Tag Archives: top stories

Jesse Jackson Is Taking on Silicon Valley’s Epic Diversity Problem

by MikaylaU07 Posted on June 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Illustration by Radio

In May 2014, the Reverend Jesse Jackson traveled from his home in Chicago to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, to address the search giant’s annual shareholder meeting. Technology isn’t what you would call a core area for the 73-year-old civil rights leader, who carries an old-school flip phone and oversees a website, Rainbowpush.org, that looks like a relic from the GeoCities era. But Jackson had a bone to pick. Despite Google’s mission to make the world’s data “universally accessible and useful,” it had been fighting for years to stop the release of federal data on diversity in its workforce. “There should be nothing to hide, and much to be proud of and promote,” Jackson told the company’s executives after politely requesting its diversity stats. “I ask you, in the name of all you represent, to pursue this mission.”

Ask him anything! On Wednesday, July 1, Jesse Jackson will be on Reddit, answering your questions on this and other topics from 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. ET (8:30-9:45 a.m. PT). Photo by John H. White, via Wikipedia Commons.

David Drummond, the company’s only black high-level executive, sized up Jackson, who stood out amid the mostly white crowd. “Many of the companies in the Valley have been reluctant to divulge that data, including Google,” he responded. “And quite frankly, I think we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re wrong about that.”

The exchange was the public culmination of some behind-the-scenes arm wrestling that was vintage Jesse Jackson. Drummond, 52, was an old friend of the reverend who had volunteered for his 1988 presidential campaign and helped launch Jackson’s first tech initiative, the Silicon Valley Project, 11 years later. The two men had met quietly a month or so earlier at Google HQ, and again around the time of the shareholder meeting. Drummond knew Jackson would ask for the stats, and Jackson knew Drummond would agree to release them. Two weeks later, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, Laszlo Bock, did just that. “Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” he said, upon revealing that the company’s overall workforce was only 30 percent female, 3 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black.

Continue Reading »

Source article: 

Jesse Jackson Is Taking on Silicon Valley’s Epic Diversity Problem

Posted in GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jesse Jackson Is Taking on Silicon Valley’s Epic Diversity Problem

The Threatened Atlantic Puffins Are Nesting And It’s Adorable

by JeannieHeberlin Posted on June 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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

The Atlantic puffins are back…for now. After spending much of the year on the open sea, the photogenic birds have made their annual trip to the North Atlantic shores of Maine, Newfoundland, and the United Kingdom to breed.

Click here to read our feature on Atlantic Puffins

But as Rowan Jacobsen reported in a Mother Jones feature last summer, rising ocean temperatures have taken a huge toll on these seabirds. Cold-water thriving zooplankton, critical to the Gulf of Maine’s food web, have reached their lowest numbers ever, forcing the fish that puffins feed to their young to go elsewhere for food. Without a reliable source of food, in 2013, only 10 percent of puffin pairs in burrows tracked by researchers successfully fledged chicks (normally that rate is 77 percent).

This isn’t the first time puffins in Maine have faced an existential threat. After 300 years of hunting and over harvesting eggs, Atlantic puffin colonies in Maine nearly disappeared. Fortunately, a successful Audubon Society initiative in the 1970s brought them back to nesting islands off the coast of Maine; by 2013, 1,000 pairs were laying eggs there.

During the past couple of years, cold water has returned to the gulf of Maine, which is great news for the puffins. In 2014, they saw a rebound: 75 percent of chicks survived. This year they are back again and as cute as ever. You can watch them below on the Audubon’s puffin live cam until August when they leave again for the ocean:

If that’s not enough, below are some more photos and video of Atlantic puffins:

Randy Rimland/Shutterstock

Helen Kattai/Shutterstock

Eric Isselee/Shutterstock

gabrisigno/Shutterstock

See the original post – 

The Threatened Atlantic Puffins Are Nesting And It’s Adorable

Posted in Anchor, FF, Free Press, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Threatened Atlantic Puffins Are Nesting And It’s Adorable

Congress Doesn’t Think Agricultural Sustainability Has Anything to Do With Your Health

by MichellBidmead Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Every five years, the US government revisits its Dietary Guidelines—suggestions for how Americans should eat. The guidelines won’t legally require you to, say, eat an apple a day, but they do affect things like agricultural subsidies and public school lunches, so they’re fairly influential.

