Tag Archives: top stories

America’s Fertilizer Keeps Blowing Up. It Doesn’t Have To

by munrhexaa Posted on May 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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It didn’t take long in the aftermath of April’s explosion in West, Texas, for the problems with the fertilizer industry to come into focus. Inspections are virtually non-existent; regulatory agencies don’t talk to each other; and there’s no such thing as a buffer zone when it comes to constructing plants and storage facilities in populated areas.

Lost in the fallout, though, is a damning fact: fertilizer doesn’t have to be explosive. Pure ammonium nitrate like the kind that caused the West disaster is already banned in the United Kingdom, Germany, Colombia, the Philippines, and China, due to its explosive risk; Australia’s largest fertilizer manufacturer discontinued the use of the compound after it was used in the 2002 Bali hotel bombing. And the Department of Defense has pressured fertilizer manufacturers overseas to neutralize their own products, warning that anything less constitutes a threat to American personnel. But in the United States, with the backing of the chemical industry, explosive ammonium nitrate has held onto a small but powerful share of the market as the fertilizer-of-choice for citrus growers.

It wasn’t for lack of opportunity. In the late 1960s, a chemist from Kansas, Charles Saffer, and an explosives engineer, Samuel Porter, began working in their spare-time to develop an antidote to the kind of destructive devices Porter had witnessed while stationed in Somalia with the US military. Porter and Saffer secured a patent for non-combustible fertilizer that involves diluting ammonium nitrate with diammonium phosphate. Because diammonium phosphate is itself used as fertilizer, the new compound was—in theory—still an effective agricultural compound. The duo enlisted a partner, Robert Colbert, and found a lawyer: a young Louisiana attorney named Billy Tauzin.

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America’s Fertilizer Keeps Blowing Up. It Doesn’t Have To

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The 10 Worst Prisons in America: Polunsky

by sssaa Posted on May 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last stop for condemned Texans. Minutes Before Six

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of an 11-part series. Click here for the complete introduction.

Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.


#1: ADX


#2: Polunsky

Read an introduction to this project here.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of the problems we explore, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with criminal-justice reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. We will be rolling out profiles of all of the contenders in the coming days, complete with photos and video.

Our subjective ranking was based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. Now, as promised, let’s head on down to Texas to visit our second contender, where condemned men (even severely mentally ill ones) spend their final years under what are arguably the nation’s harshest death-row conditions.

2] Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a.k.a. death row (Livingston, Texas)

Number of prisoners: ~300

Who’s in charge: Richard Alford, former warden at Polunksy, he now oversees all the region’s prisons; Oliver Bell, chairman, Texas Board of Criminal Justice

A typical cell at Polunsky. Minutes Before Six

The basics: “The most lethal death row anywhere in the democratic world” is also probably “the hardest place to do time in Texas,” writes Robert Perkinson, author of the book TexasTough. Indeed, the all-solitary Allan B. Polunsky Unit houses condemned Texans under some of the nation’s harshest death row conditions. The prisoners are housed in single cells on 22-hour-a-day lockdown, and even during their daily “recreation” hour, they are confined in separate cages. With no access to phones, televisions, contact visits, they remain in essentially a concrete tomb (PDF) until execution day—a stretch of at least three years for the mandatory appeals, and far longer if they opt to keep fighting. Some have been known to commit suicide or waive their appeals rather than continue living under such conditions.

The backlash: At Polunsky, the “emotional torture” of awaiting death in total isolation is “driving men out of their minds,” former prisoner Anthony Graves told senators last year at the first-ever Judiciary Committee hearing on solitary confinement. “I would watch guys come to prison totally sane and in three years they don’t live in the real world anymore,” recalled Graves, who was exonerated in 2010, after spending more than 18 years on death row.

Graves detailed for the senators some of the profoundly erratic behavior of his fellow prisoners. “I know a guy who would sit in the middle of the floor, rip his sheet up, wrap it around himself, and light it on fire. Another guy…would take his feces and smear it all over his face as though he was in military combat.”

Listen: Click on the arrow for audio of M*A*S*H* actor Mike Farrell reading our essay, “How Crazy Is Too Crazy to be Executed?”

