Tag Archives: murray

Oil will keep flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline — for now.

by SpencerMccombs3 Posted on June 22, 2017

The nation’s largest privately owned coal company, Murray Energy, just filed a lawsuit against the Last Week Tonight host over the show’s recent segment. Oliver had criticized the company’s CEO, Robert Murray, for acting carelessly toward miners’ safety.

Murray Energy’s complaint stated that the segment was a “meticulously planned attempt to assassinate the character and reputation” of Murray by broadcasting “false, injurious, and defamatory comments.”

Oliver shouldn’t be too concerned, according to Ken White, a First Amendment litigator at Los Angeles firm, who told the Daily Beast that the complaint was “frivolous and vexatious.”

The lawsuit is hardly a shocking development. Before the show aired, Oliver received a cease-and-desist letter from the company. He noted that Murray has a history of filing defamation suits against news outlets (most recently, the New York Times).

Oliver said in the episode, “I know that you are probably going to sue me, but you know what, I stand by everything I said.”

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Oil will keep flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline — for now.

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Charles Murray Still Convinced That Whites Are Smarter Than Blacks

by Sheeritwern Posted on May 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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I didn’t realize that Charles Murray was still talking about his belief that African-Americans are genetically less intelligent than whites. But he is. Over at Vox, Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett report on a two-hour podcast he did recently with Sam Harris:

The consensus, he says, is that IQ exists; that it is extraordinarily important to life outcomes of all sorts; that it is largely heritable; and that we don’t know of any interventions that can improve the part that is not heritable. The consensus also includes the observation that the IQs of black Americans are lower, on average, than that of whites, and — most contentiously — that this and other differences among racial groups is based at least in part in genetics.

I’ve read The Bell Curve, so I’m not just talking out of my ass about it. And it’s a weird book. The vast bulk of it is about the first five bolded items above, which really are part of the scientific consensus. You can argue the details, but it’s safe to say that intelligence is real; it’s important; it’s partly genetically heritable; it’s difficult to change; and blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites. The evidence in The Bell Curve on these scores is fine. But then the book gets to a couple of chapters about the genetic basis of the black-white IQ gap, and suddenly the evidence gets very, very fuzzy. In fact, I want to share a brief boxed item included on page 310:

The German Story

One of the intriguing studies arguing against a large genetic component to IQ differences came about thanks to the Allied occupation of Germany following World War II, when about 4,000 illegitimate children of mixed racial origin were born to German women. A German researcher tracked down 264 children of black servicemen and constructed a comparison group of 83 illegitimate offspring of white occupation troops. The results showed no overall difference in average IQ. The actual IQs of the fathers were unknown, and therefore a variety of selection factors cannot be ruled out. The study is inconclusive but certainly consistent with the suggestion the B/W difference is largely environmental.

In one sense, I applaud Murray and his co-author for including this. At the same time, they spend no time engaging with it in the text of the book. But they should: it’s only one study, and as they suggest, it has some missing pieces. Still, it’s one of the very few studies of African-American and white American children raised in middle-class environments outside of America. The fact that it shows no difference between black and white children is pretty significant—especially since it’s highly unlikely that any of these children received any kind of special treatment.

I don’t want to pretend that this study is definitive. It’s not. But a single disconfirming case is all you need to demonstrate that the black-white IQ gap is entirely non-biological, and this one is pretty close.

It’s not impossible that there’s a biological difference in intelligence between blacks and whites. That’s fundamentally a scientific question, and it hasn’t been conclusively proven one way or the other. But the effect of American culture on blacks is so toxic that it’s all but impossible to believe that any conclusions drawn in a study of Americans can ever be free of environmental contamination. After all, the Irish used to have low IQs. Jews used to have low IQs. And everyone was quite sure it was due to biology. But when anti-Irish and anti-Semitic animus died out, their IQs increased to normal levels. Amazing, isn’t it?

