Tag Archives: oklahoma

Did the oil industry help to discover a whole new fault line in Oklahoma?

Accusations that Stein is an anti-vaxxer have followed the Green Party candidate throughout the race, even though she’s a Harvard-educated physician and not a graduate of the Jenny McCarthy school of medicine.

In a ScienceDebate.org survey of presidential candidates’ views on science, Stein gave them a somewhat modified answer on vaccines.

“Vaccines prevent serious epidemics that would cause harm to many people,” she said, adding:

To reverse the problem of declining vaccination rates, we need to increase trust in our public health authorities and all scientific agencies. We can do that by removing corporate influence from our regulatory agencies to eliminate apparent conflicts of interest and show skeptics, in this case vaccine-resistant parents, that the motive behind vaccination is protecting their children’s health, not increasing profits for pharmaceutical companies.

Stein’s been accused of pandering to anti-vaxxers before, for saying, “There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant … There were real questions that needed to be addressed.”

While she’s still hitting on her point about corporate influence, she’s sounding less loony these days.

In the same questionnaire, however, Stein didn’t budge on another topic in which she stands at odds with the scientific community: GMOs. She wants to place a moratorium on GMOs until they have been proven safe.

Of course, those persnickety scientists will tell you it’s impossible to prove anything is safe — but that’s not a reason to dismiss new plant varieties or lifesaving shots.

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Did the oil industry help to discover a whole new fault line in Oklahoma?

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Let’s all give a small, slightly restrained cheer for Costa Rica.

The state’s last record-setting earthquake was in 2011, when it topped 5.6 magnitude. A new one on Saturday matched that record.

As fracking has boomed in the U.S., the number of earthquakes across the nation tripled from 2009 to 2015.

At 3.0 magnitude, you probably wouldn’t even notice a tremor. Approaching 6.0, you can definitely feel it — and the risk for injury starts getting more serious.

But frequency is more troubling than strength. For naturally occurring seismic activity, geologists link recurring smaller quakes to bigger, more destructive quakes to come. Oklahoma’s tremors, however are not normal: The majority are linked to wastewater injection from oil and gas operations.

The U.S. Geological Survey hasn’t determined yet whether that’s what caused Saturday’s jitters, but said: “We do know that many earthquakes in Oklahoma have been triggered by wastewater fluid injection.”

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Oklahoma and Kansas showed progress in strengthening regulations of wastewater injection. Oklahoma, which has been slower to adopt the new rules, experienced slightly fewer minor quakes in the first half of the year compared to the same period last year.

Oklahoma regulators were concerned enough to immediately order 37 wastewater disposal wells to shut down on Saturday.

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Let’s all give a small, slightly restrained cheer for Costa Rica.

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A Federal Judge Just Stopped Trans Students From Using the Bathrooms of Their Choice

Mother Jones

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The school year is off to a rough start for transgender students. A federal judge in Texas has given public schools across the country permission to ignore the Obama administration’s instructions to let trans kids use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, rather than their birth sex.

In May, the US Department of Education sent a guidance to public schools, saying they could lose federal funding if they kept trans kids out of bathrooms of their choice. On Sunday, a federal judge in Texas granted a preliminary, nationwide injunction that blocks the department’s guidance from being enforced. The injunction also prevents the Obama administration from using the guidelines in any lawsuits.

The decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by 13 states against the Obama administration over the federal government’s position on bathroom choice for students.

“Defendants have conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights,” representatives for the states wrote in the lawsuit filed in May. The case was filed by a long list of state attorneys general, including Ken Paxton of Texas, Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

A main question in the case is whether Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools, also bars discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The Obama administration says it does. The suing states argue that references to “sex” in Title IX refer only to biological sex.

US District Judge Reed O’Connor granted the nationwide injunction because the states that filed the lawsuit have a strong chance of winning their case, he wrote in his decision, which was filed on Sunday.

