Tag Archives: missouri

The Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Could Soon Take Down Laws in These 8 States

Mother Jones

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In a press call on Thursday, Planned Parenthood announced a campaign to work toward the repeal of abortion restrictions in eight states across the country, in light of the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

The ruling, announced on Monday, found that two types of abortion clinic restrictions in Texas—a law requiring abortion providers to have local hospital admitting privileges and a rule requiring clinics to meet the strict infrastructure standards of outpatient surgery centers—were unconstitutional because they caused an undue burden on abortion access.

Planned Parenthood announced on Thursday that it was planning to seek repeals of Texas-style restrictions in seven other states: Missouri, Virginia, Florida, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Planned Parenthood also announced that they would begin work toward repealing abortion restrictions in Texas beyond those struck down this week by the Supreme Court.

Missouri and Tennessee each have both of the Texas-style restrictions on the books: an admitting-privileges law and facility infrastructure requirements. In Missouri, the admitting-privileges law led to the closure of an abortion clinic in Columbia, leaving the state with just one clinic. In Tennessee, both laws are being challenged in the courts. The rest of the states on Planned Parenthood’s list each have laws requiring structural standards comparable to those of surgical centers, though the law specifics vary by state.

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The Supreme Court Abortion Ruling Could Soon Take Down Laws in These 8 States

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Sotomayor Slams Her Colleagues for Misunderstanding Illegal Police Stops

Mother Jones

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Just before President Barack Obama announced his appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, making her the first Latina justice, he said he wanted to choose someone with life experience that provided “a common touch and a sense of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.” On Monday, she put that perspective to work in a fiery dissent in a case involving a potentially illegal police stop, excoriating her colleagues for misunderstanding the police harassment to which people of color are regularly subjected.

“Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language,” Sotomayor, the child of Puerto Rican parents who grew up in the Bronx, wrote to readers of her dissent, to which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also signed on. “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong.”

The case being decided, Utah v. Strieff, has spanned a decade since an anonymous tip in 2006 about alleged drug activity in a South Salt Lake City residence led officer Douglas Fackrell to spend a week surveilling people entering and exiting the house. One day, after watching Edward Strieff visit the house, Fackrell followed him to a convenience store across the street and demanded to know what he’d been doing there. He also asked Strieff for his ID; after running a check on it, learned that he had an outstanding warrant for a minor traffic violation, so he arrested him. During his search, Fackrell found meth and drug paraphernalia on Strieff, who was ultimately charged with illegal possession.

At trial, even the prosecutor conceded that Fackrell’s stop of Strieff was illegal, because he had no reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity to justify requesting his ID. But the state asked the judge to allow the drug evidence anyway, arguing that the outstanding arrest warrant merited the search. The trial court allowed the drug evidence to be introduced, and as a result Strieff pleaded guilty to lesser charges, but reserved his right to challenge the search in court. That was a smart move, as the Utah Supreme Court ultimately ruled in his favor and found that the drug evidence, tainted by the illegal stop, should never have been admitted into court.

But on Monday, the US Supreme Court, in a 5-3 decision, overturned the Utah high court on the grounds that Fackrell’s conduct was a mistake, “negligent” behavior that shouldn’t lead to the exclusion of the drug evidence. “There is no evidence that Officer Fackrell’s illegal stop reflected flagrantly unlawful police misconduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion. (The decision came on a day when the court was buzzing with erroneous rumors that Thomas was considering retiring.) The majority found Fackrell’s conduct mostly harmless and inconsequential, justified by the existence of the outstanding traffic warrant and hardly part of a larger pattern of misconduct.

Sotomayor disagreed vehemently, arguing that the majority, which included liberal Justice Stephen Breyer alongside the court’s conservatives, had stripped Strieff’s case of its context. “Respectfully,” she writes in her dissent, “nothing about this case is isolated.”

Sotomayor cited a list of sources that Black Lives Matter activists would cheer: Michelle Alexander and her book The New Jim Crow; Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me; and the Justice Department Civil Rights Division’s report on the problems with excessive warrants in Ferguson, Missouri, a city of 21,000 where 16,000 people (including non-residents) had outstanding warrants.