Maybe eventually Murray will find his long-sought gene complexes for cognitive ability, and will be able to show that there really is a genetic difference between blacks and whites. But I doubt it. The evidence just doesn’t point in that direction. Maybe in ten or twenty years we’ll know for sure.

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Charles Murray Still Convinced That Whites Are Smarter Than Blacks

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Coal baron is trying to elect Trump with old tricks

by DebraWilmoth Posted on July 5, 2016

Coal baron is trying to elect Trump with old tricks

By on Jul 5, 2016 2:18 pmShare

The owner of the nation’s largest private coal company backs the GOP presidential nominee, pressures his employees to fundraise for him, and promises layoffs if he doesn’t get his way. If all this sounds familiar, it’s because CEO Robert Murray is reusing an old playbook to elect Donald Trump.

Last week, Murray announced potential plans to lay off as much as 80 percent of his workforce, or 4,400 employees, blaming the “ongoing destruction” of the coal industry on “President Barack Obama, and his supporters, and the increased utilization of natural gas to generate electricity.” Right now, it’s unclear just how serious the company is, since Murray Energy noted in a second statement that “no layoffs are contemplated or expected at this time.”

Meanwhile, Murray has actively campaigned for Donald Trump, calling him the industry’s only hope, and hosting a fundraiser in his name. 

There are echoes of the 2012 election in his recent actions: Murray similarly predicted layoffs if Obama won reelection, followed through on the threat immediately after he won, and went so far to pressure his employees to contribute to Mitt Romney.

Coal’s poor fortunes have more to do with the market than politics, and there’s little Donald Trump — or any president — could do to bring it back. The rise of cheap natural gas and declining demand for coal from China have been the largest factors in coal’s bankruptcies.

A Trump presidency will hardly be a miracle for the coal industry, either. Murray’s admitted that much a few months ago, saying, “I don’t think it will be a thriving industry ever again.”

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Coal baron is trying to elect Trump with old tricks

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Desperate for cash, Trump turns to the coal industry

by CorinneVarela Posted on June 21, 2016

Black gold

Desperate for cash, Trump turns to the coal industry

By on Jun 21, 2016Share

What’s a candidate to do when he’s strapped for cash and still 139 days out from election day? If you’re Donald Trump, and you don’t want to entirely self-finance, the answer to that question might lie in a business whose product has been called “black gold.”

Trump pulled in just $3 million in individual contributions and reported having only $1.3 million in the bank at the end of last month, meaning he’s got less cash on hand than either of his former rivals Ted Cruz or Ben Carson. Clinton’s fundraising, meanwhile, dwarfs Trump’s by nearly 40 times.

But Trump’s got a plan. His first move after the abysmal fundraising report was to announce that he’s holding an invitation-only fundraiser in West Virginia coal country next Tuesday, hosted by mining magnate CEO Robert Murray. Murray, one of the largest independent coal operators in the U.S., only endorsed Trump after his first-choice candidate Cruz dropped out. His ringing endorsement of Trump was to say he’s “all we’ve got.”

Despite his absolute lack of knowledge about the coal industry, Trump feels comfortable enough to turn to the coal industry after a barrage of bad press. The magnates are looking to boost Trump’s coffers, even though he can’t do much to stop the industry-wide free fall.

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Desperate for cash, Trump turns to the coal industry

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Trump now sounds like every other right-wing Republican on energy — well, almost

by MarguerU84 Posted on May 27, 2016

Trump now sounds like every other right-wing Republican on energy — well, almost

By on May 27, 2016 12:01 amShare

Donald Trump has sold himself as a different kind of Republican, but in his first energy policy speech on Thursday, he adopted the same tired, old energy ideas that have been trotted out by the GOP establishment for years. The only difference: Trump doesn’t actually understand the issues at play, so he avoided specifics and made absurd, impossible-to-keep promises.

