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Here’s Why the Feds Are Investigating Ferguson

by AlbertFuller Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last Friday, the Department of Justice announced that FBI agents were working with attorneys from the Civil Rights Division and US Attorney’s Office to conduct what Attorney General Eric Holder promised would be a “thorough and complete investigation” into the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, more than 40 FBI agents have arrived in the St. Louis suburb to interview witnesses and canvas the neighborhood where Brown was shot by a police officer on August 9.

On Wednesday, the AG himself arrived in Ferguson for a series of meetings with federal investigators, local authorities, and community members. Writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Holder said, “At a time when so much may seem uncertain, the people of Ferguson can have confidence that the Justice Department intends to learn—in a fair and thorough manner—exactly what happened.”

What exactly happens when the feds step in to investigate a case like Michael Brown’s? A quick explainer:

What is the Justice Department investigating? According to Holder, the DOJ is specifically investigating “the shooting death of Michael Brown,” and “looking for violations of federal, criminal civil rights statutes.” The investigation is separate from local authorities’ investigation. Some have asked the DOJ to take a broader view: In a letter to Holder on August 11, Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), and William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) asked the DOJ to consider expanding the scope of its investigation to include “the potential for any pattern or practice of police misconduct by the Ferguson Police Department.” Meanwhile, the US Commission on Civil Rights, a panel appointed by the president and members of Congress, has asked the DOJ to look into the disproportionately low representation of African Americans on Ferguson’s police force and city council. It remains to be seen if the DOJ will broaden its investigation beyond Brown’s death.

What could happen as a result of the DOJ investigation? The findings of the investigation could lead to a federal prosecution against Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Brown.

Who is conducting the investigation? So far, three branches of the DOJ are working together on the federal investigation. More than 40 FBI agents from the St. Louis field office are canvassing the area and interviewing witnesses. They’re working with the Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office, which would handle a potential prosecution. Within the Civil Rights Division, two sections may be involved: There’s the Criminal Section, which “prosecutes cases involving the violent interference with liberties and rights defined in the Constitution or federal law,” including excessive use of force by police officers; also, the Special Litigation Section conducts investigations into systematic violations of civil rights by state and local institutions, including police departments. However, DOJ spokesperson Dena Iverson did not clarify in an email to Mother Jones which section is involved in the Ferguson investigation.

What triggered the investigation? Generally, DOJ investigations into civil rights violations can begin in response to an official complaint filed with the Civil Rights Division, or in response to major events like those in Ferguson. The CRD has not said if there was an official complaint filed by citizens, or if the department decided to initiate the investigation on its own. “There’s no rule book” that the department follows to determine if a case warrants an investigation, explains Samuel Walker, a criminal-justice scholar at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. The Civil Rights Division doesn’t announce all of its investigative activities. The agency has not responded to a request for comment on what percentage of incoming complaints it decides to investigate, and why. But back in 2012, then-DOJ spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa told my colleague AJ Vicens that “the department investigates each jurisdiction based on the allegations received. There is no one-size-fits all approach to our investigations or our settlements.”

Where else besides Ferguson is the DOJ investigating civil rights violations? The Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section is currently investigating systematic violations of civil rights by law enforcement in at least 34 other jurisdictions across 17 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, according to a list on the DOJ website. But these cases are different from the investigation in Ferguson, which so far appears to be focused on Wilson’s shooting of Brown, which would fall under the CRD’s Criminal Section. According to its website, the Special Litigation Section can step in “if we find a pattern or practice by the law enforcement agency that systemically violates people’s rights. Harm to a single person, or isolated action, is usually not enough to show a pattern or practice that violates these laws.” The Criminal Section, meanwhile, lists 17 past investigations into criminal misconduct by law enforcement officials in 11 states.

The Justice Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which is separate from the Civil Rights Division, monitors discrimination in DOJ-funded state and local law enforcement institutions. In a May 2013 memo, OCR reported that over the previous four years, it handled 346 discrimination complaints, many of them alleging that federally funded law enforcement agencies “engaged in unlawful racial profiling in conducting traffic stops.”

Since when does the DOJ investigate civil rights violations? The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 authorizes the Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section “to review the practices of law enforcement agencies that may be violating people’s federal rights,” and oversees cases involving discrimination—prohibited under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—in state or local agencies receiving federal funds. As a result of these special litigation cases dating back to 1997, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that 21 police departments across the country have signed consent agreements with the DOJ to improve their procedures and policies, often the use of force and relationships with minority communities. Samuel Walker says that the number of these cases fell dramatically during the Bush administration, but picked back up under the Obama administration, which has doubled the size of the special litigations unit. While criminal civil rights prosecutions under the DOJ date back to 1939, the Criminal Section’s powers were limited until the Civil Rights Division was created in 1957 as part of the Civil Rights Act.

How else is the DOJ involved in Ferguson? Holder has announced that the DOJ’s COPS (Community-Oriented Policing Services) office and Office of Justice Programs are also assisting local authorities “in order to help conduct crowd control and maintain public safety without relying on unnecessarily extreme displays of force.” It’s unclear how this assistance has played out on the streets of Ferguson. Holder added that Justice Department officials from the Community Relations Service are also helping “convene law enforcement officials and civic and faith leaders to plot out steps to reduce tensions in the community.”

When will we see some results from the investigation? It may be a while before the feds publicly announce the initial findings of their investigation. As Holder wrote in Wednesday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Long after the events of Aug. 9 have receded from the headlines, the Justice Department will continue to stand with this community.” For now, there are many more questions than answers.

