Tag Archives: march

Here’s What Today’s Primary Voters Think About the Planet’s Most Important Issue

by JenniHarlow Posted on April 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Residents of five Northeastern states are voting Tuesday in crucial presidential primary contests. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has a chance to all but clinch the nomination with a strong showing. On the Republican side, Donald Trump is looking for massive victories that could put him one step closer to securing a majority of the delegates at the GOP convention in Cleveland.

The presidential election will, of course, have enormous implications for a range of issues—but some of the biggest consequences will relate to the fight against global warming. Clinton essentially wants to continue President Barack Obama’s climate policies. Her opponent, Bernie Sanders, wants to go even further by enacting a carbon tax. Trump and his closest rival, Ted Cruz, are both outspoken climate change deniers. John Kasich is somewhat less extreme on the issue but has still made contradictory statements about the science, and he refuses to commit to any meaningful action.

But what do the voters think?

Back on March 1—as a dozen or so states around the country voted on Super Tuesday—we pointed out that the electorate that day contained an awful lot of deniers. Less than half of adults in those states—48 percent—agreed with the scientific consensus that humans are mostly responsible for recent warming, according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Drawing from more than 13,000 interviews, the Yale researchers used a complicated statistical model to estimate the 2014 views of residents of every state, county, and congressional district on key climate science and policy questions.

This Tuesday, the voters look a bit different than they did on March 1. Residents of the Northeast hold some of the country’s most progressive (and accurate) views on climate change, according to the Yale study. Small majorities in most of Tuesday’s state’s—as well as in nearby New York, which voted last week—embrace the scientific consensus.

Here’s another way to crunch the same data. The researchers combined people who said global warming is caused mostly by humans with those who attribute it to both humans and nature. They also combined two kinds of climate science deniers: people who think the warming is natural and those who don’t think the planet is getting warmer at all.

Those numbers look pretty good for science, especially when you compare them with those from some of the Southern states that voted on Super Tuesday.

But here’s the thing: Trump may insist global warming is a “hoax,” but that isn’t stopping him from winning in states where most people understand he’s wrong. He won Massachusetts and Vermont on Super Tuesday. He won overwhelmingly in New York last week. And he’s leading in the polls in every state voting Tuesday.

That’s probably because voters in Republican primaries don’t have the same views on science as the average resident of their states. In New Hampshire, for instance, large majorities of Democrats and independents say humans are the main cause of global warming. But only a small minority of Republicans agree. Trump won New Hampshire by 20 percentage points.

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Here’s What Today’s Primary Voters Think About the Planet’s Most Important Issue

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Angered by Arizona’s Botched Election, One Man Decides to Run for Office

by GerardBoatright Posted on April 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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A week after the botched election in Maricopa County, Arizona—when thousands of people waited hours to cast their ballots—the state’s House Elections Committee got an earful from angry voters.

One of them, local criminal defense attorney Adrian Fontes, stepped to the lectern and ripped into the state’s legislature and Helen Purcell, the county’s chief elections official.

“A political culture that worships at the altar of slashing budgets will eventually lead to the complete collapse of our most sacred democratic institutions: the right for Americans to vote,” he said at the hearing on March 28. “You are as responsible for this as anyone else.”

He concluded, to cheers (and an attempt by the committee chair to cut him off), “I do not want Helen Purcell to resign. I want to beat her at the ballot box.”

That’s exactly what he’s trying to do. Outraged by the long lines at the March 22 election, Fontes filed his paperwork the next morning to run for County Recorder. Purcell, a Republican, has been the recorder since 1988 and is currently in her seventh term. Maricopa County has been a Republican stronghold for decades; Mitt Romney carried the county by 10 points in 2012.

Aaron Flannery, a Republican from the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, also plans to run against Purcell.