Trump was not the fossil fuel industry’s preferred candidate. Primary opponents who had  proven their deference to big business, such as Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, were considered a safer bet by the oil, gas, and coal barons. Trump, with no real ideology and a tendency to flip-flop, was seen as more of a wildcard. Still, I predicted in March that if Trump locked up the nomination, he would adopt the traditional Republican energy agenda, just as once-moderate Mitt Romney had in 2012. And that’s exactly what Trump has now done.

We got a hint that Trump was headed in this direction when he brought on oil-loving Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) as his energy policy advisor earlier this month. Cramer has an extremely anti-environment record, including a lifetime voting score of 1 percent from the League of Conservation Voters.

Then, last week, Trump met with and sucked up to Bob Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, a coal mining company. Murray is such a staunch Republican that he is alleged to have pressured employees to donate to Romney’s 2012 campaign. Massey emerged from that meeting to say he was backing Trump, but that even he thinks Trump’s grandiose promises to bring back coal are impossible. (Trump also revealed that he doesn’t know what liquefied natural gas is.)

Saying all the right-wing stuff, sorta

In his speech at an oil industry conference in heavily-fracked North Dakota on Thursday, Trump called for much less regulation and much more drilling, fracking, and mining. But, in typical Trump fashion, he took things a step further than most Republicans do. In 2012, Romney called, nonsensically, for “North American energy independence.” Trump, though, doesn’t want Canada intruding on his effort to make America great again, so he said, “Under my presidency, we will accomplish complete American energy independence.” Never mind that “energy independence,” North American or otherwise, is impossible as long as we depend on fossil fuels that can be sold on the global market. Trump said he would ensure that we are “no longer at the mercy of global markets,” but more domestic drilling won’t free us from the tyranny of international markets unless we nationalize all of the oil companies and force them to sell only to Americans. Otherwise, rising demand in Asia or supply disruptions in the Middle East will continue to affect the price of gasoline.

Trump put his own spin on the Keystone XL issue too. He got the party line right when he said that he would “absolutely” approve the pipeline, but then he added that he would negotiate “a better deal.” The U.S. should get a “piece of the profits” from Keystone, he said. “That’s how we’re gonna make our country rich again.” That sort of kickback scheme may have worked when Trump was allegedly cutting deals with mafia-run construction outfits as a New York City developer, but there is no current mechanism for it under U.S. law.

He also promised “energy reform that creates trillions of dollars in wealth.” However he came up with that ridiculous number, he might as well have pulled it out of thin air. The only source he cited for the huge economic benefits of environmental deregulation was the Institute for Energy Research, a conservative advocacy organization founded by Charles Koch and run by a former Enron executive.

Trump’s pledge that in his first 100 days in office he would, “rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan” also offered political talking points rather than thoughtful policymaking. The Climate Action Plan is not an executive action, but a collection of actions, some of which are EPA rules, like the Clean Power Plan. It’s not clear which agency would repeal those rules if he first abolished the EPA, as he proposes. And removing those rules would be vulnerable in court without Congress first getting rid of the Clean Air Act and other legislation that requires the government to regulate pollutants.

Trump’s new energy agenda is all Republican politics without even the patina of policy seriousness offered by some more experienced politicians.

Playing to two wings of the party

Trump’s energy speech was all about holding the Republican coalition together: reaching out to the fossil fuel lobby while continuing to appeal to his rural, white, Christian base. In the primaries, Trump was the candidate of the party’s unwashed masses. Now he has to win over the elite business wing, especially now that he is raising money from them for his general election campaign. In a press conference before his speech, he gave repeated shoutouts to Harold Hamm, a North Dakota businessman who has made billions in oil and gas drilling and donated heavily to Republican campaigns.

Then he made his overture to the white working class by praising coal miners and their way of life. “The miners, they’re incredible people. I asked a couple of them, ‘Why don’t you go into some other profession?’ And they said, ‘We love going after coal.’” Trump’s pro-coal stance is so transparently political rather than based on any serious policy engagement that he just says coal is great because miners are great. And miners are great because they “love going after coal.” It’s circular logic. And like Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” it defines America’s past as its peak.

