Tag Archives: top stories

For the First Time, California Is Enforcing Water Restrictions

by LanoraKitamura Posted on April 1, 2015

Mother Jones

Today, California Governor Jerry Brown announced mandatory water restrictions for the first time in the state’s history. The announcement follows a drought of more than three years, which has officials worrying that Californians may have only one year of drinking water left.

The regulations require California cities to decrease water use by 25 percent, though, crucially, only requires agricultural users to report their water use and submit drought management plans. Agriculture accounts for about 80 percent of California’s water usage. (For more drought background, check out our past coverage on agricultural water use—almonds are the biggest suck—and municipal water use.)

From the press release:

The following is a summary of the executive order issued by the Governor today.

Save Water

For the first time in state history, the Governor has directed the State Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory water reductions in cities and towns across California to reduce water usage by 25 percent. This savings amounts to approximately 1.5 million acre-feet of water over the next nine months, or nearly as much as is currently in Lake Oroville.

To save more water now, the order will also:

Replace 50 million square feet of lawns throughout the state with drought tolerant landscaping in partnership with local governments;
Direct the creation of a temporary, statewide consumer rebate program to replace old appliances with more water and energy efficient models; Require campuses, golf courses, cemeteries and other large landscapes to make significant cuts in water use; and
Prohibit new homes and developments from irrigating with potable water unless water-efficient drip irrigation systems are used, and ban watering of ornamental grass on public street medians.

Increase Enforcement

The Governor’s order calls on local water agencies to adjust their rate structures to implement conservation pricing, recognized as an effective way to realize water reductions and discourage water waste.

Agricultural water users – which have borne much of the brunt of the drought to date, with hundreds of thousands of fallowed acres, significantly reduced water allocations and thousands of farmworkers laid off – will be required to report more water use information to state regulators, increasing the state’s ability to enforce against illegal diversions and waste and unreasonable use of water under today’s order. Additionally, the Governor’s action strengthens standards for Agricultural Water Management Plans submitted by large agriculture water districts and requires small agriculture water districts to develop similar plans. These plans will help ensure that agricultural communities are prepared in case the drought extends into 2016.

Additional actions required by the order include:

Taking action against water agencies in depleted groundwater basins that have not shared data on their groundwater supplies with the state;
Updating standards for toilets and faucets and outdoor landscaping in residential communities and taking action against communities that ignore these standards; and
Making permanent monthly reporting of water usage, conservation and enforcement actions by local water suppliers.

Jump to original: 

For the First Time, California Is Enforcing Water Restrictions

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For the First Time, California Is Enforcing Water Restrictions

Scientists Can Predict Your City’s Obesity Rate by Analyzing Its Sewage

by AdalberOreilly Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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

If someone were to ask you what distinguishes skinny cities with from fat ones, you might think of the prevalence of fast food joints, the average length of automobile commutes, or the relative abundance of parks and jogging trails. But there’s also another, more underground factor: their sewage.

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

Researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee collected raw sewage samples from the intakes of municipal wastewater treatment plants in 71 cities around the country. Their results, published last month in mBio, the American Society for Microbiology’s open-access journal, showed that the microbial content of that sewage predicted each city’s relative obesity with 81 to 89 percent accuracy.

The finding actually isn’t all that surprising, says lead author Ryan Newton, a visiting professor at UW’s School of Freshwater Sciences. Other studies have shown that bacterial imbalances in your intestines can lead to metabolic syndrome, obesity, and diabetes. Newton’s study, however, is the first to demonstrate that those microbial differences also play out across entire populations, even after our poop gets flushed, mixed together, and sent through miles of pipes.

The UW study was enabled by computing advances have allowed scientists to rapidly sequence microbial populations and look for patterns in the results. Other researchers are using similar techniques to look for correlations between gut bacteria and a wide range of health conditions.

Newton isn’t the only scientist who sees sewage as a promising place for data dives. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Underworlds project, which began in January, will study sewage for the presence of viruses such as influenza and polio; bacterial pathogens that cause cholera typhoid fever, and other diseases; and biochemical molecules ranging from antibiotics to illegal drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. Scientists hope the resulting data could help predict epidemics and track other public health trends within particular neighborhoods.

