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With Nunes Out, the New Guys Running the Trump-Russia Probe Ain’t Much Better

by GiseleDRTxuhaxi Posted on April 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Thursday morning, the inevitable happened: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, announced he was yielding the reins on his panel’s derailed investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Nunes claims the reason for his retreat is that the House ethics committee is investigating whether he publicly revealed classified information—a charge he insists is “baseless.” Whatever happens with this ethics inquiry, his departure does not guarantee the investigation will fare any better than it has.

In his statement, Nunes curiously said nothing about Vladimir Putin’s secret political attack on the United States. Nor did he mention the question of contacts between Trump associates and Moscow. He only discussed one aspect of the committee’s probe: the leaking of classified information (mainly about Michael Flynn, who was fired from the national security adviser post after news reports showed he had lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the transition). “The charges…are being leveled just as the American people are beginning to learn the truth about the improper unmasking of the identities of US citizens and other abuses of power,” Nunes declared. So even as he said bye-bye to the probe, the congressman—who served on the Trump transition team and who delegitimized himself while trying to provide cover to President Donald Trump for his fact-free charge that Barack Obama had wiretapped him—was still promoting Trump’s distraction of choice: The big story is what happened when Trump and his team were possibly picked up by “incidental” intelligence collection, not Putin’s attempt to subvert an American election or the FBI’s investigation of Trump associates for possibly coordinating with Russia.

And the committee members Nunes designated as his heirs have been champions of the same diversionary tactic.

Nunes, who is retaining his post of committee chairman, assigned the task of running the Russia investigation to Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas). He also noted that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) will assist Conaway. At the committee’s first hearing for its Russia probe—before Nunes ran the investigation into a ditch—his three designees, as they questioned FBI chief James Comey and National Security Agency head Mike Rogers, focused on the narrow issue of leaks and unmasking. (“Unmasking” is the term of art for when a senior US official cleared to handle top-secret reports based on intelligence intercepts of foreign targets requests an intelligence agency to disclose to him or her the identity of a US citizen referenced in a report.) Or they asked questions designed to raise doubts about the intelligence community’s assessment that Putin meddled in the election to assist Trump. That is, they stuck to the GOP’s political script.

Moreover, in early January, Conaway dismissed the issue of Russian involvement in the campaign with a wacky comparison. Speaking to a Dallas newspaper, he compared the Russian hacking-and-leaking assault to standard campaign moves: “Harry Reid and the Democrats brought in Mexican soap opera stars, singers and entertainers who had immense influence in those communities into Las Vegas, to entertain, get out the vote and so forth. Those are foreign actors, foreign people, influencing the vote in Nevada. You don’t hear the Democrats screaming and saying one word about that.” As the Dallas Morning News reported, “Asked whether he considers that on par with Russian cyber-intrusions that aimed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Conaway said: ‘Sure it is, it’s foreign influence. If we’re worried about foreign influence, let’s have the whole story.'”

This attitude was on full display during the hearing with Comey and Rogers—at which Comey declared the FBI had no evidence to support Trump’s Obama-wiretapped-me claim and revealed the FBI had been investigating Trump-Russia contacts since July. When Conaway was granted time for questioning, he dwelled on when and why the FBI and the NSA had reached the conclusion that the Russian operation was designed to help Trump. Conaway tried to make an issue out of the fact that the FBI hit this conclusion with more certainty a few weeks before the NSA did late last year. Comey had to point out, “To be clear, Mr. Conaway, we all agreed with that judgment.” And Rogers echoed him.

Conaway’s intent was clear: to attempt to show this damaging-to-Trump assessment was still iffy. This led him into a bizarre exchange with Comey over rooting for college football teams and whether a person can cheer for one team to lose and not really desire the other team to win. (Conaway referenced his wife’s favorite team, the Red Raiders of Texas Tech.) Comey noted that “logically, when Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to lose,” he wanted Trump to win. Conaway then tried to discredit a Washington Post story by noting that the anonymous sources who provided the newspaper information about the US intelligence community’s assessment of the Russian operation (before that evaluation was made public) had probably broken the law. It was not obvious what he was driving at. But Conaway had not bothered to express any outrage over the Russian intervention or to encourage the FBI’s ongoing investigations. He was in Trump-damage-control mode.

Rooney used his grilling time to pose to Rogers a long and detailed series of questions about incidental collection and unmasking. These are not unimportant subjects. But they have nothing to do with how Putin and Russian intelligence intervened in the election. (Rogers noted that only 20 senior-ranked officials at the NSA, including himself, are authorized to approve unmasking requests.) Then came the money shot. Rooney asked, “If the NSA obtained the communication of General Flynn while he was communicating with the surveillance target legally, would you please explain how General Flynn’s identity could be unmasked based on the exceptions that we discussed?” So this was all about targeting those current or past US officials who had leaked information on Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador. Rooney was more concerned about the leaking than Flynn’s deceptions and back-channel communications (for which Flynn was fired). Rogers replied, “I’m not going to discuss even hypotheticals about individuals, I’m sorry.”

Nevertheless, Rooney decried the “serious crime” that had apparently been committed via a presumed act of unmasking. He noted he was worried that the intelligence community had broken a “sacred trust” with the American people. (There was not a word about Flynn violating any trust.) He did not once address the Russian intervention.

