Tag Archives: house

One Man Should Not Dictate Immigration Policy

by Aaron Duff Posted on November 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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

You know, the more I mull over the Republican complaint about how immigration reform is being implemented, the more I sympathize with them. Public policy, especially on big, hot button issues like immigration, shouldn’t be made by one person. One person doesn’t represent the will of the people, no matter what position he holds. Congress does, and the will of Congress should be paramount in policymaking.

Now don’t get me wrong. I haven’t changed my mind about the legality of all this. The Constitution is clear that each house of Congress makes its own rules. The rules of the House of Representatives are clear and well-established. And past speakers of the House have all used their legislative authority to prevent votes on bills they don’t wish to consider. Both the law and past precedent are clear: John Boehner is well within his legal rights to refuse to allow the House to vote on the immigration bill passed by the Senate in 2013.

Still, his expansion of that authority makes me uneasy. After all, this is a case where poll after poll shows that large majorities of the country favor comprehensive immigration reform. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill over a year ago by a wide margin. And there’s little question that the Senate bill has majority support in the House too. So not only is the will of Congress clear, but the president has also made it clear that he’d sign the bill if Congress passed it. The only thing stopping it is one man.

That should make us all a bit troubled. John Boehner may be acting legally. But is he acting properly?

From: 

One Man Should Not Dictate Immigration Policy

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on One Man Should Not Dictate Immigration Policy

Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

by MandyToddmqo Posted on November 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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

After two years of seemingly endless Benghazi coverage, how did the nation’s major media cover the report of a Republican-led House committee that debunked every single Benghazi conspiracy theory and absolved the White House of wrongdoing? Long story short, don’t bother looking on the front page anywhere. Here’s a rundown:

The Washington Post briefly moved its story into the top spot on its homepage this afternoon. In the print edition, it ran somewhere inside, though I don’t know where.
The New York Times ran only a brief AP dispatch yesterday. Late today they finally put up a staff-written story, scheduled to run in the print edition tomorrow on page A23.
The Wall Street Journal ran a decent piece, but it got no play on the website and ran in the print edition on page A5.
USA Today ran an AP dispatch, but only if you can manage to find it. I don’t know if it also ran anywhere in the print edition.
As near as I can tell, the LA Times ignored the story completely.
Ditto for the US edition of the Guardian.
Fox News ran a hilarious story that ignored nearly every finding of the report and managed to all but say that it was actually a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration. You really have to read it to believe it.

I get that the report of a House committee isn’t the most exciting news in the world. It’s dry, it has no visuals, it rehashes old ground, and it doesn’t feature Kim Kardashian’s butt.

Still, this is a report endorsed by top Republicans that basically rebuts practically every Republican bit of hysteria over Benghazi spanning the past two years. Is it really good news judgment to treat this the same way they would a dull study on the aging of America from the Brookings Institution?

UPDATE: Late tonight, the LA Times finally roused itself to run a non-bylined piece somewhere in the Africa section.

I should add that the stories which did run were mostly fairly decent (Fox News excepted, of course). In particular, Ken Dilanian’s AP report was detailed and accurate, and ran early in the morning. The problem is less with the details of the coverage, than with the fact that the coverage was either buried or nonexistent practically everywhere.

Link: 

Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

Republicans Finally Admit There Is No Benghazi Scandal

by StefaniGeorg Posted on November 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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

For two years, ever since Mitt Romney screwed up his response to the Benghazi attacks in order to score campaign points, Republicans have been on an endless search for a grand conspiracy theory that explains how it all happened. Intelligence was ignored because it would have been inconvenient to the White House to acknowledge it. Hillary Clinton’s State Department bungled the response to the initial protests in Cairo. Both State and CIA bungled the military response to the attacks themselves. Even so, rescue was still possible, but it was derailed by a stand down order—possibly from President Obama himself. The talking points after the attack were deliberately twisted for political reasons. Dissenters who tried to tell us what really happened were harshly punished.