As scientists gain a better understanding of the interplay between microbes and human health, they may eventually be able to look at municipal sewage to figure out which communities would be the best to target with public health campaigns designed to, say, get people to eat less sugar or more vegetables.

And just as important, sequencing sewage could eliminate the thorny problem of doing public health surveys. Unlike people, your poop can’t lie about what you had to eat.

See the original post: 

Scientists Can Predict Your City’s Obesity Rate by Analyzing Its Sewage

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Scientists Can Predict Your City’s Obesity Rate by Analyzing Its Sewage

Satanic Reverses: Religious Exceptions Are A Real Win For Devil Worshippers

by MattHollenbeck Posted on March 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 Andrew Rae

Last May, the Supreme Court decided in favor of Christians asserting their right to open town meetings with prayers. An unintended consequence of this and other recent court rulings knocking holes in the wall between church and state is that Satanists, pagans, and pranksters have eagerly embraced their newfound right to express their spiritual beliefs on public time and property:

Two days after the Supreme Court’s decision, a newly converted Satanist started asking towns in Florida if he could open town meetings with a prayer to his “Dude in Charge.” (So far, without luck.)

In September, an “agnostic pagan pantheist” opened a county commission meeting in Escambia County, Florida, with a two-and-a-half-minute chant invoking the elements and four directions. (“Powers of Air! We invoke and call you/Golden Eagle of the Dawn, Star-seeker, Whirlwind.”)

After a judge ruled in September that religious pamphlets could be handed out in public schools in Orange County, Florida, the Satanic Temple published The Satan­ic Children’s Big Book of Activities, a coloring book that includes a connect-the-dots pentagram.

In December, a chapter of the Satanic Temple was allowed to display a fallen angel in the Capitol of (where else?) Florida, alongside a holiday display by Flying Spaghetti Monster-worshipping Pastafarians and a Festivus pole made of beer cans.

Also at Christmastime, Satanists in Detroit set up a “Snaketivity Scene” on the lawn of the Michigan Capitol. A Republican lawmaker who set up a competing nativity scene insisted, “I’m not afraid of the snake people. I’m sure that Jesus Christ is not afraid.”

The Satanic Temple has commissioned a nearly nine-foot-tall bronzed statue of a Baphomet, a goat-headed idol seated on a throne before two children, which it plans to erect in the Oklahoma Capitol. The building already has an enormous copy of the Ten Commandments that’s being challenged by the ACLU.

Illustrations from The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities

Source – 

Satanic Reverses: Religious Exceptions Are A Real Win For Devil Worshippers

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Satanic Reverses: Religious Exceptions Are A Real Win For Devil Worshippers

Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

by PhilDrechsler Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Outlet Creek watershed in Northern California’s Mendocino County. Scott Bauer

Northern California pot farmers are using up all of the water that normally supports key populations of the region’s federally protected salmon and steelhead trout.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a new study, published last week in the journal PLOS One, that examined four California watersheds where salmon and trout are known to spawn. In the three watersheds with intensive pot cultivation, illegal marijuana farms literally sucked up all of the water during the streams’ summer low-flow period, leaving nothing to support the fish.

Author Scott Bauer, a biologist with the state department of fish and wildlife, estimated the size and location of outdoor and greenhouse pot farms by looking at Google Earth images and accompanying drug enforcement officers on raids. He did not include “indoor” grows—marijuana grown under lamps in buildings.

After visiting 32 marijuana greenhouses in eight locations and averaging the results, Bauer extrapolated his findings to all greenhouses in the study area—virtually nothing else is grown in greenhouses in this part of the country. The sites contained marijuana plants at a density of about one per square meter, with each plant (taking waste and other factors into account) using about six gallons of water a day. Overall, he calculated, pot operations within the study yielded 112,000 plants, and consumed 673,000 gallons of water every day.

And that is water the area’s fish badly need. The Coho salmon population is listed as threatened under both state and federal Endangered Species Acts, and is designated as a key population to maintain or improve as part of the state’s recovery plan.

Bauer collected his data last year, at a time when California’s drought had already become its worst in more than 1,200 years. When I spoke to him at the time, he told me that pot farming had surpassed logging and development to become the single biggest threat to the area’s salmon. Now that that the drought is expected to extend into a fourth year, the same streams could run dry again this summer, and remain so for an even longer period of time.