When Rooney was done, Gowdy picked up this line of questioning. Gowdy is best known for running the House special committee on Benghazi that went on endlessly—after other House committees had scrutinized the matter and blown apart the various anti-Clinton conspiracy theories of the right—and was marred by partisan moves and, yes, leaks from the GOP side of the committee. (Gowdy also declared during the campaign that he believed Clinton should be prosecuted for how she handled her official email when she was secretary of state.) Citing several newspaper stories about Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador—which referred to classified intercepts that had captured these communications—Gowdy said to Comey, “I thought it was against the law to disseminate classified information. Is it?” Comey replied, “Yes, sir. It’s a serious crime. I’m not going to comment on those particular articles because I don’t want to, in any circumstance, compound a criminal act by confirming that it was classified information, but in general, yes, it’s a serious crime.”

Gowdy subsequently followed up with this question: “Is there an exception in the law for reporters who want to break a story?” Comey answered, “Well that’s a harder question as to whether a reporter incurs criminal liability by publishing classified information and one probably beyond my ken.” But Gowdy suggested that a reporter could be prosecuted for publishing a story containing classified information. “You’re not aware of an exception in the current dissemination of the classified information statute that carves out an exception for reporters?” he asked the FBI chief. No, Comey said: “I’m not aware of anything carved out in the statute. I don’t think a reporter’s been prosecuted certainly in my lifetime, though.”

Gowdy did not ask anything related to how the Kremlin had targeted a political party and presidential campaign to subvert an election. Instead, he fixated on leaks and locking up journalists who receive and report classified secrets. He pressed Comey to investigate the Flynn leak, and he ticked off a list of Obama officials who might have had access to unmasked names—James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates—as if to suggest one or more of them deserved to be investigated for the Flynn leak.

Toward the end of the hearing, Gowdy did speak one sentence about the FBI’s Russia investigation. He told Comey, “I want you to go find every single witness who may have information about interference, influence, motive, our response, collusion, coordination, whatever your jurisdiction is, wherever the facts may take you. Though the heavens may fall, go do your jobs because nature abhors a vacuum.” But Gowdy then cautioned people not to confuse “evidence” with “facts” and to be wary of hearsay. This seemed to be an indirect way of questioning media reporting regarding the Russian intervention in the election and the contacts between Trump associates and Russia. In any event, Gowdy had tried to turn the hearing into an inquiry about the Flynn leak and the once-obscure subject of unmasking—which matched the agenda of Trump defenders.

Acting in a partisan and puzzling manner, Nunes made a hash of the House intelligence committee’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. After his botched stunt, his credibility was shot. Stepping aside was the correct action. Yet he has placed this important exercise in the hands of men who have indicated they are not fully concerned with the main issues, which, of course, are rather inconvenient for their party and its president. Conaway, Rooney, and Gowdy have not yet demonstrated they can mount an independent and vigorous investigation on this politically sensitive terrain. Nunes may be gone, but the challenges facing the committee remain.

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With Nunes Out, the New Guys Running the Trump-Russia Probe Ain’t Much Better

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Why Is Trump Ignoring These Good Heartland Jobs?

by AnalisaNaumann Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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For half a century, Tim Hemphill grew corn and soybeans on his 720-acre farm in northern Iowa. Then five years ago, as he readied his son to take over the business so he could retire, catastrophe struck: Local corn prices plummeted. “It was about the worst thing that ever happened to farmers,” he says. And it’s happening all over the country: Slumps in commodity prices, paired with rising costs of pesticides and seeds, have driven many small farms out of business, and caught on throughout Iowa, not only bringing a much-needed boost to farmers, but also generating county tax revenue to fund school and road improvements and adding new jobs. Iowa now gets 36 percent of its electricity from wind, a higher percentage than any other state, even California. While coal is still Iowa’s main source of electricity, one of the state’s largest utilities, MidAmerican Energy, has set ambitious reap at least $10 million a year leasing their land to turbines. Nationwide, they may earn as much as $900 million a year by 2030, according to analyst Alex Morgan of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Farmers cannot farm anything legally on that small amount of land and get that kind of return,” says Chris Kunkle, a Western policy manager at industry advocacy group Wind on the Wires. Iowa’s Gov. Terry Branstad credits wind energy with drawing $12 billion worth of investments to his state. It also added 11 manufacturing facilities and thousands of jobs, including for wind turbine technicians, the country’s fastest-growing profession. In 2016, some 9,000 Iowans worked in the wind industry, about a fifth of the number operating farms. Both Facebook and Google have set up data centers in the Hawkeye State, taking advantage of how clean energy can help them meet their goals for renewables. And more than two-thirds of Iowa’s installed wind power is in poor communities: Kunkle says he’s visited small rural counties that get about a tenth of their total budget from wind farms.

Iowa isn’t the only state benefiting from the breeze. Wind farms—and the new jobs that come with them—have swept across the Midwest, where coal and traditional manufacturing gigs have vanished. (Despite what President Donald Trump will tell you, coal jobs started to disappear back in the 1980s, when the steel industry began to sink and utilities stopped building new coal-fired power plants.) In the “wind belt” between Texas and North Dakota, the price of wind energy is finally equal to and in some cases cheaper than that of fossil fuels. Thanks to investments in transmission lines, better computer controls, and more efficient turbines, the cost to US consumers fell two-thirds in just six years, according to the American Wind Energy Association. A federal tax credit—which gives producers 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity for 10 years—is set to expire at the end of 2019, but analysts with financial firm Lazard say that even without federal subsidies, the price of wind energy is finally on par with that of traditional energy sources.