Likewise, Trump’s vow to undermine international climate negotiations — “We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs” — is as much a statement of nationalist, anti-U.N. resentment as anything to do with energy or environmental policy. It doesn’t matter that he wouldn’t be able to unilaterally pull the U.S. out of the deal.

Trump’s energy speech on Thursday demonstrated two things: he’s trying to reassure the GOP establishment that he will be a team player their economic agenda but he still has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to energy policy. But if he becomes president, he’ll find out the hard way that we can’t drill our way to “energy independence.”

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Trump now sounds like every other right-wing Republican on energy — well, almost

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Trumpapalooza for May 23, 2016

by StevieF65vjg Posted on May 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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A while back I asked how to handle the fire hose of Donald Trump news, and one suggestion was to ignore it during the day and then put all of it into a single end-of-the-day roundup. I’m not sure this is a viable long-term solution, but let’s give it a try. Here’s the Trumpapalooza for May 23, 2016:

Global Warming

Publicly, Trump has made it clear that he thinks global warming is a hoax. But when it comes to building a sea wall to protect one of his golf courses, it turns out he’s a true believer: “If the predictions of an increase in sea level rise as a result of global warming prove correct,” his company says in a letter, “it could reasonably be expected that the rate of sea level rise might become twice of that presently occurring….As a result, we would expect the rate of dune recession to increase.”

Wall Street

Trump apparently isn’t quite as plugged into the world of the rich and powerful as he thinks:

If there were any prevailing doubts of his stature on Wall Street, Mr. Trump said the chief executive at Deutsche Bank could easily allay it. “Why don’t you call the head of Deutsche Bank? Her name is Rosemary Vrablic,” he said in the recent interview. “She is the boss.”

Ms. Vrablic is a private wealth manager at Deutsche Bank in New York. She is not the company’s chief executive; John Cryan holds that role. Both declined to comment on Mr. Trump.

Energy Policy

Trump recently met with Robert Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, and had a question for him:

During the meeting, Murray said Trump had asked him about numerous facets of U.S. energy policy. At one point, Murray said he would suggest lifting obstacles to opening liquefied natural gas, or LNG, export facilities to reduce the supply glut of natural gas in the country.

He said that Trump was agreeable with the idea, but then had a question. “What’s LNG?” Murray said Trump asked.

Rape

Josh Marshall says that if Trump is going to dredge up groundless old rape accusations against Bill Clinton, it’s time to ask him some questions about his own past sexual conduct:

Trump’s former wife Ivana said Trump raped her in a sworn deposition. Given how central a role rape accusations have played in Trump’s campaign — against Mexicans, political opponents, etc. it is clearly a highly germane question, as frankly it would be for any presidential candidate.

The details surrounding the alleged rape are bizarrely novelistic even by Trumpian standards. According to Ivana, Trump was driven to freakish rage by a failed anti-baldness surgery — a so-called ‘scalp reduction’. But the actions are very clear cut. According to her deposition, Trump flew into a rage, attacked her, held her down and began pulling hair out of her head to mimic his pain and then forcibly penetrated her….This was a pretty concrete and specific accusation. And the author of the book that first surfaced the deposition said he’d found numerous friends of Ivana’s who she had confided the incident to at the time.

Vince Foster

The right-wing fever swamp has long believed that Vince Foster, a deputy White House counsel in the Clinton administration, didn’t commit suicide on July 20, 1993. Rather, Hillary Clinton had him murdered and then ordered his body dragged to Fort Marcy Park, where he was found the next day. Even by conservative standards this is both fantastical and repulsive (Foster was a good friend of Hillary’s). Naturally, that didn’t stop Trump:

When asked in an interview last week about the Foster case, Trump dealt with it as he has with many edgy topics — raising doubts about the official version of events even as he says he does not plan to talk about it on the campaign trail. He called theories of possible foul play “very serious” and the circumstances of Foster’s death “very fishy.”