When the committee tasked with making scientific recommendations for the 2015 Dietary Guidelines released its report this year, it ruffled some feathers. For the first time it included concerns about the environmental issues linked to certain dietary patterns and agricultural practices—for example, how eating less meat and more plant-based foods is “more health promoting and is associated with a lesser environmental impact.” Or that assuring food security might rely on creating agricultural practices that “reduce environmental impacts and conserve resources.”

Some lobbyists and politicians, especially those who pad their pockets with cash from Big Food and Big Ag, weren’t too happy about these suggestions. As I’ve written in the past, the suggestion that plant-based diets might be healthier for people and the planet messes with the meat industry’s bottom line, so why would they back it? In letters sent to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack over the past few months, industry groups have tried to argue that sustainability issues do not fall within the scope of the Dietary Guidelines. One letter from the National Cattleman’s Beef Association argued that the advisory committee “clearly does not have the background or expertise to evaluate the complex relationship between food production and the dietary needs of a growing American and international population.”

The House Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, which accepted at least $1.4 million from the food industry in 2013 and 2014, apparently caved to these complaints. It recently stuck a rider in its 2016 Agricultural Appropriations bill that would A) explicitly prohibit the upcoming Dietary Guidelines from mentioning anything other than diet and nutrient intake, and B) force the guidelines to only rely on scientific evidence that has been rated “Grade 1: Strong” by the Department of Agriculture. Politico reported on Thursday that a similar Senate agriculture appropriations rider would force any advice in the Dietary Guidelines to be “solely nutritional and dietary in nature.”

In an unprecedented move, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has shot back with a letter of its own. Health and food systems should be more closely related in the government’s eyes, the committee argued. “Future food insecurity is predictable without attention to the safety, quality, cost, and sustainability of the food supply,” the letter stated, adding that “the US health and public health systems are burdened with preventable health problems.” In other words, to narrow the reach of the Dietary Guidelines is to ignore the connection between things like exercise and obesity, for instance, or agricultural pesticide use and disease. To read more of the DGAC’s arguments, see the full letter here.

Expect the finalized Dietary Guidelines late this year. In the meantime, it looks like the DGAC isn’t giving up the battle for a more holistic national framework for how people eat. They certainly have Food Politics author Marion Nestle on their side; as she summarizes on her blog:

Members of the DGAC were asked to review and consider the science of diet and health and did so. They reported what they believe the science says. Some segments of the food industry didn’t like the science so they are using the political system to fight back. That some members of Congress would go along with this is shameful.

Read original article:  

Congress Doesn’t Think Agricultural Sustainability Has Anything to Do With Your Health

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Congress Doesn’t Think Agricultural Sustainability Has Anything to Do With Your Health

Here’s What We Know About the Terrorist Attacks That Hit Tunisia, France, and Kuwait

by KKMBrigette Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Dozens of people were killed on Friday in Tunisia, France, and Kuwait in what authorities in all three countries are calling terrorist attacks. Here’s what we know so far.

Tunisia

The deadliest attack happened at a resort in Sousse, a Tunisian beach town popular with European tourists. Tunisian officials said 27 people were killed on the beach near the Imperial Marhaba hotel, some of them foreigners.

“One attacker opened fire with a Kalashnikov on tourists and Tunisians on the beach of the hotel,” a local worker told Reuters. “It was just one attacker. He was a young guy dressed in shorts like he was a tourist himself.”

John Yeoman, a tourist apparently staying at the Imperial Marhaba, tweeted descriptions of the attack and a photo of the barricade he constructed in his hotel room.

The shooting comes three months after another major terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, and it could devastate Tunisia’s vital tourist economy. “This could well be a dagger through the heart of Tunisian tourism, which would have very dark implications,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Mother Jones.

France

An apparent lone attacker drove a car through the gates of a factory in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, a city near Lyon in southwestern France, killing one man and leaving his severed head on the front gate of the complex. Gartenstein-Ross said the decapitation suggested the attack may have been inspired by ISIS, whose execution videos have frequently shown the decapitation of Western hostages.