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Still, not all windy states have a turbine-friendly climate. In Wyoming, for example, coal-loving legislators penalizing utilities for including renewables in their portfolios. According to Michael Webber, deputy director of the University of Texas’ Energy Institute, the next few years will see a showdown between “rural Republicans who really want to get the economic boost wind offers to their district, versus Republican ideologues who don’t like renewables because they like fossil fuels”—and whose campaign contributions depend on protecting them.

So farmers—and voters —will have to fight for wind, which, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, “offers the greatest potential for growth in US renewable power generation.” In his energy plan, Trump speaks of reviving the country’s “hurting” coal industry and argues that “sound energy policy begins with the recognition that we have vast untapped domestic energy reserves right here in America.” We do—and those reserves could lead to hundreds of thousands of jobs in the coming years, and very few carbon emissions. And if Trump weren’t so fixated on the sputtering coal industry, he might actually see them.

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Why Is Trump Ignoring These Good Heartland Jobs?

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Leading Global Warming Deniers Just Told Us What They Want Trump to Do

by emeliamault0 Posted on March 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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What does a climate change denier wish for when everything seems possible? With Congress and the White House in agreement on the unimportance of science, there’s no need to settle for rolling back President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda one regulation at a time. It’s time to get the Environmental Protection Agency out of climate change altogether.

To get a sense of what the wish list looks like, the annual conference of the Heartland Institute would be a good place to start. The right-wing think tank that has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch groups—and is best known for pushing out misinformation on climate change—has sponsored this annual gathering for the last 12 years. This year the theme was “Resetting Climate Policy,” reflecting the triumphant and hopeful mood of the conference now that they control the agenda.

The usual ideas floated at the conference have ranged from abolishing the EPA to touting the universal benefits of fossil fuels, but this year one idea in particular dominated the discussions: Climate deniers think they have a chance to reverse the EPA’s endangerment finding that formally says greenhouse gasses poses a threat to Americans and their health. That 2009 determination, prompted by a Supreme Court decision in 2007, is the basis for the EPA’s regulatory work on climate change.

“We’ve been at this for 33 years. We have a lot of people in our network,” Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast tells Mother Jones, “and many of these people are now in this new administration.” Transition staff and new appointees in the Trump administration “occasionally ask us for advice and names of people,” he added.

Rescinding the endangerment finding is the “number one” priority Bast sees for Trump’s EPA. “I think it’s almost a sure thing they are going to revisit it,” Bast says. “Whether they are going to succeed is maybe a 90 percent certainty.”

Bast overstated the strength of his case. The problem with rescinding the endangerment finding is that the EPA would somehow have to make a convincing case that holds up in court that climate change isn’t a threat to humanity. In other words, it would be incumbent upon the EPA to disprove climate change is real.

During, his confirmation hearings, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt acknowledged that the endangerment finding was the “law of the land” and there is “nothing that I know that will cause a review at this point.” But he has recently suggested he may attempt to change course. He went on CNBC and claimed “we don’t know” that the science is settled, and insisted “we need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

Cato Institute’s Director for the Center for the Study of Science, Patrick Michaels, who gave an address to the meeting, agreed that the administration should make reversing the endangerment finding its priority. At one point in his presentation, Michaels asked if David Schnare—who previously spent years suing the EPA until he became a transition appointee at the agency—was in the audience. “David’s big on this,” Michaels said. Schnare was not there, but he helped to emphasize Bast’s point: Trump’s appointees are familiar, friendly faces.

In his keynote address, House Science Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas) expressed his gratitude to Heartland for its “help and support.” Asked if he will be holding a hearing on the endangerment finding, Smith answered, “Probably….It hasn’t been set yet. We can add that to our list.” Smith, who has already held a “Making EPA Great Again” hearing, will plans a hearing for next week questioning the scientific method of climate studies.

For anyone who acknowledges climate change is a reality and a threat, Smith’s final words about President Trump to the roughly 200 attendees who were gathered might be considered ominous: “You won’t be disappointed with the direction he’s going.”

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Leading Global Warming Deniers Just Told Us What They Want Trump to Do

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American Kids Are About to Get Even Dumber When It Comes to Climate Science

by ltrdeclan642 Posted on February 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Fusion and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The debate surrounding science education in America is at least as old as the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a high school science teacher was criminally charged for teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee law. But bills percolating through state legislatures across the US are giving the education fight a new flavor, by encompassing climate change denial and serving it up as academic freedom.

One prominent example, South Dakota’s Senate Bill 55, was voted down Wednesday, but others are on the docket in three states, with possible others on the way. Advocates say the bills are designed to give teachers additional latitude to explain scientific theories. Opponents say they empower science denial, removing accountability from science education and eroding the foundation of public schools.

In bills making their way through statehouses in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, and a potential measure in Iowa, making common cause with climate change denial is a way for advocates to encourage skepticism of evolution, said Glenn Branch, deputy director for the National Center for Science Education, an advocacy group.