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Here’s Why the Feds Are Investigating Ferguson

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26 Percent of Women Scientists Say They’ve Been Sexually Assaulted Doing Fieldwork

by BethPhclkj Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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One of the most difficult parts of getting a Ph.D. is finishing your dissertation. Those last three months were certainly the hardest of my life. Beyond the mountain of work a dissertation requires, graduate students also have to face feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, and anxiety about the looming job search. Sometimes, they need a gentle, supportive push to quit stressing about every last comma and—after years of blood, sweat, and tears—finally turn it in.

So when Kate Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chided an old friend who was still a graduate student about taking that last step to finish her thesis, she thought she was doing her a favor. But she was floored by her friend’s response.

Clancy remembers her friend saying, “Well, I was sexually assaulted in the field, and every time I open the dissertation files I have flashbacks.” On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Clancy goes on to say that conversation “was the first time that it really hit me how much these kinds of experiences can not only emotionally traumatize women, but also explicitly hold them back in their research.”

So she joined up with three fellow female scientists to study the extent to which sexual harassment and sexual assault occur in the field. On this week’s podcast, the four coauthors—Clancy, anthropologists Robin Nelson and Julienne Rutherford, and evolutionary biologist Katie Hinde—discuss their recently published survey of scientists who have worked in the field.

Their results were eye-opening and immediately generated headlines. “Around 70 percent of women from our sample reported experiencing harassment and about 40 percent of men,” Clancy says. Additionally, 26 percent of women and 6 percent of men reported being sexually assaulted (defined as “unwanted physical contact”) while doing field research. Nearly all of the women who reported assault or harassment were students, post-docs, or employees—rather than faculty members.

Field work is a highly-sought-after experience during scientific training in biology, anthropology, and other disciplines. As the study authors note, many universities require at least one field work module to earn a degree, and scientists who engage in field research publish more and secure more grants than those who do not. What’s more, despite the fact that more women enter and complete Ph.D. programs in biology and anthropology, women are less likely than men to maintain fieldwork throughout their careers.

There’s been a lot of debate concerning why, with an increasing number of Ph.D.s going to women, women remain underrepresented in the top tiers of science. This is a complicated and thorny issue, but Clancy and colleagues have added yet another data point: Women might be leaving some disciplines in order to avoid unwanted sexual comments and contact, especially in the field.

Visual representation of “respondents to the survey, their experiences, and who were aware of, made use of, and were satisfied by mechanisms to report unwanted physical contact.” PlosOne

So how did the researchers arrive at these results?

Relying on social media and other outlets to recruit survey-takers, Clancy and her colleagues managed to collect 666 responses, 77.5 percent of them from women.

As the authors note, their sample might overrepresent people who have had negative experiences, as these individuals might be more likely to respond to the survey request. But it might also be an underestimate: “We received information from some folks who said, ‘I would love to do your survey, but I can’t do your survey because it would trigger me in having to think about this traumatic experience that I had in the field,'” says Nelson, who is an assistant professor at Skidmore College.

Importantly, the study’s findings go beyond simply documenting that women are far more likely than men to be sexually harassed or assaulted in the field. Women were also more likely to report that they were harassed or assaulted by superiors. Men, by contrast, were more likely to be harassed by their peers. “There is a whole literature on sort of the directionality of sexual harassment, and there’s much greater psychological harm when it’s a vertical abuse, meaning coming from someone higher up in the hierarchy,” Clancy explains. “And so not only are women experiencing harassment and assault in greater numbers than men, but the actual nature of the assault potentially can cause greater psychological harm.”

What’s so special about field work that might explain these findings? “Our data can’t speak to specific environments within the lab or the office,” says Rutherford, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “But there are some aspects of field work that I think contribute to these kinds of behaviors, and that is there is often a certain amount of confusion about who is in charge…some field sites are run by investigators from multiple universities, and research institutions; there might be a field school where you’ll have students from many different universities—so the overseeing institution may not be clear to any individual participant in any stage in their training or in the hierarchy. So that confusion contributes to, I think, a loosening of boundaries.” And then, of course, there are the practical considerations: Scientists are far away from home, their families, other responsibilities, and social networks that both serve to keep bad behaviors in check and provide support to victims of abuse.

Indeed, the study found that only about 1 in 5 respondents who had been harassed or assaulted were “aware of a mechanism to easily report” the incidents at the time. And of those who did file reports, less than 20 percent said they were satisfied with the outcome.

So what are the next steps? “We put this paper out there as a start of a conversation,” says Hinde, an assistant professor at Harvard. “Solutions are going to be effected by our community coming together agreeing that this is a problem, that these aren’t just occasional isolated incidences or the rare bad apple, but something that we need to systematically address with culture-change.”

You can listen to the full interview with Kate Clancy, Robin Nelson, Julienne Rutherford, and Katie Hinde below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short interview with University of Chicago geoscientist Ray Pierrehumbert, who argues that we’ve been worrying too much about methane emissions from natural gas, and a discussion of a study finding that kids’ drawings at age four are an “indicator” of their intelligence 10 years later.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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26 Percent of Women Scientists Say They’ve Been Sexually Assaulted Doing Fieldwork

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Compton to District Security Guards: Go Ahead, Bring Your AR-15s to School

by LeoStoweiqjph Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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When students in the Compton Unified School District return to classrooms on Monday, some of them will have new pencils or notebooks. Their teachers will have new textbooks. But this year, the district’s campus police will be getting an upgrade, too: AR-15 assault rifles.

