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Meet the Other Mayor Accusing Chris Christie of Retaliation

by FlorriePorter Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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His city might not have been flooded with traffic as an act of political retribution, but Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop still considers himself Gov. Chris Christie’s number one enemy.

Like Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, Fulop wouldn’t endorse Christie in last year’s gubernatorial race. (Though Fulop is a Democrat, Christie spoke at his inauguration in July.) Fulop alleged in a statement Thursday that he received swift punishment from the governor’s office after making it known in September that he would endorse the Democratic slate. He claimed that after the endorsement Christie officials canceled meetings and rejected his requests to discuss city issues.

“Cancelations include an entire day of meetings with state commissioners scheduled to be in Jersey City that was abruptly canceled, with each of the commissioners individually canceling within an hour of the time I communicated my intention to not endorse,” Fulop said.

The Jersey City mayor is referenced in the now-infamous bridge closure emails released on Wednesday. After being told that Sokolich was asking questions about the George Washington Bridge lane closures, recently resigned Port Authority official David Wildstein replied, “Radio silence. His name comes right after mayor Fulop.” Fulop told the Jersey Journal that he believes he’s “Enemy Number 1” after seeing that exchange.

Two months after that email was sent and less than a week after Christie won re-election, Fulop announced plans to sue the Port Authority for $400 million. He claims the agency, which is run by both New Jersey and New York, has not been paying enough taxes on the 32 properties it owns in Jersey City.

When Christie was asked about the controversy during his long press conference Thursday, he said he didn’t know if Fulop’s meetings were canceled for purposes of payback and he promised to look into the matter. “What Mayor Fulop knows is, when we agree with him from a policy perspective we’ll work with him,” Christie said. “When we disagree with him, we’ll express those disagreements. And sometimes that’ll mean friction.”

He later added: “Have I at times been angry with Mayor Fulop and disagreed with him? You bet I have.”

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Meet the Other Mayor Accusing Chris Christie of Retaliation

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs for December

by Lubao2pzs Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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The American economy added 74,000 new jobs in December, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at minus 16,000. There’s no way to sugar coat this: it’s pretty dismal news. Last night was obviously a bad time to predict that the economy might be getting back on track.

The headline unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent, but that’s mainly because a huge number of people dropped out of the labor force, causing the labor force participation rate to decline from 63.0 percent to 62.8 percent. At the same time, the number of discouraged workers dropped. This suggests that in addition to the usual exodus of workers due to retirement, a fair number of people simply gave up and quit looking for work, dropping out of the official numbers entirely.

It’s only one month, and it might not mean much. Maybe it was just bad weather. Maybe. But it’s a lousy start to the year.

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs for December

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Yet another oil train explodes, this time in New Brunswick, Canada

by Elva Diller Posted on January 8, 2014

Yet another oil train explodes, this time in New Brunswick, Canada

By

Zach Bonnell

Looking for a way to warm yourself through this bitter North American cold snap? Just huddle around the nearest train tracks in hopes that one of the countless oil-hauling trains traversing the continent will pass by and combust.

It hadn’t even been two weeks since a derailed train laden with crude exploded in North Dakota when a similar accident occurred last night near the village of Plaster Rock in New Brunswick, Canada, just beyond the Maine border.

Of the 15 rear cars that jumped the tracks, four were carrying crude oil and four were carrying propane. Derailed cars burned through the night, and emergency responders were unwilling to get close enough to figure out which of the carriages were ablaze. About 45 nearby homes were evacuated after the accident. Fortunately, no injuries have been reported.

Here is Reuters with a reminder of just how common this kind of accident has become:

A series of disastrous derailments has reignited the push for tougher regulation. A surge in U.S. oil production has drastically increased the number of oil trains moving across the continent as pipelines fail to keep up with growing supply. …

There have been five major accidents in the past year involving a train carrying crude oil. The most devastating occurred in Quebec in July last year, when a runaway train derailed and exploded in the heart of the town of Lac Megantic, killing 47.

