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Need a fracking supporter? Hire a homeless person.

by LashawnJudy Posted on September 16, 2014

That’s fracked up!

Need a fracking supporter? Hire a homeless person.

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16 Sep 2014 5:32 PM

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In bizarre energy industry news of the day, the North Carolina Energy Coalition seems to have brought in some homeless men to stand in as fracking supporters at a state hearing on developing fracking operations in the state.

The men were bussed 200 miles from Winston-Salem to Cullowhee, N.C., where the hearing took place, for the day.

From Asheville’s Citizen-Times:

“They were clueless,” said Bettie “Betsy” Ashby, a member of the Jackson County Coalition Against Fracking. “At least two of them I met definitely came from a homeless shelter. One of them even apologized to me and said, ‘I didn’t know they were trying to do this to me.’ One said, ‘I did it for the…’ and then he rubbed his fingers together like ‘for the money.’”

Several of the men were wearing turquoise shirts or hats that said “Shale Yes” on the front and “Energy Creates Jobs” and “N.C. Energy Coalition.com” on the back.

It’s not a new tactic: If you can’t find people who actually support your cause, just pay uninformed members of underprivileged groups to fake it!

What is the mission of the N.C. Energy Coalition, exactly? From the group’s website:

Our website will provide the facts about the offshore and onshore production processes, environmental issues and economic impacts with no political spin. The Coalition will not advocate on issues but instead, provide the facts to let the public, business community and elected officials decide for themselves.

The organization is also sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.

Just this June, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed off on the legalization of fracking in the state. At the same time, the state also passed a bill that makes the disclosure of the ingredients in the chemical cocktail used in fracking punishable as a misdemeanor. (For what it’s worth, the originally proposed version of that bill would have made said disclosure a felony.)

I’d be interested, at the very least, to know if the N.C. Energy Coalition will help its paid protestors to get actual jobs at the state’s new fracking wells. Because that’s supposed to be the huge benefit of this “energy boom,” right? I guess a few bucks an hour and a bus ride to Cullowhee is a good place to start!

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Did energy group bus homeless in to support fracking?

, Citizen-Times.

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Need a fracking supporter? Hire a homeless person.

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Colleges Don’t Teach Much, but College Students Don’t Know It

by JoannaHein Posted on September 4, 2014

Mother Jones

The Collegiate Learning Assessment is just what it sounds like: a test that measures critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and communications skills in college students. Several years ago, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reported that most students didn’t improve much on this test after four years of college, and a full third didn’t improve at all. Now they’ve written a follow-up, which concludes, unsurprisingly, that students with high CLA scores do better in the job market than students with low scores. Kevin Carey provides the highlights of the rest of the study:

Remarkably, the students had almost no awareness of this dynamic. When asked during their senior year in 2009, three-quarters reported gaining high levels of critical thinking skills in college, despite strong C.L.A. evidence to the contrary. When asked again two years later, nearly half reported even higher levels of learning in college. This was true across the spectrum of students, including those who had struggled to find and keep good jobs.

Through diplomas, increasingly inflated grades and the drumbeat of college self-promotion, these students had been told they had received a great education. The fact that the typical student spent three times as much time socializing and recreating in college as studying and going to class didn’t change that belief. Nor did unsteady employment outcomes and, for the large majority of those surveyed, continued financial dependence on their parents.

….Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa’s latest research suggests that within the large population of college graduates, those who were poorly taught are paying an economic price….Yet those same students continue to believe they got a great education, even after two years of struggle. This suggests a fundamental failure in the higher education market — while employers can tell the difference between those who learned in college and those who were left academically adrift, the students themselves cannot.

I suppose this is a specialized case of the Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetent people don’t realize they’re incompetent. There’s probably not much universities can do about that, but it’s disheartening that they’re motivated to actively encourage it.

On the other hand, I suppose you can argue that it doesn’t matter. After all, employers seem to figure out pretty quickly who’s good and who isn’t, so it doesn’t do them much harm. And the kids themselves are better off for having a degree, even if they didn’t learn much. So perhaps this is a Pareto-efficient situation after all.

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Colleges Don’t Teach Much, but College Students Don’t Know It

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Which States’ Kids Miss the Most School?

by dfdedtcf Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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

September is upon us, and American kids are filling up their backpacks. But lots of kids won’t be going back to school—at least not very much. The map above shows the results of a national report released Tuesday by nonprofit Attendance Works, which zooms in on a statistic called “chronic absenteeism,” generally defined as the number of kids who miss at least 10 percent of school days over the course of a year. The measure has become popular among education reformers over the past few years because unlike other measures like average daily attendance or truancy, chronic absenteeism focuses on the specific kids who are regularly missing instructional time, regardless of the reason why or the overall performance of the school.