Overall, the outdoor and greenhouse grows consume more than 60 million gallons of water a day during the growing season—50 percent more than is used by all the residents of San Francisco.

“Clearly, water demands for the existing level of marijuana cultivation in many Northern California watersheds are unsustainable and are likely contributing to the decline of sensitive aquatic species in the region,” Bauer’s study concludes. “Given the specter of climate change”—and the attendant rise of megadroughts—”the current scale of marijuana cultivation in Northern California could be catastrophic for aquatic species.”

Source: 

Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

Forget Elizabeth Warren. Another Female Senator Has a Shot to Fill the Senate’s New Power Vacuum.

by RogelioUnderwood Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

In the nanoseconds after Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid announced Friday morning that he will give up his leadership post and retire in 2016, liberal groups raced to promote their go-to solution for almost any political problem: Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Much like the movement to draft Warren for president, the idea of putting her in charge of the Democratic caucus was more dream than reality. Warren’s office has already said she won’t run, and as Vox‘s Dylan Matthews explains, putting Warren in charge of the Democratic caucus would prevent her from holding her colleagues accountable when they stray too far from progressive ideals.

Instead, Reid’s likely replacement is New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who already has endorsements from Reid and Dick Durbin, the outgoing minority leader’s No. 2. But lefties have long been wary of Schumer, who, thanks to his home base in New York City, is far more sympathetic to Wall Street than the rest of his caucus. And lost in the Warren hype is another female senator: Washington’s Patty Murray.

As caucus secretary, Murray is the fourth-ranking member of Senate Democratic leadership, behind Reid, Durbin, and Schumer. If she decides to take on Schumer for Reid’s job, Murray could be the first woman to serve as a party leader in the US Senate. Murray’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether she’d run for the job and, besides a general statement praising Reid, was notably quiet on Friday.

In 2013, I cowrote a profile of Murray for The American Prospect looking at her role in leading Democrats’ negotiations with Republicans on the budget, and explained how she’s a pragmatic progressive who will push for the most liberal policies she can pass while still being willing to forge compromise with the centrists in her party:

There’s something peculiarly undefined about Murray’s ideology. She’s a liberal, a West Coast liberal to be precise: strong on social issues, the environment, workers’ rights, and the government’s role in society. She hews closely to the Democratic talking points of the day. But it’s hard to discern a coherent vision or theory behind her views. She is as far left as you can go without alienating the centrists in the party. More than anything, she’s a pragmatist. Success trumps belief in the “right” things. At the same time, Murray doesn’t venerate moderation for its own sake—she’s no Rahm Emanuel. “She’s a strong progressive,” says a former Budget Committee staff member, “but she won’t tilt at windmills, she won’t force a vote on something she knows she’s not going to win.”

Murray certainly has the résumé to compete for the job. She led the Democrats’ campaign arm in 2012, when the party picked up two Senate seats, defying pundits’ predictions. She forged a budget agreement with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2013 that averted across-the-board budget cuts. Murray is generally press-shy—she flies home across the country each weekend instead of doing the Sunday show circuit—which would leave room for other Senate stars, including Warren, to be the party’s public face while Murray controls the behind-the-scenes negotiations. But as that budget committee staffer told me in 2013, Murray isn’t known for picking fights she can’t win. If she runs against Schumer, it’ll be because she thinks she has a real shot at Reid’s post.

See original article here – 

Forget Elizabeth Warren. Another Female Senator Has a Shot to Fill the Senate’s New Power Vacuum.

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Forget Elizabeth Warren. Another Female Senator Has a Shot to Fill the Senate’s New Power Vacuum.

Ted Cruz Expected to Headline Event With A Man Who Compared All Muslims to Nazis

by EfrenGDFDgoxeo Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who announced his candidacy for President on Monday via Twitter, is expected to speak at the Young America’s Foundation’s “New England Freedom Conference” in Nashua, New Hampshire on Friday.

Also on the lineup is Robert Spencer, the co-founder of Stop Islamization of America and director of the Jihad Watch blog. He is notorious for his attacks on Islam. “It’s absurd” to think that “Islam is a religion of peace that’s been hijacked by … extremists,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. He has compared all Muslims to Nazis and demanded that Muslims take a loyalty test before being appointed to public office in America. He has told reporters that Islam is here to take over America, and that President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim. His book opens with the rallying cry of the Crusades, “God wills it,” and he calls for a second crusade against Islam.

