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President Obama Is the Anti-Lame Duck

by Joseph3146 Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Quentin Tarantino really likes President Obama:

You supported Obama. How do you think he’s done?

I think he’s fantastic. He’s my favorite president, hands down, of my lifetime. He’s been awesome this past year. Especially the rapid, one-after-another-after-another-after-another aspect of it. It’s almost like take no prisoners. His he-doesn’t-give-a-shit attitude has just been so cool. Everyone always talks about these lame-duck presidents. I’ve never seen anybody end with this kind of ending. All the people who supported him along the way that questioned this or that and the other? All of their questions are being answered now.

Rapid fire indeed. In no particular order, here’s a baker’s dozen list of his major actions in the nine months since the 2014 midterm elections:

  1. Normalized relations with Cuba.
  2. Signed a climate deal with China.
  3. Issued new EPA ozone rules.
  4. Successfully argued in favor of same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court.
  5. Put in place economic sanctions on Russia that have Vladimir Putin reeling.
  6. Pressured the FCC to approve net neutrality rules.
  7. Issued new EPA coal regulations.
  8. Issued an executive order on immigration.
  9. Got fast-track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and seems poised to pass it.
  10. Signed a nuclear deal with Iran and appears on track to get it passed.
  11. Won yet another Supreme Court case keeping Obamacare intact.
  12. Issued new rules that increase the number of “managers” who qualify for overtime pay.
  13. Presided over the birth of twin giant panda babies at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.

I sure hope those baby pandas survive. It would be a shame if Obama’s legacy were marred by insufficient maternal attention from Mei Xiang.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent comments: “What’s particularly striking is how many of these major moves have been embraced by likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and have been opposed by the 2016 GOP presidential candidates.” In other words, Obama’s late-term actions will provide much of the contrast between the likely Democratic and Republican nominees next year.

That’s partly because Clinton is reconstituting the Obama coalition of millennials, minorities, and socially liberal, college educated whites, who are more likely to support (and care about) action to combat climate change, immigration reform, relaxing relations with Cuba, active government to expand health coverage, and so forth. It’s also partly because the Clinton camp genuinely sees these issue contrasts as useful to the broader mission of painting the GOP as trapped in the past. It’s possible the Clinton team thinks it can pull off a balancing act in which she signals she’d take the presidency in her own direction while vowing to make progress on Obama’s major initiatives and excoriating Republicans for wanting to re-litigate them and roll them back.

Also, too, because Obama and Clinton are both liberals, and are naturally likely to agree on the general direction of the country in the first place. It’s worth remembering that a lot of Democrats struggled in 2008 to find much daylight between the two.

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President Obama Is the Anti-Lame Duck

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Oil Field Workers Keep Dying, and the Feds Want to Know Why

by RaleighCasner Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Journalism and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The oil boom in North Dakota and elsewhere has helped the US become the world’s leading energy provider and has captured the attention of Hollywood producers. It also has claimed the lives of dozens of oil field workers.

Now, that fallout from the boom is drawing renewed attention from government scientists.

In the largest study of its kind, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates the causes of workplace health problems, said it intends to examine the factors that cause injuries and accidents in the oil fields in an effort to improve safety.

Scientists from the institute will distribute questionnaires starting next year to 500 oil field workers in North Dakota, Texas and one other state that will be determined in the coming months.

“This is a high-hazard industry, and different states have different levels of maturity when it comes to safety and health for this workforce,” said Kyla Retzer, a Denver-based epidemiologist with the institute’s oil and gas program, which will be administering the study.

A recent investigation by Reveal showed how major oil companies avoid accountability for workers’ deaths in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and Montana. On average, someone dies about every six weeks from an accident in the Bakken—at least 74 since 2006, according to the first comprehensive accounting of such deaths using data obtained from Canadian and US regulators. The number of deaths is likely higher because federal regulators don’t have a systematic way to record oil- and gas-related deaths, and the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t include certain fatalities.

In response to Reveal’s investigation, the federal agency pledged to step up enforcement against major oil companies and scrutinize speed bonuses in the Bakken, which some critics fear undermine safety.

As part of the new study, workers will be asked the hours they work and whether they wear protective gear as well as whether employers typically provide written safety policies and make their employees aware of their right to stop a job when they spot a potential safety hazard. Truck drivers in the industry will be asked whether they are paid by the hour or the load and whether their employers require that they drive in bad weather. The institute is collecting comments from the public on the forthcoming survey through Sept. 8.

Scientists plan to ask energy companies for permission to invite workers at man camps, which house laborers; trucking centers and other facilities to participate in the survey. The results of the study, which will be finished by early 2017, will be published in peer-reviewed health and safety journals. In addition, scientists intend to share their findings with federal OSHA officials and make specific recommendations on potential improvements at safety or oil and gas industry conferences.