The board of the Los Angeles-area school district approved a measure to allow the campus cops to carry the new guns in July. The district’s police chief, William Wu, told the board that equipping school police with semi-automatic AR-15s is intended to ensure student safety.

“This is our objective—save lives, bottom line,” Wu told the board.

Crime is a serious problem in Compton, an independent jurisdiction south of downtown Los Angeles. In the 12 months preceding July, the city of nearly 100,000 experienced 28 murders, making it the 11th-deadliest neighborhood in the county, according to a data analysis by the Los Angeles Times.

But the choice to make Compton school police the latest local law enforcement agency to adopt military-style weapons was less about dealing with street crime than it was about preventing more exotic incidents like mass shootings. At the board meeting, Wu cited an FBI report released in January that found that 5 percent of “active shooters”— or shooters which are conducting an ongoing assault on a group of people—wore body armor, which can stop most bullets fired from handguns. To make his case, Wu cited a range of examples, including the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the University of Texas shooting in 1966, in which a student killed 16 people from the campus clock tower, out of range of police sidearms. (The student was eventually killed when a group of police climbed the tower and shot him at close range.)

“They will continue until they are stopped,” Wu said, at which point a board member interjected.

“No, they will continue until we stop them,” he said. “Compton Unified School Police…holding it down.”

“These rifles give us greater flexibility in dealing with a person with bad intent who comes onto any of our campuses,” Wu said in a statement. “The officers will keep the rifles in the trunks of their cars, unless they are needed.”

Compton is not the first district in the Southern California to allow AR-15s on its campuses. At the meeting, Wu said that Los Angeles, Baldwin Park, Santa Ana, Fontana, and San Bernardino all allow their officers to use the same weapons.

Compton school police last made news in May 2013, when a group of parents and students filed a suit against the department, alleging a pattern of racial profiling and abuse targeting Latino students. The complaint said that officers beat, pepper-sprayed, and put a chokehold on a bystander who was recording an arrest with his iPod. The group also claimed that Compton school police used excessive force against students and parents who complained that English-as-a-second-language programs were underfunded. (The case is ongoing.)

Wu said at the board meeting that seven officers have already been trained to use the new weapons. He said all officers would be purchasing their own weapons. The guns will be the officers’ personal property, but they could be bringing them to work as early as September.

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Compton to District Security Guards: Go Ahead, Bring Your AR-15s to School

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At 85, Jules Feiffer Finally Gives Us a Graphic Novel

by NoreenSinnett Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jules Feiffer JZ Holden

As you might expect, Jules Feiffer, 85, has a long, impressive résumé, starting from his apprenticeship, at age 16, with comic industry legend Will Eisner. Raised in the Bronx, New York, Feiffer went on to publish dozens of books, plays, and screenplays—his animated short, Munro, won an Oscar in 1961. He also illustrated children’s books. (Exhibit A: The Phantom Tollbooth.) His syndicated strip in the weekly Village Voice, which ran for more than four decades, earned him a George Polk award in 1961 and a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1986.

Despite his accomplishments, Feiffer had never really managed to pull off the style of long-form pictorial storytelling pioneered by Eisner and others—until now. Kill My Mother, billed as his first graphic novel, is a hard-boiled mystery-romance-thriller that takes us from Depression-era Los Angeles to 1940s Hollywood to the jungles of the Tarawa Atoll during World War II. It’s a fun, not-safe-for-work tale, replete with plot twists and secret identities. Bonus: Badass women hold the reins in this story.

Mother Jones: Your publisher says this is your first graphic novel, yet Wikipedia credits you with writing one of the original graphic novels, Tantrum, back in 1979.

Jules Feiffer: There’s a vast difference. Tantrum was really an extension of the approach and humor I used in my Village Voice strip. Kill My Mother departs completely from anything I’ve ever done. I’d call it my first noir graphic novel. But it won’t be my last, because I’m working on another one! It’s a prequel and a sequel.

MJ: Kill My Mother is a pretty wild tale. The last few chapters feel downright Shakespearean. Why this story and why this era?

JF: I don’t have a clue. I start off with a premise, and whatever direction I think it may go, it often decides to go somewhere else on its own. To write a story is often a matter of stumbling along until the story does what it wants to. I’m simply the stenographer. Sometimes I try to sharpen them up with editing, but I don’t try to edit at all while I’m writing, I just let them go. Kill My Mother was going all kinds of different places in my head and in my notes than where it ended up.

Feiffer in 1958 with the proofs of his first collection, Sick Sick Sick.
Dick DeMarsico/World Telegram (via Library of Congress).

MJ: Stylistically speaking, what new things did this format enable you to try?

JF: The thing that made me want to be a cartoonist in the first place, back in the 1930s, before comic books came on the scene, was adventure comic strips. The most exciting of the strip-layers was a guy named Milt Caniff, who did “Terry and the Pirates,” which was akin to a movie on paper. He built storyboards and he did very impressionistic work and real characters who were interesting and involved. He and Will Eisner were my role models. Those were the cartoonists I wanted to emulate in these adventure strips. I ended up writing Eisner’s “The Spirit” for three or four years, so I understood the form. But I couldn’t do the drawings. No matter how hard I tried, it was pitiful. It took me until age 80 to perfect a style that worked in that kind of genre. And I amazed myself! I thought, when I wrote this story, somebody else would have to illustrate it. The publisher tells me to try it, and so I try—and by God, things began to click!

A page from Kill My Mother Jules Feiffer

MJ: That’s exciting!

JF: And terrifying. Each one of the 149 pages, I would sit down and say, “I’m not qualified to do this.” Laughs. And then I’d have to prove myself wrong. Every day was an act of excitement and an act of terror.

