Tag Archives: professor

Kasich’s Spiritual Adviser Thinks Gay Rights Activists Are Fascist "Thought Nazis"

by ParthenBucher Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After his strong second-place finish in the New Hampshire Republican primary Tuesday, Ohio Gov. John Kasich is being lauded as the race’s most viable compassionate conservative and an antidote to candidates such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Donald Trump who have campaigned on their harshness toward, well, just about everyone.

But Kasich’s views on social issues aren’t so far apart from those of the rest of the GOP field. Take gay rights and gay marriage, issues for which Kasich is considered more moderate than his opponents. Kasich won kudos in August for his thoughtful response during a Republican debate to a question about gay marriage. He said that while he doesn’t agree with the idea in principle, that didn’t keep him from attending the same-sex wedding of a good friend. He also insisted that if one of his daughters turned out to be gay, he would certainly still love her. Kasich called on people to “treat everybody with respect and let them share in this great American dream.”

Despite his calls for tolerance, Kasich is part of a religious community that was built almost entirely on opposition to liberalized religious views on gays and lesbians. Kasich attends St. Augustine Anglican Church, in Westerville, Ohio, a church that was created in 2011 as part of a splinter group, the Anglican Church in North America, that broke with the Episcopal Church after it ordained Gene Robinson, a gay man, as a bishop. Kasich’s denomination doesn’t allow women to serve as bishops or ordain gays and lesbians as clergy, as it considers noncelibate homosexual relationships to be sinful.

Continue Reading »

Originally posted here:  

Kasich’s Spiritual Adviser Thinks Gay Rights Activists Are Fascist "Thought Nazis"

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Kasich’s Spiritual Adviser Thinks Gay Rights Activists Are Fascist "Thought Nazis"

Two Prominent Black Intellectuals Just Delivered More Bad News for Clinton

by GabrielaN24 Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After a crushing loss in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton may be having an even worse morning. As her campaign turns to South Carolina, where she hopes to win the primary with the support of African American voters on February 27, two prominent black intellectuals issued forceful statements Wednesday morning that could boost her rival, Bernie Sanders.

“I will be voting for Sen. Sanders,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the 2015 National Book Award winner Between the World and Me, said Wednesday in an interview on Democracy Now! Coates has written critically of Sanders recently for not embracing reparations for African Americans as part of his economic and social justice platform.

A much stronger rebuke of Clinton came from Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, who blasted the former secretary of state in an essay published Wednesday on the website of The Nation titled “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.” In it, Alexander argued that the economic and criminal justice policies of the Bill Clinton administration, from the 1994 crime bill to welfare reform in 1996, were devastating to African Americans—and that Hillary Clinton was a force in that administration whose role should be scrutinized and whose current positions on criminal justice and racial equality are not strong enough.

Ironically, perhaps, Alexander cites Coates at the end of the essay in also critiquing Sanders.

This is not an endorsement for Bernie Sanders, who after all voted for the 1994 crime bill. I also tend to agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that the way the Sanders campaign handled the question of reparations is one of many signs that Bernie doesn’t quite get what’s at stake in serious dialogues about racial justice. He was wrong to dismiss reparations as “divisive,” as though centuries of slavery, segregation, discrimination, ghettoization, and stigmatization aren’t worthy of any specific acknowledgement or remedy.

But recognizing that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic. Sanders opposed the 1996 welfare-reform law. He also opposed bank deregulation and the Iraq War, both of which Hillary supported, and both of which have proved disastrous. In short, there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it.

Coates and Alexander are by no means the first black intellectuals to express skepticism of Clinton and endorse Sanders. Princeton University professor Cornel West, for example, has campaigned with Sanders. On Wednesday morning, Sanders traveled to Harlem to have breakfast with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the most prominent black politician in South Carolina, is considering endorsing Clinton. She still has plenty of backing in the black political establishment. But the comments from Coates and Alexander Wednesday are a sign that the degree of support Clinton is counting on from the black community might be slipping away, and that she may not be able to sew up the black vote in South Carolina, as her supporters have long predicted.

Read original article:  

Two Prominent Black Intellectuals Just Delivered More Bad News for Clinton

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Two Prominent Black Intellectuals Just Delivered More Bad News for Clinton

Closing This Nuclear Plant Could Cause an Environmental Disaster

by GladisHouchins Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant sits by the scenic hills overlooking the California coast, a few hours’ drive north of Los Angeles. It’s the state’s only remaining nuclear plant (after the San Onofre plant was closed in 2013), and it’s responsible for about one-tenth of the state’s electricity, serving more than 3 million homes and businesses.

Since construction on the plant began in the late 1960s, Diablo Canyon has been a focal point of the nationwide controversy over nuclear power. In 1981, roughly 2,000 protesters (including the singer-songwriter Jackson Browne) were arrested at the construction site. Ever since, the plant has faced opposition from environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. But now, the plant is attracting an unlikely wave of support from some of the country’s most prominent environmentalists and climate change scientists.

Last week, in an effort to ensure that Diablo Canyon isn’t shut down in the near future, this new coalition sent a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown (D); the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that owns the plant; and five state regulatory officials. The letter warned that “closing Diablo Canyon would make it far harder to meet the state’s climate goals.” The 61 signatories include Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, climate scientists James Hansen of Columbia University and Kerry Emanuel of MIT, and the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

Their concerns center around an upcoming-ish deadline for PG&E to renew the plant’s operating license. The current license is good through 2024 for one of the plant’s two units and 2025 for the other. If PG&E wants to keep the plant running after that, it will need to seek approval from Brown’s administration and possibly from local officials in San Luis Obispo County. In its letter, the group called for a renewed operating license that could keep the plant running into the 2040s.