Her point was to show that outstanding warrants are so common, and so widely abused, that they should never be used to justify illegal stops by police. At the time of Strieff’s arrest, she noted, Salt Lake City had a backlog of 180,000 outstanding misdemeanor warrants, so many that it was at risk of getting in trouble with the Justice Department. She cited statistics showing law enforcement’s frequent use of warrants to stop all sorts of people for no good reason, writing, “Surely we would not allow officers to warrant-check random joggers, dog walkers, and lemonade vendors just to ensure they pose no threat to anyone else.”

Sotomayor argued that Fackrell stopped Strieff illegally as part of a drug investigation, knowing that the odds were decent that his target would have an outstanding warrant for something. The Fourth Amendment and decades of Supreme Court precedent, she said, should have caused the fruits of that illegal stop to been thrown out. She reminded her colleagues of the real-world consequences of such “good-faith mistakes,” as the majority called Fackrell’s actions, describing the indignities inflicted upon people arrested after these sorts of stops: body cavity searches, handcuffing, public humiliation, and a permanent arrest record, among others.

Monday was not the first time Sotomayor has reminded her colleagues about how the real word works. In oral arguments in a death penalty case last fall, she referred to her own jailed relatives to highlight racism in jury selection.

Sotomayor concluded with a reference to Eric Garner, the New York man who was choked to death by police who were harassing him on suspicion of selling single cigarettes. “We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are ‘isolated,'” she wrote. “They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere… They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.”

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Sotomayor Slams Her Colleagues for Misunderstanding Illegal Police Stops

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How ‘Green’ is Your State?

How green is your state?

To find out, surf on over to WalletHub.com and check out their 2016 analysis. The group compared all 50 states in terms of 17 key metrics that look at the health of the current environment as well as the environmental impact of people’s daily habits.

They grouped the metrics into three specific categories:

Environmental Quality: Researchers took stock of how muchsolid waste was generated per capita as well as the quality of the air, soil and water.

Eco-Friendly Behaviors: WalletHub measured the number of LEED-certified green buildings per capita, as well as the state’s transportation infrastructure and number of alternatively-fueled vehicles, as well as consumption of energy, gasoline and water.

Climate Change Contributions: This category focused on the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per capita, along withemissions of other greenhouse gases, including methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated greenhouse gases.

The research team then cruncheddata from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, American Chemistry Council, County Health Rankings, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the U.S. Green Buildings Council, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey and the World Resources Institute.

Their findings?

The ten greenest states were primarily in the Northeast, with the exception of one midwestern outlier and two states in the Pacific Northwest. Interestingly, California did not make the top ten greenest states list, coming in at number 12. On the other end of the spectrum, you might have expected a state like Texas to be the least green, but it was ranked #36in the lower half of the country, definitely, but not the worst.

Greenest States

Vermont (greenest overall)
Washington
Massachusetts
Oregon
Minnesota
Maine
Connecticut
New York
New Hampshire
New Jersey

Least Green States

Idaho
Arkansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Oklahoma
Nebraska
West Virginia
Montana
North Dakota
Wyoming (least green overall)

Perhaps not surprisingly, states considered politically “blue” are almost three times more environmentally responsible than red states.

Citizens of Missouri throw away the least amount of trash while Hawaii citizens throw away the most! And Maine recycles the most at 48 percent while Louisiana recycles only 1 percent, the least.

What value is this if you’re trying to improve the environmental quality of your own state? You can use WalletHub’s approachto compare counties in your own state and identify opportunities for improvement. (Cities might be too difficult to compare because they share so many county services, whereas county services do vary quite a bit.)

Of the 17 metrics WalletHub used, these five might be a good starting point for more specific analysis in your state:

Municipal Solid Waste: How much trash are citizens in each of your state’s counties throwing away? What enables people in a particular county to throw away less trash and recycle more? Are there plastic bag fees that encourage people to take reusable bags to the grocery store? Do curbside recycling programs make it easier for citizens to divert trash from the landfill? Have bans been put in place to prohibit use of polystyrene foam at fast food restaurants?

Gasoline Consumption: The amount of gas citizens use may vary widely from county to county. In WalletHub’s study, people living in New York consumed the least amount of gas of any state, which should be no surprise, given how densely people in the 5 boroughs of New York City live and how comprehensive the mass transit system is there. On the other hand, people in North Dakota consumed the most gasoline per capita, a reflection of the long distances folks drive from one part of the state to the next. Comparisons may be similar in rural vs urban counties in one state.