“Sometimes, health and safety is not a top priority,” Retzer said. “We haven’t had a lot of opportunities to talk to workers directly. We want to better understand what their concerns are and how we can address them.”

Kari Cutting, vice president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, dismissed the institute’s focus on hazards in the oil fields.

“I do not have any facts that would lead me to the conclusion that there are major concerns,” said Cutting, whose council represents more than 550 companies in the oil and gas industry. “I think North Dakota is very much in line with other states as far as putting safety as priority one. Gathering that kind of (survey) information will go a long way to pointing out the fact that the industry has a robust safety culture.”

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Oil Field Workers Keep Dying, and the Feds Want to Know Why

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There Might Be Fracking Wastewater on Your Organic Fruits and Veggies

by ManuelMaurer Posted on August 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The US Department of Agriculture’s organics standards, written 15 years ago, strictly ban petroleum-derived fertilizers commonly used in conventional agriculture. But the same rules do not prohibit farmers from irrigating their crops with petroleum-laced wastewater obtained from oil and gas wells—a practice that is increasingly common in drought-stricken Southern California.

As I reported last month, oil companies last year supplied half the water that went to the 45,000 acres of farmland in Kern County’s Cawelo Water District, farmland that is owned, in part, by Sunview, a company that sells certified organic raisins and grapes. Food watchdog groups are concerned that the state hasn’t required oil companies to disclose all the chemicals they use in oil drilling and fracking operations, much less set safety limits for all those chemicals in irrigation water.

A spokesman for the USDA’s National Organics Program confirmed that it has little to say on the matter. “The USDA organic regulations do not directly address the use of irrigation water on organic farms,” said the spokesman, who asked to be quoted on background, “but organic operations must generally maintain or improve the natural resources of the operation, including soil and water quality.”

Of course, that’s easier said than done. USDA organic regulations do not require farms to perform water quality tests, and irrigation water is not evaluated as an input by the Organic Materials Review Institute, which vets products used on organic farms. Calls placed to California Certified Organic Farmers, which certifies organic farms in California, were not returned.

Irrigation water appears to be a major loophole in a food safety program that otherwise strictly controls what farmers can apply to their land. Notably, the organics program does prohibit the use of sewage sludge-based fertilizer, a product widely used on nonorganic farms that sometimes contains chemicals such as flame retardants and pharmaceuticals.

On Monday, California Assemblyman Mike Gatto, a Democrat from Glendale, introduced a bill that would require crops irrigated with wastewater from oil and gas operations to be labeled as such. “No one expects their lettuce to contain heavy chemicals from fracking wastewater,” he explained in a press release.

That’s especially true if their lettuce is labeled “organic,” adds Adam Scow, the California director of the environmental group Food and Water Watch: “I think most people’s logic would tell them that’s not a practice consistent with organic standards.”

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There Might Be Fracking Wastewater on Your Organic Fruits and Veggies

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Sunspot science throws wrench in favorite climate denialism claim

by EmmanueGoff Posted on August 11, 2015

Sunspot science throws wrench in favorite climate denialism claim

By on 10 Aug 2015commentsShare

The moon landing was fake! Aliens did crash in Roswell! Tupac and Elvis are living in your basement! Chemtrails are causing your Netflix addiction! AHHH!!!!

Sorry — just giving climate change deniers a bit of a warmup. Last week, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, Frédéric Clette, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, announced that sunspot activity has not, in fact, increased over the past century, as some scientists believe. According to Clette, those little bursts of magnetism on the sun’s surface have actually remained pretty constant since 1715.

If true, this news would be a huge downer for people who don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change. After all, if there was a gradual increase in sunspot activity culminating in a peak sometime near the end of the 20th century, then obviously that would’ve been causing global warming this whole time, not humans (scientists would disagree, but who cares?).

Scientists have been tracking sunspots ever since Galileo pointed a telescope at the sun back in 1610. Since then, there have been two major sunspot records in human history: one that tracks individual spots and one that tracks groups of spots. Clette and his colleagues set out to reconcile some well-known discrepancies between the two records and in the process found that there may not have actually been a recent rise in sunspot activity after all. Here’s more from Nature:

Clette and his team identified several sources of systemic error in the two lists, such as the fading eyesight of an ageing observer in Switzerland who was seeing fewer sunspots over time. In other cases, skywatchers were focused on making other solar observations, so if their notes do not mention sunspots this does not necessarily mean that none were present.

The team developed a method for choosing a main sunspot observer for a given interval of time, while ensuring that observers from adjacent periods overlapped to give smooth transitions. Recalibrating the two lists caused the suggested Grand Maximum in the latter half of the twentieth century to disappear ― a change largely due to the correction of data collected around 1893, when the Zurich Observatory switched directors.