Several studies have shown that missing 10 percent of school seems to be a threshold of sorts: If you miss more than that, your odds of scoring well on tests, graduating high school, and attending college are significantly lower. A statewide study in Utah, for example, found that kids who were chronically absent for a year between 8th and 12th grades were more than seven times more likely to drop out. The pattern starts early in the year: A 2013 Baltimore study found that half of the students who missed two to four days of school in September went on to be chronically absent.

The Attendance Works study, which used missing three days per month as a proxy for the 10 percent threshold, categorized students missing school by location, race, and socioeconomic status. Here’s what they found:

Oddly enough, the federal government doesn’t track absenteeism. Seventeen states do, and, as David Cardinali wrote in the New York Times last week, states have found that school attendance often falls on socioeconomic lines: In Maryland, nearly a third of high school students who receive free or reduced lunch are chronically absent.

In order to work with a national dataset, Attendance Works looked at the results of the National Assessment for Educational Attainment, the nation’s largest continuing standardized test, taken by a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders across the country every two years. In addition to academic content, the test asks students a series of nonacademic questions, including how many days of school they have missed in the past month. If students reported missing three or more days, they had crossed the 10 percent threshold; assuming that month is representative of the rest of the year, the kids qualify as chronically absent.

Obviously, there’s a huge disclaimer here: Students may not remember or accurately report their own absences, and one month may not be representative of an entire school year. But at the same time, the results were remarkably consistent, reflecting conclusions from localized studies: Students in poverty are less likely to come to school, and as the chart below shows, students who come to school less perform markedly worse on tests. (For reference, an improvement of 10 points on the National Assessment for Educational Progress is roughly equivalent to jumping a grade level.)

Phyllis Jordan, a coauthor of the Attendance Works report, hopes that as schools look more into the data, they’ll be able to identify the core reasons for the absence: “If everybody from a certain neighborhood is missing school and they have to walk through a bad neighborhood, then suddenly you say, ‘Oh, we should run a school bus through there.’ If it’s all the kids with asthma and you don’t have a school nurse, maybe that’s a reason. Or maybe it’s all concentrated in a single classroom, and you have an issue with the teacher.”

The good news is that citywide studies in New York City and Chicago show that when chronically absent kids start coming to school more, they can make substantial academic gains. And the simple act of tracking and prioritizing absenteeism can lead to statewide progress: When Hawaii started keeping track of chronic absenteeism in 2012, the state went from having a chronic absentee rate of 18 to 11 percent over the course of a single year.

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Which States’ Kids Miss the Most School?

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These 7 Charts Show Why the Rent Is Too Damn High

by colord8609 Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

More Americans than ever before are unable to afford rent. Here’s a look at why the rent is too damn high and what can be done about it.

Part of the problem has to do with simple supply and demand. Millions of Americans lost their homes during the foreclosure crisis, and many of those folks flooded into the rental market. In 2004, 31 percent of US households were renters, according to HUD. Today that number is 35 percent. “With more people trying to get into same number of units you get an incredible pressure on prices,” says Shaun Donavan, the former secretary of housing and urban development for the Obama administration.

It’s not just working-class folks who have been pushed into the rental market. More middle-class Americans are renting too.

Alongside the foreclosure crisis, the financial collapse and ensuing recession jacked up unemployment and squeezed incomes. Check out how rental costs compare to renter incomes over the past quarter century:

Republicans, in an effort to shore up what they say is a dangerous budget deficit (it’s not, really), have pushed to cut spending on federal programs, including housing assistance. Nearly all government housing aid programs have taken funding cuts in recent years.

In 2013, about 125,000 families lost access to housing vouchers—which make up the largest share of rental assistance—due to across-the-board budget cuts. “Budget cuts were doing exactly the wrong thing,” Donovan says.

Those cuts come on top of years of stagnating rental voucher aid. Even though the government increased funding for housing vouchers between 2007 and 2012, the program was not able to reach more households because that extra money was eaten up by higher rents and lower incomes.

Because federal housing assistance was not able to keep up with the growing population of low-income people created by the recession, the number of very low-income renter households that received some form of housing assistance dropped from 27.4 percent in 2007 to less than a quarter in 2011.

What happens when you combine a shortage of rental units with lower incomes and less federal support? You get the “worst rental affordability crisis in history,” and a lot of people finding it harder to get by.