Energy Consumption: This comparison could be highly informative and might indicate the level of awareness people have one county to another when it comes to using electricity and natural gas. For example, some electric utilities might be particularly aggressive in educating consumers about the importance of energy conservation. The utility might also offer a package of incentives to get its customers to replace energy-wasting appliances with newer models. Knowing what strategies encourage residents of one county to save energy could be very valuable to managers of other counties as they strive to cut energy consumption and the carbon dioxide emissions that go along with it.

Water Consumption: The WalletHub analysis examined water quality, not consumption. But like energy consumption, analyzing the amount of water consumed in some counties compared to others in the same state could provide valuable insights into how to motivate people statewide to use water more wisely.

Number of LEED-Certified Buildings: Any time a new building is built, it should be able to meet at least the basic criteria for saving energy as established by the U.S. Green Building Council. Once a tally is made of all LEED-Certified buildings in a county, counties could start a friendly competition to see which ones build the most new LEED buildings over a certain period of time.

If these categories don’t correspond to the most pressing environmental challenges your state faces,choose some other categoriesthat are more relevant.The key is to use comparisons both to take stock of where things stand, and to use those comparisons to make things better. The comparisons will create useful benchmarks to measure its own progress over time, making both the planet and the people happier and healthier.

Related
6 Urban Green Space Projects That Are Revitalizing U.S. Cities
10 Greenest Cities in North America

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How ‘Green’ is Your State?

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There Are Still Politicians Who Think You Can’t Get Pregnant From Rape

Mother Jones

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During a hearing by the Idaho House of Representatives on a bill that would require women seeking abortions to undergo an ultrasound and listen to a fetal heart monitor, Angela Dwyer, an employee at a crisis pregnancy center who testified in support of the bill, explained that in her experience, she had seen two rape victims choose not to abort—one kept the baby and the other chose adoption. The proposed legislation does not make an exception for victims of incest or rape.

Rep. Pete Nielsen responded, “Now, I’m of the understanding that in many cases of rape it does not involve any pregnancy because of the trauma of the incident.” He then added, “That may be true with incest a little bit.”

According to the Spokesman-Review, Nielsen stood by his remarks after the hearing. He said pregnancy “doesn’t happen as often as it does with consensual sex, because of the trauma involved.” According to Scientific American, women get pregnant from rape as frequently as they get pregnant from consensual sex.

When pressed on the matter by a reporter who asked him how he knew this, Nielsen replied, “That’s information that I’ve had through the years. Whether it’s totally accurate or not, I don’t know…I’ve read a lot of information…Being the father of two girls, I’ve explored this a lot.”

Nielson’s comments echoed those of former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, who once memorably said on a television interview, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” Akin lost his Senate bid shortly thereafter in 2012 to Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

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There Are Still Politicians Who Think You Can’t Get Pregnant From Rape

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Here’s the Worst Appropriation of #BlackLivesMatter We’ve Seen Yet

Mother Jones

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As “Black Lives Matter” chants have grown common in communities nationwide responding to police violence against black men and women, opponents of the BLM movement have controversially altered the phrase to “All Lives Matter.” Now, Missouri state Republican Rep. Mike Moon has introduced a bill that further co-opts BLM’s rallying cry, this time for his anti-abortion agenda. Titled the “All Lives Matter Act,” the bill would define a fertilized egg as a person, asserting that life begins at the moment of conception and that embryos have the same rights as humans.

Reproductive rights advocates and activists say this use of the language of Black Lives Matter opponents is an affront to the BLM movement and especially to black women. “By hijacking the prolific chant that has become the title of a movement led by a new generation of human rights activists and recontextualizing it, Rep. Moon is further marginalizing Black women,” writes Christine Assefa at the Feminist Wire.

“Black women have had very little reproductive choice, historically. During slavery, they were forced into childbirth. Then, they were forced into methods for sterilization,” wrote Alison Dreith, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri, in a column for the St. Louis American. “This bill continues the trend in Missouri, that women should not make their own decisions.”

The legislation has been moving through the Missouri House since its 2016 session began last week. Missouri already has a “personhood” law in place, but this bill would make the provision more extreme by repealing part of the law that says that the state “personhood” law must still comply with the US Constitution and Supreme Court precedent such as Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that legalized abortion.

