retired law professor, said Sanders should focus his efforts on mobilizing his extensive donor network to regain a Democratic majority in the Senate in 2018. Edwards gives Sanders credit for his consistent message on wealth distribution, equal rights, and abortion. He added, “I’ve been waiting for Bernie Sanders for 50 years.”

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What Is Bernie Sanders’ Role in the Democratic Party?

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These Stats Show Why Milwaukee Was Primed to Explode

Mother Jones

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Milwaukee’s mayor imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on Monday and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker activated the National Guard in response to weekend rioting sparked by Saturday’s fatal police shooting of an armed black man, 23-year-old Sylville Smith. The unrest, in which protesters torched multiple businesses and police cars and at least one person was shot, was the second wave of major protests since December 2014, when a county prosecutor declined to file charges against police in the fatal shooting of another black man, Dontre Hamilton. But while anger over such police shootings may have set off the mayhem, decades of unemployment, segregated housing, substandard schools, and racist policing set the stage for Milwaukee to blow. Indeed, the city has earned itself a reputation as the worst place to be black in America. Here’s why:

Concentrated poverty: Milwaukee is one of the nation’s most segregated cities, with black residents—40 percent of the population—living almost exclusively on the city’s north side. Milwaukee is also America’s second poorest major city, in a state that in 2014 had the nation’s highest black unemployment rate. A third of its black residents live in “extreme poverty,” defined as a household with an income less than half that deemed appropriate by the federal government for a family of its size—and 40 percent live below the poverty line. This is partly because the region’s jobs are concentrated in three white suburbs that are all but inaccessible by public transportation. The WOW counties, as these suburbs are known, are at least 94 percent white, and just 1 to 2 percent black.

Failing schools: Milwaukee’s public schools are doing a poor job of educating their students. During the 2013-14 academic year, Milwaukee had the nation’s largest black-white gap in graduation rates, and K-12 test scores were abysmal.

Most black kids in Milwaukee attend highly segregated public schools. According to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Mark Levine, roughly three out of four attends a high-poverty institution where 90 percent of the students are black. And when those kids misbehave, schools are quick to dole out suspensions. In 2011-12, Wisconsin led the nation in suspending black high schoolers, thanks largely to excessive suspension rates in Milwaukee. (If you want to understand why suspensions are bad, and how children can be disciplined more effectively, read this piece.)

Mass incarceration: Black men in Milwaukee are incarcerated at the highest rate in the nation. In 2013, according to UW researchers, one in eight were locked up, and by the time the men hit their 30s and 40s, more than half have served time. Two-thirds of the incarcerated men came from six of the city’s poorest zip codes, including those for Sherman Park, the neighborhood where the most recent police killing took place. Another of the zip codes (53206) has the highest black male incarceration rate in America—62 percent, according to another UW study. (A documentary on that community is due out later this year.) So many Milwaukeeans have criminal records, one ex-offender told NPR, that police routinely ask the people they pull over whether they’re on probation. Wisconsin spends more on corrections than on higher education. And to top it off, just 10 percent of black men with a criminal record in Wisconsin have a valid drivers license—which makes it tough to secure jobs and services. (The sheriff of Milwaukee County recently called the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization.)

How it got this bad: Black people moved to Milwaukee in large numbers beginning in the 1960s—later than many blacks who left the South inhabited other Rust Belt cities such as Chicago and Detroit during the Great Migration. White immigrant communities in Milwaukee fiercely resisted integration in housing and schools, and when the city’s manufacturing industry collapsed shortly after blacks arrived, massive racial disparities sprang up in employment, housing, and education. Milwaukee also was hit harder by globalization and by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs than other major urban centers, an analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found. Black men suffered a drop in employment during this period that was more than twice what the nation endured during the Great Depression. White residents fled to the suburbs, taking their resources with them, and little has improved since. Decades of tensions between police and the city’s black communities helped fuel this latest flareup.

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These Stats Show Why Milwaukee Was Primed to Explode

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Harriet Tubman to Replace Andrew Jackson on the $20

Mother Jones

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US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will reportedly announce on Wednesday the decision to replace the image of former President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with an image of Harriet Tubman.

Politico reports Lew will also announce that the image of Alexander Hamilton will remain on the $10 bill, but that the back of that bill will feature members of the suffragist movement. Last month, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of the Broadway musical Hamilton, met with Lew to discuss keeping the former president on the $10 bill.

The movement to replace Jackson’s image with Tubman’s image started with the “Women on 20’s” group, which advocated featuring a woman on the $20 bill because of Jackson’s controversial support of the Indian Removal Act.

This is a breaking news post. We will update once the announcement is made.

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Harriet Tubman to Replace Andrew Jackson on the $20

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Texas Governor Wants to Add 9 New Amendments to the Constitution

Mother Jones

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has a plan to make America great again: Add nine new amendments to the Constitution. On Friday, fed up with Supreme Court rulings that have gone against conservatives as well as the regulatory actions of the Obama administration, the first-term Republican issued a 92-page report outlining his proposed tweaks to the founding document and calling for a national constitutional convention to make it happen.

The “Texas Plan” is as follows:

I. Prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one State.

II. Require Congress to balance its budget.

III. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from creating federal law.

IV. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from preempting state law.

V. Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

VI. Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law.

VII. Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution.

VIII. Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds.

IX. Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a federal law or regulation.

Clearly, Abbott has been listening to way too much of the Hamilton soundtrack.