French authorities arrested the suspected attacker, whom French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said was possibly named Yassin Sahli (his name has been spelled differently in various media reports) and was previously known to French law enforcement. “This person was under investigation for radicalization but this investigation was not renewed in 2008,” the Guardian reported. “He had no police record.”

KUWAIT

ISIS, the Sunni jihadist group that controls parts of Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for a bomb that exploded at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait City. Media reports have given conflicting numbers of victims, but the Kuwait Watch Organization, a human rights group, told the Associated Press that 16 people were killed. The bombing is the largest terrorist attack in Kuwaiti history; while Kuwait is a majority Shiite country ruled by a Sunni royal family, such large-scale sectarian violence is rare.

Just three days ago, an ISIS spokesman called for the group’s followers to ramp up attacks during the holy month of Ramadan. “Muslims everywhere, we congratulate you over the arrival of the holy month,” said Abu Muhammad al-Adnani in an audio statement released on Tuesday. “Be keen to conquer in this holy month and to become exposed to martyrdom.”

Continued here:

Here’s What We Know About the Terrorist Attacks That Hit Tunisia, France, and Kuwait

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What We Know About the Terrorist Attacks That Hit Tunisia, France, and Kuwait

Read the 7 Most Ridiculous Lines from Justice Antonin Scalia’s Obamacare Dissent

by LavonneGaines Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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

On Thursday morning, the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare’s insurance subsidies in a 6-3 decision penned by Chief Justice John Roberts. Legal experts had long dismissed the merits of the case, and it even turned out that the plaintiffs had questionable standing.

But to three of the court’s conservative justices, the court’s decision to side with the government is a sign not only that the court is full of partisan hacks, but also that words themselves hold no meaning.

In a blistering 21-page dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia accused John Roberts of abandoning his judicial independence to defend Obamacare at any and all costs. “Normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved,” Scalia writes.

Just how absurd is it, in Scalia’s mind, that the court upheld the subsidies? Here are his other prime quotes of indignation at the majority’s opinion:

“Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.'”
“The decision rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare”.
“The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.’ That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so.”
“You would think the answer would be obvious—so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it.”
“Impossible possibility, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!”
“Today’s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of.”
“The cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”

View post:

Read the 7 Most Ridiculous Lines from Justice Antonin Scalia’s Obamacare Dissent

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Read the 7 Most Ridiculous Lines from Justice Antonin Scalia’s Obamacare Dissent

Decoding the Scene From Dylann Roof’s "Favorite Film"

by TarahFreeland Posted on June 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Among the many violent and racist images in the apparent manifesto of Dylann Roof, the alleged mass murderer, is something slightly more exotic: a reference to the 2011 ultra-violent Japanese crime drama, Himizu (a New York Times “Critics Pick”). The manifesto uncovered on Saturday morning reads: “To take a saying from my favorite film, ‘Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society’.”

The movie, adapted from a popular manga by director Sion Sono, is set in tsunami-hit Japan in 2011, and follows the story of two teenagers—unloved, unwanted—struggling to survive amid the chaos wrought by the earthquake, and corruption. It’s a twisted and dark coming-of-age story (at some points a romance) that is beautifully shot and scored, but I wouldn’t say it’s an easy watch.

More Mother Jones coverage of the Charleston Shooting:


Here’s What We Know About the People Who Lost Their Lives in Charleston


Dylann Storm Roof Identified as Suspected Gunman in Charleston Mass Shooting (Updated)


Should the Charleston Attack Be Called Terrorism?


The Gun Lobby Blames the Charleston Mass Shooting on “Gun-Free Zones”


WATCH: Obama Just Delivered Remarks About the Mass Shooting in Charleston


Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame


Families of Charleston Shooting Victims: “We Forgive You”

The full scene in which that quote appears is in many ways far more disturbing than the quote in the manifesto, and might contain even darker clues about what might have inspired Roof’s attack at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, S.C., on Wednesday, which killed nine people. One of the main characters, Sumida—a brooding, angry boy—is recording his own voice onto a tape deck, preparing for an act of mass violence in the streets of Japan:

It’s May 7, the first day of the rest of my life. No police, no suicide. I guess I’m stingier than I figured. Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt. I want to use it for the good of society. I must have been born to do some good. I’ll kill idiots who trouble citizens.

