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October 29 vs. December 10: A Lesson in Editorial Judgment

by CarmenCross2717 Posted on December 10, 2016

Mother Jones

Today brings a reminder of the editorial judgment at work in our press corps. First, here is the New York Times on October 29, reporting on an ambiguous letter from FBI Director James Comey that literally added nothing to what we already knew:

And here is the New York Times on December 10, reporting on concrete news that the intelligence community believes a hostile foreign power played a major role in getting a game show host elected president of the United States:

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October 29 vs. December 10: A Lesson in Editorial Judgment

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Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doesn’t Want to Combat Climate Change

by bfys19 Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

On Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump has chosen Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican Conference, to be his Secretary of Interior. The Interior Department is responsible for three quarters of the nation’s public lands, and includes under its umbrella agencies like the National Parks Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Reclamation—all which are on the front lines of the fight against climate change.

But if her record in Congress is any indication, don’t expect McMorris Rogers to make climate science or conservation a priority. In 2008, after Al Gore earned a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, she dismissed the former vice president’s warnings about global warming. “We believe Al Gore deserves an ‘F’ in science and an ‘A’ in creative writing,” she joked.

One year later, McMorris Rodgers sang a slightly different tune, telling a group of students from her district that “we should be taking steps to reduce our carbon emissions”—but that’s been the extent of her climate awakening. In 2010, she earned plaudits from the Koch Brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity for opposing a cap-and-trade carbon-pricing system aimed at reducing emissions. In 2011 she voted three times against a resolution acknowledging that “climate change is happening and human beings are a major reason for it.” More recently, she co-sponsored the House bill to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency (which is not part of Interior) from regulating carbon emissions; EPA carbon regulations form the core of President Barack Obama’s climate policy.

McMorris Rodgers has explicitly voted against letting the Interior Secretary consider climate change when setting policy. In 2014, while supporting legislation designed to protect hunters’ access to public lands, she opposed an amendment stipulating that, “Nothing in this Act limits the authority of the Secretary of the Interior to include climate change as a consideration in making decisions related to conservation and recreation on public lands.”

Even the firsthand effects of climate change on her district have done little to spur the congresswoman to action. When forest fires swept through Eastern Washington in August, the state’s Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, argued that the fires, aided by tree-killing bugs and dry conditions, were a problem that would only get worse due to climate change—a position shared by the US Forest Service. McMorris Rodgers declined to make that connection when asked by reporters about Inslee’s comments, instead urging authorities to simply focus on “better forest management.”

McMorris Rogers, who has a four-percent lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters, has taken concrete steps to curb the power of the department she’s now set to run. She’s repeatedly backed legislation that would limit the president’s authority to protect public lands under the Antiquities Act, which President Barack Obama and his predecessors have used to create marine sanctuaries and to set aside large chunks of the West as national monuments. (The impetus for the most recent push was Obama’s creation of Basin and Range National Monument, to be run by the Bureau of Land Management, in central Nevada.) She also backed a proposal loosen environmental laws in national parks and wildlife refuges within 100 miles of the US–Mexican border. That’s not a good sign for fragile desert ecosystems—but it might come in handy when construction starts on Trump’s wall.

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Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doesn’t Want to Combat Climate Change

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Conway: It’s Cool for Trump to Be Apprentice Executive Producer Because Obama Golfed

by TabithaBoose Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

On Wednesday afternoon, Variety published a scoop: President-elect Donald Trump will stay on as executive producer of Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, the hit franchise he created with reality TV mogul Mark Burnett from MGM. The show returns to air on January 2—hosted by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Trumps spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed the president-elect “has a big stake in the show.” Trump won’t be involved in actually producing the show, but his fee per episode is likely to be in the low five figures, according to Variety. According to the Hollywood Reporter, this fee will be paid by MGM Television, the studio responsible for the production—not by NBC.