“The rhetoric falls into predictable patterns, and the patterns are very similar for those two groups of science deniers,” he said.

Science defenders like the NCSE say science denial has three pillars: That the science is uncertain; that its acceptance would have bad moral and social consequences; and that it’s only fair to present all sides. All three are at work in the latest efforts to attack state and federal education standards on science education, Branch said.

According to a survey published last year, this strategy is already making headway. The survey, in the journal Science, found that three-fourths of science teachers spend time on climate change instruction. But of those teachers, 30% tell their students that it is “likely due to natural causes,” while another 31% teach that the science is unsettled. Yet 97% of scientists who actively study Earth’s climate say it is changing because of human activity.

In South Dakota, state Rep. Chip Campbell, R-Rapid City, said the bill would have enabled broader discussions in the classroom, according to The Argus-Leader.

“In science it is imperative that we show not only the strengths but also the weaknesses of theories,” he said. “Weaknesses, not strengths, are the key to finding the truth.”

Many of these bills are being pushed in response to recently adopted federal standards for science education. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), developed by 26 states, were finalized in 2015. As of November 2016, 16 states had adopted them, and the guidelines are under consideration in several others.

Efforts to undermine science education are often related to adoption of the new standards. In West Virginia in 2016, for example, lawmakers removed language in the standards that said human activity has increased carbon dioxide emissions and affected the climate. In Wyoming, lawmakers passed a statute banning public schools from teaching climate change is caused by humans, though that was later repealed. Also in 2016, Idaho lawmakers passed a bill permitting the use of the Bible in public schools as long as it was in connection with astronomy, biology, and geology. The bill passed in a modified form without referencing those scientific topics, but it was later vetoed.

“The concerns of these anti-science officials aren’t rooted in peer-vetted science. They are rooted in opposition to learning the truth about climate change,” said Lisa Hoyos, the director of Climate Parents, an offshoot of the Sierra Club that supports climate education. “The purpose of these bills is to create space for peer-reviewed, evidence-based science to be challenged based on teachers’ political opinions.”

It’s part of a third wave of anti-science legislation at the state level, according to Branch.

The first wave, specifically targeting evolution, dissipated after 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that prohibiting the teaching of evolution was unconstitutional. The second wave focused on “intelligent design,” a branch of creation theory that postulates a higher power guides and shapes the process of evolution. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, anti-evolutionists focused on bills that would require teachers to say evolution was controversial, while staying silent on possible alternatives, Branch said. Later Supreme Court cases also rejected these policies on various First Amendment grounds.

The newest wave, which began around 2004, focuses on “academic freedom—teach the controversy, talk about theories’ strengths and weaknesses,” Branch said.

“They all have the same effect, which is to free teachers from having to teach evolution as accepted science, and to prevent state and local officials from doing anything about it,” he said.

The bills initially targeted evolution, but later, advocates came up with a standard list: biological evolution, the origin of life, global warming, and human cloning are considered the controversial topics in science education, Branch said.

He and Hoyos both noted that the bill would have protected teachers who wanted to teach anything at all, not just skepticism of climate change and evolution.

“A teacher could, on the public dime, teach creationism, flat-Earthism, white supremacism, and there would be nothing that the taxpayers could do about it,” Branch said. “It’s not that science teachers shouldn’t have some freedom to do what they do; but all of these states already have all various kinds of regulations, policies, and informal practices that give a reasonable degree of freedom.”

Similar active bills include Indiana’s Senate Resolution 17, Oklahoma’s Senate Bill 393, and Texas’s House Bill 1485, Branch said. Because Indiana’s is a resolution, it would have no legal effect other than to express the intent of lawmakers, which Branch said was an “interesting variant.” In Iowa, lawmakers are discussing a measure that would make the next generation standards optional, he said.

To date, South Dakota’s was the only measure to have been passed by a chamber of the legislature; the state Senate passed it in January. It’s also the first measure to die. It lingered in a House education committee before a hearing was scheduled for Wednesday, and it was defeated, 11-4. Its sponsor, Republican Sen. Jeff Monroe of Pierre, had introduced different versions of the bill for the past four years, but it never made it as far as it did in 2017, Hoyos said.

“Perhaps that’s because of the political climate we’re in, with the president actively opposing climate science,” she said. “From the president on down, there are some political forces in our society who think it is open season to attack climate science.”

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American Kids Are About to Get Even Dumber When It Comes to Climate Science

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“Jane Roe” Has Died. Abortion Rights Might Not Be Far Behind.

by StormyMoseley Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in the United States, died Saturday at at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Texas. She was 69.

McCorvey was a complicated symbol for the political fight over abortion rights. Following the high court’s 1973 decision, she became the face of the pro-choice movement. At the time, she represented the struggles faced by ordinary women confronted with unwanted pregnancies. Abortion was illegal in Texas in almost all cases when she learned she was pregnant in 1969. Poor and with a ninth grade education, she didn’t have the means to seek abortion across state lines. The legal battle dragged on for three years; by the time she won, she had long since carried the pregnancy to term. She gave the baby up for adoption.

But in 1995, McCorvey reversed her stance on abortion after discussing the Bible with Pastor Flip Benham, the director of Operation Rescue, an aggressive pro-life group that had moved in next door to the women’s health clinic where McCorvey worked. She soon quit her job at the clinic and was baptized by Benham. She became a spokeswoman for the anti-abortion movement, penning a book about her ideological transformation and traveling the country giving speeches to religious groups.