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Texas Governor Wants to Add 9 New Amendments to the Constitution

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Texas Governor Wants to Add Nine New Amendments to the Constitution

Mother Jones

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has a plan to make America great again: Add nine new amendments to the Constitution. On Friday, fed up with Supreme Court rulings that have gone against conservatives as well as the regulatory actions of the Obama administration, the first-term Republican issued a 92-page report outlining his proposed tweaks to the founding document and calling for a national constitutional convention to make it happen.

The “Texas Plan” is as follows:

I. Prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one State.

II. Require Congress to balance its budget.

III. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from creating federal law.

IV. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from preempting state law.

V. Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

VI. Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law.

VII. Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution.

VIII. Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds.

IX. Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a federal law or regulation.

Clearly, Abbott has been listening to way too much of the Hamilton soundtrack.

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Texas Governor Wants to Add Nine New Amendments to the Constitution

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The New York Public Library Just Unleashed 180,000 Free Images. We Can’t Stop Looking at Them.

Mother Jones

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Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, Manhattan Bernice Abbott/The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

The New York Public Library just digitized and made available more than 180,000 high resolution items, which the public can download for free.

The images come from pieces in the library’s collection that have fallen out of copyright or are otherwise in the public domain. This includes botanical illustrations, ancient texts, historical maps–including the incredible Green Book collection of travel guides for African American travelers in mid-1900s. They’ve also released more than 40,000 stereoscopes, Berenice Abbott’s amazing documentation of New York City in 1930s and Lewis Hines’ photos of Ellis Island immigrants, as well as the letters of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among other political figures.

One of the related projects they’ve created with this release is a cool visualization tool that lets you browse every item released.

It’s a true treasure trove and–warning!–a total time suck.

Say goodbye to your afternoon.

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The New York Public Library Just Unleashed 180,000 Free Images. We Can’t Stop Looking at Them.

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When I Was 5, I, Um — What Were We Just Talking About?

Mother Jones

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I remember approximately diddly-squat1 about my childhood. But why? Melissa Dahl explains the latest research to me today:

The way parents tend to talk to their sons is different from the way they talk to their daughters. Mothers tend to introduce more snippets of new information in conversations with their young daughters than they do with their young sons, research has shown. And moms tend to ask more questions about girls’ emotions; with boys, on the other hand, they spend more time talking about what they should do with those feelings.

This is at least partially a product of parents acting on gender expectations they may not even realize they have, and the results are potentially long-lasting, explained Azriel Grysman, a psychologist at Hamilton College who studies gender differences and memory. “The message that girls are getting is that talking about your feelings is part of describing an event,” Grysman said….“And it’s quite possible, over time, that those tendencies will help women establish more connections in their brains of different pieces of an event, which will lead to better memory long-term.”

So I can blame my crappy memory on my mother? Cool.

1This is a technical term used by neurologists and memory researchers.

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When I Was 5, I, Um — What Were We Just Talking About?

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Teddy Roosevelt, Lewis Hine and Lazy Frogs: 15 Photos

Mother Jones

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While searching through the Library of Congress archives last week, I noticed that a number of photos included the date they were photographed or published. I pulled together a handful, giving a little look at what was happening on this date through history. These photos are often pretty mundane, but even the most common, everyday occurrences take on new meaning, or at least become more a bit interesting when viewed from a distance in time.

Here are a few photos from August 15th, all photos from the Library of Congress, with captions as provided with the photos.

Cyanotype image of construction of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1890.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1913.

“Chopping corn” Everett Adams, 15 years and Ora Adams, 9 years. Address Hiatt, Ky. Go to Hickory Grove School, but they have been absent most of the past 6 weeks for work, sickness, etc. Location: Rockcastle County, Kentucky, by Lewis W. Hine, 1916

Theo. Roosevelt, Jr. playing tennis, 1922.

Miss M. Pearl. McCall, 1922.

Senators Goose Goslin slides safely into home and collides with Yankees catcher Wally Schang in 2nd game of double header, 1925.

Just plumb too lazy to catch his food on the fly like regular frogs do, Popeye, giant frog from Louisiana in the U.S. Department of Commerce aquarium, has to be fed his meals from acting as nursemaid for the critter, 1937.

CORE members swing down Fort Hamilton Parkway, Brooklyn, toward 69th St. ferry on trek to Washington. World Telegram & Sun photo by O. Fernandez, 1963.

Defense housing, Ben Morrell Project, Norfolk, Virginia. Housing for civilian and married enlisted personnel at the Norfolk, Virginia housing naval base. Constructed at a cost of $3,356,000 by the Navy. Of the 1,362 units built, 1,062 were completed August 15, 1941. Rents range from $17 to $23 a month.

Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Firehouse, Vallejo, Solano County, CA, 1919

Senator Cappe of Kansas, 1921

John Coolidge, Mrs. Coolidge, & President Coolidge enroute to Vermont, 1924.

William A. Hill, Boston, Attorney for the utility king, Howard C. Hopson, leaves the Senate side of the Capitol with his counsel, Moultrie Hitt, Washington attorney, where Hill appeared in response to a citation for contempt growing out of the activities of Hopson, who is wanted by the Senate Lobby Investigating committee, 1935.

Red Bud School. County Supervisor in doorway. Teacher thought 20 absent on account of work, etc. Location: Rockcastle County, Kentucky by Lewis W. Hine, 1916.

View of Cincinnati, Ohio. Copyright entry no. 490 dated August 15, 1866 in volume covering time period, Nov. 9, 1864 – May 9, 1867. (click on photo for link to larger view)

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Teddy Roosevelt, Lewis Hine and Lazy Frogs: 15 Photos

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