This man, Graves added, was ruled competent for execution. While on the gurney, “he was babbling incoherently to the officers, ‘I demand that you release me soldier, this is your captain speaking.’ These were the words coming out of a man’s mouth, who was driven insane by the prison conditions, as the poison was being pumped into his arms.”

Another prisoner, a paranoid schizophrenic named Andre Thomas, scooped out his eye and ate it during his stay at Polunsky. He, too, remains on track for execution. It is perhaps no wonder that Dallas insurance executive Charles Terrell asked to have his name removed from the facility after it became death row.

Watch: Anthony Graves’ Senate testimony:

Coming tomorrow: A facility with a “pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos.”

Research for this project was supported by a grant from the Investigative Fund and The Nation Institute, as well as a Soros Justice Media Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations. Additional reporting by Beth Broyles, Valeria Monfrini, Katie Rose Quandt, and Sal Rodriguez.

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The 10 Worst Prisons in America: Polunsky

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Mitt Romney’s Advice to College Grads: Start Having Babies as Soon as Possible

by Veta68O Posted on May 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Get married, have a quiver full of kids if you can.” That’s the commencement advice Mitt Romney delivered this past weekend to 110 new graduates of Southern Virginia University, a largely Mormon school near Lynchburg, Virginia, where many students volunteered with Romney’s failed presidential campaign.

Family-values talk at a Latter Day Saints school is hardly surprising, but perhaps some of Romney’s scriptural citations were. In a speech peppered with admonitions that graduates should marry and start families young, he dropped in a Biblical reference, Psalm 127, more often associated with another religious tradition: the Quiverfull movement.

In that Christian community, the verse Romney chose—”Children are a heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is His reward. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them”—has become almost synonymous with an absolutist rejection of all forms of contraception or family planning, and an embrace of what believers describe as “biblical patriarchy.” Quiverfull adherents have as many children as God will allow, describe their offspring as “arrows” in a divine army, and follow rigid gender roles in the home, where men are the spiritual leaders and women the submissive helpmeets.

Though the Mormon Church is not officially anti-contraception, Romney’s use of biblical language most often associated with anti-birth control fundamentalists is consistent. For years, conservative LDS leaders have partnered with right-wing evangelicals and Catholics on precisely this sort of “pro-family” issue. In one right-wing coalition, the World Congress of Families, a Mormon think-tank leader coauthored a statement of “pro-family” principles, “The Natural Family: A Manifesto,” that echoes Romney’s language.

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Mitt Romney’s Advice to College Grads: Start Having Babies as Soon as Possible

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Former Girlfriend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the 3 Additional Suspects: "They All Idolized Jahar"

by BenjamingBolton Posted on May 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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With the news of three additional suspects in federal custody, questions remain about the motive for the Boston Marathon bombing and whether the attack involved conspirators beyond the Tsarnaev brothers. But an account from an acquaintance of the suspects—a student at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth who was once romantically involved with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev himself—helps shed light on the individuals now at the center of the investigation.

p.mininav-header-text background-color: #000000 !importantMore MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings


How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the Wrong “Terrorist”


READ: Here Are the Federal Charges Against Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


The 11 Most Mystifying Things the Tsarnaev Brothers Did


What We Know About the Tsarnaev Brothers’ Guns


What These Tweets Tell Us About Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


Stunned Reactions From Former Classmates of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev


Did Boston Bombing Suspect Post Al Qaeda Prophecy on YouTube?


Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect Charged With Using WMD

The woman, who lived in the same dorm at UMass–Dartmouth as Tsarnaev during the 2011-12 academic year, told Mother Jones that she first met and had a “fleeting fling” with the bombing suspect during the fall of 2011. Around the same time, she says, she met Tsarnaev’s college buddies Dias Kadyrbayev, Azamat Tazhayakov, and Robel Phillipos, the men now accused of helping Tsarnaev dispose of evidence and lying to investigators after the bombing.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov, the woman said, were part of a group of about five Russian-speaking friends at the university whom Tsarnaev was never without. “They all sort of idolized Jahar,” she said, using the name she and others knew Tsarnaev by. “Dias was probably the one closest to him.” She said that of the friends, Tsarnaev was the most popular and in touch with campus social life. “I cannot speak to the nature of their relationship because of the language barrier, however I did observe that Jahar was always the leader in his group.”