But the utility is on the fence. “We have not made a decision to move forward with license renewal,” a spokesperson said, adding that the company is in the middle of a study on seismic activity in the area. (The plant is near a few major fault lines.) In a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, Tony Earley, the utility’s CEO, was more blunt: “We’ve got a lot on our plates, and we just don’t need to take on another big public issue right now.” And while 2024 may seem like a long way off, the license renewal process can take a long time, and utility executives have been quietly mulling it since at least 2009.

Embed from Getty Images

As the global campaign against climate change has gathered steam in recent years, old controversies surrounding nuclear energy have been re-ignited. For all its supposed faults—radioactive waste, links to the Cold War arms race, the specter of a catastrophic meltdown—nuclear plants have the benefit of producing huge amounts of electricity with zero greenhouse gas emissions. That may not have mattered much to Jackson Browne and his fellow activists in the ’80s, but it matters now. A recent analysis by the International Energy Agency found that in order for the world to meet the global warming limit enshrined in the Paris climate agreement in December, nuclear’s share of global energy production will need to grow from around 11 percent in 2013 to 16 percent by 2030. (The share from coal, meanwhile, needs to shrink from 41 percent to 19 percent, and wind needs to grow from 3 percent to 11 percent.)

In Paris, Hansen—probably the world’s most influential climate scientist since he first warned Congress about global warming back in 1988—gave a talk in which he said nuclear “has tremendous potential to be part of the solution to climate change.” It was a point Hansen and some of his allies have made repeatedly over the past year in talks and op-eds. That message has opened a rift in an otherwise cohesive bloc of climate hawks: Those who think a carbon-free energy future is impossible without nuclear are now squaring off against those who think the challenge can be met using only renewables like wind and solar.

Among the former group is Michael Shellenberger, who until recently was president of the Oakland-based environmental think tank Breakthrough Institute and now runs a new group, Environmental Progress. Shellenberger organized the Diablo Canyon campaign after he realized that the larger debate about nuclear could be crystallized around this one existing plant.

“I’m tired of arguing about the future,” he said. “Let’s decide what we’re going to do right now with the largest single source of clean energy in California.”

According to Shellenberger’s research, Diablo Canyon currently produces twice as much power as all the state’s solar panels (California is the nation’s No. 1 solar state). Closing it, he said, would not only shave off one-fifth of the state’s zero-carbon energy, but potentially increase the state’s emissions by an amount equivalent to putting 2 million cars on the road per year. That’s because the power gap left by the plant’s closure would likely be filled by new natural gas plants—which is what happened when San Onofre was shuttered.

“What’s powerful about Diablo is the sheer size of it,” he said. “If you flip it off, carbon emissions go up so much.”

That’s an important quandary for Gov. Brown, who has tried to position his state as a national leader on climate policy and clean energy. During his first term as governor in the mid-’70s, Brown opposed the plant. But in 2012 he said he had become more open to nuclear power because “it’s good for greenhouse gases.” Brown’s office declined to comment on Shellenberger’s letter.

Gov. Jerry Brown addresses an anti-nuclear rally near the Diablo Canyon power plant in 1979. At the time, he was opposed to nuclear power, but his views may have softened. Brich/AP

California played an outsize role at the Paris talks, with a bevy of the state’s political and business leaders, including Brown, touting the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, its cap-and-trade program and clean-energy investment, and other successes. Still, the state’s rate of reducing carbon emissions is slower than the national average—a 7.5 percent reduction since 2000, compared with 9.6 percent nationwide. It will need to pick up the pace in order to meet its ultimate goal of bringing statewide greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

The problem, Shellenberger said, is that despite the plethora of solar panels on rooftops and electric vehicles on the roads, “people don’t understand how little that stuff is compared to a single nuclear plant.” Moreover, he added, a nuclear plant has the benefit of being consistent regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

Other analysts have reached different conclusions less favorable to nuclear. A 2015 state-commissioned study by the private research firm Energy and Environmental Economics found that the state could meet its 2030 climate goals without nuclear by rapidly growing renewables and by investing in upgrades to energy efficiency and the electric grid.

Mark Jacobson—an engineering professor at Stanford University who has authored several prominent studies on how the United States could run on 100 percent renewable energy—added that he was confident California could meet its clean energy targets without nuclear. “Repairing Diablo Canyon will not only be costly, diverting funds from the development of more clean, renewable energy, but it will also result in down time, resulting in emissions from the background grid, which currently still emits pollution and carbon,” he said in an email. (“Background grid” refers to the normal electric grid, which would have to pick up the slack in Diablo Canyon’s absence.) According to Jacobs, “a more efficient solution would be to use those funds to grow clean, renewable energy further.”

For now, the fate of Diablo Canyon is unclear. But Steven Weissman, an environmental lawyer at the University of California-Berkeley who has watched Diablo Canyon from the beginning, said ultimately the state’s biggest problem isn’t its small share of power from nuclear—it’s the majority share coming from natural gas and coal.