MJ: Four years ago, you told Mother Jones that you thought most graphic novels were “self-pitying confessionals.”

JF: Well, over the last 20 years there’s been the emergence of some extraordinary talents: Chris Ware, Dan Clowes. David Small did a brilliant book, which affected me very strongly, called Stitches. I’m not sure, had I not had Stitches, whether I would have gotten the idea to do my own book. Also, Craig Thompson has a book called Blankets. These are real stories with real characters, and artwork that’s not like anyone else’s and works like a dream. So I think this field is in its own golden age right now.

MJ: Your central characters here are these badass, highly motivated girls and women. The men are pretty much louts and losers. Was that a conscious decision?

JF: No, and it’s interesting you point that out. The only thing conscious about it was that the person I originally had in mind to do the illustrations was a woman who had worked as my assistant, and I thought it would be more interesting for her if the central characters were mostly women. Once I got into it, and it became clear she didn’t want to do the book because she had her own fish to fry—she was doing very well with it, her own fish—I just kept on with it. And I loved those characters.

MJ: You may not have seen this, but a female blogger was recently threatened with rape, among other indignities, after she criticized the depiction of women in a Teen Titans comic book. Has the comic world always treated women so badly?

JF: There’s no rap against comics that isn’t true. They were sexist, they were racist, you name it—and they kind of gloried in that. If someone attacked them, back in the time I was growing up reading comics in the ’40s and the ’50s, the purveyors would look at you not knowing what the hell you were talking about. This is just what they did: “What’s wrong with this?” Over the years, when the women’s movement got going, there was greater sensitivity about it, but by that time I’d stopped reading the commercial comics, Marvel and all of that. But there are a lot of women in the graphic-novel and alternative-comics fields taking things in a different direction.

MJ: I gather the audience is pretty different, too.

JF: Yes, it is. I mean, you’ve got Fun Home, the autobiographical novel by Alison Bechdel, which got an awful lot of attention and deservedly so. It was a brilliant piece of work.

MJ: Speaking of changes, do you suppose you’ll will ever retire?

JF: When I gave up my strip, it was almost a full retirement because I was just doing things that came to my mind, like picture books for kids. And then, out of nowhere, I got involved in writing the book for a musical version of my first kids’ book The Man on the Ceiling—I’m working on that now. I mean, artists generally don’t retire. The great Al Hirschfeld died at 99 with his hands twitching because he wanted to draw. Much to my surprise, I had as much fun working on Kill My Mother as anything I’ve ever done. And this is what I’m going to concentrate on from here on in—depending on how much here on in there is before I start drooling and falling down stairs.

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At 85, Jules Feiffer Finally Gives Us a Graphic Novel

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13 Republican Climate Deniers Who Want to Be President

by AntonyReasoner Posted on August 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s hard to believe, surveying the GOP field of possible presidential nominees, but back in 2008 the parties were not that far apart on climate change. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, backed cap-and-trade for carbon emissions. After joining his ticket, so did Sarah Palin. But back then, lots of Republicans and conservatives also supported an individual mandate to buy health insurance. The Republican Party of 2008 was a big enough tent to include people who admitted demonstrable problems existed and supported free-market-oriented solutions. Not anymore. The rise of the Tea Party movement and the rightward shift of the Republican base and the politicians who pander to it put an end to all that. Whoever is the Republican nominee for president in 2016, it’s a safe bet that he—and yes, it will be a he, as all the leading contenders are male—will oppose taking any action on climate change. Chances are that he won’t even admit it exists.

The Republicans basically fall into four categories: (1) Flat-Earthers, who deny the existence of manmade climate change; (2) Born-Again Flat-Earthers, who do the same, but who had admitted climate change exists back before President Obama took office; (3) Do-Nothings, who sort of admit the reality of climate change but oppose actually taking any steps to prevent it; and (4) Dodgers, who have avoided saying whether they believe climate change is happening, and who also don’t want to take any steps to alleviate it. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker fall into the latter category. The Do-Nothings are blue and purple state governors, Chris Christie of New Jersey and John Kasich of Ohio. In a sign of how far rightward Republicans have moved since 2008, these are actually the guys who are trying to position themselves as relatively moderate and pragmatic. The Born-Agains are Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Both are staunch conservatives but only partial wingnuts. Back when that meant believing in climate change, they did, but they have since followed their base into fantasyland. Everyone else is an outright denier and always has been.

Here’s our full breakdown of all 13 of the top potential hopefuls, including their lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters if they served in Congress. No, we did not include Donald Trump even though he would probably lead in the polls if he ran. And alas, we cannot predict who might be the next Herman Cain. Maybe Papa John? If he, or any other pizza moguls, run, we’ll add an update.

Gage Skidmore

Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida

Category: Flat-Earther

While President George W. Bush never did anything about global warming, his brother goes further, by not even admitting it exists. In 2009, Jeb Bush told Esquire, “I’m a skeptic. I’m not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further… It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we’ve actually had mean temperatures that are cooler. I think we need to be very cautious before we dramatically alter who we are as a nation because of it.” Last year, he talked about how generating power with natural gas instead of coal would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but he avoided actually saying the C-word or mentioning why reducing emissions would be a good thing.