So long as North America’s oil-drilling boom continues, these kinds of disasters will likely continue — but there are hopes that new U.S. federal rules expected this year will see the most puncture-prone models of oil-hauling train cars phased out or retrofitted.


Source
Train carrying oil derails, catches fire in New Brunswick, Canada, Reuters

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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Yet another oil train explodes, this time in New Brunswick, Canada

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How the Obama Administration Can Get Bluefin Tuna Off the (Wrong) Hook

by Myrna Posted on January 7, 2014

The public’s help is sought in a push to restrict wasteful fishing practices that are harming rare bluefin tuna. Source: How the Obama Administration Can Get Bluefin Tuna Off the (Wrong) Hook ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: How the Obama Administration Can Get Bluefin Tuna Off the (Wrong) HookIn One Image: Cold Snaps In Global ContextBill Nye Wants To Wage War on Anti-Science Politics, Make a Movie—And Save the Planet From Asteroids ;

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How the Obama Administration Can Get Bluefin Tuna Off the (Wrong) Hook

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Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Brooks smoked marijuana in his youth, but then got bored with it and stopped. He says it never seemed like a very uplifting pastime, and this makes him nervous about about legalization:

I don’t have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged.

We now have a couple states — Colorado and Washington — that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use. By making weed legal, they are creating a situation in which the price will drop substantially. One RAND study suggests that prices could plummet by up to 90 percent, before taxes and such. As prices drop and legal fears go away, usage is bound to increase. This is simple economics, and it is confirmed by much research. Colorado and Washington, in other words, are producing more users.

….I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

Brooks’ column is getting a lot of mockery in my Twitter feed, but for once I guess I can’t really join in. It’s not that I agree with Brooks—and I’ll concede that his comparison of pot smoking with “higher pleasures” is kind of silly. But for the most part, all his column does is express a fairly modest sense of unease about the fact that legalization will almost certainly increase pot smoking a fair amount. There’s really nothing wrong with being a little nervous about that. These new laws will increase marijuana use.

But the big thing Brooks misses is the question of whether this will increase overall intoxication. It might. Alternatively, marijuana might largely displace alcohol use, producing little or no net increase in intoxication but producing a safer society overall since pot tends to be less damaging than alcohol. In the lingo, this is a question of whether marijuana and alcohol are economic substitutes or economic complements, and the research on this point is inconclusive. One of the great benefits of legalization in Washington and Colorado is that it will finally start to give us some decent data on this. For various reasons, it won’t settle the question definitively, but two or three years from now we’ll certainly have a much better idea than we do today about the net effect of marijuana legalization.

And if it turns out that legalizing pot reduces alcohol use? Then Brooks should be happy. There will still be plenty of idiots getting drunk and stoned, but there won’t be any more than there are now. We’ll have an increase in personal freedom; a reduction in drug war costs; and no significant change in the number of people pursuing higher pleasures. It’s well worth finding out if this will be the case.

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Does More Marijuana Smoking Mean Lower Attendance at the Opera?

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The 9 Most Important Recommendations From the President’s NSA Surveillance Panel

by GenevieveKunkel Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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The report of the president’s NSA review panel is out. It has a grand total of 46 recommendations. Here are the most interesting ones:

  1. Phone records should be stored privately, not by the government. If the NSA needs phone records, it should get a warrant for them. Like a subpoena, the warrant should be “reasonable in focus, scope, and breadth.”
  2. More broadly: “As a general rule and without senior policy review, the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information about US persons for the purpose of enabling future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.”
  3. The FBI should no longer be allowed to issue National Security Records on its own. NSLs should be issued only if a warrant is approved. Nondisclosure orders should be more restricted; should last no more than 180 days; and should not prevent the target of the NSL from challenging its legality in court.
  4. Generally speaking, companies that are ordered to produce information should be allowed to “disclose on a periodic basis general information about the number of such orders they have received, the number they have complied with, the general categories of information they have produced, and the number of users whose information they have produced in each category.”
  5. Surveillance of non-US persons “must be directed exclusively at protecting national security interests….and must not be directed at illicit or illegitimate ends, such as the theft of trade secrets or obtaining commercial gain for domestic industries.”
  6. If a US person is inadvertently surveilled, that information cannot be used as evidence in any court proceeding.
  7. The NSA should be headed by a civilian. Leadership of the NSA should be separated from leadership of the military’s Cyber Command.
  8. “Congress should create the position of Public Interest Advocate to represent the interests of privacy and civil liberties before the FISC.” In addition, more FISC decisions should be declassified.
  9. The government should commit itself to stop trying to undermine public encryption standards.