“How are you going to deal with the power coming from fossil fuels?” he said. “If you don’t solve that, you won’t solve your climate goals.”

See the original article here: 

Closing This Nuclear Plant Could Cause an Environmental Disaster

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar panels, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Closing This Nuclear Plant Could Cause an Environmental Disaster

Schools Across America Are Facing a Rash of Shooting and Bomb Threats

by BreannaDonohoe Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On January 19, a high school in Gardiner, Maine, received a message saying there was a bomb inside the school and a shooting was imminent. That day in Millsboro, Delaware, a caller claimed to be armed and on the roof of an elementary school, threatening to injure students and staff. In Wellington, Florida, a threat of a shooting was found on a sign at Palm Beach Central high school—the third threat on Palm Beach County schools in just over a week.

That was only a portion of the dozens of threats against schools that day, including those targeting nearly 30 schools in New Jersey. Amid an atmosphere of insecurity from a bad year of mass shootings in 2015, a wave of violent threats has hit schools across the nation. A series of bomb threats disrupted Ohio schools last fall, drawing attention from the Department of Homeland Security. And in December, threats resulted in a shutdown of all 900 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, with the region still on edge after the San Bernardino massacre. (Similar threats to New York City schools the same day were deemed less worrisome and drew a different response.)

Threats to schools are nothing new, and the vast majority of them turn out to be benign. According to experts, there is no comprehensive national data on school threats, so there is no way to determine if the recent problems represent a rising trend. Growing awareness of them could be explained by increased media coverage, for example. We asked experts to help explain what’s going on.

Are bomb and shooting threats to schools on the rise? Kenneth Trump, the president of the National School Safety and Security Services, says that based on a limited study he did using news reports, it appears there has been a recent uptick in school threats. Last February, Trump released a study that reviewed 812 threats reported in the media from the first half of the 2014-15 school year and found that threats had risen 158 percent since the first time he conducted such a study the prior year. That said, no law enforcement agencies tally the number of school threats, and there is no mandate for schools themselves to track or report them, so there is no way to be confident about a trend one way or the other.

The early warning signs that could help prevent the next attack

How are the threats being made? Of the 812 threats Trump assessed, more than one-third were sent electronically, either by email or on social-media platforms. Others are phoned in. Perpetrators sometimes use internet phone systems to call in threats using anonymous numbers and computer-generated voices. This is a tactic called “swatting,” which is intended to trick law enforcement officers into responding to a perceived threat.

That turned out to be behind a disruption last week in which 30 schools in New Jersey and elsewhere received automated phone calls traced to Bakersfield, California, announcing bomb threats in “robotic-sounding voices.” The tactic originated in the online gaming community, sometimes as part of a game and sometimes as a form of retaliation. “Some people have the capability of tracking you by your IP address, getting your location, and using technology to spoof a 911 call, for example, that would actually make it appear like it was from your address,” explains Trump. Similarly, some threats are sent electronically through international proxy servers that disguise the identity of the sender. “Schools have been a major target,” he says.

How do authorities rate the seriousness of these threats? “The vast majority of threats are young people who make very poor decisions, looking at it as a prank or a hoax that won’t have serious consequences and not realizing that a ton of bricks is going to fall on them—suspension, expulsion, or felony prosecution,” says Trump.

The threats fall into two basic categories: “Transient” and “substantial” threats. Transient threats tend to be made impulsively, out of a moment of anger or perhaps even out of fear related to academic pressures, according to Scott Poland, a psychology professor and school crisis expert at Nova Southeastern University. Poland says the overwhelming majority of bomb threats are transient, according to his own and Trump’s research. “We’ve even had threats come in from high-flying students like, ‘I’m not ready for my AP history test today.'” Authorities generally regard these threats to be of little concern.

Substantial threats are when the perpetrator has a grudge, has developed plans to strike, or has access to weapons. For example, when two teens threatened to kill “as many students as possible” at South Pasadena High School in 2012, the police uncovered sufficient evidence to consider the threats credible, including that the teens had researched weapons and how to make explosive devices. But plots like these are rare.

Some threats are more difficult to gauge. For example, last Monday some 2,000 students in Tallahassee, Florida, stayed home from school or were taken out of class by their parents after four schools received threats posted to social-media accounts warning that students would be shot if they went to school. The posts were shared widely on social media and went viral, and in the following days those schools operated under heightened security as law enforcement investigated.

A threat against Godby High School in Tallahassee, Florida, was posted to Instagram and went viral. Tallahassee Democrat

How much danger are school kids really in? Experts caution that anecdotal evidence of a rise in threats doesn’t mean schools have become more dangerous places. The chances of any given school coming under attack are infinitesimal. “Our perception of this is just totally off,” says Poland. He surveyed his doctoral students as to whether they thought the average college or university can expect a homicide on campus every 7 years, every 30 years, or every 175 years. “They all went for every 7 years, when the reality is that it’s about every 200 years.” Schools are the safest places children go,” adds Poland, noting that when schools cancel classes without assessing the validity of a threat it may actually put students more in harm’s way.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s top school safety official, David Esquith, said at a recent conference that despite high-profile mass shootings, “schools are safer than they’ve ever been.”

How should schools respond? “School threat assessment teams are sorely lacking across the country, as are training and protocols associated with such teams,” says Trump. This can lead to poor policy decisions, he says. In Trump’s study, 30 percent of the schools evacuated and 10 percent closed for at least one day.