Is any of this true? The House Select Intelligence Committee—controlled by Republicans—has been investigating the Benghazi attacks in minute detail for two years. Today, with the midterm elections safely past, they issued their findings. Their exoneration of the White House was sweeping and nearly absolute. So sweeping that I want to quote directly from the report’s summary, rather than paraphrasing it. Here it is:

The Committee first concludes that the CIA ensured sufficient security for CIA facilities in Benghazi….Appropriate U.S. personnel made reasonable tactical decisions that night, and the Committee found no evidence that there was either a stand down order or a denial of available air support….

Second, the Committee finds that there was no intelligence failure prior to the attacks. In the months prior, the IC provided intelligence about previous attacks and the increased threat environment in Benghazi, but the IC did not have specific, tactical warning of the September 11 attacks.

Third, the Committee finds that a mixed group of individuals, including those affiliated with Al Qa’ida, participated in the attacks….

Fourth, the Committee concludes that after the attacks, the early intelligence assessments and the Administration’s initial public narrative on the causes and motivations for the attacks were not fully accurate….There was no protest. The CIA only changed its initial assessment about a protest on September 24, 2012, when closed caption television footage became available on September 18, 2012 (two days after Ambassador Susan Rice spoke)….

Fifth, the Committee finds that the process used to generate the talking points HPSCI asked for—and which were used for Ambassador Rice’s public appearances—was flawed….

Finally, the Committee found no evidence that any officer was intimidated, wrongly forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement or otherwise kept from speaking to Congress, or polygraphed because of their presence in Benghazi. The Committee also found no evidence that the CIA conducted unauthorized activities in Benghazi and no evidence that the IC shipped arms to Syria.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how remarkable this document is. It’s not that the committee found nothing to criticize. They did. The State Department facility in Benghazi had inadequate security. Some of the early intelligence after the attacks was inaccurate. The CIA should have given more weight to eyewitnesses on the ground.

But those are routine after-action critiques, ones that were fully acknowledged by the very first investigations. Beyond that, every single conspiracy theory—without exception—was conclusively debunked. There was no stand down order. The tactical response was both reasonable and effective under the circumstances. The CIA was not shipping arms from Libya to Syria. Both CIA and State received all military support that was available. The talking points after the attack were fashioned by the intelligence community, not the White House. Susan Rice followed these talking points in her Sunday show appearances, and where she was wrong, it was only because the intelligence community had made incorrect assessments. Nobody was punitively reassigned or polygraphed or otherwise intimidated to prevent them from testifying to Congress.

Read that list again. Late on a Friday afternoon, when it would get the least attention, a Republican-led committee finally admitted that every single Benghazi conspiracy theory was false. There are ways that the response to the attacks could have been improved, but that’s it. Nobody at the White House interfered. Nobody lied. Nobody prevented the truth from being told.

It was all just manufactured outrage from the beginning. But now the air is gone. There is no scandal, and there never was.

Read article here:

Republicans Finally Admit There Is No Benghazi Scandal

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Finally Admit There Is No Benghazi Scandal

Is Dianne Feinstein Crafting a Secret Water Deal to Help Big Pistachio?

by RodericSchulze Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is negotiating a behind-closed-doors deal with Republican lawmakers to pass a bill that would ostensibly address California’s drought—an effort that has uncorked a flood of criticism from environmental circles.

Feinstein’s quiet push for a compromise drought bill that’s palatable to Big Ag-aligned House Republicans has been in the works for six months, Kate Poole, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. And it has accelerated recently, as the Senator hopes to pass it by year end, during the “lame duck” period of the outgoing Democratic-controlled Senate.

Continue Reading »

See more here – 

Is Dianne Feinstein Crafting a Secret Water Deal to Help Big Pistachio?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Is Dianne Feinstein Crafting a Secret Water Deal to Help Big Pistachio?

Antonin Scalia’s Son Now Works For Snoopy

by FloraStaten Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

When Democrats in Congress tried to fix the financial system in 2010, one of their main goals was to end the plague of giant financial institutions that had attained too-big-to-fail status—gargantuan banks and non-banks (say, insurance companies) that could one day collapse and, consequently, sink the entire economy unless they received a government bailout. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation that Congress passed compelled financial regulators to identify these companies and called for extra rules for these behemoths to minimize the risk of implosion.