Like McCorvey’s own views on abortion, popular opinion about a woman’s right to choose has been the subject of much conflict and debate since the landmark 1973 case. And while a strong majority of Americans still agrees with the Roe decision, dismantling the right to an abortion is now an explicit objective for both the new administration and the Republican-led congress.

In the month since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, GOP lawmakers have put forward measures aimed at pulling federal family planning funds from Planned Parenthood and repealing the Affordable Care Act, including its requirement that insurance plans cover contraceptives. They have also introduced bills that would make abortion illegal after 20 weeks of pregnancy and would ban the standard abortion method used by doctors in the second trimester.

A Supreme Court majority that would be open to overturning Roe is becoming increasingly likely, as well. This is something Trump promised repeatedly during the campaign as part of his largely successful effort to win over skeptical evangelical voters. As a candidate, he made four promises to the anti-abortion community: He pledged to nominate anti-abortion justices; defund Planned Parenthood; sign the 20-week abortion ban; and permanently enshrine into law the Hyde Amendment—a 40-year old budget rider that Congress has repeatedly used to bar federal tax dollars from funding most abortions. Assuming that Judge Neil Gorsuch is confirmed this spring, it may only take the departure of one pro-abortion-rights justice to tip the balance on the court against Roe.

During the campaign, the formerly pro-choice Trump brought on Mike Pence to shore up his anti-abortion bonafides. As governor of Indiana, Pence signed some of the country’s strictest abortion restrictions into law, including a measure requiring burial or cremation of aborted fetus remains and a ban on abortions due to fetal anomaly. In a September 2016 speech, Pence told an evangelical conference in Washington, DC, “I want to live to see the day that we put the sanctity of life back at the center of American law, and we send Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.”

Last month, Pence became the highest-ranking government official to ever address the annual March for Life in person. “Life is winning again in America,” Pence said at the anti-abortion gathering, pointing to the “historic election of a president who stands for a stronger America, a more prosperous America, and a president who, I proudly say, stands for the right to life.”

Roe has been seen by many as an imperfect decision. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the foremost legal warriors for gender equality, has criticized the decision for changing too much, too quickly. After founding the ACLU’s women’s rights project in the 1970s, Ginsburg focused on fighting sex discrimination with an incremental strategy. She brought several cases to the Supreme Court, building up a body of court victories that together established a sweeping legal and moral understanding of sex discrimination as something that is both illegal and wrong. Roe, she said at a conference in 2014, “established a target” for abortion opponents because it ditched this incremental approach, instead imposing a drastic change on states across the country. She suggested that if the high court had moved a little more slowly, today the idea of reproductive choice wouldn’t be so controversial. “A movement against access to abortion for women grew up, flourished, around a single target,” Ginsburg said.

After her victory as Roe’s main plaintiff, McCorvey joined the movement that sprung up to oppose Roe. Her death comes at a time when that movement, with help from the Trump White House, could achieve many of its long-held goals.

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“Jane Roe” Has Died. Abortion Rights Might Not Be Far Behind.

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Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

by TashaMathew Posted on February 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump keeps saying that the murder rate is the highest it’s been in 45 years. This is wildly untrue, but other people are joining the bandwagon anyway. Jeff Sessions says the current rise in crime is a “dangerous permanent trend.” Talk show hosts agree. America is a dark and dangerous place, and it’s getting more dangerous all the time.

Aside from outright lies, a lot of this is based on cherry-picked statistics. The murder rate in Chicago has skyrocketed over the past three years. Los Angeles has seen a substantial rise in its violent crime rate. Etc. But if you’re interested in the whole picture, I have it for you below, complete and un-cherry-picked.

You’re all used to seeing long-term crime charts from me because I’m usually illustrating the effect of lead on crime over the past 50 or 60 years. Those charts show national crime rates plummeting in the 90s and early aughts. This time, though, the chatter is all about recent increases in murder and violent crime in big cities. For starters, then, here are the basic numbers for the past decade on violent crime in large cities from the National Crime Victimization Survey:1

The data goes through 2015,2 and shows that big-city violent crime did tick upward slightly in 2015. More generally, though, violent crime has displayed a noisy but steadily downward trend over the past decade. In 2015, violent crime in big cities was nearly a third lower than it was in 2007.

Next up is violent crime from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. This is based on reports from police departments, and includes detailed data at the city level. Here are violent crime rates in America’s ten biggest cities3 through the first half of 2016:4

Some big cities have indeed shown worrying upward trends: Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles are all up over the past two or three years. At the same time, Philadelphia, New York City, and San Diego are all down. More generally, except for San Antonio every single one of these cities has a lower violent crime rate than in 2006, ranging from 4 percent down (San Jose) to 40 percent down (Dallas and Philadelphia). The overall violent crime rate for all big cities is up over the past two years, but still lower than it was in 2006.

Finally, here are the murder rates in our ten biggest cities:

Chicago, obviously, is a big outlier, with a high and rising murder rate (up 53 percent over the past two years). The three biggest cities in Texas have also seen big recent increases. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City are down compared to 2015.