“He had intimate knowledge of what was going on,” Trump said, speaking of Foster’s relationship with the Clintons at the time. “He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.” He added, “I don’t bring Foster’s death up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”

There was also some polling news, but who cares about polls in May?

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Trumpapalooza for May 23, 2016

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Forget Elizabeth Warren. Another Female Senator Has a Shot to Fill the Senate’s New Power Vacuum.

by RogelioUnderwood Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

In the nanoseconds after Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid announced Friday morning that he will give up his leadership post and retire in 2016, liberal groups raced to promote their go-to solution for almost any political problem: Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Much like the movement to draft Warren for president, the idea of putting her in charge of the Democratic caucus was more dream than reality. Warren’s office has already said she won’t run, and as Vox‘s Dylan Matthews explains, putting Warren in charge of the Democratic caucus would prevent her from holding her colleagues accountable when they stray too far from progressive ideals.

Instead, Reid’s likely replacement is New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who already has endorsements from Reid and Dick Durbin, the outgoing minority leader’s No. 2. But lefties have long been wary of Schumer, who, thanks to his home base in New York City, is far more sympathetic to Wall Street than the rest of his caucus. And lost in the Warren hype is another female senator: Washington’s Patty Murray.

As caucus secretary, Murray is the fourth-ranking member of Senate Democratic leadership, behind Reid, Durbin, and Schumer. If she decides to take on Schumer for Reid’s job, Murray could be the first woman to serve as a party leader in the US Senate. Murray’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether she’d run for the job and, besides a general statement praising Reid, was notably quiet on Friday.

In 2013, I cowrote a profile of Murray for The American Prospect looking at her role in leading Democrats’ negotiations with Republicans on the budget, and explained how she’s a pragmatic progressive who will push for the most liberal policies she can pass while still being willing to forge compromise with the centrists in her party:

There’s something peculiarly undefined about Murray’s ideology. She’s a liberal, a West Coast liberal to be precise: strong on social issues, the environment, workers’ rights, and the government’s role in society. She hews closely to the Democratic talking points of the day. But it’s hard to discern a coherent vision or theory behind her views. She is as far left as you can go without alienating the centrists in the party. More than anything, she’s a pragmatist. Success trumps belief in the “right” things. At the same time, Murray doesn’t venerate moderation for its own sake—she’s no Rahm Emanuel. “She’s a strong progressive,” says a former Budget Committee staff member, “but she won’t tilt at windmills, she won’t force a vote on something she knows she’s not going to win.”

Murray certainly has the résumé to compete for the job. She led the Democrats’ campaign arm in 2012, when the party picked up two Senate seats, defying pundits’ predictions. She forged a budget agreement with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2013 that averted across-the-board budget cuts. Murray is generally press-shy—she flies home across the country each weekend instead of doing the Sunday show circuit—which would leave room for other Senate stars, including Warren, to be the party’s public face while Murray controls the behind-the-scenes negotiations. But as that budget committee staffer told me in 2013, Murray isn’t known for picking fights she can’t win. If she runs against Schumer, it’ll be because she thinks she has a real shot at Reid’s post.

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Forget Elizabeth Warren. Another Female Senator Has a Shot to Fill the Senate’s New Power Vacuum.

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Late Libertarian Icon Murray Rothbard on Charles Koch: He "Considers Himself Above the Law"

by ShavonneHain Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Cross-posted from Kochology, where Daniel Schulman is releasing exclusive documents and other materials gathered in the process of reporting his new book Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.

Long before Charles Koch became the left’s public enemy number one (or two, depending on where David Koch falls in the rankings), some of his most vocal detractors were not liberals but fellow libertarians. None of his erstwhile allies would come to loathe him more fiercely than Murray Rothbard, one of the movement’s intellectual forefathers, with whom Charles had worked closely to elevate libertarianism from a fringy cadre of radical thinkers to a genuine and growing mass movement.