Los Angeles Unified School District said in December that it closed its 900 schools out of an abundance of caution. “It’s really pretty hard to argue with that,” notes Poland—unless you stop to think of the disruption to the lives of families. “I would argue that the several hundred thousand students would have been safest at school, with increased surveillance, than they would be on the streets.” One high school student, he notes, was struck and killed by a utility truck when the district was shut down that day.

“Administrators and police are reacting and then assessing instead of the other way around,” Poland adds. Threat assessment teams, training, and better crisis communications plans would help ease unnecessary school closings, he says. “When threats become known in the community, misinformation spreads, and school leaders have to not only manage the threat and the investigation of it, but also the communications crisis at the same time.”

One positive development, Trump says, is that schools and law enforcement agencies are increasingly coordinating to counter and resolve such threats, a practice that wasn’t so common in the past.

More – 

Schools Across America Are Facing a Rash of Shooting and Bomb Threats

Posted in Academic Press, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Schools Across America Are Facing a Rash of Shooting and Bomb Threats

How Big a Dick Is Ted Cruz? A Quiz.

by MargariZTV Posted on January 25, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Against my better judgment sometimes, I have focused most of my campaign reporting energy on making the case against Donald Trump. But there are other candidates out there who are plenty loathsome in their own way, and when you say the word “loathsome” Ted Cruz comes immediately to mind.

Over at the mothership, Tim Murphy and David Corn make the case that Ted is really one of the all-time huge pricks. Take this quiz first to test your knowledge of Cruzology, and then go read it.

  1. Did one of Ted’s former pastors say that “he pretty much memorized the Bible, but I think he did it mostly so that he could humiliate kids who got quotes wrong”?
  2. Did a veteran of the 2000 George Bush campaign say that “the quickest way for a meeting to end would be for Ted to come in”?
  3. Did Ted’s wife once admit that Ted “can be a bit of a jackass sometimes, but at least you know where he’s coming from”?
  4. Did Bob Dole say that Ted “doesn’t have any friends in Congress”?
  5. Did Mitch McConnell respond that “I’m pretty sure Dole is wrong, but I can’t figure out who his one friend is”?
  6. Did a John McCain advisor say that his boss “fucking hates Cruz”?
  7. Did President Obama once get overheard asking Joe Biden “what in God’s name is that asshole’s problem, anyway”?
  8. Did Rep. Peter King say say about a possible Ted Cruz nomination, “I hope that day never comes; I will jump off that bridge when we come to it”?
  9. Did John Boehner quip that Ted was “a great American resource; when we threatened to deport him back to Canada, they suddenly agreed to drop their softwood lumber subsidies”?
  10. Did Lindsey Graham say the choice between Trump and Cruz was like having to choose between “death by being shot or poisoning”?
  11. Did a former high school teacher just shake his head and close his door when a reporter knocked and asked what he remembered about Ted?
  12. Did a former law school acquaintance say that when she agreed to carpool with Ted, “We hadn’t left Manhattan before he asked my IQ”?
  13. Did Ted’s torts professor remark that “I don’t think there was a single question I asked the entire year where Ted didn’t instantly raise his hand and practically wet his pants pleading to be called on”?
  14. Did his Princeton freshman roommate call Ted “a nightmare of a human being” and claim he would get invited to parties hosted by seniors because the upperclassmen pitied him?
  15. Did a college girlfriend of Ted’s say “he was pretty smart, but sex with him once was enough—if you can call it sex”?
  16. Is it true that in interviews with four of Ted’s college acquaintances, “four independently offered the word ‘creepy'”?

Answer: All statements whose ordinal number takes the integer form 2n+1 or 2n-1 have been invented. The rest are real

Read original article:

How Big a Dick Is Ted Cruz? A Quiz.

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How Big a Dick Is Ted Cruz? A Quiz.

The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

by LoreneTanaka453 Posted on January 7, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In November, environmentalists were ecstatic when President Barack Obama decided not to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. But TransCanada, the company behind the project, was not so happy. On Wednesday, it filed a lawsuit against the federal government seeking to overturn the permit rejection. At the same time, it gave notice that it plans to pursue compensation under the North American Free Trade Agreement, to the tune of $15 billion.

In its NAFTA complaint, TransCanada alleges that “the politically-driven denial of Keystone’s application was contrary to all precedent; inconsistent with any reasonable and expected application of the relevant rules and regulations; and arbitrary, discriminatory, and expropriatory.”

In other words, TransCanada thinks it got misled and ripped off by the Obama administration, just to satisfy a wacky cabal of treehuggers. Now, it wants the US Treasury to cough up an apology in cash.

NAFTA is a trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico meant to protect trade between those countries. One provision of the agreement, Chapter 11, allows a corporation in one country to sue the government of another country if it feels that country’s regulations unfairly discriminate against it. It’s a provision that has always been highly controversial with environmentalists, since it provides an avenue for corporations to contest another country’s environmental policies, as TransCanada is doing now.

That strategy is unlikely to succeed, according to David Wirth, a professor of international trade law at Boston College and a leading expert on international environmental disputes. Wirth said he actually used this very question—could TransCanada win a NAFTA case against the United States?—on a recent exam, and the answer was pretty clearly no. First off, although TransCanada claims to have spent around $3 billion preparing to build the Keystone XL pipeline, it’s not clear that this would actually count as an “investment” that was illegally taken from the Canadian company by the US administration.