Without such a caveat, this “personhood” bill would virtually wipe out abortion access—and likely be found unconstitutional. In general, “personhood” bills can also restrict some methods of contraception because both the morning-after pill and IUDs can prevent an already-fertilized egg—a zygote that is considered a “person”—from implanting in the uterus. Opponents say such measures can also upend laws around abortion access. These laws usually preserve a woman’s right to an abortion as established by Roe, but they establish the fetus as a “person,” say, in the case of the murder of the mother or if the pregnancy, usually later term, results in a miscarriage. Under these laws, in vitro fertilization can be made illegal, and women who miscarry can potentially be investigated and prosecuted for fetal homicide.

“Personhood” ballot measures have been roundly rejected by voters in many states—most recently in North Dakota, Colorado, and Mississippi—but are already on the books in Kansas and Missouri. Courts in Oklahoma and Alaska have also struck down “personhood” initiatives.

In Missouri, this bill is just one of several initiatives seeking to further the state’s existing abortion restrictions. A current state Senate bill proposes tightening rules around fetal tissue donation, physician admitting privileges—by requiring abortion clinic doctors to have surgical privileges at a nearby hospital—and abortion clinic inspections, proposing that the state’s health department be required to conduct unannounced inspections of abortion clinics annually. Today, the entire state of Missouri only has one clinic that performs abortions after a Columbia clinic was forced to stop offering abortions last November when a local hospital pulled the clinic doctor’s admitting privileges.

“There are two anti-abortion laws in the Senate already. And 11, maybe 12, in the House,” says NARAL’s Dreith. “And our first day of session was Wednesday, so it hasn’t even been a full week yet. It’s going to be a long year.”

As for the title of the bill, Rep. Moon did not respond to Mother Jones‘ request for comment about why he named the measure the “All Lives Matter” act. But the title was bound to garner controversy. The Black Lives Matter movement ramped up in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in August 2014. On the day that Moon prefiled the All Lives Matter Act, a different state representative prefiled a bill that would revoke athletic scholarships from college athletes who refused to play for any reason other than health. The bill was filed just a few weeks after more than 30 black football players at the University of Missouri refused to play as part of a protest against the university president and the school’s negligence on issues around racism and a lack of diversity on campus. The coincidence of these bills being filed on the same day is telling, says NARAL’s Dreith.

“Reproductive health is intrinsically linked to racism and to the Black Lives Matter movement,” Dreith says. This bill, she notes, shows that “the lives of women—and especially black women—do not matter to this legislator.”

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Here’s the Worst Appropriation of #BlackLivesMatter We’ve Seen Yet

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The Oregon Militia Is Picking the Wrong Beef With the Feds

Mother Jones

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On January 2, a band of armed militants—led by Cliven Bundy‘s son Ammon—stormed Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, seizing the visitor center both to protest the tangled legal plight of two local ranchers convicted of arson on public land, and to defy the federal government’s oversight of vast landholdings in the West. (You might remember that Cliven launched his own successful revolt against federal authorities in 2014 to avoid paying grazing fees on public land in Nevada.)

For all the slapstick comedy on display at the still-occupied government complex—rival militias arriving to “deescalate” the situation, public pleas for donated supplies including “French Vanilla Creamer”—the armed-and-angry men behind the fiasco are pointing their rifles at a real problem. In short, the ranchers who supply the United States with beef operate under razor-thin, often negative, profit margins.

It’s not hard to see why grazing rights are an issue. Ranchers’ struggle for profitability gives them strong incentive to expand their operations to increase overall volume and gain economies of scale. A 2011 USDA paper found that the average cost per cow for small (20-49 head) operations exceeded $1,600, while for large ranches (500 or more head), the average cost stood at less than $400. Large operations are more efficient at deploying investments in labor and infrastructure (think fencing), the USDA reported.

To scale up, ranchers need access to sufficient land. And in the West, land access often means obtaining grazing rights to public land through the Bureau of Land Management. Hence the bitter dispute playing out in Burns, Oregon: The ranchers accuse the federal government of ruining their businesses through overzealous environmental regulation of that public land.

