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Mother Jones
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A month before the 2012 Iowa caucuses, then-Texas governor Rick Perry tried to save his flailing presidential campaign by tacking hard to the religious right. At the center of his effort was an ad he released in December 2011 titled “Strong,” which opens with Perry looking at the camera and stating, “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”
The Rick Perry of the 2016 campaign is sporting a new look, between the Buddy Holly frames, the speeches demanding that his party reconcile itself with its history and appeal to African Americans, and the denouncements of Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants. And on gay rights, while he’s still far from marching in a pride parade—last month he criticized the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide—Perry is singing a different tune on President Obama’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. As flagged by Bloomberg Politics, Perry appeared Sunday on ABC’s This Week, and when George Stephanopoulos asked if he stood by that ad, Perry sounded as though he still disliked the policy but was resigned to the fact that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell wouldn’t be restored. “I have no reason to think that is going to be able to be done,” Perry said. “I think—you know, that clearly has already—you know, the horse is out of the barn.”
Watch Perry on This Week:
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Mother Jones
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In the aftermath of the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, gun rights activists and their allies in the conservative media are once again blaming “gun-free zones,” arguing that an armed citizen could have otherwise been at the church to stop the attack. As Mother Jones has previously reported, there has never been any evidence that mass shooters picked their targets based on gun regulations; to the contrary, data from scores of cases shows perpetrators had other specific motivations for where they attacked, including racial hatred, as is strongly suspected to be the case in Charleston. The idea that armed citizens stop crimes in the United States has also been wildly exaggerated by the gun lobby, as a new study reaffirms.
One of the gun lobby’s key talking points is that firearms are frequently used in self-defense—as often as 2.5 million times per year. The widely repeated claim has its origins in a 1993 telephone survey conducted by a pro-gun researcher, and while the numbers have since been walked back to some degree, the National Rifle Association asserts there are at least three-quarters of a million defensive gun uses per year. But a new report from the Violence Policy Center analyzing federal data shows that even this claim is way overstated. America’s legions of “good guys with guns,” in other words, are a myth (and not least when it comes to mass shootings).
Using FBI data, the study shows citizens are far more likely to use guns to commit violent crimes than to defend against them. The FBI’s 2012 “Supplementary Homicide Report” tallied 8,342 criminal gun homicides nationwide, while finding only 259 justifiable gun homicides from around the country, as identified in reports from state and local law enforcement agencies.
Moreover, 13 states reported no justifiable gun homicides at all in 2012, according to the report. That included states with large urban regions like New York and New Jersey, as well as rural states such as North Dakota and Wyoming. Notably, Wyoming, which has a small population, lax gun laws, and a high gun-ownership rate, also led the nation in 2012 for gun suicides and had the highest per capita costs from gun violence. (You can read more about that in Mother Jones’ groundbreaking investigation of the $229 billion annual cost of gun violence in America.)
In the five-year period between 2007 and 2011, there were a total of 29,618,300 violent crimes committed, according to the study. Among those, people used guns in self-defense 235,700 times.
Even with an additional 103,000 defensive gun uses related to property crimes over the same five-year period, the total still comes to fewer than 70,000 a year—less than 10 percent of the amount claimed by the NRA and other gun rights advocates.
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The Gun Lobby Blames the Charleston Mass Shooting on "Gun-Free Zones"
Mother Jones
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Today, the Director of National Intelligence released a bunch of the documents US forces recovered from Osama bin Laden’s compound during the raid in Abbottabad. The inventory of the declassified materials provides a glimpse into what were OBL’s reading habits. Were there novels of Nick Hornby and Ian McEwan? Maybe a dog-eared copy of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History? Or a marked up first edition of Julia Phillip’s infamous Hollywood tell-all You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again?
No, you will be unsurprised to learn, there were not.
SPOILER ALERT: Bin Laden liked to read things about al-Qaeda. Things with such sexy sundry titles as “Prospects for al-Qaeda” and “Al-Qaeda and the Internet: The Dangers of ‘Cyberplanning’.”
Two fun ones though: Popular Science‘s “Best Innovations of the Year” and an article in TIME about AOL’s troubles, both of which sort of seem like the reading materials one might find in the waiting room to hell.