“They knew that without the permit approval the project wouldn’t go forward,” Wirth said. “So any money spent in advance is purely speculative.”

Second, although the complaint claims that “environmental activists…turned opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline into a litmus test for politicians—including US President Barack Obama,” it’s not clear how that really constitutes a legal problem.

“The president, in making a decision in the national interest, has to weigh a variety of factors, including arguments of environmentalists,” Wirth said. “Just because there was political disagreement doesn’t mean the process was defective.”

But most importantly, Wirth said, TransCanada’s complaint doesn’t distinguish between a bureaucratic trade decision that treated a foreign company unfairly—the kind of action NAFTA is supposed to prevent—and a decision made by the president for the benefit of public health and the environment.

“The intent of NAFTA was not to require governments to pay every time they take an action that’s in the public interest,” Wirth said. “It’s very troubling if every time the president makes a decision in the interest of the people, he’s risking an enormous liability of this sort.”

The US has a good track record on NAFTA suits brought by foreign corporations, having lost just one of 14 since the agreement came into effect in 1994. Wirth said NAFTA tribunals have tended to set a pretty low bar for the minimum standard of treatment foreign companies should expect to receive. In other words, TransCanada would have to prove that it was treated exceptionally unjustly by the Obama administration, not just that it had a frustrating experience.

As for TransCanada’s federal lawsuit seeking to reverse Obama’s ruling, the odds for that aren’t great either, since US courts have previously found that cross-border pipelines really are the president’s decision to make, according to Reuters.

Sorry, TransCanada. Maybe try for the permit again in 2017 if a Republican wins the White House. Until then, you might be out of luck.

Link – 

The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

After Laquan McDonald’s Shooting, Chicago Targets Police Contract Protections

by RubenVergara Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story appears courtesy of the Chicago Reporter, a nonprofit investigative news organization that focuses on race, poverty, and income inequality.

In the fallout from the release of the Laquan McDonald video, Chicago’s top cop lost his job. But the police officer who shot the teenager 16 times is still employed.

Officer Jason Van Dyke, who is captured on police dash cam video shooting McDonald, can thank the police union.

The Fraternal Order of Police contract with the city shapes how Chicago handles police misconduct allegations, disciplines rank-and-file officers, as well as when the city pays legal costs for police officers accused of wrongdoing. While activists have long called for changes to the contract, many people in local government have not been eager to take on that fight—until now.

With cries of reform ringing louder than before and a federal investigation of the police department, aldermen are demanding changes to a union contract that breezed through the City Council in 2014.

“Yes, the FOP is strong,” said Dick Simpson, a political science professor and former Chicago alderman. “But there is huge public pressure at the moment to provide oversight for police and to curb police abuse and corruption.”

The police contract expires in 2017. The Black Caucus is demanding that an officer’s liability risk be tied to their employment, as well as other changes, including tougher punishment for misconduct.

Ald. Howard Brookins (21st) said the contract makes it harder to cut ties with cops like Van Dyke who had numerous citizen complaints against him and had reportedly cost the city more than $500,000 in legal settlements and fees. And critics said the evidence against Van Dyke was damning enough for him to be fired immediately.

“We have to be able to get rid of bad police officers,” Brookins said. “Maybe that’s something we shouldn’t have to bargain for.”

The union contends that changes to the contract would discourage people from becoming cops.

FOP President Dean Angelo said the contract contains fair and necessary protections for cops and doesn’t tie authorities’ hands in misconduct cases such as Van Dyke’s as much as some people think. He cast the aldermen as opportunists riding the wave of public outrage over a white cop shooting a black youth.

“It’s easy now in this environment to point fingers at us,” Angelo said.

Brookins acknowledged that there hasn’t been momentum on the council to change the contract. But now, he said, “There is a political will.”

The police contract

The current police contract, which was approved by the City Council unanimously in November 2014, sets the bar high for firing or suspending a cop.

Part of the agreement, known as the police bill of rights, gives cops a layer of due process beyond what most citizens enjoy. The contract allows officers to get in writing information about an investigation, including who will question them and what they’ll be asked. Cops who shoot civilians can delay making an official statement for several days, and investigators can’t interview them without providing transcripts of every prior interviews or notifying them.

Another union protection came into play in McDonald’s death. Experts suggested the officers who saw the shooting—whose accounts clash with the video—should have been subject to lie detector tests, but the police bill of rights in the contract gives them the right to refuse the tests. In addition, police complaint and disciplinary records must be destroyed in five or seven years based on the type of alleged offense, making it harder to show a pattern of misconduct.

The union recently halted a city effort to grant requests for police misconduct records dating back to the 1960s, arguing that the city violated the union agreement by keeping the files. Investigators are also limited in how they can use past allegations of abuse to resolve new claims, according to the contract.

The superintendent has to file charges with the Chicago Police Board and win an evidentiary hearing to fire an officer or issue a lengthy suspension. Even when investigators sustain allegations against an officer, the contract allows police to skirt the police board. For example, if the Independent Police Review Authority recommends suspending an officer, the contract lets him appeal the decision through arbitration, a process that experts characterize as heavily stacked in favor of cops.

“The incentives of the chief of police on down are further dampened by the knowledge that anything they do can be undone easily in arbitration,” said Max Schanzenbach, a law professor at Northwestern University. “So they have these cops well known to have numerous citizen complaints and settlements paid out for them, but they’re not dismissed from the force.”