In the 1970s, Charles helped fund Rothbard’s work, as the economist churned out treatise after treatise denouncing the tyranny of government. Rothbard was a man with a plan when it came to movement-building. Where some libertarians had bickered over whether to advance the cause through an academic or an activist approach, Rothbard argued that the solution wasn’t to choose one path, but both. Charles was taken with his strategic vision.

Rothbard dreamt of creating a libertarian think tank to bolster the movement’s intellectual capacity. Charles Koch made this a reality in 1977, when he co-founded the Cato Institute with Rothbard and Ed Crane, then the chairman of the national Libertarian Party. This was a high point for libertarianism, when a busy hive of libertarian organizing buzzed on San Francisco’s Montgomery Street, home to Cato and a handful of other ideological operations bankrolled by Charles Koch.

But the relationship between Cato’s co-founders soon soured.

Rothbard, who was feisty by nature, chafed under the regime of Crane and Koch—the libertarian movement’s primary financier at that time. His breaking point came during the 1980 election, when David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee. Rothbard and his supporters felt that, in a bid for national legitimacy, David Koch and his running mate, Ed Clark, had watered down the core tenets of libertarianism to make their philosophy more palatable to the masses. Americans today would consider their platform—which called for abolishing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and eliminating federal agencies including the EPA and the Department of Energy—a radical one. But to Rothbard and his circle, it wasn’t radical enough. For instance, the Clark-Koch ticket stopped short of calling for the outright repeal of the income tax. And Clark, to Rothbard’s horror, had even defined libertarianism as “low-tax liberalism” in a TV interview.

Following the 1980 election, in which the Clark-Koch campaign claimed a little over one percent of the popular vote, Rothbard did not hold back. He penned a scathing polemic titled “The Clark Campaign: Never Again,” in which he wrote that Ed Clark and David Koch had “sold their souls—ours, unfortunately, along with it—for a mess of pottage, and they didn’t even get the pottage.” Thanks in part to Rothbard’s rabble-rousing, factional feuds and recriminations splintered the libertarian movement just as it was gaining momentum. A few months after Rothbard’s diatribe, Charles Koch and Ed Crane tossed him out of the Cato Institute and voided his shares in the think tank (which was set up, under Kansas law, as a nonprofit corporation with stockholders), a rebuke that turned their libertarian brother-in-arms into a lifelong adversary.

Rothbard would later play a cameo role in the messy battle between the four Koch brothers. In 1988, when Bill and Frederick Koch sued their brothers over control of the family foundation that had been established by their father, they dredged up Rothbard as a possible witness, seeking to depose him in the case. They hoped his testimony would damage Charles Koch’s credibility and support their contention that their brother was a tyrannical control freak who used nonprofit entities to advance his own aims.

A document summarizing Rothbard’s anticipated testimony was filed in the case, and I came across it as I pored over thousands of documents at the district court house in the Koch family’s hometown of Wichita. Rothbard, it seemed, was only too eager to denounce his onetime benefactor.

Charles Koch, Rothbard planned to testify, “involves himself in the minutest details related to the non-profit foundations with which he is associated…. He insists on personally approving even the minutest matters, such as $100 grants, stationery design and color of offices.” Rothbard contended that Charles would go “to any end to acquire/retain control over the nonprofit foundations with which he is associated” and “considers himself above the law.” And the economist further alleged:

Charles Koch has a practice of misusing nonprofit foundations for his own personal ends. Charles Koch wants absolute control of the non-profit foundations, but wants to be able to spend other people’s money not his own. He wants to spend that money on things that will enhance his personal image and goals, even it these expenditures are not consistent with the publicly stated goals of the foundation. Amongst other things, Charles Koch uses his involvement with non-profit foundations to aquire access to, and respect from, influential people in government and elsewhere.