If it turns out that a major error in scientific understanding resulted (in part) from “the fading eyesight of an aging observer,” then it would be at once an epic face palm moment for science and an awe-inspiring reminder of how incredibly low-tech early astronomy was. Either way, this really sucks for that guy.

Of course, the study has already met with opposition. Douglas Hoyt, a solar physicist, told Nature that the new findings were “not very convincing” and that he’s not down with tossing aside that old man’s observations.

Whatever happens to the sunspot record, one thing’s for sure: Climate change deniers will keep on keepin’ on until the day that Miami sinks beneath the sea and Alaska starts to burn (oh wait …).

Source:
Spotty sunspot record gets a makeover

, Nature.

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Coca-Cola to World: Don’t Stop Swilling Sugary Drinks, Just Exercise!

by BettyTuttle Posted on August 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Stunningly, one-third of American adults have a condition called metabolic syndrome, defined as “a cluster of major cardiovascular risk factors related to overweight/obesity and insulin resistance.” People with metabolic syndrome are twice as likely to develop heart disease as people without it, and five times as likely to develop full-blown type II diabetes. Meanwhile, a growing body of research links insulin resistance with Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive decline.

There’s a solid consensus that two things need to happen to reverse this budding calamity: People need to eat better—less hyper-processed, sugar-laden fare—and exercise more.

Now, if you were in the business of selling sweet beverages—ones that contain about 9 teaspoons of sugar per 12-ounce serving—you’d have an interest in suggesting that maybe diet’s not that big of an issue, after all. Instead of cutting down on soda, why not just take an extra walk around the block?

According to this New York Times exposé, Coca-Cola, the globe’s biggest purveyor of sugary drinks, invested $1.5 million last year to launch the Global Energy Balance Network, which, The Times reports, “promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.”

The beverage maker has also invested “close to $4 million in funding for various projects spearheaded by two prominent US health academics who serve on GEBN’s executive committee, The Times adds. One of them, University of South Carolina health professor Steven Blair, is featured in the above video insisting that “most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’—blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks, and so on for rising obesity rates… And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.”

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization recommends holding added sugar consumption to about 25 grams (six teaspoons) per day—meaning a single Coke (nine teaspoons of sugar) will take you 50 percent over its daily recommendation. My colleague Maddie Oatman has a great piece on just how easy it is to catapult over the 6 teaspoons limit in the sugar-happy US food environment.

Now, Coke’s high-dollar drumbeating about how sugary drinks don’t matter much may be nefarious, but it’s also sort of desperate. People are wising up—soda sales have fallen for ten straight years.

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Coca-Cola to World: Don’t Stop Swilling Sugary Drinks, Just Exercise!

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Three Top Rand Paul Associates Were Just Indicted

by ClayBrandon Posted on August 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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After years of investigation by the Department of Justice, three top Rand Paul associates, including the senator’s nephew-in-law, were indicted for their role in an alleged attempt to buy an influential Iowa state senator’s endorsement of Ron Paul during his 2012 presidential campaign. None of these operatives, who served as top Ron Paul campaign aides, is currently on the payroll of Rand Paul’s presidential campaign. But two of them—Jesse Benton, who is married to Paul’s niece, and John Tate—run a pro-Rand Paul super-PACs that has raised $3.1 million to support Paul’s presidential campaign.* The third man indicted, Dimitri Kesari, has served as an aide to both Rand Paul and his father.

Last year, former Republican Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges accusing him of helping to cover up a scheme for the Ron Paul campaign to pay him more than $70,000 to switch his endorsement immediately before the 2012 Iowa caucus, from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul. Sorenson has been awaiting sentencing pending his cooperation in a further investigation, but it hasn’t been clear who on Ron Paul’s staff would be caught up in the scandal. At the time Benton served as the campaign’s chairman, Tate as the campaign manager, and Kesari as the deputy campaign manager.

All three men were charged with criminal conspiracy and federal charges related to falsification of government records. Tate and Benton face charges of making false statements to federal investigators; Kesari was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to persuade Sorenson to deny the scheme when pressed by prosecutors.

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Three Top Rand Paul Associates Were Just Indicted

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President Obama Just Finalized His Plan to Fight Climate Change

by FloreneGKQN Posted on August 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama has been more vocal than any previous president about the need to combat climate change, and on Monday his administration is releasing a package of rules that will likely be the most important—and most controversial—piece of his climate legacy.

“Climate change is not a problem for another generation,” Obama said in a video released early Sunday morning. The Clean Power Plan, as the rules finalized Monday are known, is “the biggest, most important step we’ve ever taken to combat climate change.”

Coal-fired power plants are the country’s biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions and the chief culprit driving global warming. They’re responsible for even more CO2 pollution than all the nation’s passenger vehicles. The new plan aims to slash those emissions by requiring every state to reduce the carbon “intensity” (that is, emissions per unit of energy produced) of its energy sector. By 2030, the plan is expected to slash the carbon footprint of the nation’s power sector by 32 percent below 2005 levels—a more rigorous target than the 30 percent reduction outlined in a draft version of the rules released last summer.