Angelo contends that the FOP shields its officers from unfair discipline due to unfounded allegations just as any union would do for its members. He said the life or death stakes many cops operate under and the possibility of false complaints affords them special consideration.

While the public has expressed outrage over cops like Van Dyke, who, until recently, collected a check on desk duty, there’s little the city can do if the cop hasn’t been charged with a crime or had a complaint against them sustained.

The police department was able to suspend Van Dyke without pay when he got charged with murder by the State’s Attorney’s office a year after McDonald’s death, but the department did not fire him. The Independent Police Review Authority froze its investigation after forwarding the case to county prosecutors.

A call for contract reform

Ald. Ameya Pawar (47th) said he wants a separate expedited disciplinary process in the contract for fatal shooting cases like Van Dyke’s where evidence of excessive force is obvious, even without criminal charges or a drawn out investigation.

“There are a lot of questions around why this officer was not removed,” Pawar said.

Some aldermen are scrutinizing the issue of indemnification, or covering legal costs for cops sued for alleged misconduct.

Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd) released a statement calling for the police union to chip in for misconduct settlements, which cost the city more than $50 million last year. She argued that “residents of Chicago should not be solely responsible for the cost of settlements in police cases.”

Ald. Will Burns (4th) a close ally of the mayor, also issued a statement that said “officers with a high number of complaints are a liability for the city of Chicago, and erode the critical trust between police and community.” He said the contract should be reviewed to allow authorities to suspend or fire cops with too many complaint as well as officers subject to excessive force lawsuits settled by the city.

Alderman Howard Brookins at City Hall. Photo by Grace Donnelly

Brookins suggested the city should take a cue from the private sector and write risk management clauses into the union contract.

“If you kept getting your company sued and cost them millions of dollars, you would be out of there,” he said. “And if you kept getting in too many car accidents, even if you said they weren’t your fault, your insurance company would drop you as a liability risk.”

But Angelo said that making an officer’s liability risk cause for termination would discourage people from signing up for a job that is inherently risky.

“We do a job less and less people want,” Angelo said. “That would minimize the population of people who want to perform this calling.”

Critics of the union contract don’t just want to change what’s in the agreement. They also want to change the negotiation process and give the public a forum to air concerns well in advance of a City Council vote on the contract.

Not much public input, if any, goes into union contract negotiations. The FOP and the city’s negotiators typically hammer out an agreement in private, sometimes with the help of an independent arbitrator, and present it to City Council for a vote.

Several experts said the city should hold public hearings about the police contract before negotiations are finalized.

“We need to put some sunlight on those union provisions that are offensive and which ones need to be changed, and then organize at the local level to get city council and mayors who won’t yield to union demands,” said police misconduct expert Sam Walker. “The police union is very effective in playing the crime card against their critics: ‘Oh, you’re against the police, you support the criminals.’ They’ve been doing that for decades.”

Despite increasing national scrutiny of police union contracts and how they affect police accountability, Walker said that they are still an underrated issue. That’s partly because much of the public isn’t aware of their problematic provisions, he said, but also because police unions have proven adept at getting their way in city halls and statehouses across the country.

Brookins and Schanzenbach both said that some of the most challenging concerns about the contract would require changes to state law. Illinois requires cities to negotiate disciplinary procedures as part of collective bargaining and foot the bill for cops sued for misconduct. A state law known as the police officer bill of rights was modeled after one of the most criticized parts of the contract.

But there’s still a lot officials and residents in Chicago can do, Walker said, including targeting the next round of contract negotiations.

“When a contract comes up for a vote by City Council,” Walker said, “it’s too late.”

Angelo said FOP has not been twisting the city’s arm in negotiations.

“The contract has been negotiated for almost 35 years,” he said, “and we certainly didn’t pull the wool over officials in the city of Chicago’s eyes time and time again.”

Political will to take on the FOP

Fighting the FOP isn’t easy. Matthew Piers, who was a top city lawyer under Mayor Harold Washington, said he lost his battle against the union in the 1980s. When Piers, now 64, joined the Chicago Law Department in 1984, the city had approved Chicago’s first FOP contract several years earlier. He had to work within the framework of union agreements made by Washington’s predecessor, Jane Byrne. One of those agreements was the indemnification clause, and Piers was charged with deciding whether the city would pay legal costs for police officers accused of misconduct.

Piers quickly ran afoul of the union for his refusal in numerous cases to foot the bill for cops he believed had intentionally harmed civilians. One such case involved a cop who was accused of raping a woman in the back of his car. The physical evidence, Piers said, left little doubt that nonconsensual sex had occurred, so he declined to represent the officer. But the FOP, which blasted him as anti-police for his stance, took the case to arbitration, citing the union contract. The arbitrator ordered the city to pay legal bills for the officer, who Piers said kept his job.

“Your conduct could cost the city millions with there being no repercussions for you as an individual,” Piers said. “That disconnect—I found it troubling then, and I find it troubling now.”

There have been several versions of the FOP contract ratified since the 1980s, but the provisions that City Council members want to put under a microscope aren’t new.

Angelo wonders why aldermen are talking so tough about a contract that they approved just last year. Aldermen could have questioned the contract or raised the issue of discipline, but, Angelo said, “I didn’t hear a word from any of them.”