Rothbard died in 1995, taking his grudge to the grave. By then, Charles and David Koch had abandoned the libertarian movement and struck out on their long path to becoming Republican powerbrokers. As their influence has expanded within the broader GOP in recent years, I’ve heard echoes of Rothbard’s past criticisms in the conservative nonprofit world by recipients of Koch network funding who complain of micromanagement by the Koch brothers’ political adjutants. “Nobody really works with them,” said the leader of one conservative group. “They work for them or not at all. They are kind of creating a monopoly” and attempting to “make the conservative movement theirs.”

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Late Libertarian Icon Murray Rothbard on Charles Koch: He "Considers Himself Above the Law"

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Factory farms get even grosser

by CherieMartino Posted on April 29, 2014

Factory farms get even grosser

By

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Residents of some farming communities are being forced to put up with serious airborne bullshit.

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reports on the growth of the revolting practice of using water irrigation systems to squirt manure over farmland.

So far, 14 of Wisconsin’s 258 dairy factory farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are using the practice, which involves spraying fine mists of dung out of commercial sprinklers. Nearly all of North Carolina’s hog farms do likewise. The practice is also used in Iowa, Michigan, and other Midwestern farming states. From the Wisconsin Watch report:

Applying liquid manure to fields using pipelines and farm irrigation systems is less expensive than trucking manure and applying it with traditional land-spreading rigs. …

The issue is tied inextricably to the controversial spread of CAFOs across the Wisconsin landscape. The farms produce overwhelming amounts of manure and have angered and frustrated nearby residents who feel they have little control over the growth and operations of the industrial farms. Cattle on Wisconsin farms produce as much waste each year as the combined populations of Tokyo and Mexico City, according to calculations by Gordon Stevenson, a retired former chief of the [Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s] runoff management section. …

Spraying manure doesn’t just sound gross. It poses real human health risks:

Some research suggests that the plethora of chemicals and pathogens found in liquid manure can have serious health impacts, ranging from respiratory disease to potentially lethal antibiotic resistant infections. Opponents fear wider use of manure irrigation will increase the risk of human illness …

[C]ritics and even some proponents of manure irrigation say the practice can threaten water supplies.

Backers defend the spraying by saying it helps farms more precisely place their manure on their land. But try selling that crap to Wisconsinite Scott Murray, who sold his home several years ago after he and his family could no longer stand the manure mist drifting over from a neighboring CAFO. “It even got into the walls of our home,” Murray said. “It hurt so bad even to breathe.”


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Manure spraying under scrutiny, Wisconsin Watch

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Factory farms get even grosser

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The Venn Diagram That Explains How the Ryan-Murray Budget Deal Happened

by Jay Walker Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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The House just passed the Ryan-Murray budget deal, signaling an unexpected end to the cycle of budget crises and fiscal hostage-taking. A few weeks ago, such an agreement seemed distant. Sequestration had few friends on the Hill, but the parties could not agree on how to ditch the automatic budget cuts to defense and domestic spending. Republicans had proposed increasing defense spending while taking more money from Obamacare and other social programs, while Democrats said they’d scale back the defense cuts in exchange for additional tax revenue. Those ideas were nonstarters: Following the government shutdown in October, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) called the idea of trading Social Security cuts for bigger defense budgets “stupid.”

Which explains why Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray’s deal craftily dodged taxes and entitlements while focusing on the one thing most Republicans and Democrats could agree upon: saving the Pentagon budget. Ryan’s budget committee previously declared the sequester “devastating to America’s defense capabilities.” Murray had warned of layoffs for defense workers in her state of Washington as well as cuts to combat training if sequestration stayed in place.

The chart above shows why military spending is the glue holding the budget deal together. It also shows how any remaining opposition to the bill in the Senate may bring together even stranger bedfellows than Ryan and Murray: progressive dove Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and sequestration fan Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

We’ve got much more coming on military spending and how the Pentagon just dodged a budgetary bullet. Stay tuned.

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The Venn Diagram That Explains How the Ryan-Murray Budget Deal Happened

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