Sumida has just brutally attacked and killed his father in a fit of rage in the previous scene. Caked in mud, he returns to a trailer to contemplate his next steps—some kind of vigilante justice—covering his face and body in multi-colored paints, and rather calmly intoning his plans. He then takes a large knife and begins killing people.

The choice of a Japanese film might seem peculiar at first, given the manifesto is a white supremacy rant. But in a section titled “East Asians”, the essay reads: “Even if we were to go extinct they could carry something on. They are by nature very racist and could be great allies of the White race. I am not opposed at all to allies with the Northeast Asian races.”

The film was widely praised by reviewers. The Guardian wrote that the director “Sono retains his go-for-the-throat approach, but the violence here somehow connects with the brutal economic conditions, and he fosters very tender, affecting performances.”

If Roof watched the whole film, he surely missed the point—the moral universe of the film is pretty clear. The film ends with Sumida’s friend Keiko convincing him to give himself up to the police and seek redemption. The end of the film, tracking through the rubble left by the tsunami, is especially haunting.

“Let’s go to the police,” she says. “Sumida. Don’t give up. Live! Sumida. Say something. Don’t give up! Have a dream!”

Roof did the opposite: he extinguished the hopes and dreams of so many innocent people and their families on Wednesday night.

Watch the film’s trailer below:

Himizu (trailer) from Cinefamily on Vimeo.

Source: 

Decoding the Scene From Dylann Roof’s "Favorite Film"

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Decoding the Scene From Dylann Roof’s "Favorite Film"

Want To Get Rich? Become a Water Lawyer in California

by AlissaQdkhqo Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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

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

Want to get rich? Move to California, become a lawyer. Most important, specialize in water, because as the state’s drought drags on, every drop of coastal rain, every flake of Sierra snowpack, and every inch of reservoir water becomes both more valuable and more contested. Before long you’ll start counting rain drops—every one that fails to fall will ring cha-ching.

More MoJo coverage of the California Drought:


7 Key Facts About the Drought


Invasion of the Hedge Fund Almonds


California Is Literally Sinking Into the Ground


Bottled Water Comes From the Most Drought-Ridden Places in the Country


Weather-Sensitive Watering, and 4 Other Simple Fixes for California’s Drought


It Takes HOW Much Water to Make Greek Yogurt?!


California Has Cut Water to Some Farmers. What Exactly Does That Mean?

The latest windfall to California’s legal community came Friday, when the State Water Resources Control Board announced it was cutting certain historical water rights—held by some farmers, communities, and companies for more than a century. In a normal state with a normal drought, this wouldn’t be too much of an issue. But California water policies are so old (and so unsuited to the state’s desert ecosystem) that they might be outside the jurisdiction of the present-day water board. With barely a weekend for curtailment news to simmer, the summer air is already thick with lawsuit rumors.

“California has the most complex system of water rights in the world,” says Buzz Thompson, a legal expert in said system at Stanford University. The state’s problems trace back to its earliest days. In order to take the stress out of drafting up a constitution from scratch, California’s founders adopted English Common Law, and customized it with caveats to fit their needs. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother amending the Common Law rules on water allocations.

The English, and thus Californians today, used a system called riparian law: You are allowed to use a reasonable amount of any tributary, creek, stream, or river that abuts or bisects your land. This worked great in rainy England, veined with waterways. “That type of system of makes no sense in California,” says Thompson, “because there is a lot of land through which no river or stream passes.”

If you want water to run through your land in California, you have to dig a path for it yourself. The necessity of canals and pipes led to an irrigation-based water rights system called prior appropriation. Under this system, you are allocated a reasonable amount water from the source from whence you diverted, as long as you put it to good use.

Here’s where things get ridiculous. The system for establishing rights to those flows was—prior to 1914—absolutely bananas, leading to a lot of inappropriate water usage in a state that was, and remains, essentially a desert.

To lay claim to running water back then, all you had to do was post and record a notice of the diversion. In 1901, the mayor of San Francisco used this law to claim the Tuolumne River by posting a note on a tree. The state finally figured out its own water scarcity in 1914, when it passed a law requiring any new claims to submit an application to a state-controlled board (now known as the State Water Resources Control Board).