“I don’t know if those people read what they voted on,” he said. “But if they didn’t read this contract before they voted on it and now are blaming us—shame on them.”

Brookins said he has raised concerns about the FOP contract in the past, but didn’t feel he had the political capital to be more vocal or force a change until now.

“Even when I was first elected in 2004, it was not popular or desirable to talk against the police,” Brookins said. “Everybody wanted to be the friend of law enforcement, to be tougher on crime, and going against the police, they equated that as siding with the criminals. So lawmaker after lawmaker has been tougher and tougher on crime, saying we support our police officers. So almost anything they wanted they got that they bargained for.”

See the original post:

After Laquan McDonald’s Shooting, Chicago Targets Police Contract Protections

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on After Laquan McDonald’s Shooting, Chicago Targets Police Contract Protections

Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

by MiriamPTCZ Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The week after ISIS launched its catastrophic November attacks in Paris, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) published its annual “Global Terrorism Index.” It contained an unexpected finding: By killing 6,664 people in 2014, the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram was the world’s deadliest terrorist group, beating out ISIS by nearly 600 victims. But the report, with its exact-sounding figures, raises a question: Is it really possible to know how many people ISIS has killed?

As in many conflicts, assessing the actual toll of the Syrian civil war is a difficult, potentially dangerous business. And when it comes to putting a precise number on ISIS’ death toll, researchers who track these grim statistics are skeptical. “My gut instinct is, we don’t know,” says Megan Price, the executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). “I don’t think those are knowable numbers.”

“What we know is just a part of what is going on,” says Bassam al-Ahmad, the spokesman for the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC), a monitoring organization that gathers information from inside the country to maintain a running count of how many people have died in its nearly five-year-old conflict. Using a three-stage documentation process, the VDC has confirmed the deaths of 4,406 people at the hands of ISIS so far. But Ahmad says that is by no means the total number. “What is the percentage of what we know?” he asks. “Maybe around 50 percent.”

And uncovering the information needed from ISIS territory presents even greater challenges. Media and NGO access is all but barred. In the group’s Syrian capital, Raqqa, internet cafés have been forced to close, and in other areas ISIS militants have put them under surveillance, making it difficult for activists to share information with the outside world. There are consequences for those who dig up information that the insurgent group doesn’t want publicized, like kidnappings, torture, and executions. In January 2014, ISIS militants kidnapped one of the VDC’s reporters in Raqqa. “They came to his house and abducted him,” says Ahmad. “Until now, we don’t know anything. We have sources who say he was beaten and tortured.”

That reporter, as well as four other VDC employees who disappeared from the Syrian city, Duma, in December 2013 and have not been heard from since, are not included in the group’s tally of the dead. The VDC does not know if they’re alive, but it also has no way to confirm their deaths. It’s not an uncommon problem. “We hear many stories about people who are kidnapped by ISIS and are executed. But sometimes you have no information about them. If you don’t have information about an incident, that doesn’t mean something hasn’t happened,” Ahmad says. The number of people who have simply vanished in Syria is in the tens of thousands. They are not included in the VDC’s count.

“Violence can be hidden,” says Price. “ISIS has its own agenda. Sometimes that agenda is served by making public things they’ve done, and I have to assume, sometimes it’s served by hiding things they’ve done.” For example, after Kurdish forces recaptured the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar from ISIS last month, as many as 16 previously unknown mass graves were uncovered.

In determining ISIS’ 2014 death toll at 6,073 people, the IEP drew its data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, which uses publicly available materials like news articles and legal documents to establish its estimates. It’s a common documentation method, but it can be limiting because more newsworthy events, like bombings with a high number of casualties, make it into the data, but under-the-radar deaths may not.

“Traumatic events that cause multiple deaths get very well communicated—and maybe even exaggerated—in their frequency and occurrence compared to more mundane, violent acts that result in death,” says Les Roberts, a professor of population and family health at Columbia University and a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist who has led dozens of surveys on mortality in war zones, including in Iraq. (Read more about the controversy surrounding his 2004 estimate that 100,000 civilians were killed after the American invasion.) “A bomb is newsworthy. A bomb is big enough that the people in the morgue when you call them will say, ‘Oh yeah, we had four deaths in here,’ because they came in together and they create a psychological image, even though they had 42 dead bodies come in from a variety of other causes, mostly gunshot wounds.” In ISIS’ case, this may mean that public mass executions and suicide bombings get counted while other atrocities are overlooked.

Getting a grip on ISIS’ impact is just part of the larger struggle to get an accurate picture of the carnage in Syria. The VDC has confirmed approximately 200,000 casualties by name, photos, or videos. Their number is dwarfed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ most recent estimate of as many as 330,000 casualties. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stopped providing public estimates of Syrian casualties after January 2014, saying it could no longer guarantee the accuracy of its source material.

According to Price, the HRDAG intends to publish new numbers in early 2016—nearly two years after the last public UN estimate. These figures will be based on not only cases gathered by the VDC and three other groups documenting deaths in Syria, but an extrapolated estimate of unreported deaths. Even if it’s the most accurate account to get presented, however, the new number will still likely be off. “Having looked at the data in this particular conflict, as well as several others, the safe answer always is: that number is too low,” Price says.

