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This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm – Ted Genoways

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This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm

Ted Genoways

Genre: Agriculture

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: September 19, 2017

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


Winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize 2019 selection for the One Book One Nebraska and All Iowa state reading programs "Genoways gives the reader a kitchen-table view of the vagaries, complexities, and frustrations of modern farming…Insightful and empathetic." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, and yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their family farm—and their entire way of life—are under siege on many fronts, from shifting trade policies, to encroaching pipelines, to climate change. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid, nuanced portrait of a radical new landscape and one family’s fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.

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This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm – Ted Genoways

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Trump would be giving up a big presidential power if he abolished new national monuments.

The crisis of affordable housing (after climate change, natch).

It’s not for lack of local media coverage. Follow the news from New York City to Seattle, and you can’t avoid stories about skyrocketing home prices and rent along with record rates of homelessness. The bestseller Evicted followed low-income residents in Milwaukee who were tossed out of their homes for missing a rent payment.

Add up each local crisis, city by city, and it’s clear that the country has a national crisis that requires a national response. Yet affordable housing passed without much notice in the 2016 election. Interviewers and debate moderators never asked about housing. Republican presidential candidates, including President-elect Donald Trump, a high-end real estate developer, ignored it altogether.

To be sure, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders issued modest proposals on housing policy. But they gave housing little attention on the campaign trail.

So will 2017 be the year that our political system wakes up to the housing crisis? The signs aren’t promising. Trump and congressional Republicans want to cut housing aid, which has already been squeezed by cuts from the Budget Control Act of 2011.

But maybe it’s the year that progressives in Congress propose a national strategy to provide high-quality, affordable housing to all Americans. It’s a political cause in dire need of a champion.

Link – 

Trump would be giving up a big presidential power if he abolished new national monuments.

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The Black Man Whose Killing Sparked Milwaukee Riots Had Bipolar Disorder

Mother Jones

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Sylville Smith, the 23-year-old black man whose shooting by police sparked riots in Milwaukee earlier this month, suffered from bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, according to his mother, Mildred Haynes. Smith had chosen not to take medication, Haynes told me, because he thought that admitting to mental illness would impede his ability to get a concealed-carry license. “He didn’t want to be disabled because he wanted a gun,” she told me. Her son had been shot twice in the past, and robbed four times, Haynes said. He wanted the weapon to protect himself.

Wisconsin is a concealed-carry state. Applicants who have been committed for treatment for mental illness or drug dependency are barred from receiving a permit, but people are not required to undergo a mental health evaluation when they apply. Haynes earlier told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that her son had, in fact, obtained a permit. Police officials have said the gun in Smith’s possession at the time of his death was stolen from a home in a nearby town.

In our interview, Haynes also told me that Smith had an Individualized Education Program (IEP) in elementary and high school, a specialized plan for students with learning disabilities, mental health issues, or other impairments. He had problems with comprehension and understanding, she said, and he spent time in special-education classes from elementary school onward. He also was suspended from school for behavior related to his condition.

Smith was shot by a Milwaukee police officer earlier this month while fleeing from a traffic stop. According to the official account, the officer chased Smith, who turned toward the cop holding a gun. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said body camera footage of the incident, which has not been released, confirms the police account. The department has not publicly identified the officer, but Milwaukee residents have been spreading his name and, in some cases, home address on social media—the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says it has confirmed that this officer was the shooter.

Other recent shootings by police have involved subjects with a mental illness. Korryn Gaines, killed by Baltimore County police officers during a standoff earlier this month, had “developmental and behavioral injuries,” depression, and mood swings due to childhood lead poisoning, according to a lawsuit filed against her former landlord. In July, a health worker was inexplicably shot in North Miami after an officer took aim at an autistic patient the victim cared for. The officer, according to the police, mistook the toy car the patient was holding for a gun.

A report by the Treatment Advocacy Center last December found that 1 in 4 police encounters involve a person with mental illness, and that people with mental health problems are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than are people who lack such problems.

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The Black Man Whose Killing Sparked Milwaukee Riots Had Bipolar Disorder

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The Koch Brothers Usually Have Scott Walker’s Back. Not This Time.

Mother Jones

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The Koch brothers and their political machine have long been key allies of Wisconsin governor and presumptive 2016 hopeful Scott Walker. With the GOP presidential field getting more crowded by the day and political observers wondering who will with the Koch Primary—and the financial backing of these billionaires and their donor network—Walker has sparked a controversy in his home state in which and he and Team Koch are on opposite sides.

When Walker announced a plan last week to spend $250 million in taxpayer money for a proposed $500 million basketball arena in downtown Milwaukee, the local chapter of the Koch-founded advocacy group Americans for Prosperity joined the chorus of detractors who condemned the project. The National Basketball Association is demanding the new venue and is threatening that the Milwaukee Bucks franchise may have to move if the arena isn’t built by 2017. This has put Walker in a tough spot. The failure to retain the team would be an ugly black eye for Walker, but the plan to spend taxpayer funds propping up a highly lucrative private business is irritating Wisconsin Republicans and Democrats alike.