The conference, to be hosted at the Radisson in southeast New Hampshire, bills itself as a conservative gathering on “why big government policies are a problem” and “ways to effectively push back against leftist, big government threats to your freedoms.” It’s hosted by The Young America’s Foundation, which has previously been linked to extremists. Young Americans for Freedom, which merged with The Young America’s Foundation in 2011, hosted an event in 2007 in which Nick Griffin— who was the chairman of the British National Party, a white supremacist group, and a Holocaust denier—spoke. Two board members of Young America’s Foundation, Ron Robinson and James B. Taylor, also ran a political action committee that donated thousands of dollars to a white nationalist organization, the Charles Martel Society.

The Council on American Islamic Relations criticized Cruz for agreeing to speak at a conference that is providing a platform to Spencer. “If Senator Cruz believes that he can campaign for president while sharing center stage with a professional hate monger like Robert Spencer, I seriously doubt his ability to win the U.S. minority vote or unite the country as president,” said CAIR Government Affairs Manager Robert McCaw.

“Senator Cruz has been invited to speak to Young America’s Foundation,” says Rick Tyler, a spokesperson for Cruz’s campaign. “He intends to keep that commitment.”

Continued: 

Ted Cruz Expected to Headline Event With A Man Who Compared All Muslims to Nazis

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ted Cruz Expected to Headline Event With A Man Who Compared All Muslims to Nazis

Ted Cruz Expected to Headline Event With a Man Who Compared Muslims to Nazis

by IXYEmeryebk Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who announced his candidacy for President on Monday via Twitter, is expected to speak at the Young America’s Foundation’s “New England Freedom Conference” in Nashua, New Hampshire on Friday.

Also on the lineup is Robert Spencer, the co-founder of Stop Islamization of America and director of the Jihad Watch blog. He is notorious for his attacks on Islam. “It’s absurd” to think that “Islam is a religion of peace that’s been hijacked by … extremists,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. He has compared Muslims to Nazis and demanded that Muslims take a loyalty test before being appointed to public office in America. He has told reporters that Islam is here to take over America, and that President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim. His book opens with the rallying cry of the Crusades, “God wills it!” and he calls for a second crusade against Islam.

The conference, to be hosted at the Radisson in southeast New Hampshire, bills itself as a conservative gathering on “why big government policies are a big problem” and “ways to effectively push back against leftist, big government threats to your freedoms.” It’s hosted by the Young America’s Foundation, which has previously been linked to extremists. Young Americans for Freedom, which merged with the Young America’s Foundation in 2011, hosted an event in 2007 in which Nick Griffin— who was the chairman of the British National Party, a white supremacist group, and a Holocaust denier—spoke. Two board members of Young America’s Foundation, Ron Robinson and James B. Taylor, also ran a political action committee that donated thousands of dollars to a white nationalist organization, the Charles Martel Society.

The Council on American Islamic Relations criticized Cruz for agreeing to speak at a conference that is providing a platform to Spencer. “If Senator Cruz believes that he can campaign for president while sharing center stage with a professional hate monger like Robert Spencer, I seriously doubt his ability to win the US minority vote or unite the country as president,” said CAIR Government Affairs Manager Robert McCaw.

“Senator Cruz has been invited to speak to Young America’s Foundation,” says Rick Tyler, a spokesperson for Cruz’s campaign. “He intends to keep that commitment.”

Source:  

Ted Cruz Expected to Headline Event With a Man Who Compared Muslims to Nazis

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ted Cruz Expected to Headline Event With a Man Who Compared Muslims to Nazis

The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

by JoannWreford Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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

When most of us think of Mexican food, we visualize tacos, burritos, and chiles rellenos. But we should probably add cucumbers, squash, melons, and berries to the list—more or less the whole supermarket produce aisle, in fact. The United States imports more than a quarter of the fresh fruit and nearly a third of the vegetables we consume. And a huge portion of that foreign-grown bounty—69 percent of vegetables and 37 percent of fruit—comes from our neighbor to the south.