Now, t’s clear that what the Malheur militiamen appear to be demanding—essentially laissez-faire land management based on private ownership, overseen by local politicians—is a recipe for ecological ruin. In a recent New York Times op-ed, the environmental historian Nancy Langston described what happened last time such a policy regime prevailed in the area: “By the 1930s, after four decades of overgrazing, irrigation withdrawals, grain agriculture, dredging and channelization, followed by several years of drought, Malheur had become a dust bowl.”

But the real beef struggling ranchers should take up with the federal government involves not zealous federal regulation, but rather its opposite: the way the feds have watched idly as giant meat-packing companies came to dominate the US beef production chain. Ranchers run what are known as cow-calf operations—they raise cows up to a certain weight on pasture, sell them to a feedlots to be fattened on corn and soybeans (and other stuff), which then sell them to companies known as beef packers that slaughter and prep the meat for consumers. As the University of Missouri rural sociologist Mary Hendrickson points out, after a decade of mergers and acquisitions, just four companies slaughtered and packed 69 percent of US-grown cows in 1990. By 2011—after another spasm of mergers—the four-company market share had risen to 82 percent, Hendrickson reports.

Such consolidation at the top of the value chain gives farmers less leverage to get a decent price for their cows. A market dominated by a few buyers is a buyer’s market. The Kansas rancher and rural advocate Mike Callicrate has been making this point tirelessly for years. Callicrate thinks the BLM has been overly burdensome for ranchers in the West, he tells me, but there’s a bigger problem that is “rarely mentioned” either by the gun-toting ranchers or the media covering them: “the historically low, below break-even, market prices for livestock.”

As the big beef packers scaled up and consolidated their market share in the 1980s and ’90s, giant retailers led by Walmart did the same. The result has been steady downward pressure on the beef supply chain: The retail giants pressured the beef packers to deliver lower prices, and the beef packers in turn pressured ranchers. The result has been a big squeeze.

In the chart below that Callicrate created for a 2013 blog post, drawn from USDA data, the trend is clear: Compared to 40 years ago, nearly a third less of every dollar you spend on beef goes into the pocket of the rancher who raised the cow.

Chart by Mike Callicrate

Under pressure from this squeeze, ranchers have had little choice but to scale up, or exit the business altogether—as tens of thousands have done:

Chart: USDA

Rather than demanding unfettered access to public land, the Malheur rebels could be agitating for federal antitrust authorities to take on the beef giants. As the New America Foundation’s Barry C. Lynn has shown repeatedly, since the age of Reagan, US antitrust regulators have focused almost exclusively on whether large companies use their market power to harm consumers by unfairly raising retail prices. Those regulators have looked the other way when companies deploy their girth to harm their suppliers by squeezing them on price. So antitrust authorities okayed merger after merger, even when deals left just a few giant companies towering over particular markets. As a result, writes Lynn, “In sector after sector, control is now more tightly concentrated than at any time in a century.” The meat industry is a classic example.

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama vowed to challenge the big meat packers and defend independent farmers and ranchers from their heft. As Lina Khan showed in a 2012 Washington Monthly piece, President Obama actually made a valiant effort to do just that—before surrendering to a harsh counterattack from the industry’s friends in Congress.

The current presidential election would be an ideal time for beleaguered ranchers to bring corporate domination of meat markets back into the public conversation. Armed occupations of bird-refuge visitor centers won’t help with that struggle.

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The Oregon Militia Is Picking the Wrong Beef With the Feds

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Move Over, Monsanto: The Pesticide and GMO Seed Industry Just Spawned a New Behemoth

Mother Jones

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US chemical titans Dow and DuPont have agreed to a $130 billion merger. Once combined, DowDuPont (as it will be known) intends to split into three parts, including one devoted solely to agriculture. The announcement likely triggered corner office gasps in Basel, Switzerland, and in St. Louis, Missouri—hometowns of the globe’s two-largest pesticide and seed companies, Syngenta and Monsanto. That’s because Dow and DuPont are both sprawling conglomerates that contain massive ag divisions. Combining them into a “leading global pure-play Agriculture company” (as the companies’ press release puts it) will create a gargantuan new rival for those market-leading agribusiness titans.