So far that process has been humming along relatively smoothly. But it could soon be derailed in court, thanks to Eugene Scalia, the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a partner at the Washington power-law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. In recent years, Scalia the Younger, on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce and other clients, has waged a campaign via a series of lawsuits to defang assorted Dodd-Frank rules governing banks and other financial institutions. Scalia’s lawsuits have largely aimed at marginal aspects of financial reform, not the foundational elements of the Wall Street reform law. But Reuters reported earlier this month that insurance giant MetLife—preferred insurer of Snoopy—had hired Scalia, an indication the firm was preparing take the government to court to challenge a designation that MetLife is a too-big-to-fail institution. If such a case does ensue and Scalia is successful, he could make it tough for the government to label any non-bank as too big to fail.

Read more about Eugene Scalia’s campaign to sabotage Wall Street reform.

Dodd-Frank established the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a 10-member body of government regulators, including the secretary of the Treasury and the chair of the Federal Reserve. This council is in charge of determining which financial companies qualify as a Systemically Important Financial Institution, or SIFI. Under Dodd-Frank, the process for designating a bank a SIFI is straightforward: any bank with $50 billion in assets is automatically a SIFI. Nineteen US banks now meet this definition.

But deciding which non-banks pose a systemic risk is trickier. To slap the SIFI label on a non-bank, the FSOC has to consider 11 factors, including how much leverage the company carries, whether it is a major player in handing out loans to US businesses, how interconnected it is with institutions already designated as SIFIs, and the level of credit it provides to low-income and minority communities.

Once declared a SIFI, a bank comes under the supervision of the Federal Reserve and is subject to stricter rules, such as higher capital requirements. But for the non-banks deemed SIFI, the Federal Reserve has yet to issue new rules, leaving unclear what extra requirements they will be forced to comply with as too-big-to-fail institutions.

So far, the FSOC has said just three non-bank companies are too big to go under: AIG, Prudential, and GE Capital. In September, the FSOC unanimously proposed listing MetLife—the largest insurer in the country—as a SIFI, a move that the company immediately challenged. In early November, according to Bloomberg, Scalia and MetLife’s CEO met with the FSOC to argue against the designation. The board still must issue a final declaration on MetLife, but given the earlier consensus, it seems likely it will stick to the original decision.

MetLife’s recourse would be to contest the designation in court. It’s not certain that MetLife would sue the FSOC. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “The people familiar with the matter said a major factor in MetLife’s decision about litigation would be the strength of the written rationale provided to the company by the Financial Stability Oversight Council.” But it appears a good bet that Scalia would find room to object. The pioneering tactic he has used to convince judges to reject other financial regulations is to argue that the government didn’t conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis before issuing a regulatory decision—that is, contending that the feds were lazy with their math and didn’t provide enough justification for the way they devised a rule. And when the FSOC has issued SIFI designations in the past, its rulings have tended to be more thematic and analytical than facts-drenched. The decision on Prudential, for example, runs 12 pages and broadly discusses the insurance company’s role in the economy without presenting many statistics to back up the claim that Prudential poses a wider risk if there’s a run on its assets.

In May, Scalia testified before the House Committee on Financial Services and slammed the FSOC’s decision on Prudential. “The process by which companies are considered for designation is exceptionally opaque,” he griped in his written testimony, describing this particular decision as lacking “substantiation and analytic rigor.”

Scalia has had a good run, winning a series of cases challenging other parts of Dodd-Frank. But several of those victories came at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, which until recently was dominated by Republican appointees. Now, thanks to the Democrats’ decision to weaken the Senate filibuster, the appeals court has several new Obama appointees, shifting the balance of power to a majority that might be less hostile to the FSOC’s decision-making. So as MetLife ponders whether to mount a legal crusade against the financial regulators, its officials have to consider this: with those new judges, can Scalia continue his streak? And should they bring and a case and lose, what are the odds a higher court featuring another Scalia—who might have to recuse himself—could help them out?