Not surprisingly, as I’ve shown before, labor conditions on Mexico’s large export-oriented farms tend to be dismal: subpar housing, inadequate sanitation, poverty wages, and often, labor arrangements that approach slavery. But this week, workers in Baja California, a major ag-producing state just south of California, are standing up. Here’s the Los Angeles Times: “Thousands of laborers in the San Quintín Valley 200 miles south of San Diego went on strike Tuesday, leaving the fields and greenhouses full of produce that is now on the verge of rotting.”

In addition to the work stoppage, striking workers shut down 55 miles of the Trans-Peninsular Highway, a key thoroughfare for moving goods from Baja California to points north, the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada (in Spanish) reported after the strike started on March 17.

The blockade has been lifted, at least temporarily. But the “road remains hard to traverse as rogue groups stop and, at times, attack truck drivers,” the LA Times reports. And the strike itself continues. The uprising is starting to affect US supply chains. An executive for the organic-produce titan Del Cabo Produce, which grows vegetables south of the San Quintín Valley but needs to traverse it to reach its US customers, told the Times that the clash is “creating a lot of logistical problems…We’re having to cut orders.” And “Costco reported that organic strawberries are in short supply because about 80% of the production this time of year comes from Baja California,” the Times added. The US trade publication Produce News downplayed the strike’s impact, calling it “minor.”

Meanwhile, the strike’s organizers plan to launch a campaign to get US consumers to boycott products grown in the region, mainly tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, inspired by the successful ’70s-era actions of the California-based United Farm Workers, headed by Cesar Chavez, La Jornada reported Tuesday. And current UFW president Arturo Rodriguez has issued a statement of solidarity with the San Quintín strikers.

Such cross-border organizing is critical, because the people who work on Mexico’s export-focused farms tend to be from the same places as the people who work on the vast California and Florida operations that supply the bulk of our domestically grown produce: the largely indigenous states of southern Mexico. And the final market for the crops they tend and harvest is also the same: US supermarkets and restaurants.

In a stunning four-part series last year, LA Times reporter Richard Marosi documented the harsh conditions that prevail on the Mexican farms that churn out our food. He found:

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.
Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.
Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.
Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences, and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.
Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

As for their counterparts to the north, migrant-reliant US farms tend to treat workers harshly as well, as the excellent 2014 documentary Food Chains demonstrates. The trailer, below, is a good crash course on what it’s like to be at the bottom of the US food system. In honor of National Farm Worker Awareness Week, the producers are making it available for $0.99 on iTunes. And here‘s an interview with the film’s director, Sanjay Rawal, by Mother Jones‘ Maddie Oatman.

Read this article: 

The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Holmes, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

Mike Huckabee Should Probably Stop Criticizing Hillary Over Her Emails

by Cherie65Cw Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee thinks questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails as secretary of state “will linger” throughout the 2016 presidential race. “If the law said you had to maintain every email for public inspection, that’s what you got to do,” he recently told ABC News. Huckabee also suggested that the missing emails might shed new light on the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012.

Huckabee, who is considering a second run for president himself, is probably right that the issue of secrecy will dog Clinton’s campaign going forward. But he might not be the best man to make that case. As Mother Jones reported in 2011, Huckabee destroyed his administration’s state records before leaving office in 2007.

In February, Mother Jones wrote to the office of Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe seeking access to a variety of records concerning his predecessor’s tenure, including Huckabee’s travel records, calendars, call logs, and emails. Beebe’s chief legal counsel, Tim Gauger, replied in a letter that “former Governor Huckabee did not leave behind any hard-copies of the types of documents you seek. Moreover, at that time, all of the computers used by former Governor Huckabee and his staff had already been removed from the office and, as we understand it, the hard-drives in those computers had already been ‘cleaned’ and physically destroyed.”

He added, “In short, our office does not possess, does not have access to, and is not the custodian of any of the records you seek.”

Huckabee responded at the time by attacking Mother Jones, which he claimed “doesn’t pretend to be a real news outlet, but a highly polarized opinion-driven vehicle for all things to the far left.” He also called the story “factually challenged.” But the Arkansas Department of Information Systems confirmed that the hard drives had been destroyed while he was still in the governor’s mansion. Legal? Sure. But absolutely shady.

