Tag Archives: mason

Kim Davis Is Either Big Winner or Big Loser, Depending on Your Perspective

Mother Jones

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It looks like I have my answer about what will happen when Kim Davis reports back to work in the Rowan County clerk’s office:

One of Davis’ deputy clerks, Brian Mason, said he will continue to issue licenses even if Davis instructs him to not do so. “Because of the federal court order,” Mason said when asked why he might buck his boss when she returns to work.

….Mason patiently answered a dozen reporters’ questions Wednesday when the clerk’s office opened for business, displaying the license he and five other deputy clerks have used since they assured Bunning they would comply with his order. Those revised licenses do not include Davis’ name, instead indicating the license is authorized by “the office of the Rowan County Clerk,” where it once indicated “the office of Kim Davis, Rowan County Clerk.”

….“It was an office decision,” Mason said when asked who authorized the change.

Davis will not have to personally issue marriage licenses to any gay couples, and the licenses themselves no longer have her name on them. This is what she asked for in the first place, so she ought to be satisfied. Right?

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Kim Davis Is Either Big Winner or Big Loser, Depending on Your Perspective

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Pot industry’s homegrown credit union squares off against the fed

Pot industry’s homegrown credit union squares off against the fed

By on 5 Feb 2015commentsShare

Marijuana has been legal in Colorado for medicinal purposes since 2009, and for recreational uses since last year. Many satisfied voters celebrate on the daily by toking up with a little less bud-induced paranoia. But the state’s pot businesses are feeling a new paranoia: namely, that financial institutions won’t do business with them.

As a result, most weed shops in Colorado conduct business entirely in cash. Which is why, the New York Times reported, a group of entrepreneurs is hoping to open Colorado’s first credit union specifically created to serve pot-selling businesses. But hold your applause, ladies and gents: Their efforts are being strangled by, shall we say, federal green tape. Here’s the Times:

[Mark] Mason, 54, … and a group of other entrepreneurs in Colorado want to start the first-ever financial institution established specifically to serve the pot industry. To do that, they need to make deposits in a Federal Reserve account, and the agency hasn’t let them. Such humdrum administrative decisions are made all the time by federal banking officials, but this one raises big political and legal issues between the federal government and the state of Colorado over the legalization of marijuana.

Before we get blunt about the details, we’d like to issue a brief PSA (Pot Sustainability Announcement): Weed growing, illegal or otherwise, can have a serious impact on the environment from blazing energy costs to harshing the local landscape.

Because legal marijuana, with robust environmental regulations, can be easier on the Earth, I kinda like the idea (Not to be confused with my own personal beliefs about marijuana-usage, grandma!). Making financial institutions available to small business owners is a step towards a greener planet (in, uh, a couple of ways).

Back to the green-cash-money problem: Because weed isn’t nationally legalized, banks put themselves at risk of prosecution for money laundering. They also have a harder time getting insured by larger financial institutions.

And so, Colorado’s weed shop owners are feeling the consequences of a bank-challenged industry: Some have had their bank accounts repeatedly cancelled, others keep cash bolted tight in safes on the shop floor, and all pay high federal tax rates.

Colorado is not likely to strike out the law now, even with neighboring governments suing the state for Colorado-grown pot entering their borders. And since only 5 percent of Colorado’s weed sellers use financial institutions, the state’s economy is craving pot-friendly credit unions.

If Mason is able to limbo under the existing banking regulations and open the doors to the first financial pot joint, it could mean another step toward a cleaner weed industry. And that’s something we’d be stoked about.

Source:
The First Bank of Bud: Marijuana Industry in Colorado, Eager for Its Own Bank, Waits on the Fed

, The New York Times.

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Pot industry’s homegrown credit union squares off against the fed

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Michigan neighbors sue to shut down new wind farm

Michigan neighbors sue to shut down new wind farm

Lake Winds Energy Park

Lake Winds Energy Park sure looks peaceful, but 17 neighbors claim otherwise.

Neighbors of a 56-turbine wind farm built last year in Mason County, Mich., have filed a lawsuit claiming that the turbines have negatively affected their health and wealth and should be shut down.

The lawsuit [PDF], filed by 17 property owners in a community along the east shore of Lake Michigan, alleges that Lake Winds Energy Park keeps them awake at night and has left them fatigued and stressed, unable to concentrate properly, and stricken with headaches, dizziness, nausea, and ringing and aching in the ears. They also say it has decreased their property values. They are seeking financial payouts and a shuttering of the facility.

Power plant developer Consumers Energy told MLive that it has met all permit requirements and is working to reduce the turbines’ impacts on neighbors:

Consumers Energy is reprogramming some of its turbines to account for the possibility that “shadow flicker” — a strobe effect when sunlight passes through moving blades — may carry further than earlier models predicted. The reprogramming should be complete by Monday, April 15, the company said. Wind turbines have shadow-flicker detection systems intended to stop blades from rotating when the sun hits them at an angle that affects neighboring residents.

Once a relative anomaly on the American landscape, wind farms have been popping up all over in recent years, helping the country move away from fossil fuels.

But with the growth of the wind sector has come a growing number of complaints about the shadows, flickers, and weird pulsing noises generated by turbines. A self-published 2009 book gave birth to the term “wind turbine syndrome,” a sickness characterized by the same ailments listed in the lawsuit.

Many scientists question whether such a syndrome even exists. For a paper published in this month’s Journal of Environmental Health [PDF], researchers reviewed a number of studies on the issue and found no evidence in the scientific literature that wind turbine syndrome is real. They did, however, find that wind turbines can be seriously annoying for neighbors:

At present, a specific health condition or collection of symptoms has not been documented in the peer-reviewed, published literature that has been classified as a “disease” caused by exposure to sound levels and frequencies generated by the operation of wind turbines. It can be theorized that reported health effects are a manifestation of the annoyance that individuals experience as a result of the presence of wind turbines in their communities.

Nonetheless, complaints of this supposedly debilitating syndrome have been growing since the term was introduced, mostly afflicting residents in communities where organized campaigns have been waged in opposition to wind energy farms. That led Australian researchers to conclude recently that people who live near wind turbines are being fooled into experiencing symptoms that the turbines do not actually cause.

We wish the people of Mason County the best of health. We trust they are not feigning sickness just to shut down a clean power source that they do not like, and we hope that efforts by wind energy companies can help reduce annoyances while still delivering a steady stream of renewable energy. We need that renewable energy to escape the clutches of fossil fuels — and we all know how sick the fossil fuels have made us and our world.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Michigan neighbors sue to shut down new wind farm

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