All this is raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest. As the Huffington Post explained:

Trump’s role is rife with potential entanglements. While his paycheck will come from MGM, the program airs on NBC, a major broadcast network with an influential news division (which employs reporters Trump has personally attacked). It’s also the same network that airs Saturday Night Live, a show Trump has criticized on numerous occasions for its unflattering depiction of him. And NBC is owned by Comcast, a corporation that was recently slapped with a hefty fine by the Federal Communications Commission—an entity that will soon be under Trump’s control.

Today, Trump adviser and former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway appeared on CNN’s New Day to defend the decision. According to Conway, whatever Trump does in his “spare time” is up to him, much in the way that Obama liked to play golf. “Were we so concerned about the hours and hours and hours spent on the golf course of the current president?” Conway said. “I mean presidents have a right to do things in their spare time, in their leisure time.” Watch the entire exchange above.

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Conway: It’s Cool for Trump to Be Apprentice Executive Producer Because Obama Golfed

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Canada Just Took a Big Step Toward Banning a Nasty Pesticide

by MosesWillingham Posted on November 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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While President-elect Donald Trump ponders which anti-regulation stalwart to place at the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Health Canada—our northern neighbor’s version of the EPA—just took a bold step toward protecting the environment. Last week, the Canadian agency declared in a preliminary assessment that a high-profile insecticide should be banned within five years, because it’s turning up in waterways “at levels that are harmful to aquatic insects”—the base of the food chain for fish, birds, and other animals.

Health Canada is soliciting public comment on its assessment through late February, after which it will decide whether to proceed with a phased-in ban. The chemical is imidacloprid, widely marketed by Bayer, the German chemical giant that recently bought US seed/agrichemical titan Monsanto in a deal pending approval by US and European antitrust authorities. Bayer was not amused by the finding, declaring itself “extremely disappointed.”

Imidacloprid is part of a class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids, the globe’s most-used insecticides—and one that has been linked by a growing body of research with the declining health of honeybees and other pollinators.

The Canadian assessment has nothing to do with pollinators, though. The agency is conducting a separate evaluation of how the chemical affects them. It’s striking that the agency decided that the risk imidacloprid poses to waterborne insects is so great that the chemical should be banned. Mark Winston, a professor of apiculture at Simon Fraser University and senior fellow at the university’s Centre for Dialogue, told CBC News that the recommendation “really surprised” him, because “to take an action to phase out a chemical that is so ubiquitous, and for which there is so much lobbying pressure from industry…that’s a really bold move.”

Based on similar concerns, Health Canada has initiated reviews of two other prominent neonics, clothianidin and thiamethoxam. They, too, have potent corporate interests behind them—Bayer is a major producer of clothianidin, while the Chinese agrichemical giant Syngenta is the sole maker of thiamethoxam products on the Canadian market, according to Health Canada.

Meanwhile, south of the border, imidacloprid has also generated serious concern among regulatory agencies. Back in January, the EPA released a preliminary assessment finding that in two crops where it’s commonly used, cotton and citrus, imidacloprid harms bees and lowers honey production. As for the most prominent crop for imidacloprid, soybeans, the EPA noted that they’re “attractive to bees via pollen and nectar,” meaning they could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid. But the agency revealed that it doesn’t know whether it causes harm, because data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans’ pollen and nectar are “unavailable” both from Bayer and independent researchers—even though it’s been on the market for 20 years.

Overall, the assessment was so dire that an EPA spokeswoman told me at the time that the agency “could potentially take action” to “restrict or limit the use” of the chemical by the end of this year. Such a move has yet to happen.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Trump has descended upon Washington. His main ag adviser during the campaign, Charles Herbster, regularly denounced regulation of agriculture. The man leading Trump’s EPA transition is an anti-regulation zealot, and according to Politico, the president-elect is mulling candidates of that ilk to head the agency. Soon, it may not just be disappointed Democrats who fantasize about emigrating north. Bees and aquatic insects may join them.

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Canada Just Took a Big Step Toward Banning a Nasty Pesticide

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White Supremacist Sites Claim Their Traffic Is Booming. Actually, No.

by MaxwellIsrael Posted on November 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Has white supremacy gone mainstream? It certainly feels that way based on this week’s headlines, with leading so-called “alt-right” figures crowing about Trump’s victory on major news sites (including Mother Jones). The self-described alt-right “platform,” Breitbart News, claimed that its readership has doubled over the past eight months to 37 million unique visitors. And Trump’s choice of Breitbart chairman Stephen Bannon, nativist Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, and anti-Muslim Lt. General Michael T. Flynn for key leadership posts has given bigotry a seat in the Oval Office.