Literally kept in an old safe in the back room of an office building in Sacramento, these slips of paper determine how much water each rights-holder is due. More importantly, they determine the order in which the rights holder gets to drink. And that’s determined historically: First in line, first in law. “The whole system was created through action on the ground rather than someone making a legal regime and then codifying the system,” says Leon Szeptycki, the director of the Water in the West program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Setting up a first come, first serve water system in a desert is pretty insane. (For one thing, it creates an uneven patchwork of water haves and have-nots.) What’s crazier is that political pressures at the time meant the pre-1914 allocation and riparian rights got grandfathered right past the whole thing. That’s right: There are people in California whose right to water came from putting a piece of paper on a tree, and those rights are some of the most senior in the state. And they don’t just belong to people. Corporate farming conglomerates, sprawling rural irrigation districts, several cities, and even the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife have pre-1914 water rights.

Which brings us to last Friday. This move restricts access to water rights holders whose claims date from 1903 to 1914. (The state had already curtailed all post-1914 rights). Thompson says the agency’s move is both expected and incredibly historic. Expected because without precipitation the state is forced to cut off water from senior rights holders. Historic because the State Water Resources Control Board is a fairly cautious agency that does not like being sued.

“The most important thing about the most recent curtailment order is it reflects the depth of our current drought,” he says. In response to Friday’s announcement, many of the pre-1914 rights holders announced plans to sue the water resource board because their rights predate the existence of the board. In fact, the State Water Resources Control Board’s charter states that it only controls permits that come after 1914.

On the other hand, the board’s charter does not prevent it from curtailing pre-1914 rights, neither riparian nor appropriated. Further, there are several state statutes giving the board the authority to police both reasonable uses of water and illegal diversions. “Those statutes as well as other legislative and legal decisions I think provide the board sufficient authority to issue the type of curtailment orders that they did,” says Thompson.

And as long as the drought continues, these curtailments will continue to reach back in time; all the way to the most senior rights holders, whose allotments trace back to the Gold Rush.

But even though Governor Brown teased an overhaul of the state’s allocation system earlier this year, legal experts doubt this is possible. That’s because California’s water rights knot is enshrined in the state’s constitution. Any challenges would probably have to be backed up at the federal level.

Caught between the calcified reality of the drought and the calcified words in the state’s constitution, the curtailments will probably continue—and the lawsuits will follow. And like we’ve said before, any explanation of California’s drought is always incomplete. Even if the state does win its case, enforcing the curtailments is an entirely different dilemma, with woefully outdated and outclassed methods of tracking water. These conflicts aren’t going away anytime soon. Which reminds me: Feel free to tell your kid to study water law too.

Source:  

Want To Get Rich? Become a Water Lawyer in California

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Want To Get Rich? Become a Water Lawyer in California

Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame

by TiffanySimpkins Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Shrinking newsrooms, digital “churnalism,” and armies of pundits carving up increasingly divided audiences—that’s the media we’re told we must accept to live in America today.

But have hope, news consumer! There’s another, less remarked-upon media phenomenon going on: the return of the heroic local newsroom dominating breaking national coverage.

From Boston to Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, one thing has become crystal clear: To get real reporting—and to get it fast—you’ve got to switch off cable and go local. It’s here you’ll find the scoops, the sense of place, the authentic compassion; it’s here you can avoid the predictable blather from a candidate, or pundit, or hack filling airtime. It’s here you’ll find out what’s really happening to a particular group of Americans who have just been shoved into a tragic spotlight. Turn off the TV and Google the local paper on your phone. Find their Twitter feed. Follow their journalists.

Take Charleston. During the early hours of the story on Wednesday night, cable news frustrated viewers by coming late to the game, according to this breakdown by Adweek‘s cable-addict Mark Joyella. (CNN was first to report the news just after 10 p.m., and it stayed with the story, Joyella writes—though it attracted criticism on social media for simulcasting a live feed from its global operations, CNN International, instead of staying domestic.) When Fox News and MSNBC got into the story on Thursday, their programs lined up the usual suspects to engage in a cliched debate over the national narrative: Was it guns? Was it race? Was it mental illness? And the nationally televised blame game began in earnest: While Fox mused about whether pastors should pack heat, and attacked President Obama for bringing up gun control, MSNBC commentator Michael Eric Dyson criticized the president for “obscuring” race with guns: “When will this president finally see that he doesn’t have to run from his race or run from blackness?” Dyson said. I could go on.