Notable quote: “I think global warming may be real.… It is not unanimous among scientists that it is disproportionately manmade. What I get a little tired of on the left is this idea that somehow science has decided all this so you can’t have a view.” (2011)

Bob Jagendorf

Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey

Category: Do-Nothing

Compared to all of his competitors, Christie’s position on climate change is refreshingly reality-based. In 2011, he said: “There’s undeniable data that CO2 levels and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing. This decade, average temperatures have been rising. Temperature changes are affecting weather patterns and our climate…when you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts.” Other than the fact that he understated the scientific consensus—it’s more like 97 or 98 percent—there isn’t much to find fault with there. But if you think that means Christie will back action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, think again. On the same day he made those comments, he withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade program for Northeastern energy utilities, complaining that it was “nothing more than a tax on electricity.” He also rolled back his state’s renewable energy goal, from 30 percent by 2021 to 22.5 percent. And the Christie administration conspicuously does not mention climate change in the context of Sandy recovery.

Notable quote: “I haven’t been shown any definitive proof yet that climate change is what caused Sandy. And this is just, listen, this is a distraction. I’ve got a place to rebuild here and people want to talk to me about esoteric theories.” (2013)

Gage Skidmore

Ted Cruz, senator from Texas

Category: Flat-Earther

Cruz—a high school valedictorian, Princeton alum, and editor of the Harvard Law Review—is supposed to be smart. His grasp of climate science, however, leaves much to be desired. In a February interview with CNN, Cruz deployed classic, bogus GOP talking points about climate change. “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened,” said Cruz. “You know, back in the ’70s—I remember the ’70s, we were told there was global cooling. And everyone was told global cooling was a really big problem. And then that faded.” There has, in fact, been global warming in the last 15 years. And it is not true that in the 1970s “everyone was told global cooling was a really big problem.”

Notable quote: “Climate change, as they have defined it, can never be disproved, because whether it gets hotter or whether it gets colder, whatever happens, they’ll say, well, it’s changing, so it proves our theory.” (2014)

LCV score: 15 percent

Gage Skidmore

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas

Category: Born-Again Flat-Earther

In 2007, when all the cool kids were for cap-and-trade, so was Huckabee. He said, “One thing that all of us have a responsibility to do is recognize that climate change is here, it’s real.… I also support cap-and-trade of carbon emissions. And I was disappointed that the Senate rejected a carbon counting system to measure the sources of emissions, because that would have been the first and the most important step toward implementing true cap-and-trade.” But Huckabee totally flip-flopped after the rise of the Tea Party and anti-Obamaism reshaped the GOP. In 2010, he even denied that he ever had supported cap-and-trade. “This kind of mandatory energy policy would have a horrible impact on this nation’s job market,” he wrote in a blog post. “I never did support and never would support it—period.” By 2013, he was hosting climate-denier-in-chief Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) on his radio show to spread falsehoods. Among the ones Huck contributed himself: “When I was in college, all the literature at that time from the scientific community said that we were going to freeze to death.”

Notable quote: “The volcano that erupted over in Northern Europe in 2010 actually poured more CO2 into the air in that single act of nature than all of humans have in something like the past 100 years.” (2013) Actually, no, it didn’t.)

Gage Skidmore

Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana

Category: Dodger

Jindal was supposed to be the great hope of smart Republicans. He majored in biology at Brown, was a Rhodes scholar, and he famously declared, “We’ve got to stop being the stupid party.” But he’s done his fair share of dumbing down the GOP. As Brown biology professor Kenneth R. Miller wrote in Slate, “In Jindal’s rise to prominence in Louisiana, he made a bargain with the religious right and compromised science and science education for the children of his state.” He signed into law the Louisiana Science Education Act, which “allows ‘supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials’ to be brought into classrooms to support the ‘open and objective discussion’ of certain ‘scientific theories,'” such as evolution and climate change. In other words, he’s promoting creationism and climate change denialism in public schools. Still, Jindal has never come out and stated whether he accepts climate science.

Notable quote, on EPA’s proposal to regulate CO2 from power plants: “This is such a dangerous overreach in terms of the potential threat to our economy and our ability to restore those manufacturing jobs, I absolutely do think litigation needs to be on the table.” (2014)

LCV score: 6 percent

Steve Beshear

John Kasich, governor of Ohio

Category: Do-Nothing

In what passes for moderation in today’s GOP, Kasich actually acknowledges the existence of global warming. That doesn’t mean he wants to do much about it. “I happen to believe there is a problem with climate change. I don’t want to overreact to it, I can’t measure it all, but I respect the creation that the Lord has given us and I want to make sure we protect it,” Kasich said in 2012 at an energy conference hosted by The Hill. Ohio is rich in coal and heavily dependent on it for energy, and Kasich pledged to keep it that way, touting the promise of ever-elusive “clean coal.” In comments to reporters after that 2012 event, Kasich said he opposes EPA regulation of coal-fired power plants’ CO2 emissions: “I believe there is something to climate change, but to be unilaterally doing everything here while China and India are belching and putting us in a noncompetitive position isn’t good.” Still, give him credit for evolving; in 2008, he claimed, “Global warming is cyclical, and the focus of a ferocious debate.”

Notable quote: “I am just saying that I am concerned about it, but I am not laying awake at night worrying the sky is falling.” (2012)

LCV score: 27 percent

Gage Skidmore

Rand Paul, senator from Kentucky

Category: Flat-Earther

What makes Paul so scary is that he actually believes the crazy things he says. When your average Republican talks about small government, you know it’s all just code for “protecting the currently wealthy and their businesses.” So, if you could convince most GOP politicians that it’s in their political interest to take action on climate change, they could be moved. Paul isn’t like that. He is actually committed to his far-right, small-government ideology. He doesn’t even think, for example, that the federal government has the power to force businesses to racially integrate. So of course he doesn’t support action to address climate change, and he never will. When he’s trying to sound more mainstream, he says climate science is “not conclusive“; at other times, he caricatures the science of climate change to try to discredit it.