See the article here: 

Antonin Scalia’s Son Now Works For Snoopy

Posted in alo, Anchor, Bunn, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Antonin Scalia’s Son Now Works For Snoopy

Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

by CarleyFreehill Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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

David Brooks is unhappy that President Obama continues to be a liberal even though Democrats lost in this year’s midterm election:

The White House has not privately engaged with Congress on the legislative areas where there could be agreement. Instead, the president has been superaggressive on the one topic sure to blow everything up: the executive order to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws.

….I sympathize with what Obama is trying to do substantively, but the process of how it’s being done is ruinous. Republicans would rightly take it as a calculated insult and yet more political ineptitude. Everybody would go into warfare mode. We’ll get two more years of dysfunction that will further arouse public disgust and antigovernment fervor (making a Republican presidency more likely).

This move would also make it much less likely that we’ll have immigration reform anytime soon. White House officials are often misinformed on what Republicans are privately discussing, so they don’t understand that many in the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get immigration reform out of the way. This executive order would destroy their efforts.

I continue to not get this train of thought. In 2006, Republicans lost. President Bush’s first action was to order a surge in Iraq, which infuriated Democrats. In 2008, Republicans lost. They responded by adopting a policy of obstructing every possible action by Democrats—including even a modest stimulus package during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In 2012, Republicans lost. They responded with brinkmanship over the fiscal cliff, a flat refusal to fill open judicial positions on the DC circuit court, and an endless bellowing rage over Benghazi and other manufactured outrages.

By comparison, all Obama is doing is something he’s been saying he’ll do for nearly a year. It’s not even all the big a deal if you step back for a moment and think about it. Several million undocumented immigrants are going to be told they’re officially free of the threat of deportation for a temporary period, as opposed to the status quo, in which they’re effectively free of the threat of deportation. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a big deal for the immigrants affected. But in terms of actual impact on immigration policy writ large? It doesn’t really do much.

And yet, this single action is apparently enough to—rightly!—put Republicans into warfare mode. If that’s true, I can only conclude that literally anything Republicans don’t like is enough to justify going into warfare mode. That’s certainly been how it’s worked in the past, anyway.

Look: Republicans can decide for themselves if they want to go to war. If they want to pass yet another bill repealing Obamacare, that’s fine. If they want to sue the president over the EPA or immigration, that’s fine. If they want to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, that’s fine. I assume Obama will win some of these battles and lose others, but in any case will treat them as the ordinary cut and thrust of politics instead of declaring them calculated insults that have infuriated him so much he can’t possibly ever engage with the GOP again. In other words, he’ll act like an adult, not a five-year-old.

This is what we expect from presidents. Why don’t we expect the same from congressional Republicans? Why are they allowed to stamp and scream whenever something doesn’t go their way, and everyone just shrugs? Once and for all, why don’t we demand that they act like adults too?

POSTSCRIPT: I didn’t bother with Brooks’ claim that Republicans are “privately” discussing real, honest-to-goodness immigration reform, but color me skeptical. If they want to engage on this subject, they need to discuss it with Obama, not between themselves. They’ve had plenty of time for that, and have never been willing to buck the tea party to get something done. Why would it be any different now? For more, I think Ed Kilgore has about the right take on this.

Read More: 

Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Isn’t It About Time to Ask Republicans to Start Acting Like Adults?

Why Won’t Orrin Hatch Blame Republicans For the Failure of Immigration Reform?

by ClarencXQA Posted on November 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch cracks me up:

Hatch expressed concern that President Barack Obama may soon take executive action on immigration and protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. “It would be catastrophic for him to do that,” said Hatch. “Part of it is our fault. We haven’t really seized this problem. Of course, we haven’t been in a position to do it either, with Democrats controlling the Senate. I’m not blaming Republicans. But we really haven’t seized that problem and found solutions for it.”

….”Frankly, I’d like to see immigration done the right way,” Hatch added. “This president is prone to doing through executive order that which he cannot do by working with the Congress, because he won’t work with us. If he worked with us, I think we could get an immigration bill through … He has a Republican Congress that’s willing to work with him. That’s the thing that’s pretty interesting to me.”

You know, it was only 17 months ago that the Senate passed a vigorously negotiated and tough-minded bipartisan immigration bill that was actively supported by President Obama. You know who voted for it? Orrin Hatch. The only reason it’s not the law of the land today is….Republicans in the House. That’s it.

