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This Republican Who Wants to End the Weekend Is Probably Headed to Congress

by OdessaSeal Posted on September 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Glenn Grothman, a Republican state senator who is on track to be the next congressman from Wisconsin’s 6th district, has never been shy about speaking his mind. He’s a bomb-thrower, a perpetual outrage machine for his liberal opponents, and a gift to the local and national press corps.

Grothman briefly stepped onto the national stage during the 2011 protests against Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to curb public workers’ bargaining rights. He was one of the most outspoken critics of the anti-Walker protesters. On MSNBC, he derided those protesting the bill as “a bunch of slobs” and compared those who occupied the state Capitol to “college students and hangers-on having a party.”

In August, Grothman surprised many, including some in his own party, by squeezing out the narrowest of victories in the GOP primary in his overwhelmingly Republican district, which includes Oshkosh and Fond du Lac. Referring to Grothman’s previous remarks about women, one Republican operative tweeted, “Gee, so glad we nominated the guy w/ a reputation of being a misogynist in #WI06 w/ both our Gov and AG candidates down vs women.”

Uncharacteristically, Grothman has gone silent since his primary victory. (His campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)

Here is a roundup of what might be called his greatest hits. Read them and remember that Grothman is likely headed to Congress.

Days off from work are “a little ridiculous”: In January, Grothman proposed rolling back a Wisconsin law requiring employers to give workers at least one day of rest per week. He told the Huffington Post the existing state law was “a little goofy” and his proposal was about “freedom.” “Right now in Wisconsin, you’re not supposed to work seven days in a row, which is a little ridiculous because all sorts of people want to work seven days a week,” he said.

Sex ed could turn kids gay: In 2010, Grothman, who believes that homosexuality is a choice, proposed banning Wisconsin public school teachers from mentioning homosexuality in sex education classes because some teachers had an “agenda” to turn kids gay.

Planned Parenthood is racist: In January 2013, Grothman appeared on Voice of Christian Youth America, an evangelical talk show, and he called Planned Parenthood “the most overtly racist organization.” He said that Planned Parenthood has a pattern of “not liking people who are not white” and specifically targets Asian Americans for sex-selective abortions. (Planned Parenthood opposes sex-selective abortions.)

“Money is more important for men”: After voting in 2011 to repeal Wisconsin’s equal-pay protection law, Grothman argued that the male-female pay gap wasn’t about discrimination in the workplace. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he told the Daily Beast. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.” He added, “You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious.” (At a 2010 tea party rally, Grothman said, “In the long run, a lot of women like to stay at home and have their husbands be the primary breadwinner.”)

People on food stamps don’t act poor enough: In a 2004 op-ed calling for new restrictions on the federal food stamps program, Grothman outlined the extensive research that informed his position. “I’ve interviewed over a dozen people who check out people who pay with food stamps,” he wrote, “and all felt people on food stamps ate better—or at least more costly—than they did.” He also wrote: “Observations of people who work in food stores indicate that many people who use food stamps do not act as if they are genuinely poor.”

God is probably mad at John Kerry: In April, Grothman appeared again on Voice of Christian Youth America, and he discussed Secretary of State Kerry’s efforts to lobby against Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s bill to punish gays and lesbians. “Now, usually I associate the United States with being a positive influence on Africa,” Grothman said. “You associate the United States with sending missionaries to Africa…Instead, what we have is the secretary of state going to Africa and educating Ugandans or saying he is going to send American scientists to Uganda to explain how normal homosexuality is. Think about that. What must God think of our country?”

The Kwanzaa conspiracy: A December 2012 press release issued by Grothman’s state senate office asked, “Why Must We Still Hear About Kwanzaa?” In it, Grothman claimed that Kwanzaa is a phony holiday promoted by “white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people’s throats in an effort to divide Americans.” He urged “mainstream Americans” to be “more outspoken on this issue. It’s time it’s slapped down once and for all.”

Affirmative action is “offensive”: Following the US Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which upheld a ban on racial preferences in college admissions, Grothman said he would re-up a previous bill outlawing all race- and gender-based affirmative action programs in Wisconsin. “There’s no question that affirmative action is an idea whose time has come and gone,” he told Wisconsin Public Radio. “It’s offensive and it’s very anti-business.”

If he could turn back time: Grothman told an interviewer in 2010, “Did people even know what homosexuality was in high school in 1975? I don’t remember any discussion about that at the time. There were a few guys who would make fun of a few effeminate boys, but that’s a different thing than homosexuality. Homosexuality was not on anyone’s radar. And that’s a good thing.” But Grothman doesn’t just miss the ’70s; he’s also said he wants to turn the clock back to the 1950s.

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This Republican Who Wants to End the Weekend Is Probably Headed to Congress

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Paul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Plan Would Cost Billions to Implement. Will GOPers Go for That?

by CSNMindyihta Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) laid out a new set of proposals to revamp the federal safety net during a speech on Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, central to his vision was the idea of consolidating federal programs to create a “personalized, customized form of aid—one that recognizes both a person’s needs and their strengths—both the problem and the potential.”