The share of households spending more than a third of their income on rent has grown by 12 percent since 2000. Today, half of all renters pay more than 30 percent of their monthly income in rent. For 28 percent of Americans, more than half of their salaries go toward rent.

The rental crisis is worse in certain areas of the country:

And the crisis has hit people of color harder than whites.

The stimulus act Congress passed in the wake of the recession directed $1 billion into rental housing. And HUD is not sitting on its hands while the rental market goes to shambles. The department has launched several programs aimed at bolstering the number of low-income and public housing units.

But these initiatives aren’t enough to stem the unfolding rental crisis, Donovan says. Legislation in Congress aimed at reducing the government’s role in housing finance would take a bigger bite out of the problem. It would direct nearly $4 billion a year to affordable rental housing. The bill was recently approved by a key Senate committee. And as far as its chances in the obstructionist, GOP-dominated House? “I think better than most people might think,” Donovan says. “I say that because I do think there’s a confluence of more and more people understanding that the status quo is unacceptable.”

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These 7 Charts Show Why the Rent Is Too Damn High

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Did the NRA Know About Robert Dowlut’s Reversed Murder Conviction?

by ArronKruger Posted on August 5, 2014

Mother Jones

For all its bluster, the National Rifle Association also knows how to maintain a disciplined silence in the face of uncomfortable questions. Most notably, it went to ground in the wake of the Newtown school shooting in December 2012, resurfacing after a few days with bland talking points, followed by Wayne LaPierre’s assertion that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that in the week since I published an investigation into the complicated past of the NRA’s top lawyer, the gun lobby has not responded.

The subject of my article, NRA general counsel Robert J. Dowlut, is a low-profile yet influential legal expert who has spent more than 35 years pushing for an aggressively broad interpretation of the Second Amendment. In 1964, he was sentenced to life in prison for shooting his girlfriend’s mother in South Bend, Indiana. Several years later, the conviction was reversed due to bad police work and Dowlut eventually walked free.

Before I reported on Dowlut’s background, I contacted him 10 times by phone, email, and registered mail, explaining what I was writing about and inviting him to share his side of the story. When I did not hear from him, I asked the NRA and its public affairs head, Andrew Arulanandam, for comment multiple times. I also sent registered letters directly to NRA leaders including executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, president Jim Porter, and lobbying head Chris Cox. None responded.

If Dowlut or the NRA do decide to talk, here are the four questions I’d most like them to answer:

1. Did Dowlut ever disclose his past to his colleagues or the NRA? So far, none of Dowlut’s colleagues and friends have come forward to talk about what they did or didn’t know. David Hardy, a prominent gun-rights writer who’s known Dowlut “longer than I can remember” told me he had “no idea” about Dowlut’s previous conviction and reversal. Other gun-rights groups and bloggers have also been conspicuously silent since the story ran.

2. How did Dowlut’s experience influence his career? Dowlut’s writings strongly suggest that his legal odyssey played a role in shaping his philosophy. In a 1983 article, he disapprovingly cited Supreme Court Justice Byron White’s dissent in Miranda v. Arizona, a case very similar to his own. White had predicted that protecting criminal suspects’ rights “will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets.” Did Dowlut’s position—that gun rights are another essential defense against official overreach—stem from his time as the accused? Did this stance put Dowlut at odds with the NRA’s tough-on-crime talking points? (Consider that the NRA’s president from 1992 to 1994 was Robert Corbin, the prosecutor who made a point of retrying Ernesto Miranda after the landmark 1966 Supreme Court decision bearing his name. Corbin also served as the vice chairman of the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund; Dowlut is the fund’s longtime secretary.)

3. Did Dowlut ever disclose his past to the bar? Several readers have asked if Dowlut disclosed his experience as a criminal defendant while applying for admission to the bar. (He was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1980 and is also a member of the Virginia Bar.) I don’t know: bar applications are confidential and it’s not clear what was asked on the Character and Fitness sections of the DC and Virginia Bar applications four decades ago. Currently, the DC Bar asks applicants to disclose all previous arrests, charges, and convictions, even for matters that have been dismissed or expunged. The Virginia Bar asks applicants to disclose any involvement in criminal proceedings (including juvenile cases and traffic offenses). Assuming that Dowlut faced similar questions when he became a lawyer, how did he respond?

4. What really happened 51 years ago in South Bend? The South Bend police still consider the murder of Anna Marie Yocum on the night of April 15, 1963 to be an open case. Most of the main characters involved in Dowlut’s murder trial are dead; the victim’s daughter is alive, but refused to speak with me. The court records I obtained, while voluminous, offer competing narratives that leave a trail of nagging questions: The police interviewed several other potential suspects—what were they asked, and why were they released? If Dowlut had no knowledge of the crime, how was he able to lead detectives to a buried gun allegedly linked to it? Whom did the gun belong to? And finally, what does Dowlut think actually happened on that night?