In the final draft, the administration has relaxed deadlines for meeting the new carbon targets—states will now have until 2018 to propose a carbon-cutting strategy and until 2022 to implement it, according to leaked versions—a serious concern for environmentalists who have stressed the necessity of immediate action to limit climate change. And although the targets might sound ambitious, they might not actually be too different from what many states would achieve without them, thanks to a boom in clean energy that is already underway. Moreover, many of the changes required by the rules will play out under Obama’s successor, leaving open the possibility that they could be undermined by a climate change-denying president.

Still, the significance of this official crackdown on the gas behind global warming is hard to overstate, said David Doniger, director of the clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The very fact that they’re regulating carbon pollution from power plants is a historic step, a huge step,” he said. “This is part of using the existing law to turn the US from doing nothing, to playing a leadership role to curb climate change.”

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President Obama Just Finalized His Plan to Fight Climate Change

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Ted Cruz Super-PAC Has Just One Donor

by GladysShiels Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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A super-PAC backing Ted Cruz called Keep the Promise II just filed its campaign disclosure, and it stands rather in contrast with the filing this morning from Jeb Bush’s super-PAC. Right to Rise, the Bush-backing super-PAC, revealed a list of donors that included anonymous shell corporations, 28 former ambassadors, and hundreds of wealthy and moneyed elite from around the country, requiring this reporter to do plenty of math to determine how much came from big donors and how much came from very big donors. Keep the Promise II’s disclosure is much simpler.

One guy gave $10 million.

That’s it.

Although the super-PAC raised more money than the actual campaigns of 14 of the 20 declared major candidates, there were no other donors.

The guy’s name is Toby Neugebauer. He is the billionaire founder of a private-equity firm, and his father is Congressman Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas).

To be fair, it’s one of at least three super-PACs backing Cruz. The others have not yet filed their reports, but will likely list donors other than Neugebauer.

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Ted Cruz Super-PAC Has Just One Donor

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How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

by rogalski_adam@o2.pl Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Trailing in the polls, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee grabbed the media’s attention this weekend by claiming that President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran is “marching the Israelis to the door of the oven.” On Friday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz made headlines by calling fellow Republican Mitch McConnell—the Senate Majority Leader—a liar on the Senate floor. A few days before that, Rand Paul literally took a chainsaw to the tax code over an electric-guitar rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.”

The first Republican presidential debate is next Thursday on Fox News. And under rules set by Fox (with the blessing of the Republican National Committee), just 10 of the 16 declared major candidates—those with the highest average in the five most recent national polls leading up to the debate—will get a spot on the stage. Participants in the second debate, hosted by CNN in September, will also be selected based largely on polling averages. The result is a last-minute scramble by the candidates to crack the top 10 any way they can.

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How Far Will GOP Candidates Go to Get Into Next Week’s Debate?

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When the Gun Lobby Tries to Justify Firearms Everywhere, It Turns to This Guy

by Norris41S7784335 Posted on July 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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When you watch the news after the latest big shooting, there’s a good chance you’ll come across John Lott. The 57-year-old economist has made more than 100 media appearances over the past two years, from friendly conversations on Fox News to heated debates on MSNBC and CNN. After nine churchgoers were gunned down in Charleston, South Carolina, he went on Sean Hannity’s show and criticized President Obama for spreading “clearly false” information about gun violence. Following the recent mass shooting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, his op-ed asking “Why should we make it easy for killers to attack our military?” was among the most popular articles on the Fox News site. After an interview with Lott in the wake of the movie theater shooting in Lafayette, Louisiana, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham gushed, “He knows more about guns and the Second Amendment than pretty much anyone I know.”

More from MoJo: Read Chris Mooney’s look the Lott controversy in 2003

Lott does not come off as the stereotypical pro-gun activist. His demeanor is professorial and his argument is academic: Based on his years of research and data analysis, he claims that guns reduce crime by enabling people to protect themselves and deter criminals. His message is simple: As he told CNN’s Piers Morgan in the wake of the Aurora mass shooting, “Guns make it easier for bad things to happen. But they also make it easier for people to protect themselves and prevent bad things from happening.” His book, More Guns Less Crime, which has been referred to as the bible of the gun lobby, forms the quantitative justification for the effort to ease restrictions on concealed firearms across the country.

It’s no coincidence that Lott’s profile has risen as Americans have been reckoning with the causes and impact of gun violence. But his newfound visibility is surprising considering that, a dozen years ago, his professional reputation was in tatters, his bold claims undermined by accusations of shoddy research and questionable ethics.

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When the Gun Lobby Tries to Justify Firearms Everywhere, It Turns to This Guy

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