Notable quote: “If you listen to the hysterics…,you would think that the Statue of Liberty will shortly be under water and the polar bears are all drowning, and that we’re dying from pollution. It’s absolutely and utterly untrue.” (2011)

LCV score: 11 percent

House GOP

Mike Pence, governor of Indiana

Category: Flat-Earther

Pence is an ultra-conservative who does not much care for environmental regulation. He also remains unconvinced that the Earth is warming. “In the mainstream media, there is a denial of the growing skepticism in the scientific community on global warming,” Pence claimed in a 2009 interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. It is not clear what “growing skepticism” he was referring to. In the same interview, Pence refused to say if he believes in evolution but implied that he does not.

Notable quote: “I think the science is very mixed on the subject of global warming.” (2009)

LCV score: 4 percent

Gage Skidmore

Rick Perry, governor of Texas

Category: Flat-Earther

Perry is no one’s idea of a man of science or an intellectual, not even his supporters’. Texas political insiders call him “Bush without the brains.” At Texas A&M, he got mostly Cs and Ds, even in gym, and an F in organic chemistry. When drought parched Texas in 2011, Perry’s solution was to call for three days of prayer for rain. Remarkably enough, that didn’t work. Perry, who is extremely close with polluters who donate to his campaigns, simply invents facts to suit his conviction that climate change isn’t happening. In 2011, he said, “I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.” The Washington Post fact-checker debunked this claim. Perry’s 2012 presidential run was disastrous, in part because he proved himself too dumb even for Republican primary voters, which is sort of like being too white for Iceland. And yet, he is making noises about running again. And since Republican primary voters seem to get dumber with each election cycle, he could be a contender this time.

Notable quote: “I don’t believe man-made global warming is settled in science enough.” (2011)

Gage Skidmore

Marco Rubio, senator from Florida

Category: Born-Again Flat-Earther

Like a lot of ambitious Republicans, Rubio tacitly accepted the science of climate change back in 2007. He talked up renewable energy and referred to global warming as one of the reasons to embrace it. By 2009, he had seen the error of his ways, saying, “There’s a significant scientific dispute” about climate change. By 2010, he was using his Republican primary opponent Charlie Crist‘s belief in “man-made global warming” as an attack line. In May 2014, Rubio made an inept effort to deny climate science, saying, “Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activities.” Ah, merely “a handful of decades of research.” That’s nothing, right? After getting a lot of blowback for those comments, he tried to clarify and just dug himself in deeper.

Notable quote: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.” (2014)

LCV score: 11 percent

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Paul Ryan, U.S. rep from Wisconsin

Category: Flat-Earther

Climate change can be a tough issue for someone who wants to present himself as a wonk, as Ryan so very badly does. To just ignore the science is to risk looking dumb. So, for Ryan, opposition to climate regulation is more about his intense opposition to economic regulation more generally. He constantly asserts that climate regulations, for example, would impose an enormous cost on our economy. Insofar as he discusses the underlying science of climate change, though, he tries to cast doubt on it, using a combination of phony concern for scientific accuracy and an even phonier regular-Midwestern-guy shtick. In a 2009 op-ed, he devoted several paragraphs to the trumped-up scandal at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and suggested that climate change should be a low priority for Wisconsinites because it snows in their state in the winter, writing: “Unilateral economic restraint in the name of fighting global warming has been a tough sell in our communities, where much of the state is buried under snow.” In July, while refusing to discuss the science of climate change, Ryan asserted that the EPA’s proposed power plant regulations are “obnoxious.” “I think they’re exceeding their authority and I think they kill jobs,” he said.

Notable quote: “There is growing disagreement among scientists about climate change and its causes.” (2010)

LCV score: 13 percent

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Rick Santorum, former senator from Pennsylvania

Category: Flat-Earther

As you might expect from a religious extremist who once compared homosexuality to “man on dog,” Santorum’s beliefs on climate change are unapologetically ignorant. At least he can boast of having been consistent. As Politico noted of Santorum in 2011, “Unlike Romney and some of the other GOP presidential candidates, the former senator has never backed cap-and-trade legislation or other mandatory policies to curb greenhouse gases.” Santorum attacked Romney for admitting that climate change was happening, calling it “junk science” that was invented by liberals to gain greater control over the economy. And his May 2014 book calls climate change a “hyped-up crisis.”

Notable quote: “I for one never bought the hoax. I for one understand just from science that there are one hundred factors that influence the climate. To suggest that one minor factor of which man’s contribution is a minor factor in the minor factor is the determining ingredient in the sauce that affects the entire global warming and cooling is just absurd on its face.” (2012)

LCV score: 10 percent

Eric Brown/Flickr

Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin

Category: Dodger

Walker is a favorite of the Koch brothers—he notoriously kissed ass during a call with a prankster pretending to be David Koch. The oil oligarchs like him because he opposes governmental regulations, except for when the regulation stymies clean energy. Walker imposed regulations to keep wind turbines further away from homes and signed a pledge never to pass a carbon tax. He has also raised money for the Heartland Institute, an organization that spreads climate misinformation. But he’s never actually said whether he accepts climate science.