These are useful recommendations, especially 1, 2, 3, 6, and 8. Recommendation 7 is already a dead letter, since President Obama has said he plans to keep dual-hatted leadership for the NSA and Cyber Command.

How much of this will survive the president and Congress? I’d like to say I’m optimistic, but I’m not, really. These recommendations are useful but modest, and I suspect that Congress will whittle them down even more. Stay tuned.

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The 9 Most Important Recommendations From the President’s NSA Surveillance Panel

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Silicon Valley Takes On the NSA

by BobMoowattin Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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The titans of Silicon Valley have finally banded together to tell Washington they’re tired of the NSA ruining public trust in the internet by hoovering up every gigabit of data ever created. It’s all very polite, and naturally they’ve made their views public via a website that promotes the following five principles:

  1. Governments should codify sensible limitations on their ability to compel service providers to disclose user data that balance their need for the data in limited circumstances, users’ reasonable privacy interests, and the impact on trust in the Internet. In addition, governments should limit surveillance to specific, known users for lawful purposes, and should not undertake bulk data collection of Internet communications.
  2. Intelligence agencies seeking to collect or compel the production of information should do so under a clear legal framework in which executive powers are subject to strong checks and balances. Reviewing courts should be independent and include an adversarial process, and governments should allow important rulings of law to be made public in a timely manner so that the courts are accountable to an informed citizenry.
  3. Transparency is essential to a debate over governments’ surveillance powers and the scope of programs that are administered under those powers. Governments should allow companies to publish the number and nature of government demands for user information. In addition, governments should also promptly disclose this data publicly.
  4. The ability of data to flow or be accessed across borders is essential to a robust 21st century global economy. Governments should permit the transfer of data and should not inhibit access by companies or individuals to lawfully available information that is stored outside of the country. Governments should not require service providers to locate infrastructure within a country’s borders or operate locally.
  5. In order to avoid conflicting laws, there should be a robust, principled, and transparent framework to govern lawful requests for data across jurisdictions, such as improved mutual legal assistance treaty — or “MLAT” — processes. Where the laws of one jurisdiction conflict with the laws of another, it is incumbent upon governments to work together to resolve the conflict.

This is a good start. Next up: whether these guys are really serious, or whether they’re going to call it a day after creating a website and not really try very hard to harness public opinion to fight for these principles. Stay tuned.

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Silicon Valley Takes On the NSA

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The Quality of American Teachers Seems to be Getting Better

by Bart Jameson Posted on November 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the current issue of Education Next, Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch report that the quality of new teachers has improved over the past decade:

We find that more academically competent individuals are being drawn into the teaching profession….driven mainly by the proportion of teachers with SAT scores that fall in the top quartile of the distribution. This finding of increasing academic competence for newer entrants to the teacher labor market also shows up when we use undergraduate GPA as our indicator of academic competency, though research by Cory Koedel indicates that inconsistent grading standards across academic majors may render this measure less meaningful.

G&W’s research suggests that schools are drawing fewer teachers from the bottom quartile of SAT scores and more teachers from the top quartile. You can see this in the thick red line in the chart on the right (taken from the original paper), which shows the number of teachers from the class of 2008 with different SAT scores: compared to 1993 and 2000, there are fewer from the lower ranks, about the same number from the middle ranks, and more from the higher ranks. Megan McArdle suggests this is mainly due to the Great Recession:

As insecurity in the private-sector labor market increases, the value of public-sector job protections effectively increases, meaning that candidates will be willing to accept lower pay in exchange for the guarantee that it will be nearly impossible to fire them….It’s also possible that a lot of college students suddenly and for no apparent reason decided they wanted to be teachers around the same time that the job market became massively more insecure. But I’m betting it’s no coincidence. Bad news for the graduating seniors, but good news for the nation’s schools.