The election in Maricopa County, where voters made their choices for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, made national headlines for its lines that stretched as long as five hours. There were also questions as to why county election officials decided to cut the number of voting places from 200 to 60, and accusations that the distribution of those locations adversely affected minority neighborhoods. The state’s House Elections Committee held a contentious hearing the Monday following the election about the bungled election, and five days later, the US Department of Justice, citing concerns about the wait times and the impact to minority communities, opened an inquiry into the election. Arizona Secretary of State Michelle Reagan will hold several public meetings this week to talk about the matter.

Fontes, 46, tells Mother Jones that he’s been thinking about the state of elections in Marciopa County since he nearly ran for a state House seat in 2014. (He’d filed paperwork to run, but ended up not running after all). Since then, he’s been active in local Democratic Party politics.

“We’ve been watching our right to vote deteriorate for several election cycles,” he said, “and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Fontes, a former US Marine and lawyer with experience in Arizona, Colorado, and in federal courts in California, says he’s not sure the County Recorder should be a partisan position, because it requires a person who will go to bat for all voters.

During his testimony before the House Elections Committee, he said that Arizona’s primary (technically called a “presidential preference” vote) should be modified to let all registered voters participate—not just those registered with one of the major parties—and called for a re-vote to occur on June 7th.

Adrian Fontes Champion PR

“There’s a lot of people out there, from all sides of the political spectrum, who got cheated,” Fontes says. “I’m not saying I think they got cheated. There’s no question that they were cheated. And the fraud that was committed against these voters wasn’t by a political party. The fraud that was committed against these voters was by their very own government.”

Fontes sees the problems as part of a years-long pattern of systemic voter suppression. Until 2013, Arizona was one of 16 states that were covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, requiring them to get federal approval for changes to election procedure or law. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the underlying formula behind Section 5, so Arizona and the other “pre-clearance” jurisdictions could make any changes they wanted. If Arizona had still been under pre-clearance, the decision to cut polling locations by 70 percent would likely have required federal approval and may not have been carried out.

Fontes says the long lines were a form of “poll tax” and were no accident. “If you’re a working person, you’ve got two or three jobs, you can’t afford five hours out of a working day,” he says. “You just can’t. Not only for those folks, but for the veterans who are disabled, for the non-veterans who are disabled. For the elderly. For single parents with kids. This wasn’t just an inconvenience. This was a deterrent, an intentional deterrent to keep people from voting.”

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Angered by Arizona’s Botched Election, One Man Decides to Run for Office

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Disturbing Video Shows Cop Body-Slamming 12-Year-Old Girl at School

by DIFAdantfywuy Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Authorities in San Antonio are investigating a video that surfaced Tuesday showing a uniformed police officer restraining a middle-school student from behind and slamming her to the ground. The video, recorded on a cellphone at Rhodes Middle School, shows a scene that quickly turns tense, with one student repeatedly asking 12-year-old Janissa Valdez if she’s okay as Officer Joshua Kehm handcuffs Valdez on the ground.

San Antonio Independent School District spokeswoman Leslie Price told MySanAntonio.com that Kehm intervened after two female students “became verbally aggressive toward each other” in the March 29 incident. Kehm has been placed on administrative leave while the district and its police department conduct the investigation.

Also: Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad

The video has reignited the debate over the use of force by school resource officers. As Mother Jones has previously reported, at least 28 students have been seriously harmed by sworn police officers on K-12 campuses over the last five years. The incidents raise questions over the officers’ lack of training and oversight, along with the disproportionate impact such incidents have on minority and disabled students. Data released by the Department of Education in March 2014 found that of 92,000 students arrested enrolled in the 2011-12 school year, black students accounted for 31 percent of arrests and students with disabilities made up a quarter of arrests, despite comprising 16 percent and 12 percent, respectively, of total enrolled students.

What’s more, as education news site The 74 recently reported, 4 of the 10 largest public school districts in the country have more security officers than school counselors.

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Disturbing Video Shows Cop Body-Slamming 12-Year-Old Girl at School

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California’s Snow is Finally Back—But the Drought Is Far From Over

by KLTAugusta Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ninety miles east of Sacramento in the Sierra Nevada mountains, snow surveyors plunged aluminum rods into the snow on Wednesday morning and recorded quite a different number than they did the year before: 58.4 inches.