While Walker’s forays into union-busting had strong conservative backing, the political dynamics involved in the public financing of sports arenas and stadiums are much different. Across the nation in recent years, conservatives and progressive groups and activists have questioned the notion that financing arenas for lucrative sports franchises with taxpayer funds will spur the local economy. And Walker is feeling the backlash.

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The Koch Brothers Usually Have Scott Walker’s Back. Not This Time.

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The Slow-Mo Scandal That Could Crush Scott Walker’s Presidential Hopes

Mother Jones

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In 2010, Scott Walker was the young, hyperambitious executive of Milwaukee County and one of three candidates angling for the Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial nomination. Part of his official duties included overseeing Operation Freedom, a charity event that raised money for veterans and their families. When Walker’s chief of staff caught wind that $11,000 of the nonprofit’s money had gone missing, Walker had his office ask the local district attorney to investigate. Now that he’s seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he probably wishes it hadn’t.

The prosecutors caught the scent of more than just missing funds, coming to suspect that members of Walker’s staff had blurred the lines between official business and politicking. When Walker balked at handing over more documents, the DA asked a judge to open a so-called John Doe investigation. Unique to Wisconsin, a John Doe is a wide-ranging secret inquiry similar to a federal grand jury probe. For nearly three years—during which time Walker was elected governor, won a showdown with public-sector unions, and survived a recall attempt—prosecutors collected thousands of documents, interviewed dozens of witnesses, and even raided homes and offices in search of evidence. Eventually, they filed criminal charges against six people connected to Walker.

The fallout from the probe isn’t the only legal drama Walker must contend with as he inches toward a 2016 presidential run: A second investigation has been following the money behind his campaign to defeat the 2012 recall effort. Walker has called the whole ordeal a “political witch hunt,” and his allies say he will emerge not only unscathed, but reenergized. Yet the ongoing controversy has cast a pall over the rising Republican star and has exposed the inner workings of a political machine that allegedly flouted election laws and wooed anonymous dark-money donors, teetering between campaigning and corruption.

Is your judge for sale? Read how dark money is taking over judicial elections.

The initial John Doe investigation centered on the discovery that members of Walker’s county staff had routinely engaged in political activity on official time, working to bolster his political fortunes and those of the state GOP. Their transgressions ranged from minor oversights to flagrant violations of the fundamental premise that taxpayer money and government resources cannot be used for political ends. For example, Walker’s constituent services coordinator, Darlene Wink, devoted hours of work time to posting pseudonymous pro-Walker comments on local news sites. She also worked on county time planning fundraisers for Walker. According to documents collected by the prosecutors, Wink knew her activities skirted the line. Once, after asking a colleague how to erase chat messages, she wrote, “I just am afraid of going to jail—ha! ha!

Prosecutors also found that Walker’s deputy chief of staff, Kelly Rindfleisch, spent much of her time at her county job actually working on behalf of Walker’s campaign and that of his ally running for lieutenant governor. To keep her communications from becoming public, Rindfleisch used a private email account while exchanging more than 1,000 messages with Walker’s campaign staff. These messages illustrate how Walker’s office and his gubernatorial campaign were at times indistinguishable, with the county staff trying to cover their tracks. In an email discussing how to plant damaging stories about Walker’s 2010 primary opponent, Rindfleisch wrote, “This needs to be done covertly so it’s not tied to Scott or the campaign in any way.”

Just how deeply had politics pervaded Walker’s supposedly apolitical office? In court, prosecutors highlighted one particularly troubling example. In July 2010, a concrete slab fell from a county parking garage, killing a 15-year-old boy. Knowing that journalists would file public records requests about the accident, Walker’s campaign sprang into action. Hours after the boy’s death, Walker’s campaign manager ordered Rindfleisch to “make sure there is not a paper anywhere that details a problem at all.”

The probe led to six convictions. Rindfleisch was sentenced to six months in jail. Wink pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. A Walker aide and an appointee both received two-year prison sentences after admitting to embezzling more than $70,000 from Operation Freedom. And a railroad executive who’d donated to Walker’s campaigns admitted to an illegal scheme in which he pressed his employees to donate to Walker and reimbursed them for it; he received two years of probation.

Walker, though, insisted he had no knowledge of any of the abuses going on under his nose. (Rindfleisch’s desk was 25 feet from his office.) As his former employees and associates were sentenced, he catapulted to national stardom as a conservative governor in a blue state who took on organized labor and survived. But he wasn’t in the clear yet.

In October 2013, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed the second John Doe investigation. This time, the targets were bigger, including Walker’s anti-recall campaign, two top gubernatorial aides, and some of Wisconsin’s most prominent conservative advocacy groups. What came to be known as John Doe II focused on whether Walker’s campaign had illegally coordinated with big donors and conservative groups to defeat the recall. In other words, the investigation went to the core of the post-Citizens United era, in which deep-pocketed outside groups may not officially coordinate with candidates’ campaigns even as they raise unlimited funds for them.