To highlight the gravity of the deal, here’s a snapshot of the industry’s pre-merger position. After waves of mergers and buyouts in the ’90s and early ’00s—coinciding with the emergence of genetically modified seeds—the global seed landscape shook out like this:

The companies that rose to dominate the space—Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont—also sold pesticides, and lots of them. While these giant chemical companies’ rationale for moving into GM seeds was to diversify away from reliance on peddling bug- and weed-killing chemicals, the two business lines always had a certain synergy. That’s because the era’s blockbuster GM trait was herbicide resistance—the companies engineered corn, soybean, and cotton varieties that could thrive even when they’re doused with these companies’ own branded herbicides. The rapid adoption of these crops gave rise to a plague of herbicide-resistant weeds, a boom in herbicide use, and a new iteration of crops, including ones from Monsanto and Dow, engineered to resist multiple herbicides.

Earlier this year, Monsanto made a bold, sustained push to buy out its rival Syngenta. The combined company would have been truly enormous, controlling something approaching a third of both the seed and pesticide markets (see charts here). Syngenta’s management ultimately fought off the bid in August, but rumors of coming mergers and buyouts in the agribiz sector have swirled ever since. With the Dow-DuPont deal, those prophecies have proven thunderously true. The new firm will mash up DuPont’s seed heft with Dow’s fat share of the pesticide market. Let’s call it DowDuPont Agri. Here’s a sketch of its girth, made by crunching numbers in the above charts. Antitrust regulators may shave the final company a bit—DuPont and Dow both sell corn seeds, for example, and there is speculation that Dow’s relatively small corn seed business might have to be sold off.

Note that in this scenario, the same three mega firms—Monsanto, Syngenta, and DowDuPont Agri—will control more than half the global seed market and nearly half the pesticide market. The GMO seed industry once vowed to wean industrial agriculture off its reliance on pesticides. But as I wrote in May, when the globe’s biggest seed company (Monsanto) was hotly pursuing marriage with the globe’s biggest pesticide maker (Syngenta), the industry now appears to be betting big on a pesticide-soaked future.

And the new company will likely—unless antitrust authorities make it sell off overlapping business segments—emerge as a bigger seed and agrichemical player than the two that currently stand atop the market.

But I may soon have to rev up Datawrapper again and redo those charts. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the DuPont-Dow tie-up could “spur agricultural rivals to forge their own partnerships, further shrinking the handful of companies that dominate the global seed and pesticide business.” As recently as mid-November, Monsanto execs were publicly contemplating another bid for Syngenta, and some prominent Syngenta shareholders are pushing the company to reconsider its refusal to merge with Monsanto in the wake of the new merger, the Journal reported last week. “The synergies in terms of costs, distribution, and R&D would create huge value for shareholders and establish a dominance that would be difficult for any competitor, including a Dow/DuPont, to rival,” one fund manager whose firm owns Syngenta stock told the Journal. But the hottest takeover rumor involving Syngenta involves not its US rival, but rather China National Chemical Corp., or ChemChina, a vast state-owned enterprise.

There’s also talk of Monsanto making a play for the agrichemicials division of German chemical giant BASF, which owns a juicy 12 percent of the global pesticide market (see chart above). In the wake of the Dow-DuPont merger, I am left to wonder: What new, yet even more massive beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward our corn fields to be born?

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Move Over, Monsanto: The Pesticide and GMO Seed Industry Just Spawned a New Behemoth

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Mike Huckabee Wants Syrian Refugees to Be Placed in Homes of "Limousine Liberals"

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was quick to blame President Obama’s handling of ISIS and the current migrant crisis swelling Europe. On Saturday, he topped his usual blend of hateful xenophobia by suggesting Syrian refugees be placed in the neighborhoods of “limousine liberals” such as Hillary Clinton.

“How come they never end up in the neighborhood where the limousine liberal lives?” Huckabee said in a radio interview. “Behind gated communities and with armed security around. Mrs. Clinton, you have suggested we take in 65,00 refugees. How many can we bring to your neighborhood in Chappaqua?”

The former Arkansas governor continued by connecting two seemingly disparate events and belittling the protests that erupted at the University of Missouri last week over allegations of racism on campus.

“Heck, we may take them to the University of Missouri,” Huckabee continued. “A lot of the students are so stressed out from feeling unsafe because somebody said a word they didn’t like that they are not using their dorm rooms anymore. Maybe we can put them there.”

Since the deadly attacks on Friday, Republican politicians have been vowing to slam the door on the Obama administration’s plan to accept refugees fleeing from violence in Syria and the Middle East. Concerns over the screening process have been heightened after a Syrian passport was located near the body of one of the Paris attackers.