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Did the NRA Know About Robert Dowlut’s Reversed Murder Conviction?

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These Gun Owners Oppose the NRA’s Efforts to Allow Stalkers and Abusers to Keep Their Weapons

by FannieCrabtree Posted on July 30, 2014

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding its first-ever hearing on domestic violence and guns, in light of several bills that aim to strengthen federal gun restrictions against abusers. Federal law bans felons, people subject to permanent domestic-violence protective orders, and certain people convicted of domestic-violence misdemeanors from owning guns. But it does nothing to keep firearms out of the hands of a wide range of potentially dangerous abusers, including convicted stalkers, dating partners convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors, and people under temporary restraining orders. State laws largely don’t address these categories, either, and according to a Mother Jones analysis, the data suggests that states with fewer measures barring domestic abusers from possessing guns have more gun-related, intimate-partner homicides.

Several Democrat-backed bills that aim to strengthen federal law when it comes to gun ownership and domestic abuse are languishing in Congress, including one introduced in July 2013 by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that would bar convicted stalkers and abusive dating partners from possessing guns. The gun lobby has fought back against Klobuchar’s bill, with the Huffington Post reporting last month that the NRA sent a letter to lawmakers blasting the measure as a backdoor attempt to limit gun ownership. The legislation “manipulates emotionally compelling issues such as ‘domestic violence’ and ‘stalking’ simply to cast as wide a net as possible for federal firearm prohibitions,” the NRA told lawmakers. The powerful pro-gun-rights group has in the past fought to allow domestic violence offenders to possess guns, unless they’re convicted felons.

But not all gun-owners are siding with the NRA to fight these stricter gun controls. “I am a gun owner. I was shot and left for dead by my own gun,” says Christy Martin, a former championship boxer whose ex-husband was sentenced in 2012 to 25 years in prison for attempting to murder her with a firearm. Martin flew to Washington, DC this week to attend Wednesday’s hearing, at the invitation of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “I consider myself a physically fit, somewhat strong woman, mentally strong, emotionally strong, but it didn’t matter,” she says, noting that her ex-husband had a history of stalking behavior prior to the attack, and that she’d like to “close up some of those loopholes for stalkers.”

Elvin Daniel is a gun-owner and self-described NRA member who is testifying at the hearing in support of efforts to curb gun ownership for stalkers and abusers. He accuses the NRA of employing “a scare tactic” to prevent Klobuchar’s bill from advancing. “I absolutely do not agree with them,” he says. Daniel’s sister, Zina Haughton, was shot and killed by her estranged husband in October 2012. “I know that Senator Klobuchar’s bill will keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people,” he says, “not law-abiding gun owners.”

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These Gun Owners Oppose the NRA’s Efforts to Allow Stalkers and Abusers to Keep Their Weapons

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Lawsuit: Former Georgia GOP Staffer Claims Party Officials Targeted Her With Racial Slurs

by ElaneScorfield Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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

A former staffer for the Georgia Republican Party has filed a lawsuit claiming that party officials discriminated against her because she’s black and subjected her to racist slurs and comments. In one case, she alleges, a colleague called her “the house nigger.”

Qiana Keith served as the executive assistant to Georgia GOP Chair John Padgett until she was fired in March, allegedly for complaining about racist treatment by fellow Republican Party staffers. Her lawsuit, which she filed July 8 in federal court, accuses the Georgia GOP and Padgett of “intentional and unlawful race discrimination” that culminated in her wrongful termination.

“Ms. Keith was terminated for consistently poor job performance,” Anne Lewis, the general counsel of the Georgia Republican Party told Mother Jones in a statement. “More than two months later, she contacted the Party through a lawyer and made claims of race discrimination and retaliation. We immediately undertook a full investigation of those claims and found that there was no merit to any of them. The Party and Chairman Padgett will vigorously defend themselves in court against these completely unfounded claims.”

According to Keith’s lawsuit, she was hired in June 2013 and “it soon became clear that Ms. Keith’s race set her apart from her co-workers, and she was treated differently throughout her employment. Keith was repeatedly…put in demeaning situations by her co-workers.”