That may help explain why the two would’ve helped Tsarnaev dispose of evidence after the marathon bombing, as authorities now allege. Whether they did so, and what knowledge they may have had about the bombing, remains unclear.

The woman, who was contacted by Mother Jones, asked to remain anonymous, fearing for the loss of her privacy. Her account of the Boston bombing suspects was corroborated by another former resident of the UMass-Dartmouth dorm where she met and became involved with Tsarnaev.

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Former Girlfriend of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the 3 Additional Suspects: "They All Idolized Jahar"

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Here’s How the Rifle That Just Killed a 2-Year-Old Girl Is Marketed for Kids

by 0df53x21 Posted on May 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, inside a rural Kentucky home, a five-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed his two-year-old sister. The boy had been playing with a .22 caliber single-shot Crickett rifle made and marketed for kids. The children’s mother was reportedly outside the house when the shooting took place, and apparently didn’t know that the gun contained a shell.

“Just one of those crazy accidents,” said the Cumberland County coroner, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Clearly the issue of parental responsibility is at the center of this tragedy. But against the backdrop of the Newtown massacre and ongoing national debate over regulating firearms, it also points back to the big business of guns—including how the industry profits from products aimed at children.

The Pennsylvania-based maker of Crickett rifles, Keystone Sporting Arms, markets its guns with the slogan “My First Rifle.” They are available with different barrel and stock designs, including some made in hot pink to appeal to young girls.

Business has boomed since the company’s inception in 1996, according to its website. In its first year, it had four employees and produced 4,000 rifles for kids; by 2008 it had greatly expanded its operations, with 70 employees and an output of 60,000 rifles a year. KSA’s site states that its goal is “to instill gun safety in the minds of youth shooters and encourage them to gain the knowledge and respect that hunting and shooting activities require and deserve.”

But a visit to the “kids corner” page reveals a gallery of photos that some people might find unsettling:

Then again, KSA’s approach to arming America’s tykes may be no more disturbing than the post-Newtown boom in bulletproof backpacks and school clothes.

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Here’s How the Rifle That Just Killed a 2-Year-Old Girl Is Marketed for Kids

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Don’t Use Jason Collins As an Excuse to Blame Homophobia on Black People

by Justin Thomas Posted on May 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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Jason Collins began his coming out essay in Sports Illustrated with the words, “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”

There’s a reason Collins chose to mention he was black and gay—as though those two things were in as much tension as being the first openly gay male athlete active in one of America’s favorite sports—but it deserves a more thoughtful examination than the one offered by Charles P. Pierce in Grantland. Pierce, feigning a familiarity with the history of the civil rights movement and the black church belied by the weakness of the evidence he’s able to provide, writes:

His explanation for his decision to come out is rich with the historical “dual identity” forced on black Americans under Jim Crow, and the similar dynamic within which he lived as a gay man. Homophobia in the black community—indeed, even among the leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1960s—was some of the most virulent and stubborn of all, and there are still some who resent the equation of the gay rights movement with their struggle. In his announcement in Sports Illustrated, then, Collins gave every indication that he’s fully aware of the historic and cultural dimensions of his decision, and of the sacrifices made elsewhere so that he would be free to make it now.

Look, man: It’s called “double consciousness,” not “dual identity,” and it’s an intellectual concept applicable to black existence in America prior to Jim Crow and after its demise. “Dual identity” is what Batman has. And Pierce’s mangling of W.E.B. DuBois is the least of the problems with this paragraph.

There was certainly homophobia in the civil rights movement—but in the 1950s and ’60s, American society was homophobic, and Pierce offers no evidence that the civil rights movement was more homophobic than any other American institution during that period. Given that one of the architects of the civil rights movement’s nonviolent strategy was Bayard Rustin, it was arguably less homophobic than much of society at the time. With a few notable exceptions, surviving leaders of the movement—from Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) to Rev. James Lawson to Jesse Jackson to Julian Bond—are all in favor of gay and lesbian rights.

There’s also little evidence for the proposition that black homophobia is “the most virulent and stubborn of all.” Black folks, who were disenfranchised for centuries, didn’t put any of those old anti-sodomy laws on the books. The legal architecture of discrimination based on sexual orientation is one of the few things in America that dates back to colonial times that wasn’t built by black people.