Speaking at the G20 summit in Turkey on Monday, President Obama hit back at Republicans’ growing refusal to take in refugees, calling their rejections a “betrayal of our values.”

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Mike Huckabee Wants Syrian Refugees to Be Placed in Homes of "Limousine Liberals"

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How Campus Racism Just Became the Biggest Story in America

Mother Jones

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Tim Wolfe, president of the University of Missouri system, resigned from his post on Monday amid growing pressure from students, faculty, and alumni over a series of racial incidents that have plagued the system’s flagship campus in Columbia this fall. Wolfe’s decision to step down came a week after Missouri graduate student Jonathan Butler went on a hunger strike to demand the president’s ouster, after weeks of protests over university inaction. The issue was thrust into the national spotlight on Saturday when a group of black players on the Missouri football team declared they would refuse to participate in football-related activities until Wolfe was removed or stepped down. The players drew support from coaches and the athletic department, though some within the team were unhappy with the protest.

But the matter escalated remarkably fast from Saturday, with Gov. Jay Nixon and US Sen. Claire McCaskill calling for reform, Wolfe resigning, and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin of the University of Missouri, Columbia, announcing late Monday that he would also resign at the end of the year.

Here’s how the chain of events unfolded since mid September. (For more, check out this timeline from the Maneater, the university’s student newspaper, and one from the Missourian.)

September 12: Payton Head, president of the Missouri Students Association, took to Facebook to reflect on the university’s racial climate after a group of people repeatedly screamed “nigger” at him, he said, while he was walking through campus. Head told the Missourian: “I’d had experience with racism before, like microaggressions, but that was the first time I’d experienced in-your-face racism.” (Read his lengthy, impassioned post here.)
October 5: The Legion of Black Collegians, the university’s black student government, described an incident of overt racism, when, according to a letter released by the group, an intoxicated “white male” disrupted a group rehearsal of a play on campus and referred to members as “niggers.” That day, Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin condemned the incident in a video, noting that “hate and racism were alive and well at Mizzou.” Loftin called for mandatory diversity training for students, faculty, and staff: “It’s enough. Let’s stop this. Let’s end hatred and racism at Mizzou. We’re part of the same family. You don’t hate your family.”
October 10: Members of Concerned Student 1950, an activist group whose name alludes to the year the first black student was admitted to the university, took to the streets during the university’s homecoming parade to condemn the university’s history of racism; they blocked Wolfe’s car, demanding a response from him. Wolfe did not acknowledge them or get out of the car, and police dispersed the protestors without an arrest, the Missourian reported. Jonathan Butler later told the Missourian: “We’ve sent emails, we’ve sent tweets, we’ve messaged but we’ve gotten no response back from the upper officials at Mizzou to really make change on this campus.”
October 21: Concerned Student 1950 released a list of demands calling for Wolfe’s ouster, and for institutional changes at the university to promote racial inclusion.
October 24: An incident in a bathroom in one of the campus residence halls prompted further outcry: Someone reportedly drew “a swastika on the wall with their own feces,” according to a letter released by the university’s Residence Halls Association. The group called it an “act of hate.”
October 27: Concerned Student 1950 met with Wolfe to discuss its demands; according to the Missourian, the group noted that Wolfe “also reported he was ‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus.” The group said in a statement: “Not understanding these systems of oppression therefore renders him incapable of effectively performing his core duties.”
November 2: Graduate student Jonathan Butler announced he would go on a hunger strike, calling for Wolfe’s resignation for failure to adequately respond to the string of racial incidents. Concerned Student 1950 would later call for demonstrations at university events, including Missouri’s football game against Mississippi State. Since November 2, students have camped out at the heart of the university’s campus, Carnahan Quadrangle, in support of Butler’s hunger strike.
November 6: Wolfe issues a statement expressing concern for Butler’s health and apologized for his behavior at the homecoming parade. “My behavior seemed like I did not care,” he said. “That was not my intention. I was caught off guard in that moment. Nonetheless, had I gotten out of the car to acknowledge the students and talk with them perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are today.” He acknowledged that racism existed at the university. “Together we must rise to the challenge of combating racism, injustice, and intolerance.”
November 7: Members of Missouri’s football team took a stand. In a statement posted by the Legion of Black Collegians on Twitter, many of the team’s black athletes said they would decline to participate in practice until Butler’s strike was resolved.
November 9: In an emotional statement before the University of Missouri Board of Curators, Wolfe resigned, saying he hoped his taking responsibility would heal the campus. “I ask everybody — from students to faculty to staff to my friends, everybody — use my resignation to heal and to start talking again. To make the changes necessary and let’s focus on changing what we can change today and in the future, and not what we can’t change, which is what happened in the past.”