So what’s the problem here? Why shouldn’t we blame Republicans?

Read the article: 

Why Won’t Orrin Hatch Blame Republicans For the Failure of Immigration Reform?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Won’t Orrin Hatch Blame Republicans For the Failure of Immigration Reform?

The War on Voting May Have Swung These 4 Races

by EdwinFortin Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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

In several races around the country on Tuesday, the victors won by razor-thin margins. Many of these races were in states that had recently enacted voting restrictions expected to depress turnout amongst minorities, young voters, and the poor, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Brennan Center. No one knows how many of the newly disenfranchised may have voted. Nevertheless, the report’s author Wendy Weiser notes, “In several key races, the margin of victory came very close to the likely margin of disenfranchisement.” Here’s look at the numbers in some of those elections, all via Brennan:

Kansas Governor: Republican Gov. Sam Brownback got 33,000 more votes than his Democratic challenger Paul Davis.

In 2011, Kansas implemented a requirement that voters provide documentation of citizenship to vote, and just before the 2012 election, the state enacted a strict photo ID law.

More than 24,000 Kansas voters tried to register this year, but couldn’t because of the state’s proof of citizenship law. In addition, it’s estimated that the state’s photo ID law reduces turnout by about 2 percent, or 17,000 voters.

North Carolina Senate: Republican House state speaker Thom Tillis beat incumbent Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan by 48,000 votes.

In 2013, North Carolina enacted a law—which Tillis helped write—limiting early voting and same-day registration, which the Justice Department warned would likely depress minority turnout. During the last midterms in 2010, about 200,000 North Carolinians cast their ballots during early voting days that the state’s new voting law eliminated.

Virginia Senate: Democratic Sen. Mark Warner beat GOPer Ed Gillespie by a margin of just over 12,000 votes.

Voters this year faced a new voter ID law that the state enacted in 2013. This type of law tends to reduce turnout by about 2.4 percent, according to New York Times pollster Nate Silver. Applied to the Virginia Senate race this year, that would mean that turnout was reduced by over 52,000 voters.

Florida Governor: Republican Gov. Rick Scott eked out a victory over former Democratic Gov. Charlie Crist by roughly 72,000 votes.

In 2011, Florida reduced the early voting period. The same year, Scott imposed a measure making it nearly impossible to vote for convicts who have already served their time. The move essentially disenfranchised nearly 1.3 million formerly incarcerated Floridians, about one in three of whom are African-American.

See original: 

The War on Voting May Have Swung These 4 Races

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The War on Voting May Have Swung These 4 Races

The Fight for Abortion Rights Just Got a Whole Lot Harder

by SusieFossey Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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

The GOP wave didn’t just crash into the US Senate. It flooded state legislatures, as well. By Wednesday evening, Republicans were in control of 67 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers—up from 57 before the election. It’s still unclear which party will control two other chambers.

Already, anti-abortion advocates are calling it a big win. Hundreds of the country’s most extreme anti-abortion bills pop up in these statehouses every year, and Tuesday’s results won’t do anything to put a stop to that. But reproductive rights advocates also suffered big setbacks Tuesday in places where they had actually been playing offense. Now, Democratic losses in states like Colorado, Nevada, New York, and Washington could torpedo their efforts to expand reproductive rights.

New York Republicans won a tiny majority in the state Senate, a development that could kill the proposed Women’s Equality Act—an omnibus bill that includes an equal pay measure, protections against pregnancy discrimination, and stronger domestic violence and sexual harassment laws. The bill had previously stalled in the Democratic Senate because of a provision that would give New York women an affirmative right to abortion. But in the waning days of the campaign, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, had pressured legislators to agree to pass the bill in the next session, and the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates were confident that the election would produce a friendlier Senate.

“We were really hopeful,” says Christina Chang, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood NYC Votes. “But a lot of the folks who won seats have not expressed support for the Women’s Equality Act…After last night’s elections, we have a harder road ahead of us.”