“It cannot be disputed,” he wrote, “that the plain meaning of the term sex as used…following passage of Title IX meant the biological and anatomical difference between male and female students as determined at their birth.” He noted that the injunction would only apply to states that want to separate school bathrooms according to biological sex. Other states can maintain policies allowing kids to use facilities based on gender identity.

“I’m pleased the court has ruled against the Obama Administration’s latest overreach,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote on Twitter following the decision. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union, which has represented transgender students in other civil rights cases, and four other civil rights groups blasted the judge’s ruling in a joint statement.

“The court’s misguided decision targets a small, vulnerable group of young people…for potential continued harassment, stigma and abuse,” the statement said.

The impact of the injunction may be limited, however. Legal experts told the New York Times that higher-level courts in other regions have previously sided with the Obama administration’s view that transgender people are protected by existing anti-sex-discrimination laws, and those rulings won’t be affected by the new injunction.

The Texas decision follows a similar order from the US Supreme Court. Earlier this month, the high court’s justices temporarily blocked a transgender boy in Virginia from using the boys’ bathroom at his school while the justices decide whether to take up a case concerning that school board’s bathroom policy. If the justices agree to hear the case, it would be the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in on this issue.

The 13 states suing the Obama administration include Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia, Maine, Arizona, Kentucky, and Mississippi. Separately, 10 other states sued the Obama administration in July over the same issue. Those states include Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

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A Federal Judge Just Stopped Trans Students From Using the Bathrooms of Their Choice

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Clinton’s army of energy advisers towers over Trump’s

Clinton’s army of energy advisers towers over Trump’s

By on Aug 12, 2016 12:05 pmShare

Hillary Clinton did not talk much about climate change and energy in her big economic policy speech on Thursday, but she has a huge team working behind the scenes on environmental policy.

Politico reports that the Clinton campaign has nearly 100 advisors on climate, energy, and the environment — many of them informal and unpaid — who have produced recommendations on “everything from chemical safety and Everglades restoration to nuclear power and climate finance.”

The Clinton climate camp is drawn largely from the ranks of her husband’s and President Obama’s administrations — a sign she’ll pick up where Obama left off. Her advisers include former Obama climate advisers Heather Zichal, Jody Freeman and Paul Bodnar, as well as Clinton-era EPA administrator Carol Browner. At the very top sits campaign chairman John Podesta, who worked on climate and energy policy in the Obama White House.

Clinton’s selection of advisers “contrasts sharply with Trump’s campaign, which is relying on just a few outside experts such as Oklahoma oilman Harold Hamm to help chart his energy agenda,” writes Politico’s Andrew Restuccia. Trump’s other main energy advisers include Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Andrew Wheeler, a former staffer for Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and vice-president of the Washington Coal Club, a group of coal industry lobbyists.

If Trump wins, some of those pro-fossil fuel voices are likely to end up in his cabinet.

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Clinton’s army of energy advisers towers over Trump’s

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10 More States Sue Federal Government Over Transgender Bathroom Rules

Mother Jones

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Ten more states sued the federal government Friday over rules allowing transgender kids to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity—rather than the sex listed on their birth certificates—in public schools. They join a group of 13 other states already suing the Obama administration over the same mandate.

A May 13 directive from the Department of Education and the Department of Justice, which does not carry the force of law, said schools that forced transgender kids to use bathrooms matching their birth sex would be violating Title IX and could lose federal funding.

The lawsuit filed Friday is being brought by the states of Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming. They argue the Obama administration’s directive was an overreach and a misinterpretation of Title IX.

“The recent action by these two federal agencies to require showers, locker rooms, and bathrooms to be open to both sexes based solely on the student’s choice, circumvents this established law,” Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson wrote in a statement. “It also supersedes local school districts’ authority to address student issues on an individualized, professional and private basis. When a federal agency takes such unilateral action in an attempt to change the meaning of established law, it leaves state and local authorities with no other option than to pursue legal clarity in federal court in order to enforce the rule of law.”