But here’s a reality check: Readership of actual white supremacist websites—by which I mean those that openly claim the racial superiority of whites—has actually changed very little over the past year. Here’s a chart of unique monthly visitors to the largest two such sites, provided to Mother Jones by the analytics firm comScore:

This is hardly the sort of growth one might expect if Americans were suddenly warming up to white supremacy. Traffic to Stormfront was lower last month than in October, 2015. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site founded in 2013, had too little traffic in many months even to meet comScore’s reportability thresholds. Though comScore’s traffic figures aren’t 100 percent reliable, they do suggest that the growth of these sites has been at best minimal over the past year.

Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin told me in an email that his traffic had doubled over the past year to 4 million unique viewers, but did not respond when I confronted him with comScore’s dramatically lower figures. Anglin has claimed a rise in readers based on the notoriously unreliable Alexa rankings, but back in 2014, when Alexa showed a decline in Daily Stormer readers, he called Alexa “a complete joke which can never be taken seriously again.”

Breitbart also appears to be inflating its numbers. According to data collected by comScore, its traffic has increased over the past year from 13 million to 19 million unique viewers. That is still a dramatic rise, but it falls far short of the 37 million unique visitors that Breitbart claims. (A Breitbart spokesperson did respond to a request for comment).

There’s no doubt Breitbart has unleashed a miasma of racist rhetoric and ideas over the past year. In the week following the election, organizations that track hate crimes recorded the biggest spike in such incidents since the aftermath of 9/11. Among 10,000 Trump supporters sampled by an analytics firm in October, more than a third followed at least one white nationalist Twitter account. Trump’s denunciations of entire etnic groups, religions, and genders has had the effect of normalizing hate speech.

But white supremacy is still a step too far, even for Trump and his inner circle. Maybe they really do find neo-Nazis and the KKK abhorrent (if so, Trump certainly could have been swifter in denouncing them). Or maybe they’re just smart enough to know what any corporate marketer long ago figured out: When it comes to unvarnished white supremacy, nobody wants to hear it.

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White Supremacist Sites Claim Their Traffic Is Booming. Actually, No.

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Trump vows to create jobs by cutting regulations. That won’t work.

by Margene8108 Posted on November 22, 2016

In his first post-election national address — conveyed via YouTube — President-elect Donald Trump detailed his plans to “make America great again” in his first 100 days in office.

These plans include renegotiating international trade deals, imposing new bans on lobbying within his administration, and ending restrictions on fossil fuel production. That would fly in the face of the U.S. commitment to ratchet down emissions under the Paris Agreement, the international climate treaty supported by 71 percent of Americans.

“On energy,” Trump said, “I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale energy and clean coal, creating many millions of high-paying jobs. That’s what we want. That’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

That order of business, however, does not address the dearth of “millions of high-paying jobs” in the energy sector. Fossil fuel jobs have been in decline not because of overregulation, but due to the low prices of gas, oil, and coal. (That said, those prices are forecast to rise again.)

In fact, the shale drilling industry is already exempt from a number of the major federal environmental laws, including the Clean Air and the Clean Water Act.

As for “clean coal,” someone should probably tell the President-elect there’s no such thing. But we have a feeling he’s not going to listen.

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Trump vows to create jobs by cutting regulations. That won’t work.

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Um, where did all of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just go?

by KatherineUbc Posted on November 17, 2016

Many have agreed that President-elect Donald Trump has some questionable ideas when it comes to climate policy. Today, we get to add anthropomorphized gym sock O’Reilly and known cup goblin Starbucks to that list!

On Wednesday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, he advised Trump on a number of items to consider as he prepares to take office. On this list:

“Finally, President-Elect Trump should accept the Paris treaty on climate to buy some goodwill overseas. It doesn’t really amount to much anyway, let it go.”