Even before he destroyed his hard drives rather than grant the public access to his records, Huckabee took a combative approach to public records requests. When Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley (who has also weighed in on Huckabee’s transparency record) requested documents from Huckabee in 1995, the then-lieutenant governor flipped out. In a press release issued by his campaign, he attacked Brantley as a “disgruntled and embittered wannabe editor” from a “trashy little tabloid”—and went after Brantley’s wife, a Clinton judicial appointee, for good measure. All because the editor filed a request for records every citizen was entitled to.

Dale Bumpers Papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas

Hillary Clinton’s missing emails are a legitimate scandal if you care about government transparency. But many of her loudest critics have done little to inspire confidence they’d do anything differently.

Visit source – 

Mike Huckabee Should Probably Stop Criticizing Hillary Over Her Emails

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Mike Huckabee Should Probably Stop Criticizing Hillary Over Her Emails

Philadelphia Cops Shoot and Kill People at 6 Times the Rate of the NYPD

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Philadelphia, a city with a vastly smaller population than that of New York City, has seen a much higher rate of police shootings in recent years. According to a new report published on Monday by the US Department of Justice, police violence disproportionately affects Philadelphia’s black community, and officers don’t receive consistent training on the department’s deadly force policy.

The 174-page report results from an investigation the DOJ launched in 2013 at the request of Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, during a time when officer-involved shootings, including fatal incidents, were on the rise, even as violent crimes and assaults against the police was on the decline. “Police carry baggage and lack legitimacy in some communities,” Ramsey, who has been appointed to chair the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, recently told the New York Times. “And for us to change the paradigm, we have to understand why we are viewed in this way.”

The DOJ’s Philadelphia investigation, which examined nearly 400 deadly force incidents between 2007 and 2013, provides a rare close-up of the patterns of officer-involved shootings. The report follows on the heels of another damning report the DOJ published on the city of Ferguson, where federal investigators found systematic racial discrimination among public officials and police.

While it’s nearly impossible to know how much the findings in Philadelphia represent police practices across the country—there is no comprehensive national data on police officers’ use of force, as we reported last year—the DOJ probe does reveal an alarming rate of shootings when compared to other large departments. Philadelphia’s police force, which is one-fifth the size of the NYPD, saw dozens more officer shootings resulting in deaths and injuries than those by the NYPD over the same period.

Here are a few key findings from Monday’s report:

In a city where blacks and whites each make up about 45 percent of the population, almost 60 percent of the officers involved in shootings between 2007 and 2013 were white, while 81 percent of suspects involved were black.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209575.js’);

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209576.js’);

In nearly half of officer-involved shootings of an unarmed victim, the officer mistook a nonthreatening object for a gun.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209554.js’);

Black suspects were the most likely to get shot because of a misidentified object. White suspects were the most likely to be involved in a physical altercation that resulted in the officer shooting.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209559.js’);

Among officer-involved shootings in which the victim was black, black and Hispanic officers were more likely than their white counterparts to have shot at a suspect after mistaking a plain object for a gun.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209607.js’);

While the overall number of officer-involved shootings declined between 2007 and 2013, the share of victims who were unarmed during those incidents more than tripled, from 6 percent in 2007 to 20 percent in 2013.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209561.js’);

Officers initiated the encounter in 43 percent of officer-involved shootings in 2013, down from nearly 60 percent in 2007 and nearly 70 percent in 2008.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209565.js’);

Out of 382 suspects involved in the shootings between 2007 and 2013, about 88 were killed, 180 injured, and 115 unharmed. The majority of suspects brandished a weapon but did not shoot, held a weapon other than a firearm, or were unarmed. Forty-nine suspects (13 percent) shot at the officer, injuring six and killing one.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209603.js’);

The average time spent on investigating an officer involved shooting has declined from 417 days in 2007 to 264 days in 2013.

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209613.js’);

Out of 88 officers who were found to have violated department policy during a shooting incident, 73 percent were not suspended or terminated. Some interviewees told the Justice Department they believed that the department’s board of inquiry undermined findings from internal reviews of officer shootings, resulting in “too little discipline.”

dc.embed.loadNote(‘//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1691753-cops-w0753-pub/annotations/209610.js’);

Read the article:  

Philadelphia Cops Shoot and Kill People at 6 Times the Rate of the NYPD

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Philadelphia Cops Shoot and Kill People at 6 Times the Rate of the NYPD