In both Colorado and Washington state, Democrats held majorities in both legislative houses and controlled governor’s mansions going into Tuesday night’s election. By Wednesday night, Republicans appeared on their way to controlling the Colorado Senate and they had captured and outright majority in the Washington Senate.

In recent years, Colorado Democrats have helped reproductive rights advocates check a number of items off their wish list. They increased Medicaid reimbursement rates for family planning services—a move that encourages more providers to offer that type of care—and they passed funding for comprehensive sex education. In 2012, Democrats blocked an effort by anti-abortion forces to pass religious freedom exemptions for health care providers, which abortion rights groups said would jeopardize access to contraception. Last year, Democrats repealed the remnants of a law that criminalized abortion. And this year, Democrats pushed for the Reproductive Health Freedom Act, which would have blocked new abortion restrictions, before backing down in the face of conservative opposition.

That kind of progress will likely come to a halt if Republicans take over the Senate—although reproductive rights advocates again remain hopeful.

“So many of the Republicans in Colorado sent messages to voters about being advocates of women’s health and not wanting to insert government into private decisions,” says Cathy Alderman, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. “We’re hoping they weren’t just using those issues as political ploys.”

In Washington state, Democrats had been fighting for a bill that would require abortion coverage in most insurance plans sold on the state’s Obamacare exchange. It was a bold measure at a time when many conservative states were banning abortion coverage. The bill stalled in the Senate, where a few renegade Democrats frequently sided with the powerful Republican minority. But additional GOP gains in the Senate would “derail any hope” that the bill will pass, says Elizabeth Nash, a researcher with the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank.

In Nevada, Democrats—who controlled the statehouse before Tuesday—supported a bill to establish comprehensive sex education. The state has some of the highest sexually transmitted infection and teen pregnancy rates in the country, yet schools rarely teach condom use or encourage STI testing. On Tuesday, Republicans won control of the legislature. Republicans roundly opposed the bill the last time it was introduced, and there is little chance that they’ll allow it to pass this year.

“I can’t say that the Republican party has ever been behind Planned Parenthood issues in Nevada, but we do know Nevada is a very pro-choice state,” Alderman says. “We’re optimistic and hopeful that they’ll see comprehensive sex education as smart policy, but we haven’t had their support in the past because of abortion opponents who come out and say that somehow this legislation is about pushing abortion.”

But while turnover in those states is a blow to reproductive rights groups, the 2014 elections didn’t change change the map for abortion rights quite like the 2010 election, when Republicans took over an even larger number of statehouses.

Nash argues that in some other states where Democrats suffered big losses, abortion rights will likely be protected by divided government. In Iowa, Democrats—who, this session, just barely held back an onslaught of anti-abortion bills—hung onto the state Senate. In New Mexico, where Republican Gov. Susana Martinez won reelection, Democrats lost the House but held the Senate. Republicans now control the New Hampshire statehouse, but they failed to unseat Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who supports abortion rights and will veto most anti-abortion legislation.

In West Virginia, Republicans took control of the House for the first time since 1931 and also won the governor’s mansion. The state Senate, meanwhile, is evenly divided between the parties. But the state was already hostile to abortion rights: Many West Virginia Democrats, including outgoing Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, supported harsh anti-abortion bills when their party controlled the legislature.

So in West Virginia—and many other red states—Republicans didn’t need a wave year for abortion rights to be in jeopardy. The outlook was pretty bleak already.

Taken from: 

The Fight for Abortion Rights Just Got a Whole Lot Harder

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Fight for Abortion Rights Just Got a Whole Lot Harder

10 Terrifying Facts From the UN’s New Climate Report

by ITAVinceyt Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The latest IPCC report is out, and the news is not happy.

The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, called today’s report the “strongest, most robust and most comprehensive” to come out of the IPCC, which has been tracking climate change since 1988. It is “yet another wake-up call to the global community that we must act together swiftly and aggressively,” the White House said in a statement.

The report’s language is stronger than in years past: Warming is “unequivocal,” and the changes we’re seeing are pervasive, it states clearly. We must take action quickly to cut our dependence on fossil fuels, it warns. If we don’t, we’ll face “further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

As we explained last week, you may be experiencing déjà vu—that’s because there have been three IPCC reports released since September 2013. Today’s is the final installment in this cycle of reports; called the synthesis report, it’s intended to summarize and clarify the three that came before. All the parts together form the complete Fifth Assessment Report, or AR5, a comprehensive look at climate change of the sort that hasn’t been released since 2007.