Meanwhile, the Post and Courier, Charleston’s major daily newspaper—winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize—seized its hometown story immediately, posting an article just before 10 p.m. the night of the shooting. It hasn’t stopped pumping out sensitively reported articles from deep within the affected community since that first notice. The paper assigned somewhere between a half and two-thirds of its newsroom of 80 people to the task of covering the unfolding story, trying to patch reporters in on shifts as much as possible to keep them from burning out in the field. After covering the death of Walter Scott two months ago, the newsroom was experienced in switching into high gear, “though you’re never quite prepared for any of these things,” Mitch Pugh, the newspaper’s executive editor, told me on Friday.

For this newsroom, it’s personal, and reporters have begun to feel the strain. “A lot of our folks know people who were either in the church or close to people in the church,” Pugh said. “We’re trying to get people more into a shift mode, and get some mental health breaks, and some downtime to get some rest.”

Some reporters, he said, just “don’t want to let go of it.” That’s the nature of reporting in a city traumatized by an event of this magnitude.

Much more so than the bigger guys who parachute in, the major advantage of being the hometown paper is that this newsroom gets it. The journalists “understand deeply the complex relationship this community has had with the issue of race,” Pugh said. “I think we’re able to report on those issues in a more responsible and authoritative way than some of the outside media.”

Cable television has been on the ground in Charleston, doing reporting and making sure Lindsay Graham and other candidates answer tough questions about a Confederate flag flying near the statehouse. But not like the Post and Courier, whose coverage has sharply focused on the community—its grieving, the memorials, intensely moving profiles of the victims, and political reactions—not simply the obsessive speculation about the motivation of the alleged killer, 21-year-old Dylann Roof.

It’s a way for the paper to “focus on our community, on the victims, on the efforts to come together and heal,” Pugh told me.

Mourners cry out during a prayer vigil held for the victims of Wednesday’s shooting at Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston. Grace Beahm/The Post And Courier/AP

That intimacy with the community has led to some extra caution. With the stakes so high, getting it wrong is simply not an option. The newspaper, for example, knew the names of some victims on Wednesday night, but waited until they were confirmed through more official channels before reporting them. Any error would be magnified under the strain of shock and anger. “We weren’t interested in being first on that,” Pugh said. “We were interested in being right.”

But they could not get everything right. When newspapers hit the streets on Thursday, some were affixed with a jarring advertisement for a gun shop just above the headline: “Church attack kills 9“. The outraged reaction was immediate and the paper apologized. “I think that being forthright and honest and taking responsibility, most people will understand and accept that,” Pugh said of readers who called and wrote to complain. The paper now has policies in place “to ensure that does not happen again,” he added.

The increased profile may have also led to unwanted attention in the form of a potential hacking attack against the paper’s website, which became inaccessible on Friday for “20-to-30 minutes at a time, sporadically,” across the morning, Pugh said. The companies responsible for hosting the website investigated the possibility of an attack. “It’s starting to look like someone tried to take our site down,” Pugh told me, though it was too early to confirm.

The Post and Courier’s response to the massacre is reminiscent of other newspapers dominating the coverage when tragedy strikes in their communities: The Baltimore Sun’s relentless coverage of the protests after the death of Freddie Gray; the Boston Globe’s award-winning coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and manhunt; the St Louis Post-Dispatch’s forensic, and visually powerful (and also award-winning) coverage of the death of Michael Brown and furious protests for justice in Ferguson. There’s little wonder there’s some camaraderie among these city papers. In April, the Boston Globe sent lunch to the Baltimore Sun’s newsroom, a way of paying forward another act of generosity when in April 2013, the Chicago Tribune bought the Globe pizzas during the bombing coverage.

A letter from the Tribune to the Globe read: “We can’t buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch.”

In each of these papers: heart-breaking, personal stories, rendered powerfully whether a national audience was watching or not.

We were.

The Post and Courier’s approach can be felt in the op-ed pages, too. A Thursday editorial read: “A shared revulsion for the killer’s inhumanity—and for the persisting poison of racism that apparently sparked his barbaric deed—unites us. A shared commitment for a better, more understanding future drives us.”

