Tag Archives: local

The Next Cliven Bundy Showdown

by ShannaNeedham Posted on May 9, 2014

Mother Jones

It looks like a new front has opened up in Cliven Bundy‘s war against the US government.

This Saturday, angry residents of San Juan County, Utah, plan to illegally ride their ATVs through Utah’s Recapture Canyon—an 11 mile-long stretch of federal land that is home to Native American archeological sites—because they don’t think that the federal Bureau of Land Management should have designated that land off-limits to motor vehicles. The protest was meant to be a local affair. But on Thursday, Bundy, the rancher who wouldn’t pay the feds grazing fees and sparked a gun-drenched showdown in Nevada, called on his supporters to join the anti-government off-roading event, E&E Publishing’s Phil Taylor reported. Bundy, whose crusade against the federal government became tainted by his racist comments, is looking to spread the cause from cattle to cross-country cruising.

“We don’t expect any violence,” San Juan County Sheriff Rick Eldredge told the Denver Post last week. Others aren’t so sure, especially since the out-of-staters in attendance could help rile things up—which is what happened during the Bundy stand-off. “This may blow up to be significantly more than they thought,” Bill Boyle, a resident of San Juan and publisher of the San Juan Record newspaper told the Post. “I think there are those who would like everyone with an AK-47 to be here.”

San Juan County residents who plan to attend Saturday’s event are Bundy supporters and Ted Nugent fans, according to an analysis of their Facebook pages by the Denver Post. They also hate President Barack Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid, according to the newspaper, which reports that “BLM employees in San Juan County have had windows shot out of their homes and their yards torn up by ATVs in the middle of the night.”

The BLM made the Recapture Canyon land off limits in 2007 because ATVs were damaging the land and folks were vandalizing Native American sites. San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman, who is organizing Saturday’s protest, does not believe the feds have the authority to protect cultural resources. He says the goal of the ride is to reassert county jurisdiction in the face of federal “overreach,” according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Federal overreach was the theme that Bundy’s champions in the national conservative media repeatedly pressed—until Bundy’s racist comments became news.

Local officials do not have a good estimate of how many mad-as-hell ATV riders will show up to zoom through sacred Native American land on Saturday. But the BLM has decided to stand back and avoid a conflict for now, as it did several weeks ago on the Bundy ranch in Nevada. Utah’s BLM director Juan Palma, however, said there will nonetheless be consequences for the anti-government activists. “The BLM-Utah has not and will not authorize the proposed ride and will seek all appropriate civil and criminal penalties against anyone who uses a motorized vehicle within the closed area,” he said in a statement.

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The Next Cliven Bundy Showdown

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GOP leader calls anti-fracking congressman a terrorist

by PenniLesina Posted on May 5, 2014

Define “terror”

GOP leader calls anti-fracking congressman a terrorist

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Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) thinks local communities should be able to decide how fracking is regulated in their areas, and whether it’s allowed at all. He’s among the backers of some initiatives proposed for the November ballot that could increase local control over oil and gas drilling.

And the chair of the Colorado Republican Committee, Ryan Call, says that makes Polis a terrorist. Here’s a screen grab that ColoradoPols.com took of a Twitter exchange before Call deleted the offensive tweet:

ColoradoPols.com

Another Republican, state Rep. Jerry Sonnenberg, picked up the theme, saying, “Polis’ jihad against responsible energy development is reckless.”

The Boulder Daily Camera reports that Call apologized for using the T word:

“It’s a fact that Congressman Jared Polis’ proposed regulations will put thousands of Colorado jobs and our state’s economic future at risk,” [Call] said. “While I passionately believe that we must protect these jobs and energy development in our state, I understand that my comment has distracted from this important conversation.” …

On Friday, Polis said his fight for local control over drilling may have to be settled in November’s election, in which his seat also will be on the ballot.

“Fundamentally, what my constituents feel needs to occur is that communities need to have a role in the siting of fracking activities in their areas,” he said. “Currently, that debate is co-opted by the state, which allows fracking to occur anywhere and everywhere.”

What’s really more terrorizing – run-of-the-mill democracy, or energy companies pumping poisons into the ground and the air for short-term financial gain with limited government oversight?