The March 30 measurement is welcome news for drought stricken Californians, and a stark contrast from 2015’s record low of zero inches, the lowest number the Sierra had seen since measuring began in the 1940’s. This year’s snow pack is just about equal to the annual average—but that still won’t provide enough melt water to say the drought is over.

Snowpack in March 2015, the lowest ever recorded LA Times

Snowpack in March 2016, recorded at nearly 60 inches. LA Times

“This was a dry, dusty field last year, so it’s a big improvement but not what we had hoped for,” Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, said just after taking the measurement. “This is going to improve conditions for both reservoir storage as well as stream flow, but there’s still going to be some ongoing effects from the past years of…way-below-average snow pack.”

Frank Gehrke, Gov. Brown, and DWR Director Mark Cowin address the media after 2015’s dire snow survey. Florence Low/Department of Water Resources

Throughout the winter months, snow surveys are taken at various points in the Sierra Nevada. The measurement near the first of April is the most significant historically and hydrologically, because it’s the time of year when snowfall typically begins to melt, providing 30 percent of the state’s water.

In addition to the traditional aluminum pole method, surveyors from the state’s Department of Water Resources conducted aerial surveys and analyzed data from snow pillows, flat sensors put on the ground that measure the weight of accumulated snow.

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California’s Snow is Finally Back—But the Drought Is Far From Over

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Donald Trump Abandons Pledge to Support GOP Nominee

by LesleeKneebone Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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After previously pledging to support whoever becomes the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump said Tuesday that promise no longer stands. Instead, Trump said during CNN’s town hall in Wisconsin, “we’ll see who it is.”

Trump repeatedly noted in Tuesday that he does not need the support of Ted Cruz or of any of the GOP contenders who have dropped out, including Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, saying he doesn’t want to make anyone “uncomfortable.”

“I don’t want his support, I don’t need his support, I want him to be comfortable,” Trump said of Cruz.

Cruz, who appeared first during the town hall, was also asked whether he would support Trump if he is the nominee. Cruz refused to explicitly answer the question.

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Donald Trump Abandons Pledge to Support GOP Nominee

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Scotland closes its last coal-fired power plant

by JavierHibbins Posted on March 25, 2016

Scotland closes its last coal-fired power plant

By on 25 Mar 2016commentsShare

Scotland may be home to golf, haggis, and Sean Connery — but it’s no longer hospitable to coal. On March 24, Scottish Power shut down Longanett power station, its last standing coal-fired power plant.

Weirdly enough, the act of silencing the plant’s turbines was exactly what you might imagine — granted, it would probably never occur to you to imagine something like this, but if you were going to: A crowd gathered ’round a very retro control room as a man pressed a large, red button to the tune of an alarm sounding in the background.

Longanett power station provided electricity for Scottish lads and lasses for nearly half a century, but its days were fated to come to an end with the onset of a pricey carbon tax and, you know, the whole global decline of coal. The Guardian reports that a handful of straggling open-cast coal mines remain in Scotland, but Longanett was the last major coal user in the country.

Though the closing of the power station signals the end for some jobs, it’s accompanied by a wave of energy investment, including more than $900 million in offshore wind farms. By 2020, Scotland hopes to keep its 5 million residents humming on 100 percent clean energy.

Looks like coal power in Scotland is becoming almost as elusive as Nessie.

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Scotland closes its last coal-fired power plant

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Donald Trump Just Sent A Tweet That Makes Me Want To Throw Up Until I Drown In My Own Vomit

by EstelaOZDX Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just reading this shit makes me feel caked in filth.

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Donald Trump Just Sent A Tweet That Makes Me Want To Throw Up Until I Drown In My Own Vomit

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Fox News Celebrates St. Patrick’s Day With Vomit-Inducing Bigotry

by BeulahWinchcomb Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hello. Here is a clip from Fox News that is going to make you want to vomit.

“Amirite?” Jesus Christ, lady.