In the section titled “Documents probably used by other compound residents” we find some of the bin Laden children’s periodicals: art stuff, Guinness Book of World Records, video game instruction manuals, a sports nutrition guide, and a suicide prevention manual entitled “Is It the Heart You Are Asking? by Dr. Islam Sobhi al-Mazeny.
Pretty bleak!
Here’s the full list of “media articles” from Bin Laden’s bookshelf, courtesy of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. You should probably commit the names of some of them to memory so you’ll have something interesting to talk about at parties.
Business Week (19 Feb 2007 issue)
Doctrine: Journal of General Military Review, Issue 3
Foreign Policy in Focus, “Prospects for al-Qaeda” (24 Jan 2003)
Foreign Policy (Jan-Feb 2008)
Foreign Policy (March-Apr 2008)
Foreign Policy (May-June 2008)
Foreign Policy (Nov-Dec 2008)
Foreign Policy (Sept-Oct 2008)
Heft, “The Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Determination of Illegal Combatants,” Issue 4 (2002)
“The Impact of the War in Iraq on Islamist Groups and the Culture of Global Jihad,” by Reuven Paz, Project for the Research of Islamist Movements (2004)
International News, “Governments’ Successful Measures against Terrorism” (21 Aug 2009)
Journal of International Security Affairs, “Future Terrorism, Mutant Jihads” by Walid Phares
Los Angeles Times, “Is al-Qaeda Just Bush’s Boogeyman? (11 Jan 2005)
Middle East Policy, “Terrorist Recruitment and Radicalization in Saudi Arabia” (Winter 2006)
Military Review, “Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations” (Nov-Dec 2005)
Newsweek, part of an article on an attack within Israel
Newsweek, part of an article on President Bush’s business practices prior to his terms as President
Newsweek, part of an article on hawks and doves on Iraq within the Bush Administration
Newsweek, quotes column (unknown issue, but apparently from the years of the Bush Administration)
Osprey corporate advertisement featuring U.S. military troops rappelling from a helicopter
Parameters, “Al-Qaeda and the Internet: The Dangers of ‘Cyberplanning’,” Timothy L. Thomas (Spring 2003)
Parameters, “The Origins of al-Qaeda’s Ideology and Implications for U.S. Strategy,” by Christopher Henzel (Spring 2005)
Popular Science, “Best Innovations of the Year Issue” (Dec 2010)
“Pushing the Prize Up , A Few Notes on Al-Qaeda’s Reward Structure and the Choice of Casualties,” by Raul Caruso and Andrea Locatelli
“Studi Politico-Strategici: An Introduction to Unconventional Warfare,” by Joseph Gagliano
Time, part of an article on a dive of America Online’s stock
Tulsa World article on criminal charges against David Coleman Headley
U.S. News and World Report (fragment, issue unknown)
Washington Quarterly, “Counterterrorism after al-Qaeda” by Paul Pillar (Summer 2004)
Washington Quarterly, “The Post-Madrid Face of al-Qaeda,” by Rohan Gunaratna (Summer 2004)
Washingtonian Magazine profile of John Esposito (Jan 2005)
“Documents probably used by other compound residents”:
Art Education: The Journal of National Art Education Association, “Islamic Art as an Educational Tool about the Teaching of Islam” by Fayeq S. Oweiss (March 2002)
Arabic Calligraphy Workshop by Fayeq S. Oweiss
Published Work Sample from Fayeq S. Oweiss (2004)
Resume for Fayeq S. Oweiss, Ph.D. (2006)
Delta Force Extreme 2 Videogame Guide
Game Spot Videogame Guide
Grappler’s Guide to Sports Nutrition by John Berardi and Michael Fry
Guinness Book of World Records Children’s Edition 2008 (scans of several pages from)
Is It the Heart You Are Asking? by Dr. Islam Sobhi al-Mazeny (suicide prevention guide)
Silkscreening Instructions
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By Eve Andrewson 13 May 2015commentsShare
For National Women’s Health Week, we’ll be highlighting women’s health issues in the United States.
Hello! We’re here with your daily reminder that reproductive rights remain regularly challenged here in the United States, which we often mistakenly consider one of the most advanced countries in the world. And also that, as a country made up of very different states that are each uniquely weird and awful in their own ways, the experience of trying to get reproductive healthcare as a woman in America is wildly variable.