Source
Republicans Cry “Terrorism” As Local Control Negotiations Falter, ColoradoPols.com
Colo. GOP chair labels Jared Polis ‘terrorist’ over Boulder Democrat’s fracking stance, Daily Camera
Untangling Colorado’s Flood of Anti-Fracking Ballot Initiatives, DeSmogBlog

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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GOP leader calls anti-fracking congressman a terrorist

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Kill the Penny, Save the Economy!

by Finley11Wjxpzza Posted on April 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Ryan Cooper is annoyed by coins. They’re too much trouble, and they just pile up in the penny jar at home. I used to feel that way, but now that my local supermarket has a Coinstar machine, I don’t care anymore. I throw my coins into the machine every few months, and within a minute I get an Amazon gift card or something for the full value of the change. No muss, no fuss, no more rolling up coins.

Still, Cooper thinks we could do better if we not only got rid of the penny, but got rid of all our other small change too:

Here’s my solution: multiply the face value of every U.S. coin by 10. A penny will be worth 10 cents, a nickel 50 cents, a dime one dollar, a quarter $2.50, and a dollar coin 10 bucks. (We could also reinvent the half-dollar, which is barely produced now, as a nice $5 coin.)

This will have several beneficial effects: first, it will make change real money again….Second, it will be easy to accomplish. We won’t have to have a big fight with the zinc lobby or Abraham Lincoln fans over whether to stop production of a particular coin, or rebuild all the vending machines around differently-shaped coins.

….Third — and this might be the most contentious part of this proposal — changing coins could be a nice piece of badly-needed economic stimulus. Effectively, we’d be printing up a bunch of new money and handing it to whoever has coins on hand. We’d have to think carefully about the details, but the idea would be to allow people who have old coins to hand them in for fresh new versions worth 10 times as much….How much money are we talking about? According to the Federal Reserve, as of 2010 there was about $40 billion worth of coins in circulation, which constituted 4.3 percent of the U.S. currency stock. We’d be increasing that by $360 billion at a stroke, which would actually be a pretty powerful economic stimulus.

I like this kind of out-of-the-box thinking! Unfortunately, I suspect the biggest beneficiaries wouldn’t be coin hoarders, but banks, which probably own about 90 percent of all circulating coins. (I’m just guessing about that.) Plus, you’d better do this in secret. If you don’t, you’re going to have the damnedest run on Sacagawea dollars ever. You can sign me up for a ton or two right now.

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Kill the Penny, Save the Economy!

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Oregon tells rail companies to keep oil deliveries secret

by JessicaLgf Posted on April 24, 2014

Oregon tells rail companies to keep oil deliveries secret

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Oregon transportation officials are doing everything in their power to keep the state’s residents in the dark about the movement of crude-filled, explosion-prone rail cars.

The Oregonian won a two-month battle in March when the state Department of Justice ruled that the state Department of Transportation was of course legally required to provide information it receives about the oil shipments to the daily newspaper. Failing to do so “could infringe on the public’s ability to assess the local and statewide risks,” a Justice Department attorney advised.

“Risks shmisks,” the Transportation Department replied. It heavily redacted reports it had received from the rail companies before releasing them to the journalists — and then kicked the intrasigence up a notch. The department told rail companies to stop submitting reports because such reports would become public. (Rail companies have broken promises to share this type of data with the federal government. Oregon transportation officials claim publishing the information is a security risk, despite the fact that oil-laden rail cars are already clearly labeled.) From The Oregonian:

The Oregon Department of Transportation, the state’s rail safety overseer, says it will no longer ask railroads for reports detailing where crude oil moves through the state after The Oregonian successfully sought to have them made public.

Railroads “provided us courtesy copies with the understanding we wouldn’t share it — believing it might be protected,” ODOT spokesman David Thompson said in an email. “We now know that the info is NOT protected; so do the railroads.” …

State law requires railroads to annually submit detailed reports saying what dangerous substances they’ve moved, where and in what volume. They’re due to emergency responders across the state by March 1 of each year. That hasn’t been happening.

The reports have been sent to ODOT instead, which historically acted as a central hub, providing the information on request to firefighters across the state.

ODOT officials say that process needs reform. But as ODOT begins working to change those disclosure rules, its officials say they no longer need any reports.

Keeping this kind of information secret won’t just make it hard for residents to make decisions about where they can live and travel safely. It will make it more difficult for the Transportation Department to do its job. “There’s no other place to get the data,” a retired department rail safety inspector told the paper.