On May 25, another lawsuit was filed against the federal government over the same directive by the states of Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, and Georgia; the governor of Maine; the Arizona Department of Education; and school districts in Texas and Arizona. Kentucky and Mississippi later signed on to that lawsuit.

The Obama administration argues that transgender kids are already a vulnerable minority and that blocking them from bathrooms of their choice is discriminatory.

“We’re talking about kids, and anybody who’s been in school, been in high school, who’s been a parent, I think should realize that kids who are sometimes in the minority—kids who have a different sexual orientation or are transgender—are subject to a lot of bullying, potentially they are vulnerable,” President Barack Obama said in an interview with BuzzFeed defending the directive.

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10 More States Sue Federal Government Over Transgender Bathroom Rules

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Oklahoma Governor Vetoes "Insane" Abortion Bill

Mother Jones

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On Friday afternoon, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin vetoed a bill that would have made performing most abortions a felony in the state. On Thursday, the Oklahoma Senate passed the bill 33-12, with no floor debate. During the voting process, Sen. Ervin Yen, the sole state senator who is a physician, called the measure “insane.”

As Mother Jones reported in April, the bill would make performing abortions, except for those intended to save a woman’s life, a felony punishable by a minimum of one year in prison.

If it is discovered that they have provided an abortion, doctors would be stripped of their state medical licenses. The only exception to these rules would be abortions to save the life of the mother, and the bill makes clear that the threat of suicide by a woman seeking an abortion doesn’t fulfill the “life” requirement.

Had the bill been signed into law by Gov. Fallin, it would most certainly have led to a protracted and costly legal battle over the bill’s constitutionality, since its near total ban on abortion goes against Roe v. Wade—the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. However, the prospect of litigation is not what Fallin took issue with when rejecting the bill. Instead, she said that the “life” exception provided in the bill was “vague.”

“The bill is so ambiguous and so vague that doctors cannot be certain what medical circumstances would be considered ‘necessary to preserve the life of the mother,'” Fallin said. “While I consistently have and continue to support a re-examination of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, this legislation cannot accomplish that re-examination. In fact, the most direct path to a re-examination of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade is the appointment of a conservative, pro-life justice to the United States Supreme Court.”

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Oklahoma Governor Vetoes "Insane" Abortion Bill

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Yet Another State Succumbs to Obamacare’s Greatest Weapon: Math

Mother Jones

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Oklahoma has been resisting expansion of Medicaid for years, but they might finally be ready to cave in:

A bust in the oil patch has decimated state revenues, compounded by years of income tax cuts and growing corporate subsidies intended to make the state more business-friendly. Oklahoma’s Medicaid agency has warned doctors and other health care providers of cuts of up to 25 percent in what the state pays under Medicaid.

….In the poverty-wracked south­eastern corner of the state, where 96 percent of babies in the McCurtain Memorial Hospital are born to Medicaid patients, most health care would end, said hospital CEO Jahni Tapley. “A 25 percent cut to Medicaid would not put my hospital in jeopardy, because we are already in jeopardy,” Tapley said. “A 25 percent cut would shutter our doors for good, leaving 33,000 people without access to health care.”

….Under the proposal, which would be funded in part with a $1.50-per-pack tax on cigarettes, Oklahoma would shift 175,000 people from its Medicaid rolls onto the federal health exchange created by the Affordable Care Act.

Oklahoma’s governor is calling this “Medicaid rebalancing,” but her constituents are too sharp for her. They know what’s going on: “They can call it Medicaid rebalancing, but there’s only one federal program that offers a 9-to-1 federal match, and that’s Obamacare,” said Johnathan Small, president of the Oklahoma Council on Public Affairs. There’s just no fooling some people.

Anyway, it’s good to see that they’re not planning to fund this with, say, an increase in the income tax or the oil tax or the corporate tax. That might actually hit rich people, and God knows that would be the wrong way to pay for indigent services.