Which brings us to Texas. To start: Allow me say that it’s so easy to shit on Texas that I just refuse to engage in it on principle. Fine — it’s the state that brought us both the Bushes and Ashlee Simpson. But it’s also home to many people who are forced to live with its terrible policies without having any say in them, so I’m not going to insult them by lumping them in with a bunch of old crotchety dunderheads in Austin.
A recent study from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Texas at Austin found that 55 percent of women surveyed across the state encountered some sort of barrier to accessing reproductive healthcare. That’s the majority of women in one of the most populous states in the country.
From the Texas Tribune:
Affordability, insurance issues and a lack of nearby providers were among the top barriers women reported facing between 2011 and 2014, according to the study, which included 779 women between the ages of 18 and 49. And young, low-income women with less education — particularly Spanish-speaking Hispanic women who were born in Mexico — faced the most barriers to reproductive services.
And today, as a cherry on top of the Hell Sundae that is the Texas woman’s experience of trying to exercise her reproductive rights, a bill that would restrict minors’ and immigrants’ access to abortions will be put to the vote in the Texas House of Representatives. This bill would further complicate and lengthen the already nightmarish process of attempting to get an abortion without parental consent.
From Houston Press:
Under [this] bill, girls seeking an abortion would have to prove “mental or emotional injury to a child that results in an observable and material impairment in the child’s growth, development, or psychological functioning,” and, “physical injury that results in substantial harm from physical injury to the child.
“Quite literally, this would require some teenage girls to be beaten before they can obtain an abortion,” [Susan] Hays [legal director for Jane’s Due Process] says.
The bill also requires the provision of a government ID to obtain an abortion.
Let’s all take a moment for Texas, and allow Tami Taylor* to comfort us with her marvelous voice, magical hair, and monumental wisdom:
*Connie Britton, the actress who played Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights, is an outspoken supporter of reproductive rights in Texas.
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Mother Jones
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Guns kill more people than cars do in a growing number of states, according to a new analysis of national mortality data from the Violence Policy Center. The report finds that in 2013, firearm-related deaths exceeded those caused by motor vehicles in 17 states and the District of Columbia. This means that four more states have crossed this threshold since 2012, including Louisiana, Missouri, Virginia, and Tennessee. In Nashville this Friday, the National Rifle Association opens the doors to its 144th annual convention.
The Violence Policy Center’s report is the latest among several studies indicating that guns are soon likely to surpass cars as America’s “top killing machine.” While traffic safety regulations have helped reduce the number of motor-vehicle-related deaths over the years, the report notes that the number of deaths caused by firearms has been creeping up, as the chart below shows. That’s noteworthy in part because about 90 percent of American households own a car, but less than a third of American households own guns.
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NRA Holds Annual Convention in a State Where Guns Now Kill More Than Cars Do
Mother Jones
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Erik Eckholm of the New York Times writes that violent crime has plunged dramatically over the past two decades. But the reasons remain elusive:
There are some areas of consensus. The closing of open-air drug markets….revolution in urban policing….increases in drug and gun sentences….Various experts have also linked the fall in violence to the aging of the population, low inflation rates and even the decline in early-childhood lead exposure. But in the end, none of these factors fully explain a drop that occurred, in tandem, in much of the world.
“Canada, with practically none of the policy changes we point to here, had a comparable decline in crime over the same period,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor and an expert in criminal justice at the University of California, Berkeley. He described the quest for an explanation as “criminological astrology.”
I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!
But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.
So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.
“Criminological astrology” is a good phrase to describe the relentless effort of US criminologists to explain a worldwide phenomenon using only parochial US data. But there is one explanation that really does work pretty well everywhere: the reduction in gasoline lead, which happened all over the world, but happened at different times in different places. And everywhere it happened, crime started to decline about 20 years later. No explanation is ever perfect, but this one comes closer than most.
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Mother Jones
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On a fall day in a congressional office bedecked with University of Oregon (Go Ducks!) paraphernalia, Tom Colicchio and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) were getting on like old college buddies.