In the summer of 2014, a federal judge unsealed documents detailing the prosecutors’ contention that Walker, his campaign, and aides had illegally funneled money to a network of 12 supposedly independent conservative groups and directed their spending to fight the recall. At the center of the probe was the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a dark-money group that was run by RJ Johnson, who was also an adviser to Walker. Court filings accidentally published online revealed that a mining company had donated $700,000 to the Club; soon after, Walker signed a mining bill that the company had lobbied for. In one email, one of Walker’s campaign consultants suggested ideas for raising cash for the Club, including “Take Koch’s money” and “Get on a plane to Vegas and sit down with Sheldon Adelson. Ask for $1m now.”

The Doe II investigation is currently on hold after pingponging among judges—some of whom have allowed it to proceed while others ordered it shut down. Its fate now rests with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear three separate challenges to the investigation. Four of the court’s seven members are conservatives whose most recent election bids were supported by $10 million from the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s main business lobby. Prosecutors have petitioned at least one of those justices to step aside, but to no avail. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is expected to rule on Doe II as soon as this summer.

Walker, who is also expected to officially announce his candidacy this summer, has sought to turn the probe to his advantage, characterizing it as terrifying government overreach. In April, he told an Iowa radio station that “even if you’re a liberal Democrat, you should look at the investigation and be frightened to think that if the government can do that against people of one political persuasion, they can do it against anybody, and more often than not we need protection against the government itself.”

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The Slow-Mo Scandal That Could Crush Scott Walker’s Presidential Hopes

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Dairy accidents spilled a million gallons of crap in Wisconsin this year

Dairy accidents spilled a million gallons of crap in Wisconsin this year

Shutterstock

More than a million gallons of crap were let loose following agricultural accidents in Wisconsin this year.

No, we aren’t talking bullshit. We’re talking about cow shit, the E. coli– and nutrient-laden fruits of the state’s dairy industry. This is the kind of pollution that causes green slime to grow over the Great Lakes and that leads to dead zones at the other end of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that already this year farming accidents have spilled 1 million gallons of livestock manure in the state. That’s more than five times the amount that was leaked during similar accidents last year. The figure only includes the most spectacular explosions of poo, not the cow pats that are washed off grazing lands into creeks and rivers during rains.

Wisconsin farms this year generated the largest volume of manure spills since 2007, including an accident by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s flagship research farm in Columbia County that produced a mile-long trail of animal waste. …

Manure contains an array of contaminants, including E. coli, phosphorus and nitrogen, that can harm public waterways and drinking water. …

[M]anure handling is a volatile issue in Wisconsin as dairy farms grow larger.

Factory farms, aka concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs, have been responsible for about a third of manure spills in Wisconsin since 2007.

State officials say they’ve become more proactive in addressing spills in recent years, but apparently not proactive enough. The EPA hasn’t been proactive enough either; it was recently ordered by a federal judge to decide what to do about fertilizer contaminating waterways and worsening the Gulf of Mexico dead zone.


Source
Manure spills in 2013 the highest in seven years statewide, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

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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Dairy accidents spilled a million gallons of crap in Wisconsin this year

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Climate denier Ron Johnson denies denying climate change

Climate denier Ron Johnson denies denying climate change

Gage Skidmore

Sen. Ron Johnson: He was for climate denial before he was neutral about it.

An ad campaign targeting climate-denying politicians appears to be having something of an effect.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), under fire for being a climate denier in a world ravaged by climate change, this week denied believing that humans are not warming the planet. Yet the senator still will not acknowledge the basic fact that humans are warming the planet.

Confused? So are we. But we’ll try to explain.

Johnson is one of four members of Congress being targeted by a $2 million TV advertising campaign funded by the League of Conservation Voters. LCV went after Johnson because of statements he’s made denying climate science, like in 2010 when he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change,” and speculated that sunspots or “something in the geologic eons of time” might instead be responsible for the changing weather.

But on Wednesday, Johnson stepped back from such strong assertions. During a Madison Rotary Club luncheon, he said he’s a “strong environmentalist.” (What is this — 1984?) Here were his comments to the group when asked about climate change, as reported by the Isthmus Daily Page:

“I don’t have a belief one way or the other,” he told the crowd of some 300 Rotarians. “I’m willing to accept the science. I’m willing to accept the facts. What I’m not willing to accept is that until we know conclusively what’s doing it and if any action we take would have any kind of measurable impact, I don’t think we should be spending trillions of dollars unilaterally.”

Here’s the thing: If you “don’t have a belief” that humans are changing the climate, then you are a climate denier.

This is the LCV ad that appears to have fueled Johnson’s half-hearted flip-flop:

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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Climate denier Ron Johnson denies denying climate change

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