Well, the thing is, it does actually amount to a lot.

Here’s a confusing screenshot, because this action item appears under the heading “What President Obama Failed to Do,” when President Obama did, in fact, succeed in accepting the Paris Agreement.

On Thursday morning, a coalition of 365 major companies and investors submitted a plea to Trump to please, come on, just support the goddamn Paris Agreement, because to do otherwise would be a disastrous blow to the United States’ economic competitiveness. The list includes Starbucks (the nerve!!!!), eBay, Kellogg, and Virgin.

Anyway, Trump’s whole “refusing to acknowledge climate change” thing seems like a bad look.

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Um, where did all of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice just go?

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A woman who fought predatory oil and gas leasing on Native lands got the Presidential Medal of Honor.

by TrentSeeley753 Posted on November 17, 2016

Many have agreed that President-elect Donald Trump has some questionable ideas when it comes to climate policy. Today, we get to add anthropomorphized gym sock O’Reilly and known cup goblin Starbucks to that list!

On Wednesday’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor, he advised Trump on a number of items to consider as he prepares to take office. On this list:

“Finally, President-Elect Trump should accept the Paris treaty on climate to buy some goodwill overseas. It doesn’t really amount to much anyway, let it go.”

Well, the thing is, it does actually amount to a lot.

Here’s a confusing screenshot, because this action item appears under the heading “What President Obama Failed to Do,” when President Obama did, in fact, succeed in accepting the Paris Agreement.

On Thursday morning, a coalition of 365 major companies and investors submitted a plea to Trump to please, come on, just support the goddamn Paris Agreement, because to do otherwise would be a disastrous blow to the United States’ economic competitiveness. The list includes Starbucks (the nerve!!!!), eBay, Kellogg, and Virgin.

Anyway, Trump’s whole “refusing to acknowledge climate change” thing seems like a bad look.

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A woman who fought predatory oil and gas leasing on Native lands got the Presidential Medal of Honor.

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Why Did Trump Win? A Roundup of the Most Popular Theories.

by JessikaLetters Posted on November 15, 2016

Mother Jones

In the past week, I’ve seen hundreds of pieces about why Donald Trump won and why Hillary Clinton lost. In the next few months, I’ll see thousands more. So do we have an answer yet?

Ha ha. Of course not. For the most part, people are just blaming all the stuff they already believed in. I recommend skipping those pieces entirely. I haven’t entirely made up my mind yet, but for the record, here’s how I’m currently feeling about all the usual suspects:

James Comey. Yeah, I think he made a big difference. Pretty much everyone on both sides agrees that support for Clinton shifted in response to Comey’s first letter and then again in response to his second letter. My guess is that his last minute intervention swayed the vote by about 2 percent. That’s not a lot, but in this election it was the difference between winning and losing.

Whitelash. In general, I’m unconvinced. White voters made up 72 percent of the electorate in 2012 and 70 percent in 2016. This doesn’t suggest that Trump motivated white voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. Nor did white voters support Trump at a higher rate than they supported Romney. However, there’s more to this….

The white working class. Maybe. They did vote for Trump in greater numbers than they voted for Romney, but that merely extended a trend that’s decades old. The white working class has been getting steadily more Republican since Nixon, so it’s not clear if Trump accelerated this trend or merely benefited from it. It’s also possible that rural blue-collar whites had a substantial effect in a few key swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) even if they didn’t have a big effect nationally. We need more data here.

Racism. This one is tricky. Obviously Trump appealed to white racism, but it’s not as if racism suddenly spiked in 2016. It’s about the same as it’s always been, and it’s hard to see in the data that it made a big difference compared to previous years. However, we did learn something new and disheartening: it didn’t make a difference. In 2012, 93 percent of Republicans voted for Romney. This year, 90 percent voted for Trump. It turns out that Republicans just don’t care about explicit appeals to racism and misogyny. You can be as openly bigoted as you want, and you’ll only lose 3 percent of the Republican vote.