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Yet Another State Succumbs to Obamacare’s Greatest Weapon: Math

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The Supreme Court Just Made Government Hacking Much Easier

Mother Jones

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A Supreme Court ruling issued Thursday could make it much easier for the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to hack computers across the country, angering privacy advocates and drawing a rebuke from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

The court approved a change to Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure, which outlines how federal criminal cases are run. The current version of the rule says search warrants are only valid in the relatively small judicial districts where they were issued. Under the new rule, magistrate judges would be able to issue warrants that apply to computers throughout the country, allowing law enforcement officers to hack and infect them remotely. The change still has to be approved by Congress, which has until December 1 to reject or alter the rule change before it automatically takes effect.

The government says the change is necessary to keep up with wide-ranging computer networks and criminals who use tools to hide their physical locations online. Courts in Oklahoma and Massachusetts threw out evidence this month in two child pornography cases stemming from the government’s takeover of a dark-web site called Playpen, which it used to insert tracking tools into the computers of people accessing child porn. Because the order allowing the takeover was issued by a judge in Virginia, the judges in the two cases said, the evidence from the investigation could not be used elsewhere.

But privacy advocates say the rule change is an attempt by the government to expand its hacking powers without public debate. “Instead of directly asking Congress for authorization to break into computers, the Justice Department is now trying to quietly circumvent the legislative process by pushing for a change in court rules, pretending that its government hacking proposal is a mere procedural formality rather than the massive change to the law that it really is,” said Kevin Bankston, the director of the Open Technology Institute at the liberal-leaning New America Foundation, in a statement.

Sen. Ron Wyden also attacked the rule change as overly broad. “Under the proposed rules, the government would now be able to obtain a single warrant to access and search thousands or millions of computers at once; and the vast majority of the affected computers would belong to the victims, not the perpetrators, of a cybercrime,” he said in a press release. Wyden has promised to introduce a bill that would reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling.

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The Supreme Court Just Made Government Hacking Much Easier

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Here’s Why Oral Rape is Not Rape in Oklahoma

Mother Jones

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In Oklahoma, it’s legal to have oral sex with someone who’s completely unconscious, the state’s highest criminal court has ruled.

In a unanimous decision, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found that a teenage boy was not guilty of forcible sodomy after having oral sex with a teenage girl who was so intoxicated after a night of drinking that she had to be carried to his car. “Forcible Sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation,” the judges ruled on March 24. The decision was reported by the Guardian on Wednesday.

Local prosecutors were shocked, saying the court’s ruling perpetuated victim-blaming and antiquated ideas about rape. Benjamin Fu, assistant district attorney in Tulsa County, described the decision as “insane,” “dangerous,” and “offensive.”

But some legal experts note that Oklahoma’s forcible sodomy law only prohibits oral sex with someone who’s unable to provide consent because of mental illness or mental disability, not because of intoxication or unconsciousness. Therefore, they say, the court’s ruling was appropriate. The state has a separate rape law that protects victims who are too drunk to consent, but only in cases of vaginal or anal penetration, not oral sex. “We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language,” the appeals court wrote.

The incident occurred in 2014 after the two high school students had been drinking and smoking marijuana with friends at a Tulsa park. The boy, who was 17 years old at the time, gave the 16-year-old girl a ride home; blood tests later showed her blood-alcohol level was .341, indicative of severe alcohol poisoning, Oklahoma Watch reported, citing court records. She was unconscious when he dropped her off at her grandmother’s house and taken to the hospital, where she woke up in the middle of an examination for sexual assault. The boy’s DNA was detected around her mouth. He claimed she had consented to have oral sex, but she says she can’t remember anything after leaving the park, the Guardian reports.

Sexual battery might have been a more appropriate charge than rape or forcible sodomy, Shannon McMurray, an attorney for the defendant, told Oklahoma Watch. She added, however, that it would be difficult to show there had been no consent, since the girl could not recall what happened after leaving the park.

The court’s decision was an “unpublished opinion,” meaning it can’t be cited as legal precedent. But according to Fu, other defendants are asserting the same interpretation of Oklahoma law in a bid to avoid charges in similar cases.