Rather than black homophobia, “stubborn” better describes black resistance to conservative appeals based on homophobia, or the determination of black voters in 2012 who defied a nationwide voter suppression campaign to elect a black president who has himself endorsed the right of same-sex couples to marry. “Virulent and stubborn” doesn’t really explain the sharp reversal in public opinion on gay rights happening not just in the black community but also everywhere else, a reversal so dramatic that the state with the fourth-largest black population in the country became one of the first to adopt marriage equality by a popular vote. In some polls, black voters lag behind other groups in approving of same-sex marriage, but the trend is clear, and black Americans’ loyalty to a party that supports marriage equality makes it clear that however broad the remaining opposition is, it isn’t very deep.

Worst of all, the only evidence Pierce offers for the idea that “the leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1960s” were the “most virulent and stubborn” homophobes of all (a description that doesn’t even fit Marion Barry) is a link to an article about Rev. William Owens, a Tennessee pastor bankrolled by the National Organization for Marriage as part of their (failed) racial-wedge strategy in 2012 who claims he was a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement.

Well he used to, anyway. Last year, I reached out to three actual surviving leaders of the Nashville sit-in movement, Lewis, Lawson, and Vivian. Not one of them had ever heard of Owens, and Lawson and Vivian were astonished that anyone who might have been part of that movement at that time would be fighting gay rights now. In the last NOM press release I saw, Owens had demoted himself from “leader” to “participant.” If you’re going to slander some of the greatest people America has ever been lucky enough to call her own, you need more examples than one guy history can’t even characterize as a backbencher.

Other than that, sure, he’s a perfect example of how homophobia in the civil rights movement was the most “stubborn and virulent” of all. Cool history, bro.

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Don’t Use Jason Collins As an Excuse to Blame Homophobia on Black People

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What the NRA’s Millions Do—And Don’t—Buy

by gammak Posted on May 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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In the days leading up to last month’s crucial votes on the most significant gun control legislation to come before the Senate in nearly two decades, polls showed that about 90 percent of Americans supported background checks for all gun purchases. But when the clerk called the roll, the centerpiece amendment—requiring background checks for firearm sales at gun shows, through classified ads and on the Internet—got just 54 yeas, six votes short of the 60 vote super-majority required.

Just four months after Adam Lanza killed 26 people at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and President Obama promised tougher gun laws, the vote proved to be the latest in a long-running string of victories for gun rights activists, the firearms industry, and particularly the National Rifle Association, the nation’s pre-eminent gun lobby.

The power of the gun lobby is rooted in multiple factors, among them the pure passion and single-mindedness of many gun owners, the NRA’s demonstrated ability to motivate its most fervent members to swarm their elected representatives, and the lobby’s ability to get out the vote on election day. But there’s little doubt that money, the political power it represents, and the fear of that power and money, which the NRA deftly exploits, have a lot to do with the group’s ability to repeatedly control the national debate about guns. Whether that fear is justified is an intriguing question—but it clearly exists. That has, perhaps, never been clearer than it was last month on Capitol Hill.


NRA’s School Security Plan Cites Phony Shooting


This Collection of NRA Ads Reveals Its Descent Into Crazy


Investigators Discover NRA Materials in Newtown Killer’s House


The NRA Myth of Gun-Free Zones


Gunmakers and the NRA Bet Big on Silencers. What Could Go Wrong?


EXCLUSIVE: Unmasking the NRA’s Inner Circle


Meet the NRA’s Board of Directors


The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys


How the NRA and Its Allies Helped Spread a Radical Gun Law Nationwide

See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

Big money, big gaps

For starters, the dollars and cents disparities are nothing short of staggering. The NRA and its allies in the firearms industries, along with the even more militant Gun Owners of America, have together poured nearly $81 million into House, Senate and presidential races since the 2000 election cycle, according to federal disclosures and a Center for Responsive Politics analysis done for the Center for Public Integrity.

The bulk of the cash—more than $46 million—has come in the form of independent expenditures made since court decisions in 2010 (especially the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision) essentially redefined electoral politics. Those decisions allowed individuals, corporations, associations and unions to make unlimited “independent” expenditures aimed at electing or defeating candidates in federal elections, so long as the expenditures were not “coordinated” with a candidate’s actual campaign.