Taken from: 

Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Charleston’s Hometown Newspaper Is Putting Awful Cable News to Shame

Rand Paul’s Plan to Give the Economy a "Steriod Injection" Could Have Scary Side Effects

by AlvinMacDonnell Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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

On Thursday, GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) unveiled his plan to give the economy a “steroid injection” by rewriting the country’s tax code down to a simple, straightforward flat tax of 14.5 percent on personal income and a 14.5 percent “business activity tax.” By Paul’s reckoning, this would save taxpayers billions and supercharge the economy almost immediately upon implementation. But at least one nonprofit group that advocates tax reform is saying that, just like a real steroid injection, Paul’s scheme to quickly bulk up the economy may have long-term and devastating effects for its health.

Setting aside all other questions about the credibility of a flat tax, nonprofit think tank Citizens for Tax Justice released its analysis of Paul’s proposal, and it’s ugly.

When the dust clears, this would leave the federal government with $1.2 trillion less in tax revenue in fiscal year 2016 if the plan were implemented immediately—a reduction of about one-third in total federal revenues. Over a decade, the plan would cost a stunning $15 trillion.

Ultimately, the fiscal realities of the tax plan might not matter. The flat tax has never caught fire as a presidential election issue. In 2012, Herman Cain had his “9-9-9” plan and Rick Perry suggested a 20 percent flat tax. Most famously, in 1996 there was Steve Forbes, who briefly looked like he could turn his magazine-famous name into a politically relevant one—but didn’t.

Link: 

Rand Paul’s Plan to Give the Economy a "Steriod Injection" Could Have Scary Side Effects

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rand Paul’s Plan to Give the Economy a "Steriod Injection" Could Have Scary Side Effects

The Gun Lobby Blames the Charleston Mass Shooting on "Gun-Free Zones"

by cazaresibiuieftina Posted on June 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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

In the aftermath of the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, gun rights activists and their allies in the conservative media are once again blaming “gun-free zones,” arguing that an armed citizen could have otherwise been at the church to stop the attack. As Mother Jones has previously reported, there has never been any evidence that mass shooters picked their targets based on gun regulations; to the contrary, data from scores of cases shows perpetrators had other specific motivations for where they attacked, including racial hatred, as is strongly suspected to be the case in Charleston. The idea that armed citizens stop crimes in the United States has also been wildly exaggerated by the gun lobby, as a new study reaffirms.

One of the gun lobby’s key talking points is that firearms are frequently used in self-defense—as often as 2.5 million times per year. The widely repeated claim has its origins in a 1993 telephone survey conducted by a pro-gun researcher, and while the numbers have since been walked back to some degree, the National Rifle Association asserts there are at least three-quarters of a million defensive gun uses per year. But a new report from the Violence Policy Center analyzing federal data shows that even this claim is way overstated. America’s legions of “good guys with guns,” in other words, are a myth (and not least when it comes to mass shootings).

Using FBI data, the study shows citizens are far more likely to use guns to commit violent crimes than to defend against them. The FBI’s 2012 “Supplementary Homicide Report” tallied 8,342 criminal gun homicides nationwide, while finding only 259 justifiable gun homicides from around the country, as identified in reports from state and local law enforcement agencies.

Moreover, 13 states reported no justifiable gun homicides at all in 2012, according to the report. That included states with large urban regions like New York and New Jersey, as well as rural states such as North Dakota and Wyoming. Notably, Wyoming, which has a small population, lax gun laws, and a high gun-ownership rate, also led the nation in 2012 for gun suicides and had the highest per capita costs from gun violence. (You can read more about that in Mother Jones’ groundbreaking investigation of the $229 billion annual cost of gun violence in America.)

In the five-year period between 2007 and 2011, there were a total of 29,618,300 violent crimes committed, according to the study. Among those, people used guns in self-defense 235,700 times.

Even with an additional 103,000 defensive gun uses related to property crimes over the same five-year period, the total still comes to fewer than 70,000 a year—less than 10 percent of the amount claimed by the NRA and other gun rights advocates.

Originally posted here: 

The Gun Lobby Blames the Charleston Mass Shooting on "Gun-Free Zones"

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, Citizen, FF, GE, Holmes, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Gun Lobby Blames the Charleston Mass Shooting on "Gun-Free Zones"