“This is a call for the legislature to change the statute, which is entirely out of step with what other states have done in this area and what Oklahoma should do,” Michelle Anderson, the dean of the CUNY School of Law, told the Guardian. “It creates a huge loophole for sexual abuse that makes no sense.”

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Here’s Why Oral Rape is Not Rape in Oklahoma

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Are You One of the 7 Million Americans Threatened by Man-Made Earthquakes?

If you lived on the San Andreas Fault in California, where the earth’s crust shifts naturally on a somewhat regular basis, you would know that an earthquake could strike there almost any day.

But if you live in Kansas? Or Oklahoma? Or Colorado, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas?

Believe it or not, even if you occupythe middle of the country, you could be facing a future filled with damaging earthquakes, too. But that’s not because volatile tectonic plates are sliding back and forth and crashing against each other to create massive cracks in the continent’s surface.

It’s because oil and gas operations are sending enormous volumes of wastewater deep underground, where they can push the earth’s crust further downward, increase pressure against already existing fault lines and cause a great big rumble that will knock down your china cabinetor worse.

A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assesses the risk of earthquakes or seismic activity caused by humans. The agency particularly looked at earthquakes triggered when wastewater from oil and gas operations is injected underground, as it is during the “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing occurring in the energy fields east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Mississippi River.

What they found has sent shockwaves across news outlets, social media sites and of course, the households in the paths of these operations: “The report shows that approximately 7 million people live and work in areas of the central and eastern U.S. (CEUS) with potential for damaging shaking from induced seismicity.”

“The chance of damage from all types of earthquakes is similar to that of natural earthquakes in high-hazard areas of California,” warns the USGS.

The conclusions are based on analysis of a “hazard model” that considers where, how often and how strongly earthquake shaking could occur anywhere in the U.S. in 2016 while taking into account seismic activity of the last six years. The USGS noted that the central parts of the United States have undergone the most dramatic increases in earthquake-type events, with 1,010 happening in 2015. Already through mid-March 2016, 226 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or larger have occurred in this part of the country. The largest occurrednear Prague, Oklahoma, where some of the most active wells injecting wastewater underground exist.

Sparking earthquakes is not the only concern that’s been raised related to fracking. Though the process has enabled access to enormous stores of natural gas, it has also been blamed for poisoning ground water and drinking supplies. Citizens and public health researchers have documented chemical spills around fracturing operations, reduced air quality, noise and night sky light pollution. The landscape is also destroyed as forests and wild lands are scraped clear to make way for drills, rigs and other industrial energy facilities. The award-winning film “Gasland,” which was nominated for an Academy Award, made a particularly striking point when it showed water that had been contaminated with fracking chemicals coming out of the faucet of a kitchen sink and catching fire.

The USGS and various state agencies will continue to monitor earthquake activity related to oil and gas activity, but that’s not going to do much to stop it. That’s turning out to be a state and federal decision. Already in the U.S., Maryland and New York have banned fracking statewide, while cities in Texas, Ohio and California have followed suit. U.S. federal agencies and President Obama are also being pressured to institute a moratorium on fracking, but those efforts have not gained much traction yet.

Meanwhile, if you’re concerned about both fracking and the rise in earthquakes caused by fracking, you can support organizations like Americans Against Fracking, a national coalition that includes Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, Breast Cancer Action, Democracy for America and 350.org.

You can also do your part to reduce demand for the natural gas that fracking generates. Start by saving energy at home, especially if your home is heated with gas and if you have gas appliances. Install a programmable thermostat to help cut down on how much energy you use. Insulate your attic and crawl spaces. Weatherstrip windows and doors. Have an energy audit to see where you can save the most energy the fastest.

Just as importantly, if not more so, explore your options to switch to solar panels or buy wind power. Increasingly, utilities make it possible for their customers to purchase wind-generated energy from independent sources. You can also buy or rent solar photovoltaics to get yourself off the utility grid.

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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Are You One of the 7 Million Americans Threatened by Man-Made Earthquakes?

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