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What the NRA’s Millions Do—And Don’t—Buy

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This Website Will Help You Outsmart the Supreme Court’s Anti-Transparency Ruling

by hu7vfd0 Posted on May 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states have no constitutional obligation to honor public records requests from non-residents. Journalists, who frequently rely on freedom of information laws to expose corruption and break open stories, fear that the decision may make it harder for them to access public records.

MuckRock, a website that files public records requests on behalf of activists, journalists, and private citizens for a small fee and posts the resulting records online, has a solution. The website has been helping out-of-staters seeking public records in Virginia and seven other states with similar laws—Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Tennessee—by pairing them with locals willing to co-file the requests. After Monday’s decision, MuckRock began offering free website subscriptions to citizens of those states to help keep that information flowing.

MuckRock cofounder Michael Morisy, who also works for the Boston Globe, says he “fully expects more states to at least look into adding these laws as they look for ways to cut down on costs for complying with public records requests and generally decrease the amount of people accessing this tool.”

That more states might move to block out-of-staters from filing open-records requests was apparent long before the Supreme Court’s decision, Morisy says. In the decades since federal and state Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, laws were first passed in the 1960s, states have added numerous exemptions limiting who can request information and narrowing the types of information that can be disclosed. But the court’s decision, he adds, is a “major step back.”

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This Website Will Help You Outsmart the Supreme Court’s Anti-Transparency Ruling

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You Won’t Believe What’s In Your Turkey Burger

by Aale Thomas Posted on May 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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More MoJo coverage of bacteria and health:


Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?


This Is Your Body on Microbes


Should You Take a Probiotic?


Poop Therapy: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Fecal Transplants


Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?


Antibiotics As Key to Curing Starvation


Why You Shouldn’t Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

Back in August 2011, the agribusiness giant Cargill recalled a stunning 36 million pounds of ground turkey tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella that had come from a single processing facility in Arkansas, a failure that eventually sickened 136 people and killed another. The company shut down the plant, tweaked its process (mainly by adding to and “intensifying” its system of spraying meat with antimicrobial fluid), and quickly reopened it. Within a month, the company had to recall another 108,000 pounds of ground turkey from the same plant, because it was infected with the same strain of superbug salmonella.

Have things gotten any cleaner in the world of Big Turkey since those events? Cargill says it has cleaned up its act, but recent research suggests that ground turkey still has an antibiotic-resistant-pathogen problem. The latest evidence comes from Consumer Reports, which has just published the results of testing it did on 257 samples of ground turkey picked up from retailers around the country, produced by a variety of processors, including Cargill. CR contacted Cargill with the results, and got the following response:

“As we’ve publicly stated over the past year and a half, no stone was left unturned in our efforts to determine the originating source of salmonella Heidelberg associated with the ground-turkey recalls, yet to this day we do not know the origin of the bacteria linked to outbreak of illnesses,” said Mike Robach, vice president of corporate food safety and regulatory affairs for Cargill in Minneapolis. He provided a long list of steps that Cargill has taken since the outbreak to make its ground turkey safer.

Even so, the results of Consumer Reports’ tests won’t make you eager to order that next turkey burger: “More than half of the packages of raw ground meat and patties tested positive for fecal bacteria.”

Overall, 90 percent of the samples tested by CR researchers carried at least one of the five bacteria they looked for—and “almost all” of the bacteria strains they found showed resistance to at least one antibiotic. The two fecal-related bacteria strains—enterococcus and E. coli—showed up the most frequently:

Consumer Reports

What’s more, those bacteria tended to be superbugs—that is, resistant to at least one antibiotic:

Consumer Reports

You’ll note from the above charts both good and bad news about salmonella, the source of that 2011 Cargill outbreak. Happily, salmonella was rare in the meat CR tested—just 12 samples contained it, or 5 percent of the total. Unhappily, though, the salmonella they did find tended to be of the superbug variety—eight of those samples carried salmonella resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics. And there’s evidence of lingering problems at that Arkansas plant of Cargill’s—one of the multi-resistant salmonella strains came from there, CR reports.

Consumer Reports also tested samples ground turkey labeled organic, “antibiotic-free,” and “no antibiotics.” (Under USDA code, meat labeled organic must come from animals that were never treated with antibiotics.) The bacterial strains that turned up in these products were much less likely to be antibiotic-resistant.