Students flooded onto the university’s Columbia campus following the resignation on Monday, chanting and calling for change. They drew support from those at the university and well beyond, including from congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis, and from Michael Sam, the former Missouri football star who became the first openly gay player drafted by a NFL team.

As the day went on, members of Concerned Student 1950 linked arms around the encampment on a campus plaza to create a “no media safe space.”

Video shot on the ground shows supporters, including a Greek life administrator and a mass communications professor, blocking a student photographer from taking pictures on public ground and asking him to back up.

On Monday, Butler addressed a large crowd of protesters: “This is not a moment,” he said, “This is a movement.”

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How Campus Racism Just Became the Biggest Story in America

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Coal-Loving Republicans Are Suing Obama Again

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama’s signature plan to fight climate change was formally published this morning, thus opening the season for a fresh round of legal challenges from two dozen states, most of which are major coal consumers.

The Clean Power Plan, as it’s known, aims to reduce the nation’s power-sector carbon footprint to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. To reach that goal, each state has a unique target that it can achieve by cleaning or shuttering coal-fired power plants, building renewable energy systems, and investing in energy efficiency. Ever since it was first proposed a couple years ago, it’s been a punching bag for Republicans in Congress, in state capitals, and in the 2016 presidential race. Marco Rubio recently promised to “immediately stop” the plan if elected.

The dangerous, cutthroat world of America’s most notorious coal baron

The plan has also already spent a lot of time in court, so far surviving a series of attempts by states and coal companies to block it from being implemented. The last such case ended in September, when a federal court ruled that legal challenges couldn’t be brought until the final version of the new rules was officially published.

Now that threshold has been crossed, and the lawsuits are flooding in. According to the Hill, 24 states and Murray Energy, a coal company, filed suits Friday morning:

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R), who is leading the legal fight against the plan, called it “the single most onerous and illegal regulations that we’ve seen coming out of D.C. in a long time.”

The West Virginia and Murray lawsuits came the day the rule was published in the Federal Register, the first day court challenges can legally be filed. The states joining West Virginia are Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Arizona and North Carolina.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that most of these states are major consumers of coal, the most carbon-polluting form of energy, and are thus the most likely to take a beating from the regulations. (Of course, coal has been struggling since before Obama even took office). Here’s a look at how much the suing states depend on coal; I’ve ranked them by the share of their total electricity mix that comes from coal, rather than by their total consumption volume:

Tim McDonnell

It’s worth noting as well that all but three of those states (Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina) have Republican attorneys general. Now that the dust has basically settled on battles over gay marriage and Obamacare, the Clean Power Plan is the next logical thing for GOP-led states to fight with the Obama administration about.

But the plan really isn’t as crazy as Morrisey, et al., would have you believe. In fact, it has taken some heat from environmentalists for not going far enough, and for doing little more than locking in the incremental greenhouse gas reductions that were already happening. Still, there’s a lot riding on these legal challenges, because the Clean Power Plan is the administration’s main bargaining chip for the global climate negotiations coming up in a month in Paris. The promises that Obama has made to the rest of the world as to how the United States will help slow climate change basically ride on this plan. So if the plan were to be killed in court, the whole international agreement could collapse.

Fortunately, it seems very unlikely that the court will throw the rule out, said Tomás Carbonell, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Carbonell added that if history is a guide, the litigation is likely to come to a conclusion before Obama leaves office, which would preclude the possibility that a President Donald Trump or another climate change denier could let the plan wither on the vine by refusing to defend it in court.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has a good explainer on the plan’s strengths, not least of which is that most states are already well on their way to coming up with a plan for compliance. So far, it doesn’t seem like anyone is following Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) advice to just ignore the plan altogether.

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Coal-Loving Republicans Are Suing Obama Again

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