Notable quote, criticizing his gubernatorial opponent for pushing climate legislation: “Governor Jim Doyle D has put his trust in international politicians, bureaucrats, celebrities and discredited scientists to replace the real manufacturing jobs Wisconsin is losing every day.” (2009)

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13 Republican Climate Deniers Who Want to Be President

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From Anarchists To Tibetan Monks, Here Are Some of the Outsiders Joining Protests in Ferguson

by WSIMargene Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Crisis is the leading edge where change is possible,” Lisa Fithian, an itinerant protest organizer, once told me. Nowhere does that seem more true right now than in Ferguson, Missouri, where ongoing protests have drawn attention to a deep national vein of racial animus. It’s not surprising, then, that national figures have begun parachuting into town: The Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, actress Keke Palmer, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey—and the list goes on. The threat of “outside agitators” is a meme that has accompanied protests dating back to the civil rights era and beyond. But in Ferguson, there are indeed complaints from local organizers that some outsiders are making the situation worse.

On Monday, when Missouri Governor Jay Nixon signed an order to bring in the National Guard, he cited “violent and criminal acts of an organized and growing number of individuals, many from outside the community and state.” On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill said on MSNBC that the protesters “have now been invaded…by a group of instigators, some coming from other states, that want a confrontation with police.” An officer told the Washington Post that visitors to Ferguson are engaging in “looting tourism.”

Arrest statistics appear to bear them out, up to a point. Of the 78 people arrested Monday night, police told reporters, 68 percent were from the St. Louis metro area, but 18—or 23 percent—had come from out of state, some from as far away as New York and California.

So who are these outsiders, and what do they want? I went looking for every non-local organization claiming to have members protesting in Ferguson, from fringe to mainstream. Here are some I found:

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From Anarchists To Tibetan Monks, Here Are Some of the Outsiders Joining Protests in Ferguson

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Obama May Soon Send This Reporter to Jail. Here Are the Embarrassing Secrets He Exposed.

by SantosSolis Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration has fought a years-long court battle to force longtime New York Times national security correspondent James Risen to reveal the source for a story in his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Risen may soon serve jail time for refusing to out his source. The fight has drawn attention to Obama’s less-than-stellar track record on press freedom—in a recent interview, Risen called the president “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.” But lost in the ruckus are the details of what Risen revealed. Here’s what has the government so upset.

In State of War, Risen revealed a secret CIA operation, code-named Merlin, that was intended to undermine the Iranian nuclear program. The plan—originally approved by president Bill Clinton, but later embraced by George W. Bush—was to pass flawed plans for a trigger system for a nuclear weapon to Iran in the hopes of derailing the country’s nuclear program. “It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world,” Risen wrote in State of War, “providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from the rogue countries like Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.”

The flaws in the trigger system were supposed to be so well hidden that the blueprints would lead Iranian scientists down the wrong path for years. But Merlin’s frontman, a Russian nuclear scientist and defector then on the CIA’s payroll, spotted the flaws almost immediately. On the day of the handoff in Vienna in winter 2000, the Russian, not wanting to burn a bridge with the Iranians, included an apologetic note with his delivery, explaining that the design had some problems. Shortly after receiving the plans, one member of the Iranian mission changed his travel plans and flew back to Tehran, presumably with the blueprints—and the note—in hand. Merlin did not wreck the Iranian nuclear program—in fact, Risen wrote, the operation could have accelerated it.

In a sworn affidavit filed in 2011, and in a recently rejected appeal to the US Supreme Court, Risen has argued that his reporting served the public good. Published at a time when military action in Iran seemed possible, State of Fear revealed how much of the effort to gather information on Iran’s nuclear capability was not just shoddy but dangerous—even, in the case of Operation Merlin, helping Iran get closer to building a nuclear weapon.

The Bush administration did not see it that way. In 2008, Bush’s Justice Department subpoenaed Risen, demanding that he reveal his source—or face jail time for contempt of court. After taking office in 2009, the Obama administration renewed the Bush-era subpoena and continued to try to identify and prosecute Risen’s source. Justice Department staff believe they know who the source was—an ex-CIA operations officer named Jeffrey Sterling, who was previously an on-the-record source for Risen—but they want Risen to confirm their hunch and fill in a few details. In legal filings, Justice Department lawyers have called Risen a witness to “serious crimes that implicate the national security of the United States” and argued that “there are few scenarios where the United States’ interests in securing information is more profound and compelling than in a criminal prosecution like this one.”

If Risen is called to court to testify but fails to show up or refuses to talk, he’s likely to become the first reporter since Judith Miller in 2005 to be sentenced to jail time for refusing to divulge a source.

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Obama May Soon Send This Reporter to Jail. Here Are the Embarrassing Secrets He Exposed.

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The St. Louis Area Has a Long History of Shameful Racial Violence

by BobbyLomas Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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A mob blocks a street car during the East St. Louis Riot of July 1917 University of Massachusetts-Amherst Libraries

The shooting of Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent riots, protests, and police crackdown have highlighted the area’s long history of racial strife. One chapter from that history, a century-old summer riot just fourteen miles away from Ferguson, in East St. Louis, Illinois, shows how black Americans were subjected to racial violence from the moment they arrived in the region.

In 1917, East St. Louis was crowded with factories. Jobs were abundant. But as World War I halted the flow of immigration from Eastern Europe, factory recruiters started looking toward the American South for black workers. Thousands came, and as competition for jobs increased, a labor issue became a racial one.

East St. Louis’ angry white workers found sympathy from the leaders of the local Democratic party, who feared that the influx of black, mostly Republican voters threatened their electoral dominance. In one particularly striking parallel to today’s political landscape, local newspapers warned of voter fraud, alleging that black voters were moving between northern cities to swing local elections as part of a far-reaching conspiracy called “colonization,” according to the documentary series Living in St. Louis.