You can draw different conclusions from this data depending on what you look at.5 However, this is the best data we have. This is reality. Whatever you decide to say about violent crime, it needs to be based on this.

1The NCVS data on violent crime doesn’t include homicide because, obviously, you can’t call up people and ask if they’ve been murdered in the past year. Generally speaking, however, violent crime as a category includes murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

2Unlike the other charts in this post, this one starts in 2007 because the Bureau of Justice Statistics warns that a change in methodology in 2006 makes it difficult to compare 2006 to other years.

3Because of a dispute over methodology, Chicago has no official numbers for forcible rape before 2015. Because of this, it also has no official numbers for violent crime. However, it’s pretty easy to create a close estimate of the rape rate and then use that to recreate the violent crime rate. That’s what I’ve done here.

4I’ve annualized the rates for the first half of 2016 so they’re comparable to the other years.

5It’s worth mentioning that property crime is also down over the past decade. Ditto for crime in smaller cities and towns. I haven’t shown any of that here because big-city violent crime seems to be the topic of the moment. However, you might be interested in a little-known bit of crime trivia that will surprise most people: violent crime in big cities has fallen so much that it’s actually lower than anyplace else. The safest places in America are the biggest and smallest cities. It’s the medium-sized cities that now have the biggest violent crime problems.

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Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

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Wind power is beating the pants off of other renewables.

by GladisAtkins1 Posted on February 9, 2017

The industry is growing so fast it could become the largest source of renewable energy on both sides of the Atlantic.

In America, wind power won the top spot for installed generating capacity (putting it ahead of hydroelectric power), according to a new industry report. And in the E.U., wind capacity grew by 8 percent last year, surpassing coal. That puts wind second only to natural gas across the pond.

In the next three years, wind could account for 10 percent of American electricity, Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, said in a press release. The industry already employs over 100,000 Americans.

In Europe, wind has hit the 10.4 percent mark, and employs more than 300,000 people, according to an association for wind energy in Europe. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland, and Lithuania lead the way for European wind growth. In the U.S., Texas is the windy frontier.

“Low-cost, homegrown wind energy,” Kiernan added in the release, “is something we can all agree on.”

Excerpt from: 

Wind power is beating the pants off of other renewables.

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Trump Accidentally Makes Support of Civil Asset Forfeiture Administration Policy

by AraceliHeinig Posted on February 7, 2017

Mother Jones

The latest from our president:

Actually, Trump was obviously joking about destroying the nameless senator’s career. The real scandal is what the conversation was about:

SHERIFF: A state senator in Texas was talking about introducing legislation to require conviction before we can receive that forfeiture money.

TRUMP: Can you believe that?

The target here was probably Konni Burton:

Before the 85th Texas Legislative Session formally opened on Tuesday, state lawmakers had already filed a handful of bills that would curb or strike down the law enforcement practice known as civil forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize assets from those suspected, not charged or convicted, of involvement in criminal activity.

Konni Burton, R-Colleyville, has her name on the most comprehensive of the lot. Senate Bill 380 was pre-filed on Dec. 20 and would reform asset forfeiture laws to prohibit the state of Texas from taking an individual’s property without a criminal conviction, in most cases.

….Burton’s bill aims to make sure the possessors of that property, or cash in many cases, are actually criminals and the property related to actual crime before the cops have the right to seize it….Predictably, opposition to such bills comes mainly from law enforcement agencies that seize cash and stand to gain from the sale of seized property.

This demonstrates the problem with Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip style.1 My guess is that he has no idea what civil asset forfeiture is and has no real opinion about it. If, say, Trump had been in a meeting with a few senators, and Bob Goodlatte had remarked that “police can seize your money even if you weren’t convicted of a crime,” Trump probably would have reflexively answered, “Can you believe that?” Instead, a sheriff said it was a bad thing related to Mexicans, so Trump automatically agreed with him. That means it’s now official Trump administration policy.

Sad. But then again, Jeff Sessions is a huge fan of civil asset forfeiture and all the corrupt incentives it creates, so he probably would have gotten Trump on board one way or another. It’s yet another big win for the working class.

1One of the problems, anyway.

Credit: 

Trump Accidentally Makes Support of Civil Asset Forfeiture Administration Policy

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Buying a Home Is Nearly Impossible for Teachers in These Cities

by Lenore55Fuug Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Lauren Paquette dreams of owning a home with a pool. But the 34-year-old fifth-grade science teacher knows it’s a pipe dream: She recently had to find a roommate to help with the monthly rent of $1,425 on her three-bedroom house in Houston. Although that’s relatively cheap compared with rents across the country, it’s tough on a teacher’s salary. Saving up for a down payment is out of the question, said Paquette, a single mother.

“It’s not like I went into this job thinking I’d make a bunch of money, but I expected to be able to make ends meet,” Paquette said. Finances have been easier since she left North Carolina for Texas (North Carolina ranks in the lower tenth of states for teacher pay), but Paquette’s struggles aren’t unique.

As housing prices have soared in all the usual major metropolitan areas—as well as in cites like Las Vegas, Sacramento, Atlanta, and Minneapolis—teachers’ wages haven’t kept pace. And with school districts already struggling to recruit and retain educators, this rising gap is just another barrier to keeping teachers in the profession.