Everyone involved hopes the research summarized within will guide political leaders and UN negotiators as they try, over the next year, to cut an emissions-reducing deal and save us all.

Though this report is breezy by IPCC standards, coming in at a mere 116 pages with a 40-page summary for policymakers, we boiled it down a bit more. Here, with some charts, are 10 key things to take away—many of them familiar from the IPCC installments that have come out over the past 13 months.

1. We humans really, truly are responsible for climate change, and ignoring that fact doesn’t make it less true. “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history,” the report states. The atmospheric concentration of key greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—is “unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years,” the report warns, and our fossil-fuel driven economies and ever-increasing population are to blame.

IPCC

2. Climate change is already happening. Each of the past three decades has been warmer than the last, and warmer than any decade since we started keeping records. Sea levels are rising. Arctic ice cover is shrinking. Crop yields are changing—more often than not, getting smaller. It has been getting wetter, and storms and heat waves are getting more intense.

IPCC

3. …and it is going to get far worse: “Heat waves will occur more often and last longer…extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions. The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise,” the report states. If we stick to our current path, we could see 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius of warming—or even more—by the end of the century.

These graphs show projected changes in sea-level rise and surface temperature given different emissions scenarios:

IPCC

4. Much of recent warming has been in the ocean. About 90 percent of the energy that has gone into the climate system since 1971 went into the ocean. That means a warmer, expanding ocean, which fuels stronger storms. It also means rising sea levels and eroding coastlines.

5. The ocean is also becoming more acidic. By taking in so much of the carbon dioxide that humans have been spitting out since the industrial revolution, the ocean has become 26 percent more acidic and its pH level is falling. Scientists think this could have widespread and severe effects on marine life—increasingly, ocean acidification is being referred to as the “other CO2 problem.”

6. Climate change will hit developing nations particularly hard, but we are all vulnerable. Climate change will make food systems more volatile, exacerbate health problems, displace people, weaken countries’ infrastructures, and fuel conflict. It will touch every area of life. Economic growth will slow as temperatures warm, new poverty traps will be created, and we’ll find that poverty cannot be eliminated without first tackling climate change.

7. Plants and animals are even more vulnerable than we are. As climates shift, entire ecosystems will be forced to move, colliding with one another. Many plants and small animals won’t be able to move quickly enough to keep up, if global warming marches forward unabated, and will go extinct.

8. We must switch mostly to renewables by 2050, and phase out fossil fuels by 2100. To avoid the most damaging and potentially irreversible impacts of climate change (e.g., from the report: “substantial species extinction, global and regional food insecurity, consequential constraints on common human activities, and limited potential for adaptation”), we’ll need to make sure our greenhouse gas emissions are cut severely by the middle of this century. We should aim for “near zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived GHGs by the end of the century.”

This graph shows how much our emissions could go up or down under different emissions scenarios:

IPCC

9. We already have the answers we need to tackle climate change. We have the necessary technologies available, and economic growth will not be strongly affected if we take action, the report argues. As the cliché goes, all it takes is the will to act. But we must act in unison, the report states: “Effective mitigation will not be achieved if individual agents advance their own interests independently. Cooperative responses, including international cooperation, are therefore required to effectively mitigate GHG emissions and address other climate change issues.”

10. This dire report is decidedly conservative. The effects of climate change could be much worse than what this report presents. As Chris Mooney explains, many scientific experts say the panel errs on the side of caution. He writes:

…a new study just out in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society …charges that the IPCC is focused on avoiding what are called “type 1” errors—claiming something is happening when it really is not (a “false positive”)—rather than on avoiding “type 2” errors—not claiming something is happening when it really is (a “false negative”).

So the actual effects of climate change could be even more severe, and even stranger, than what the IPCC describes.

Link:

10 Terrifying Facts From the UN’s New Climate Report

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 10 Terrifying Facts From the UN’s New Climate Report