One instance cited in the lawsuit occurred at the chairman’s annual dinner in 2013. At these events, Keith says, the chairman’s executive assistant is expected to attend as his “escort and aide.” The lawsuit alleges that “when Ms. Keith arrived, however, a party official had given the post to a white male.” The official, Margaret Poteet, the party’s finance director, allegedly refused to assign Keith to any official duties outside of cleaning up after the dinner.

When Keith complained about her treatment to Adam Pipkin, her direct superior, “he refused to listen to her,” the suit claims. Instead, Keith alleges, Pipkin chastised her for “seating a black member of the Republican Party at the head table with the Chairman.”

The lawsuit claims that Keith later heard Poteet complaining about her to Karen Hentschel, the party’s accounting director. “Don’t worry about her, she is just the house nigger,” Hentschel allegedly said.

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Lawsuit: Former Georgia GOP Staffer Claims Party Officials Targeted Her With Racial Slurs

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Democrats See Winning Issue in Carbon Plan

by Myrna Posted on June 9, 2014

Several Democrats in competitive Senate races have supported an E.P.A. proposal to curb power-plant emissions, citing growing public support for action and perceptions that Republicans are anti-science. Credit:  Democrats See Winning Issue in Carbon Plan ; ;Related ArticlesThough Not Quietly, Kentucky Moves to Cut Reliance on CoalIn Some States, Emissions Cuts Defy SkepticsBattle Over Fracking Poses Threat to Colorado Democrats ;

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Democrats See Winning Issue in Carbon Plan

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Bird lovers to sue feds for letting wind farms kill eagles

by NoemiSmalley Posted on May 2, 2014

Bird lovers to sue feds for letting wind farms kill eagles

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Some bird advocates ain’t cool with recent moves by the Obama administration to smooth the way for wind power.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced in December that it will issue 30-year “take” permits that allow wind farms to inadvertently kill bald and golden eagles, provided they use “advanced conservation practices” to limit the number of deaths. Previously the permits were issued for only up to five years.

This week, the American Bird Conservancy said it will sue the federal government over the permits.

Wind energy advocates point out that turbines are less deadly to birds than many fossil fuel operations, not to mention household cats and buildings — and that wind power can help birds by slowing climate change. Still, the bird lovers at ABC think the wind industry needs to do more to protect our feathery friends.

The rule change “was adopted in violation of several federal wildlife protection and environmental laws,” ABC’s attorneys wrote in a letter stating their intent to sue. The group alleges the policy shift violates the Endangered Species Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, and argues that it was made without the public consultation or environmental analysis that should have been required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“ABC strongly supports wind power and other renewable energy projects when those projects are located in an appropriate, wildlife-friendly manner,” the letter states. “On the other hand, when decisions regarding such projects are made precipitously and without compliance with elementary legal safeguards, … ABC will take appropriate action to protect eagles and other migratory birds.”


Source
American Bird Conservancy to Take Legal Action Over FWS 30-Year Eagle Kill Rule, American Bird Conservancy

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Canada orders dangerous oil cars off its railways

by Junepps1b Posted on April 25, 2014

Canada orders dangerous oil cars off its railways

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Oil industry train tickets are about to expire in Canada.

Canada’s transportation department on Wednesday announced a suite of new safety rules, motivated by the horrific oil-train explosion last summer in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, which killed 47 people. The rules heavily target DOT-111 rail cars, which are widespread across the continent but are vulnerable to puncture and explode. (The U.S., meanwhile, is being outrageously slow in updating its oil-train safety rules.)

The Ottawa Citizen reports:

About 5,000 DOT-111 tanker cars are to be removed from Canadian railways within 30 days. Another 65,000 DOT-111 cars must be removed or retrofitted within three years, a timeframe rail industry experts are calling “ambitious.”

The measures didn’t fully satisfy [New Democratic Party] leader Tom Muclair. “What happens in the meantime in all those communities where this very dangerous material is being transported today?” he asked. “You can’t tell us you know that they’re dangerous and yet you’re going to continue to allow them to roll through these communities.”

[Transport Minister Lisa] Raitt said, however, that the DOT-111 cars are just one of several risk factors contributing to rail crashes. “There’s not just one aspect in mitigating risks, there’s many.”…

Effective immediately, Transport Canada will conduct risk assessments of routes where dangerous goods are transported, and establish speed limits of 50 miles per hour or less in areas that are built up or near drinking water.

Good for Canada. But what will happen with all those dangerous rail cars that are retired in Canada? Some fear that they could end up over the border, hauling explosive crude through American communities.


Source
Transport Canada orders 5,000 tanker cars off the rail system, Ottawa Citizen
Canada to phase out old railway oil tankers; won’t wait for U.S., Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Canada orders dangerous oil cars off its railways

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