Source
ODOT acts to limit disclosure of oil train shipments after The Oregonian won its release, The Oregonian

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Oregon tells rail companies to keep oil deliveries secret

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California nears a tipping point with single-use plastics

by Myrna Posted on April 2, 2014

From the ground up we are nearing a state-wide bag ban in California. Taken from: California nears a tipping point with single-use plastics ; ;Related ArticlesOutside the bubbleSan Francisco phases out single-use plastic water bottles on municipal propertyThe future of surfing is not disposable ;

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California nears a tipping point with single-use plastics

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Steelhead Drive Is Gone, Along With So Many Lives Lived on It

by Myrna Posted on April 1, 2014

Local authorities in Washington released the names of 19 of the dead who have been identified, the youngest 4 months old and the oldest 71. Original source:  Steelhead Drive Is Gone, Along With So Many Lives Lived on It ; ;Related ArticlesLandslide Death Toll Hits 27, with 22 MissingLandslide’s Debris Hampers a Search for RemainsNew Endurance Records Set as Snow Vanishes From Iditarod Trail ;

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Steelhead Drive Is Gone, Along With So Many Lives Lived on It

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Want Better Broadband? Unbundle the Local Loop.

by XOCKellieqnkfp Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Felix Salmon says we have plenty of bandwidth in America. Contra Tyler Cowen, we don’t need to spend a bajillion dollars rolling out a new nationwide network based on new pipes or new technology:

What we do need, on the other hand, is the ability of different companies to provide broadband services to America’s households. And here’s where the real problem lies: the cable companies own the cable pipes, and the regulators refuse to force them to allow anybody else to provide services over those pipes. This is called local loop unbundling, it’s the main reason for low broadband prices in Europe, and of course it’s vehemently opposed by the cable companies.

Local loop unbundling, in the broadband space, would be vastly more effective than waiting for some hugely expensive new technology to be built, nationally, in parallel to the existing internet infrastructure. The problem with Cowen’s dream is precisely the monopoly rents that the cable companies are currently extracting. If and when any new competitor arrives, the local monopolist has more room to cut prices and drive the competitor out of business than the newcomer has.

Cable companies have a thousand ready-made technical incantations to explain why they can’t possibly open up their networks to competitors. To listen to them, you’d think this would be akin to letting a five-year-old mess around with your electric wiring. This is delicate stuff! You can’t just let anyone start sending bits around on it.

It’s all special pleading, of course, of the same type that Ma Bell engaged in when people wanted to start putting answering machines on their phone lines. But everyone understands there would be technical requirements they’d have to meet, just as answering machines had to meet reasonable technical requirements back in the day. Regulators would have to be involved to make sure everyone plays nice with each other, but that’s far from impossible.

No, this is all about money, as you already guessed. Allowing other companies to use their last-mile pipes would (a) take away some of their broadband rents, (b) force cable companies to genuinely compete on price and features, and (c) allow competitors onto their network who couldn’t care less about cannibalizing TV business. If I were a cable company, I’d fight that tooth and nail too.

But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to take their arguments seriously. The rest of us should be in favor of competition, not the profit margins of local cable TV monopolies.

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Want Better Broadband? Unbundle the Local Loop.

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It’s Time to End the Cable Sports Tax

by Napoleon6794 Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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With spring training in the air here in Los Angeles, the saga of Dodger baseball is entering the ninth inning. Until last year, Dodger games were split between a broadcast channel and a basic cable sports channel. Total cost for the rights was about $50 million. Then Time-Warner signed a deal to run a 24/7 Dodger channel and paid a whopping $210 million for the 2014 rights. They have to make back that money, of course, and their plan for doing it is twofold: (a) charge a lot for the channel, and (b) insist that cable and satellite companies put it in their basic subscriber packages, where everyone has to pay for it:

Many distributors are upset about being pressured to carry a new sports network in a region that already has several similar channels, including not only Prime Ticket but also Fox Sports West, Pac-12 Los Angeles and Time Warner Cable’s SportsNet and Deportes.

“It is really hard to understand why everyone needs their own channel when they didn’t need one before,” said Andy Albert, senior vice president of content acquisition for Cox Communications.

“Time Warner Cable has unilaterally decided to pay an unprecedented high price and now wants all of their own customers as well as those of their competitors, none of which who had any say in the matter, to pick up that tab,” said Dan York, DirecTV’s chief content officer….”Given the high price that Time Warner Cable is seeking, it would be reasonable to ask that only those families who truly want to pay for the Dodgers actually pay for it,” said DirecTV’s York, whose company has 1.2 million subscribers in the region.