Up on Alaska’s Mohawk River, the congressman insisted, you can still spear salmon with a pitchfork. “I was in Juneau half an hour and caught 30 fish,” countered Colicchio, the smooth-domed celebrity chef, who’d chosen a navy blazer for the occasion. “I said, ‘Nah, this isn’t fun anymore, this is boring.'” But Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo’s Top Chef and founder of the New York City restaurants Gramercy Tavern, Craft, and Colicchio & Sons (his boys are 3, 5, and 21)—wasn’t here simply for the pleasantries.
More than 700 chefs had already signed a petition supporting a DeFazio-sponsored bill, currently stalled in the House with 67 cosponsors, that would require food manufacturers to disclose their GMO ingredients. A subset of the signatories were on the Hill to lobby legislators and staffers. “As chefs, we know that choosing the right ingredients is an absolutely critical part of cooking,” the petition reads. “But when it comes to whether our ingredients contain genetically modified organisms, we’re completely in the dark.” The chefs were joined by reps from activist groups—including Food Policy Action, the Center for Food Safety, a national campaign called Just Label It, and the Environmental Working Group—to address the issues of transparency, food safety, and the massive amounts of money ($36 million in the last election) the food industry has spent fighting GMO-labeling initiatives.
Invited to observe the meeting with DeFazio, I took advantage of the chance to give Colicchio a light grilling. Here are a few tidbits Colicchio gave me on some of his favorite topics:
On states rights: “We typically label things not because they’re dangerous. If they’re dangerous, we take them out of the food supply. But we believe everything in our processed foods should be labeled.
 Like some labels say “modified food starch.” Why modified? It’s been altered. I’m not asking for a skull and crossbones—simply a line in the ingredient list that says ‘GMO corn.’ That’s it!
“We’re not debating the science of GMOs, but I would say there’s an ever-increasing environmental issue because of the overuse of herbicides. If you look at the health of the soil, if you care about the environment, how much carbon is in the ground, you wanna know what’s in your food.
 This is a recent development, where people in the food industry are starting to care about the policies behind these issues. Typically consumers who care about food, they’re not thinking about policy. Like when they go to a farmers market, they’re probably paying more—there are policies that are keeping those foods more expensive than processed ones. I don’t quite understand how people who care about states’ rights all of the sudden don’t believe states have a right to label. Those same people will say the states have a right to raise animals a certain way. Where did all the states’ rights people go? I want them! They’re somewhere in this building!”
On customer confusion: “I always use this example: It’s summer, and you go into the supermarket and see all the beautiful strawberries. One is labeled local. One is labeled organic and ‘made in Chile’—it’s GMO free, but people don’t know that. People will go, ‘Oh, that one’s local, so I’ll buy that.’ That lack of transparency puts the organic farmer at a competitive disadvantage.”
On getting his kids thinking about (and actually eating) good food: “I find that the trick to get them to eat is to bring them shopping. I started gardening this year, and they are so interested in watching stuff grow. And I want to teach them patience, because they’re so focused on immediate response of hitting a button and something happens. My older son really loves food and really cares about it. He isn’t into policy yet, but we had a food policy booth set up at Lollapalooza, and he manned it this year because I couldn’t get there. I had to entice him with lots of free music.”
On his own childhood dinners: “We had a family that had to be at the table at a certain time every single night. I don’t think I was a picky eater. I don’t remember. The only thing I do remember is my older brother would constantly steal the food off my plate.”
On his earliest cooking mishap:
 “I would bake a lot with my grandmother. I grew up in a four-family home in New Jersey. There were two homes on the plot and my grandparents lived in the other building. So I made this blueberry pie and I had to walk it a couple hundred yards to the side house. We’re on the second floor, and my grandmother insisted that I put it in a brown paper bag and hold it straight. I kept saying, “Oh, it’ll be okay.” I run home, upstairs. I take it out, big moment, and the blueberries all flew out of the pie!”
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Mother Jones
One of the hot topics of conversation in progressive circles these days is the middle class. Democrats support plenty of programs that provide benefits to the poor (Medicaid, minimum wage, SNAP, etc.), but what about programs that benefit the middle class? What do Democrats do for them?