This is reasonable sounding. However, the most recent data is for teachers hired in 2008, which predates the big spike in unemployment starting in 2009. So I’m not quite convinced. I’d like to see data through 2013 to confirm what’s going on. Given the steep rise in private-sector unemployment and the preciptous decline in private-sector job security over the past five years, we should expect to see schools becoming even more selective about who they’re willing to hire. If the recession story is true, the data should show at least another 5 percentile point increase in the SAT scores of new teachers.

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The Quality of American Teachers Seems to be Getting Better

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3 Graphs That End The ‘Food vs. Fuel’ Debate

by Posted on October 22, 2013

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3 Graphs That End The ‘Food vs. Fuel’ Debate

Posted 22 October 2013 in

National

Critics of renewable fuel (chiefly the oil industry) love to claim that growing our own fuel means higher food prices for American consumers. They’re dead wrong, and there’s still a lot of misinformation out there regarding the relationship between corn and the price of food in the grocery store. Let’s take a look:

  1. The price of corn is the lowest it’s been in three years, yet food prices have not come down. This year USDA is forecasting a record breaking corn crop in the US – just this week they updated their inventory estimate by an increase of 25%! Accordingly we have reached a three year low drop in corn prices- corn traded this month at$4.41 a bushel compared to the 2012 peak of $8.49.

Source: NASDAQ.com

 

  1. Only 16% of grocery costs can be traced back to farm inputs, like corn or wheat. The rest goes to costs like energy, transportation, packaging, marketing and labor.

Source: USDA.com, foodpolitics.com

 

  1. Oil, not corn, has been driving up global food prices. While the price of corn is one of many, complicated factors that go into grocery costs, researchers at the World Bank identified crude oil as the number one determinant of global food prices. The cost of energy from oil is integral to so much of the 84% we discussed in #2 (above) that when the price of oil goes up, food prices follow closely behind.

The facts could not be more clear: the agricultural inputs that become renewable fuel simply do not have enough influence on food prices to make a meaningful difference. The only way to spare consumers pain at the grocery store is to end our oil dependence and protect policies that promote alternatives, like the Renewable Fuel Standard.

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3 Graphs That End The ‘Food vs. Fuel’ Debate

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America’s kids eating healthier, getting fitter

by Lubao2pzs Posted on September 17, 2013

America’s kids eating healthier, getting fitter

By

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Yay for exercise and healthy food.

Here’s news as sweet as a fistful of blueberries: American kids aged 11 to 16 were eating more fruit and vegetables in 2009 than those who came before them just eight years earlier, according to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Kids are also cutting back on sweets and sugary drinks, eating breakfast more regularly, spending more time exercising, and spending less time in front of the television, the study found:

PediatricsClick to embiggen.

The following graph shows the modest rise in the number of days per week that American kids engaged in physical activity (PA) and the decline in the hours per day that they sat in front of the television:

PediatricsClick to embiggen.

These healthier habits have begun making a difference.

The average body mass index of thousands of kids studied increased between 2001 and 2005, then started falling between 2005 and 2009. That’s in line with the results of other studies, which have shown a plateau in childhood obesity rates. (Though as we told you last week, America’s most obese kids, primarily children of poor black and Hispanic parents, continue to get fatter.)

“Over the previous decades, the pattern had been that kids were getting less physical activity, and it’s been very hard to increase their fruit and vegetable consumption,” Ronald Iannotti, coauthor of the study and chairman of the department of exercise and health sciences at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, told USA Today. “We’ve got a long way to go, but the good news is that those are increasing.”

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.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

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America’s kids eating healthier, getting fitter

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