SportsNet LA’s response: A la carte is “not really on the table,” Rone said.

Of course it’s not. If it were a la carte, Time-Warner wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of earning back its $210 million. But I say: tough luck. It’s time to put a stop to this madness. The Dodgers (and the Lakers, who signed a similar deal) seem to think that every cable household in the LA basin should pay a head tax of $60 per year to support them. Why? Beats me. Because it’s sports. No other private enterprise is able to demand an explicit tribute like this from every consumer in a region, whether or not they happen to buy their products. For most companies, the best they can do is finagle a few tax breaks here and there—which, of course, sports teams do too.

This is basically a tax on everyone with a TV. There’s no excuse for it, and our local tea partiers should all be up in arms about it. Here’s hoping that Cox and DirecTV and all the other cable companies hold out and force the Dodgers and Time-Warner to cry uncle. Someone needs to set an example.

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It’s Time to End the Cable Sports Tax

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Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

by JuliaPage Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last election season, a shadowy nonprofit pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign to change how electoral votes are counted. The group didn’t disclose who was funding its efforts—a fact that Mother Jones highlighted in a story titled “Who’s Paying for the GOP’s Plan to Hijack the 2012 Election?” But now, thanks to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonpartisan government watchdog, it’s clear that organizations with ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch footed at least some of the bill.

Each state and the District of Columbia has a certain number of electoral votes, based on their population, and they get to decide for themselves how those votes should be allotted. Currently, every state except Maine and Nebraska gives all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. But in 2011, GOP lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin introduced bills that would divide electoral votes among candidates based on how many congressional districts they won. Because Republicans drew the boundaries of the districts in those states, this scheme would be almost certain to hand Republican presidential candidates the majority of their electoral votes—even if more voters cast ballots for Democrats. (Read more about how the plan would work here.) Presuming the race is close enough, this could decide the nationwide outcome.

In the case of Pennsylvania, a mysterious nonprofit called All Votes Matter spent large sums lobbying for these changes. Local officials wondered about its funding sources. “They raised an awful lot of money very quickly—$300,000 in just a few days,” Democratic Pennsylvania state Sen. Daylin Leach told Mother Jones at the time. “We’re all curious where that level of funding comes from.” But All Votes Matter didn’t disclose its donors, nor did it have to. The group is organized as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” nonprofit, which means that it can spend money on politics while keeping its donors secret. (Such groups are not supposed to spend more than half of their budget on political causes, but IRS enforcement is slack.) Thus the public knew little about the agendas behind this effort to upend the mechanics of presidential elections.

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Koch-Tied Groups Funded GOP Effort to Mess With Electoral College Rules

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Texans want frackers to stop causing earthquakes

by HalleyR55yl Posted on January 22, 2014

Texans want frackers to stop causing earthquakes

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Some North Texans who have been enduring a months-long flurry of earthquakes want the shaking to stop — and they believe that means putting an end to a controversial fracking practice.

“Is somebody going to help us?” one resident asked the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates gas and oil drilling, during a hearing on Tuesday. “I’ve heard of tornado alley. I’ve never heard of earthquake alley.”

The dozens of residents who traveled to Austin for the hearing want frackers barred from injecting their wastewater underground at high pressure. Scientists have linked the practice to earthquakes in other regions.

The commission says operations at one injection well in the area were suspended in November after it was found to be operating at unusually high pressure. But the commission says it doesn’t have the power to stop frackers from operating injection wells just because of earthquake risks. Here’s more from the local CBS affiliate:

[G]eneral counsel for the commission Wendell Fowler said inspectors can only start the two to three month process of shutting down a well if there is polluted water, fluid escaping, a change in conditions or the rules. Seismic activity is not one of the criteria.

RRC Chairman Barry Smitherman said injection activity at the wells in question has been less than it was back in 2010. He also made note of a recent paper where some researchers cast doubt on the connection between injection wells and quakes.

The commission said it would hire a seismologist in the coming weeks to investigate the residents’ complaints. But it appears that any real solution would require new state legislation.


Source
North Texans Protest Fracking, Earthquakes At Railroad Commission Meeting, CBS
Railroad Commission reports injection well near Azle shut down, The Dallas Morning News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Texans want frackers to stop causing earthquakes

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