Third parties. This doesn’t explain anything. Third-party candidates did double their vote share compared to 2012, but so what? Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were candidates in 2012 too. If they got more votes this year, it’s because the two major party candidates were less appealing than Obama and Romney—which is what we’re trying to explain in the first place.

The fundamentals. This probably had a bigger effect than it’s getting credit for. There are lots of models out there, but generally speaking they mostly suggested that 2016 was a very winnable year for Republicans. The economy was OK but not great; Democrats had been in office for eight years; and Obama’s approval rating was mediocre. Clinton was fighting a modestly uphill battle the whole way.

The media. I think the press played a significant role in Trump’s victory, though the evidence is all anecdotal. Two things were in play. First, Trump hacked cable news. He figured out that they’re basically in the entertainment business and will provide endless coverage to anyone who drives ratings. The more outrageous he was, the more coverage he got. Second, the media’s gullible willingness to cover Clinton’s email woes so relentlessly hurt her badly. It’s easy to say that Clinton has no one but herself to blame for this, and there’s something to that. Still, even long after they should have known better, the press reported every new development in breathless tones and 60-point headlines—even though, time after time, it turned out there was nothing there. They got played—and what’s worse, they got played by the same wide-ranging cast of Hillary haters that’s played them before.

Sexism. I don’t know. It obviously seems likely that it played a role, but I haven’t seen any real data to back it up.

Lousy turnout from Democrats. Maybe. It appears that voter turnout in general was down from 2012, but only slightly—and once all the votes are counted it might be dead even. In any case, turnout seems to have affected Democrats and Republicans about equally. We need more data before we can say much about this.

Millennials. This clearly had an effect. Young voters abandoned Clinton in much greater numbers than older voters (about 5 percent vs. 1 percent, by my calculation). Likewise, third parties got about 9 percent of the millennial vote, compared to 3 percent of the older vote. There’s not much question that Clinton did poorly among millennials, and this reduced her overall vote total by 1-2 percentage points. The question is why this happened. The options are (a) Clinton was a corrupt, neoliberal sellout that young voters were never likely to warm up to, or (b) Bernie Sanders convinced millions of millennials that Clinton was a corrupt, neoliberal sellout who didn’t deserve their vote. Take your pick.

Voter suppression. This had, at most, a small effect. Among the key “firewall” states that Clinton lost, Pennsylvania has no voter ID law; Michigan has a loose ID law that allows you to vote without ID if you sign an affadavit; and Wisconsin has a strict photo ID law. Wisconsin was very close, and voter ID might have made the difference there. But Clinton still would have lost.

The electoral college. Yeah, there was that.

Once again: this is my best take on all of these theories right now. But the actual evidence is still weak. CPS data won’t be available for years, and in the meantime we have exit poll data—which is suggestive but not much more—and a lot of people looking at county and precinct level data, trying to tease out who voted for whom. We’ll eventually know more, but it will take a while. Until then, it’s probably best not to be too sure of whatever your own pet theory is.

Except for James Comey, of course. That guy sucks.

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Why Did Trump Win? A Roundup of the Most Popular Theories.

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Environmentalists are raising the pressure on Obama over Dakota Access.

by LavadaDedman Posted on November 7, 2016

Cushing, Oklahoma, was shaken on Sunday night by a 5.0 magnitude temblor. About 40 to 50 buildings were damaged, some substantially, according to the Associated Press, but no major injuries have been reported. The quake was felt as far away as Illinois, Iowa, and Texas.

Cushing — aka the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World” — is home to one of the largest oil storage terminals in the world. In 2012, President Obama visited Cushing to promote his support for the oil and gas industry.

But that same oil and gas industry has spurred a surge of earthquakes in Oklahoma, which are triggered when drillers inject wastewater underground. In 2005, prior to the state’s current oil and gas boom, there was only one earthquake of magnitude 3.0 or higher in Oklahoma. In 2015, there were more than 900.

Just in the last week, there have been about two dozen quakes in the state. Luckily, no damage has been reported to the Cushing oil terminal. But how long will that luck last?

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Environmentalists are raising the pressure on Obama over Dakota Access.

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