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Fox News Celebrates St. Patrick’s Day With Vomit-Inducing Bigotry

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Here’s What Bernie Sanders Actually Did in the Civil Rights Movement

by WillardFriedman Posted on February 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Civil rights icon John Lewis told reporters that he never encountered Bernie Sanders when the Vermont senator was working with Lewis’ Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. Because he made his remarks at a press conference announcing the Congressional Black Caucus PAC’s endorsement of Sanders’ opponent, Hillary Clinton, Lewis’ comments can be seen as a mild dig at Sanders. (In the same breath he said he had met Bill and Hillary Clinton.)

But it’s also undoubtedly true.

The Georgia congressman was a titan of the civil rights movement. A participant in the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), he went on to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and still bears the scars he received at Selma. Sanders’ involvement was, by comparison, brief and localized, his sacrifices limited to one arrest for protesting and a bad GPA from neglecting his studies. But Sanders was, in his own right, an active participant in the movement during his three years at the University of Chicago.

Although Sanders did attend the 1963 March on Washington, at which Lewis spoke, most of his work was in and around Hyde Park, where he became involved with the campus chapter of CORE shortly after transferring from Brooklyn College in 1961. During Sanders’ first year in Chicago, a group of apartment-hunting white and black students had discovered that off-campus buildings owned by the university were refusing to rent to black students, in violation of the school’s policies. CORE organized a 15-day sit-in at the administration building, which Sanders helped lead. (James Farmer, who co-founded CORE and had been a Freedom Rider with Lewis, came to the University of Chicago that winter to praise the activists’ work.) The protest ended when George Beadle, the university’s president, agreed to form a commission to study the school’s housing policies.

Sanders was one of two students from CORE appointed to the commission, which included the neighborhood’s alderman and state representative, in addition to members of the administration. But not long afterward, Sanders blew up at the administration, accusing Beadle of reneging on his promise and refusing to answer questions from students on its integration plan. In an open letter in the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, Sanders vented about the double-cross:

Chicago Maroon

That spring, with Sanders as its chairman, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of SNCC. Sanders announced plans to take the fight to the city of Chicago, and in the fall of 1962 he followed through, organizing picketers at a Howard Johnson in Cicero. Sanders told the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper, that he wanted to keep the pressure on the restaurant chain after the arrest of 12 CORE demonstrators in North Carolina for trying to eat at a Howard Johnson there:

Chicago Maroon

Sanders left his leadership role at the organization not long afterward; his grades suffered so much from his activism that a dean asked him to take some time off from school. (He didn’t take much interest in his studies, anyway.) But he continued his activism with CORE and SNCC. In August of 1963, not long after returning to Chicago from the March on Washington, Sanders was charged with resisting arrest after protesting segregation at a school on the city’s South Side. He was later fined $25, according to the Chicago Tribune:

Chicago Tribune

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Here’s What Bernie Sanders Actually Did in the Civil Rights Movement

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These 19 Big-Name Toothpastes and Face Scrubs Will Be Forced to Ditch Tiny Bits of Plastic

by HoraceKaiser305 Posted on January 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just before Christmas, Congress passed a law banning microbeads—those tiny pieces of plastic that act as exfoliants in face washes, toothpastes, and other personal-care products.

Researchers have found that the beads are too small to be caught by water treatment plants, so they end up in waterways. There, they act as sponges for toxins—such as pesticides, heavy metals, and phthalates—and are frequently mistaken by fish for food. Roughly 300 million tons of the plastics per year end up in US waterways.

The Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, which requires companies to stop using plastic microbeads by June of 2017, was introduced to the House in March. The House passed the bill in December, and the Senate passed it a week later with unanimous consent.

The law comes after several states had passed bans on the beads; in response to consumer pressure, large personal-care companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble had already announced initiatives to phase out the microbeads.

But several popular consumer products still contain the plastics, and these brands have some reworking to do before summer of 2017. Here are some big-name products that contain plastic microbeads—and some that don’t.

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These 19 Big-Name Toothpastes and Face Scrubs Will Be Forced to Ditch Tiny Bits of Plastic

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