Consumer Reports

The Consumer Reports study comes on the heels of a troubling analysis of Food & Drug Administration meat-testing data performed by Environmental Working Group. Every year, the FDA randomly selects samples of meat from retailers, tests them for resistant bacteria, and publishes the results in a manner that’s nearly indecipherable (try it yourself—latest report, released in February, here). EWG slogged through the results (report here) and found that 81 percent of ground turkey samples contained traces of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

All of which shines a harsh spotlight on the Food & Drug Administration’s “voluntary” approach to curbing antibiotic use on farms. Between 2003 and 2011, antibiotic use on US livestock farms soared from 20 million pounds per year to 30 million pounds—a jaw-dropping 50 percent leap. These facilities now suck in 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the US. The great bulk of these drugs are used not to treat sick animals, but rather to make them grow faster and keep them alive until slaughter under tight, filthy conditions.

Meanwhile, there’s the US Department of Agriculture’s imminent plan to slash the number of inspectors it places on poultry-industry kill lines (chicken and turkey) while simultaneously allowing those same kill lines to be sped up.

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You Won’t Believe What’s In Your Turkey Burger

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Ed Markey Is On Track to Replace John Kerry—With the Help of the "Green Billionaire"

by olekdd3 Posted on May 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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Congressman Ed Markey is one step closer to replacing Secretary of State John Kerry in the US Senate. On Tuesday, he cruised past John Lynch, a fellow Democratic congressman, in the special Democratic primary in Massachusetts to fill Kerry’s vacated seat. With nearly all precincts reporting, Markey held a commanding lead of 57 percent to 43 percent over Lynch.

Markey will face ex-Navy SEAL Gabriel Gomez in a special general election to be held in late June. Gomez is a political newcomer. His only prior run for office was an bid to win a seat on the board of selectmen in tiny Cohasset, Mass. (He lost.) That didn’t stop Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic super-PAC, from describing Gomez as “Mitt Romney Jr.,” a businessman-turned-politician who wants to cut benefits for senior citizens and lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Gomez, for his part, has pledged to “reboot” Congress by instituting, among other changes, term limits for politicians and a lifetime ban on lobbying.

Markey has carved out a liberal record during his 20 terms in the House—a long political career that his opponents will no doubt use against him. Over those years, he has established a reputation as one of Congress’ leading advocates for protecting the environment and fighting climate change. He co-authored one of the most comprehensive pieces of legislation to address climate change, the American Clean Energy and Security Act in 2009, which failed to make it through Congress.

Markey’s strong environmental record helps explain why he got an assist in his win over Lynch from the San Francisco hedge fund investor and environmentalist Tom Steyer. Despite Markey and Lynch agreeing to a “People’s Pledge” to keep outside money out of their race, Steyer’s NextGen super-PAC spent more than $400,000 on online ads and microtargeting, often hammering Lynch over his support for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Steyer’s involvement added some drama to a off-year primary with a lackluster turnout.

Steyer says he will use his fortune, estimated at $1.4 billion, to drag the issue of climate change into the spotlight in American politics and to combat the influence of climate change deniers and the oil lobby. He’s taking a similar approach to the climate issue that New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg takes on gun control: supporting candidates who see things his way and attacking those who do not. “Really, what we’re trying to do is to make a point that people who make good decisions on this should be rewarded, and people should be aware that if they do the wrong thing, the American voters are watching and they will be punished,” Steyer told the Hill.

Long active in California politics, the Markey-Lynch race was Steyer’s first big foray as an outside spender into a marquee Congressional race. He drew howls with an open letter giving Lynch a deadline of “high noon” to flip his position on the Keystone pipeline. But by the end of the campaign, Steyer’s spending appeared to have boosted Markey (even if the veteran congressman didn’t really need the help to win Tuesday’s primary). And a dedicated environmentalist is now on the cusp of filling John Kerry’s old seat—exactly what Steyer wants.

Steyer has yet to say if he’ll go after Gabriel Gomez in the general election. But he’s one for one so far, and given every indication he plans to spend a lot more money in the months and years ahead.

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Ed Markey Is On Track to Replace John Kerry—With the Help of the "Green Billionaire"

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