A cartoon from the time of the riot, lambasting then-president Woodrow Wilson for making the world “safe for democracy” while ignoring the plight of East St. Louis. Wikipedia

That May, a local aluminum plant brought in black workers to replace striking white ones. Soon, crowds of whites gathered downtown, at first protesting the migration, then beating blacks and destroying property. On July 1, a group of white men drove through a black neighborhood, firing a gun out their car window. (The perpetrators were never caught.) A few hours later, another car drove through the neighborhood. Black residents fired at it, killing two police officers.

On July 2, as news of the killings got out, white residents went tearing through black neighborhoods, beating and killing blacks and burning some 300 houses as National Guard troops either failed to respond or fled the scene. The official toll counted 39 black and eight white people dead, but others speculated that more than a hundred people died in what is still considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in twentieth-century America. Afraid for their lives, more than six thousand blacks left the city after the riot.

That the United States was then fighting in Europe to defend democracy while failing to protect its own citizens was not lost on Marcus Garvey, soon to become one of the most famous civil rights leaders of his time: “This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy,” he said to cheers at a speech in Harlem on July 8. “I do not know what special meaning the people who slaughtered the Negroes of East St. Louis have for democracy… but I do know that it has no meaning for me.”

Top image credit: STL250

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The St. Louis Area Has a Long History of Shameful Racial Violence

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Anonymous’ "Op Ferguson" Says It Will ID the Officer Who Killed Michael Brown

by Jaqueline2060 Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Update (4:12 p.m. ET): Anonymous has obtained and posted St. Louis police dispatch tapes from the day of the shooting.

The police chief of Ferguson, Missouri, says he is withholding the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, out of concern for the safety of the officer and his family. But that might be easier said than done. Just a few hours later, the hacktivist group Anonymous announced on Twitter that it was now “making a final confirmation on the name of Mike Brown’s murderer,” adding: “It will be released the moment we receive it.”

I traded emails last night with one of the half-dozen core Anonymous members working on Operation Ferguson, as the group’s effort to pressure and shame the local police department is known. They were still working to verify the identity of the shooter. “I can only tell you that our source is very close personally to the officer who killed Mike Brown, and that this person is terrified to be our source,” said the anon, whom I will call Fawkes. He added that the source “reached out to us, we did not seek out this person.”

The claim to have outed the Ferguson shooter comes only two days after Anonymous announced the launch of Operation Ferguson in this video:

The computer-generated voice, graphics, and hacking threats are trademark Anonymous, but one aspect is unusual: a demand for federal legislation “that will set strict national standards for police misconduct and misbehavior.” Though Anonymous has a strong anarchist strain that disdains politics, Fawkes told me that the idea wasn’t controversial within the group. “We have done a few of these ‘justice ops’ and it seems there needs to be a larger solution to the problem on a nationwide level,” he told me. “There was no debate—everyone on the team embraced the idea.”

Ferguson is 60 percent black. Virtually all its cops are white. Read more stats ››

It has been a busy few days for Operation Ferguson. The hackers shut down the city’s website for a few hours on Sunday night and Tuesday morning, posted the home address and number of St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar, and dropped an email bomb that crammed city and police inboxes with junk messages. The goal was “to get journalists like you to do interviews with us, and incidentally maybe talk about the issue at hand in the process,” Fawkes told me. “Looks like it worked.”

In previous “justice ops,” Anonymous hackers have targeted the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to protest the Charles Hill and Oscar Grant shootings and the transit system’s attempt to dampen protests by shutting down cellphone signals. Other Anonymous ops have uncovered criminal evidence or the names of suspects. “It’s actually back to the classics,” said McGill University cultural anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, author of the forthcoming book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, whom I met last night in a chatroom where hackers were plotting their next moves. She added that “a lot of old-school folks came back for this,” though they’ve been careful to avoid the attention of law enforcement and other anons by using fresh pseudonyms.

But the veterans’ participation hasn’t stopped Op Ferguson from seeming unhinged at times. On Tuesday afternoon, one Anonymous Twitter account threatened to release information about the police chief’s daughter unless he disclosed the name of the officer who’d killed Brown. (The threat was later withdrawn.) And the op’s Twitter account repeated a bogus internet rumor attributing a screenshot of a racist Facebook tirade to Belmar’s wife—the tweet has since been deleted.

“We are not exactly known for being ‘responsible,’ nor for worrying overly much about the safety of cops,” Fawkes told me. “After all, they have vests and assault weapons. I think they can look after themselves. This is psychological and information warfare, not a love fest.”

Half outlaw, half idealist, Anonymous has always operated at the margins of legitimacy, its tactics ranging from gumshoe detective work to illegal hacking and shameless PR stunts. It’s hard to know whether its current claim to have ID’d Brown’s killer will be borne out. “I don’t think they have it,” Coleman told me. But, she added: “I would not be surprised if they do soon.”

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Anonymous’ "Op Ferguson" Says It Will ID the Officer Who Killed Michael Brown

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Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.

by AveryWinder Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, the working-class city in northern St. Louis county where an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by police officers on Saturday, say the town has been a “powder keg” of racial imbalance for decades. “They treat us like second class all the way down the line,” one black resident told the LA Times. A black city alderman said the ensuing protests are “a boiling over of tensions that had been going on for a long while.”

Here’s a by-the-numbers look at who lives in Ferguson, who’s in charge, who gets stopped by police, and more.

All icons courtesy of the Noun Project. Houses: Laurène Smith

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of black members of Ferguson’s school board.

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Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.

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