Redfin, a real estate brokerage firm, compared listed home prices in more than 30 cities with average teachers’ salaries to gauge what percentage of available homes teachers could afford. (Administrators, principals, and special-education teachers were not included in the data, and New York City was not studied.) The number of homes within reach for a single teacher has declined in some places by more than 25 percent since 2012.

That’s no surprise in San Francisco, where just 14 out of the 2,244 listed houses were within reach on the average teacher salary of $71,000. But the dearth of affordable options has worsened in Las Vegas, Sacramento, Chicago, and Dallas, where in each city less than 25 percent of listed houses are affordable for teachers.

Of course, home ownership—traditionally an economic engine of the middle class—isn’t out of reach for just teachers. High housing prices are pushing middle-class workers out of many cities. Redfin chief economist Nela Richardson said the notion that civil servants live in the communities they serve is becoming a thing of the past: “These are middle-class salaries, but middle-class people can’t afford to buy homes.”

Rental prices mirror the housing market, so teachers who rent are also getting pushed out of the cities in which they teach. Meanwhile, attempts to fix the crisis in Los Angeles have backfired, and other novel solutions—like Sen. Corey Booker’s eight-building Teacher Village in Newark, New Jersey, or plans for teacher-only residential units in the San Francisco Bay Area—either just opened or are still years away. Despite creative housing solutions for our cities’ educators, many critics of these plans argue that the real solution is simply paying teachers higher salaries.

David Fisher, the vice president of the Sacramento City Teachers Association, lived in a studio apartment with his wife and son for 15 years before he could afford a house in Sacramento. “These aren’t McMansions in the suburbs,” Fisher said. “These are modest houses is modest neighborhoods.” Besides, he said, most teachers are concerned with paying off student loan debt before even considering buying a home.

There are a few cities where it’s not so bad. In Philadelphia, where teachers’ salaries saw a 15 percent increase since 2012, more than 35 percent of houses for sale are affordable for teachers. Like most civil servants, teachers have more options anywhere the housing supply is larger.

Paquette, the science teacher, figures that she may be able to buy a house in 10 years—and says she’ll stay in Houston as long as she can afford it. Whether she’ll stay in education is another question. “I get that itch quite often,” she said, “to leave the classroom.”

Original link – 

Buying a Home Is Nearly Impossible for Teachers in These Cities

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Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough

by AlberthaODea0 Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to nominate pro-life Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade “automatically,” and he released a list of 21 candidates he would consider for a spot on the high court. The conservative legal organization the Federalist Society, as well as the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, helped draft the list. But since the election, some pro-life activists have been pushing the Trump team to jettison most of the people on his short list on the grounds that they aren’t sufficiently committed to overturning the landmark 1973 abortion ruling.

In mid-December, Andrew Schlafly, president of the Legal Center for the Defense of Life and son of the late anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly, wrote an open letter to Trump, signed by more than 70 anti-abortion activists, urging him to appoint a Supreme Court justice with a “proven pro-life record.” In a not–so–subtle reminder that pro-life voters may have played a huge role in putting Trump in the White House despite his obvious moral failings, Schlafly wrote:

Exit polls in the election showed that 21% of voters felt that this issue of the Supreme Court was ‘the most important factor’ in determining for whom they voted. Among that group of voters, you defeated your opponent by a landslide of 15%, 56-41%.

“I’m worried that Trump’s advisers will pull a Souter,” Schlafly explains, referring to President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Justice David Souter. Souter was something of a blank slate when he was nominated, and he proved to be far more liberal than Republicans had believed. When it comes to the Supreme Court, Schlafly and his supporters don’t want to leave anything to chance, which means a nominee who doesn’t just profess pro-life convictions, but has a documented track record of ruling in abortion cases. But Schlafly suspects some of the people advising Trump on a court pick want “a stealth candidate, someone without a record,” who would generate less opposition in a confirmation hearing.

Among those he’s singled out for supposedly pushing such a candidate is Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society—which Schlafly insists is “not a pro-life organization,” despite Leo’s stated opposition to abortion. (Leo did not respond to a request for comment.)

Among those whom Schlafly has targeted on Trump’s short list are some pretty stalwart conservative federal judges, including Diane Sykes, a 7th Circuit judge who reportedly ranks as one of Trump’s top two choices. Schlafly believes Sykes is not pro-life because as an Indiana state court judge she sentenced two anti-abortion protesters to 60 days in jail for a clinic protest. Later, on the federal bench, she also helped strike down a law defunding Planned Parenthood—another black mark against her in his book. Another potential nominee, 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, won’t be pro-life on the bench, according to Schlafly, because he doesn’t invoke the term “unborn child” in his decisions or public comments.

Candidates who meet Schlafly’s litmus test are few and far between, but there are two women from the highly conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas, Judges Edith Jones and Jennifer Elrod, who make the cut. Jones is a conservative poster gal who has been floated as a candidate for a GOP Supreme Court slot so many times that she’s been dubbed the “Susan Lucci” of Supreme Court nominations, after the soap opera star who was nominated 18 times for an Emmy before finally winning. As Tim Noah explained in Slate in 2005, “Presidents have been not choosing Jones since 1987,” back when Ronald Reagan needed a Supreme Court nominee to replace Robert Bork, whom the Senate rejected as too much of an extremist.