By coincidence, this week provides a couple of examples of programs that are targeted more at the middle class than the poor. First up is President Obama’s proposal to fund two years of free community college for everyone. As Libby Nelson explains, Pell Grants already make community college free for most low-income students:
The most radical part of Obama’s free community college proposal isn’t that it’s free — it’s that it’s universal….So the best way to look at the Obama free college plan is as a promise to the middle class. Families who earn too much for federal financial aid but aren’t wealthy enough to afford thousands of dollars of college bills are rightly feeling squeezed as tuition prices rise.
This might not be the most effective way to spend federal money. But it’s politically smart. To see why, look at pre-K. Most of the research on pre-kindergarten effectiveness is about whether it helps poor children catch up to their peers from wealthier families. But in 1995, Georgia decided to use lottery winnings to make free pre-K available not just to the poor, but to any family who wanted to join.
Two decades later, Georgia’s universal pre-K program is very popular, championed by liberals and conservatives alike. And the reason it’s managed to stay relatively apolitical and noncontroversial is that it’s universal, Fawn Johnson wrote in National Journal last year. A program just for the poor “would be about class warfare,” one Georgia Republican told her.
Elsewhere, Greg Sargent notes that new rules governing overtime wages could benefit middle-class workers:
Obama will soon announce a rules change that governs which salaried workers will get time-and-a-half over 40 hours under the Fair Labor Standards Act….“The spotlight is now on raising wages,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told me. “Raising wages is the key unifying progressive value that ties all the pieces of economic and social justice together. We think the president has a great opportunity to show that he is behind that agenda by increasing the overtime regulations to a minimum threshold of $51,168. That’s the marker.”
….A lower threshold could exclude millions. In raising his voice, Trumka joins Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressive Senators who have urged a threshold of $54,000, and billionaire Nick Hanauer, who is urging $69,000. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that raising the threshold to a sum approximating what the liberal Senators want could mean higher overtime pay for at least 2.6 million more people than raising it to $42,000. EPI says setting it at over $50,000 could mean over six million people, or 54 percent of salaried workers, are now covered.
Both of these proposals would primarily benefit middle-class workers which makes it unlikely that either of them will get any support from Republicans or from the business community. But they’re worth pursuing anyway. At least they let everyone know whose side each party is on.
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smog list
By Amelia Urryon 4 Jan 2015commentsShare
When Chinese environmental advocate Ma Jun realized that no one was going to take responsibility for the crippling smog that plagues his country, he decided to take matters into his own hands. His idea: encourage citizens to start pointing their fingers at the problem. Literally.
Manufacturers have been reaping the rewards of China’s new industrial economy, while ducking the consequences of fouling up its air. So Ma and colleagues built a live-updating map that shows exactly where individual polluters are emitting the noxious stuff that threatens Chinese citizens’ health, to the tune of 670,000 premature deaths, and contributes to global climate change.
Using government-installed air monitoring systems, the app reports real-time emissions from sources all over the country, marking the culprits with guilty orange circles. Although China has strict anti-pollution laws — some violations are even punishable by death — the laws are typically poorly enforced. With few electoral routes to justice available, public opinion is often the best tool for fighting smog. The L.A. Times has more:
Many of the worst polluters are state-owned companies or have close ties to regional officials. Among the worst offenders are firms such as Tianjin Pipe Group, China’s largest producer of crude-oil pipelines, which recently ranked as the region’s top source of airborne particulates, and the Dezhou Kaiyuan power plant in Shandong province, southeast of Beijing, which topped the list for sulfur dioxide, emitting seven times the national limit.
Particularly at the local and provincial level, officials suffer from a “lack of motivation” to pursue serious polluters, Ma said. Public “transparency is one of the very few options we have” to “drive enforcement,” he said.
So far, 10,000 people have downloaded the app, which means 10,000 fingers are poised to shame the worst offenders.
A few years ago, this kind of monitoring would not even have been possible. Before 2012, it was illegal for Chinese cities even to disclose information about their particulate matter; now almost 200 do so publicly. It’s no surprise that the tide of policy is turning. China’s smog is so bad that the country’s politicians have no choice but to acknowledge it and make steps toward solving the problem. This app is just one more goad to make sure those steps are real, and move policy in the right direction. When’s the last time you could say the same about Snapchat?
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In China, app aims to shame polluters by showing who is fouling air
, L.A. Times.
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