Roberts notes that it can be hard to collect reliable casualty data even in a country that’s at peace. “In the United States, which I think is a near-optimal environment for us investigating murders,” says Roberts, “our best estimate is that something in the ballpark of one-third of murders are never detected.” Sometimes a death is misclassified as an accident or a suicide, or a body is never found. Now imagine trying to get this information with ISIS breathing down your neck. “If in the United States we have a gross undercount of murders, how can we expect in the anarchy of Syria that it’s going to be even comparable?”

Continued here – 

Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, Cyber, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Inside the Difficult, Dangerous Work of Tallying the ISIS Death Toll

Watch This Navy Admiral Destroy Ted Cruz’s Climate Myths

by HelaineTobin0 Posted on December 8, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ted Cruz is certain that global warming stopped 18 years ago. He said that repeatedly during a Senate hearing he chaired Tuesday afternoon devoted to examining what he described as “the science behind claims of global warming.” Satellite data, insisted Cruz, shows that “there has been no significant global warming for the past 18 years.”

Cruz—who is currently one of the GOP front-runners in Iowa—has made this claim before. Back in March, Kevin Trenberth, a leading climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Climate Desk that Cruz’s theory is “a load of claptrap…absolute bunk.” And Ben Santer, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, blasted Cruz for “embracing ignorance with open arms.” The scorn of those leading scientists apparently wasn’t enough to get Cruz to change his tune. But perhaps what happened at Tuesday’s hearing will make a difference.

“I would note this chart…which shows for the last 18 years, that there has been no significant warming whatsoever,” said Cruz. He then asked Retired Rear Admiral David Titley—a meteorologist who previously served as the oceanographer of the Navy—about this so-called “pause in global temperatures.”

Titley’s response was fantastic, and you should watch the whole exchange above.

He started out by explaining that Cruz’s dataset begins just before the exceptionally warm El Niño year of 1998. Out of context, this makes recent warming appear less dramatic. As the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points out PDF, the warming trend looks much bigger if you pick 1995 or 1996 as the beginning of your dataset.

Titley, who is now a meteorology professor at Penn State, then pointed to his own chart—more than a century’s worth of temperature data that shows an unmistakable warming trend. “I’m just a simple sailor,” said Titley, “but it’s hard for me to see the pause on that chart. So I think the pause has kind of come and gone.”

Cruz then noted that his own chart focused on data from satellites (whereas Titley’s uses data from thermometers on the Earth’s surface). But Titley shot back that the satellite measurements—which are frequently touted by climate change deniers—have a number of significant problems. Indeed, as my colleague Tim McDonnell explained in March:

There are a couple important caveats with satellite temperature data that Cruz would do well to make note of. One, Santer said, is that it has a “huge” degree of uncertainty (compared to land-based thermometers), so it should be approached with caution. That’s because satellites don’t make direct measurements of temperature but instead pick up microwaves from oxygen molecules in the atmosphere that vary with temperature.

Fluctuations in a satellite’s orbit and altitude and calibrations to its microwave-sensing equipment can all drastically affect its temperature readings. More importantly, satellites measure temperatures in the atmosphere, high above the surface. The chart above shows the lower troposphere, about six miles above the surface. This data is an important piece of the climate and weather system, but it’s only one piece. There are plenty of other signs that are far less equivocal, and perhaps even more relevant to those of us who live on the Earth’s surface: Land and ocean surface temperatures are increasing, sea ice is declining, glaciers are shrinking, oceans are rising, the list goes on.

This article is from: 

Watch This Navy Admiral Destroy Ted Cruz’s Climate Myths

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch This Navy Admiral Destroy Ted Cruz’s Climate Myths

3 New Books to Feed Your Brain

by ElinorO62bp Posted on November 29, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

You’ve just filled your belly to the brim. Turn now to some new tomes that will help fill your mind:

The Devil’s Chessboard

By David Talbot

“What follows,” David Talbot boasts in the prologue to his new book The Devil’s Chessboard, “is an espionage adventure that is far more action-packed and momentous than any spy tale with which readers are familiar.” Talbot, the founder of Salon.com and author of the Kennedy clan study Brothers, doesn’t deal in subtlety in his biography of Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.—Aaron Weiner

The Hidden Half of Nature

By David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé

In this transformative read, David Montgomery, a professor of earth and space sciences, and his wife, biologist and environmental planner Anne Biklé, unravel the universe of microbes that make dirt fertile and allow us to digest food. Both the lining of our colons and the ground beneath our feet, the authors write, are “bio­logical bazaars where plants and people trade nutritional wares and form alliances.” Combining lucid explication of emerging science with personal anecdotes, Montgomery and Biklé, who confronted a cancer diagnosis while writing the book, reveal that our immune defenses depend on protecting and nourishing these microscopic brigades.—Tom Philpott

My Life on the Road

By Gloria Steinem

Steinem spent her childhood crammed against her sister in the backseat of a car as her father tried to persuade roadside antique dealers to buy his wares. In My Life on the Road, her first book in more than 20 years, Steinem elegantly reflects on this nomadic upbringing and how it inspired her own travels. Though she never learned to drive, her tours as a young journalist introduced her to women who helped shape her ideology: disgruntled American stewardesses, passengers in a female-only Indian train car, and an Irish taxi driver who told Steinem in the 1970s, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!”—Becca Andrews.

Continue reading here:  

3 New Books to Feed Your Brain

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, Hoffman, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 3 New Books to Feed Your Brain