Today, Jones’ far-right views would make the late Bork look like a bleeding-heart liberal. In 2006, Jones made the Texas Observer’s list of worst judges in the state for rulings such as the one that upheld the execution of a man whose lawyer slept through his trial. Her performance in a sexual-harassment case was also noteworthy. “After hearing testimony that a woman had endured, among other things, a co-worker pinching her breast at work, Jones retorted, ‘Well, he apologized,'” wrote the Observer.

In 2014, lawyers and law students filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Jones over a speech she gave at a 2013 Federalist Society event. Jones allegedly said the death penalty provided a “positive service” to defendants because they are “likely to make peace with God only in the moment before imminent execution.” She also allegedly said, “African Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime” and “prone to commit acts of violence.” (Because there was no recording of Jones’ remarks, the complaint against her was dismissed.)

But for anti-abortion activists, her record is stellar: She was part of a three-judge panel that upheld a 2012 mandatory sonogram law in Texas, forcing doctors to give women seeking an abortion medically unnecessary information designed to persuade them to change their minds. In 2014, she was on a panel of judges considering a challenge to a Texas abortion law that closed 22 abortion clinics in the state. During oral arguments, she told lawyers for the Texas clinics that the 300-mile round trip some women would have to endure to reach a clinic under the new law was no big deal if they drove fast. The road, she said, was flat.

Elrod, who is also on Schlafly’s short list, wrote a circuit opinion in a preliminary phase of the case upholding that controversial law, which was struck down by the US Supreme Court last year in Women’s Whole Health v. Hellerstedt. In her opinion, Elrod gave almost complete deference to the state’s argument that the abortion-closing law was designed to protect women’s health, despite having no evidence to support that claim. She wrote, “In our circuit, we do not balance the wisdom or effectiveness of a law against the burdens the law imposes,” suggesting that the difficulties women might face obtaining an abortion in Texas were not relevant to her deliberations.

Florida Supreme Court Chief Judge Charles Canady is one of Trump’s potential candidates who meets with Schlafly’s approval as well. Canady, as a member of Congress in 1995, coined the term “partial-birth abortion” when he sponsored legislation banning dilation and extraction abortions in which doctors removed an intact fetus after collapsing its skull to minimize health complications in the woman. As a state court judge, he blocked a young woman from getting an abortion without her parents’ consent. His anti-abortion credentials are rock solid.

Schlafly complains that Trump’s advisers, including the Federalist Society’s Leo, are pushing him to tap younger judges while ignoring older, more proven judges such as Jones, who is 67, or Canady, 62. He wrote recently, “Mr. Leo’s approach runs afoul of conservative principles, which recognize that the longer someone is in D.C., the more liberal they generally get. That’s apparently true for some think tank executives as well, by the way.”

The anti-abortion movement as a whole has not gotten on board with Schlafly’s campaign, largely because everyone on Trump’s Supreme Court list is very conservative and likely to be hostile to abortion, even if they have not yet ruled on it. The signatories of Schlafly’s letter to Trump are B-listers of the anti-choice movement. Many of them represent state chapters of his late mother’s organization, the Eagle Forum, or the much-diminished Operation Rescue. But the most politically powerful anti-abortion groups such as Americans United for Life, National Right to Life, and the Family Research Council have not weighed in on his picks. Even anti-abortion stalwart Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, has shied away, despite being approached by Schlafly for support, saying that Schlafly’s letter “doesn’t reflect my judgment on all of the candidates.”

Ed Whelan, a former Scalia law clerk and attorney in the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Justice, has been one of the most outspoken conservative critics of Schlafly’s abortion purity campaign. He declined to comment for this story, but in his “Bench Notes” column in National Review, Whelan has explicitly defended potential Trump nominees from Schlafly’s attacks. He points out, for instance, that Schlafly’s own mother approved of the judges on Trump’s list before she died. In her last book, The Conservative Case for Trump, she and her co-author wrote, “It is to Trump’s credit that his shortlist is as good as it is.”

And he counters Schlafly’s criticism of the 7th Circuit’s Sykes by noting that while Sykes did rule in a case involving abortion protesters, “she didn’t sentence them for protesting abortion. She sentenced them for cementing their legs to the front of a car parked at the entrance to an abortion clinic and thus shutting down the clinic. What sentence does Schlafly believe Sykes should have imposed?”

But Whelan’s primary opposition to Schlafly’s campaign is that he believes the anti-abortion purists “want judges to indulge pro-life values to misread the law in order to reach pro-life results,” something he argues Scalia would never have approved of. Schlafly dismisses Whelan’s criticism as sour grapes: “Ed Whelan was a strident opponent of Trump himself.”

On Wednesday, during his first press conference since July, Trump said he would announce his Supreme Court choice during the first week or two after the inauguration. It’s unclear whether he’s taking Schlafly’s input under advisement. Neither Trump nor his advisers have responded to Schlafly. But Schlafly notes that his letter was featured on Fox News, and he’s hopeful it’s making an impact. “Nothing else a president does even compares to the significance of this decision,” Schlafly says, noting that its ramifications could last 30 years or more. Yet he thinks when it comes to the potential justices, Trump’s team hasn’t done its homework on the abortion issue, and he’s simply trying to fill in the research gaps. “Everybody knows that’s what’s at stake,” he says. “A very thorough vetting process is in order.”

Taken from:  

Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough

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