The plan, wrapped in caring language about giving the poor individual attention, has earned plaudits from both the right and the left for avoiding partisanship and offering up a concrete idea that policy makers will have to take seriously. Liberals have given Ryan—an Ayn Rand devotee who on the campaign trail reduced American society to one of makers versus takers and whose budgets have proposed slashing millions in spending on the poor—credit for getting out of the office and spending some time with actual poor people during his year-long “listening tour,” whose genuine impact is evident in his proposal.

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Paul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Plan Would Cost Billions to Implement. Will GOPers Go for That?

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4 Key Takeaways About Scott Walker’s Alleged "Criminal Scheme"

by OTHLeannez Posted on June 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, a federal judge unsealed a batch of documents shedding light on a secret investigation that has dogged Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and some of his conservative allies since the summer of 2012.

Prosecutors are probing whether Walker and two of his aides illegally coordinated with outside groups—including the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity—to fend off a wave of recall elections in 2011 and 2012. This kind of probe, conducted in secret, is known in Wisconsin as a “John Doe.” It is spearheaded by Francis Schmitz, a former federal prosecutor who was on George W. Bush’s shortlist to be US attorney in Wisconsin’s Eastern District. The investigation was initiated by the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office, which is led by Democrats.

Here are four key takeaways from the newly released documents:

1) Walker and two aides allegedly ran a “criminal scheme”

Prosecutors allege in the documents that Walker, his campaign committee, and two close aides, RJ Johnson and Deborah Jordahl, ran a “criminal scheme” using dark-money nonprofit groups to evade state election laws. Their goal: Defend Walker and a group of state lawmakers facing recall elections in 2011 and ’12.

The documents describe a web of 12 nonprofit groups that closely coordinated their fundraising and spending. Prosecutors say Walker, Johnson, and Jordahl presided over this web of groups. The documents quote a May 2011 email sent by Walker to GOP operative Karl Rove about the coordination plans: “Bottom-line: RJ Johnson helps keep in place a team that is wildly successful in Wisconsin. We are running 9 recall elections and it will be like 9 congressional markets in every market in the state (and Twin Cities).”

In a statement, Walker said: “The accusation of any wrongdoing written in the complaint by the office of a partisan Democrat district attorney by me or by my campaign is categorically false. This is nothing more than a partisan investigation with no basis in state law.”

2) A conservative leader voiced concerns about coordination between outside groups and Walker

The documents show that the Wisconsin Club for Growth acted as a conduit for funneling dark money to pro-Walker and pro-GOP groups. It also ran its own ads defending Walker and his policy agenda, which included a controversial budget-repair bill that limited bargaining rights for public-sector workers.

Wisconsin Club for Growth’s activities had at least one conservative leader worried. “Notably, prior to the 2011 Wisconsin Senate recall elections, the national Club for Growth organization raised concerns about coordination or interaction with Wisconsin Club for Growth and Friends of Scott Walker as early as 2009.”

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The documents cite a comment by the national Club for Growth’s then-director, David Keating, who said he had “legal concerns” about Wisconsin Club for Growth ads that featured Walker.

3) Walker’s alleged coordination scheme was an expansive, all-hands-on-deck effort

A quick bit of history: In early 2011, Walker introduced Act 10, the anti-union bill that curbed workers’ rights. Democrats and labor unions reacted by organizing massive protests, then sought retribution by recalling state lawmakers who’d voted for the bill.

The documents reveal, in the clearest detail yet, the extent to which Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and a slew of dark-money nonprofit groups rallied to fend off those recall efforts. RJ Johnson, a Walker confidant and a central player in the coordination probe, used the Wisconsin Club for Growth to coordinate with the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, the national Club for Growth, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, the Republican State Leadership Committee, and the Republican Governors Association. It was a murder’s row of conservative players who all pitched in to help preserve the GOP majorities in the Wisconsin legislature and to keep Walker, a rising GOP star, in office.

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4) All of this information may be for naught

Something to remember amidst the frenzy surrounding the release of the new documents: The John Doe probe into Walker and his allies is almost dead.

The pushback has been led by Eric O’Keefe, a director with Wisconsin Club for Growth who has fought the probe every step of the way, selectively leaking documents to the Wall Street Journal editorial board and suing in court to halt the investigation. And he’s having success: The probe is temporarily on hold while a federal judge studies his lawsuit. O’Keefe say their activities zeroed in on by prosecutors weren’t illegal because the groups in question coordinated on issue-based activities, not expressly political work. He also argues that the John Doe probe violates his First Amendment rights to free speech.

So far, a state judge and a federal judge have sympathized with O’Keefe’s argument, saying that prosecutors have failed to make the case for illegal coordination. The investigation of Walker and his allies is still alive, but its prospects don’t look good.

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4 Key Takeaways About Scott Walker’s Alleged "Criminal Scheme"

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Is It “Madness” to Rebuild a Flu Virus That Wiped Out 50 Million People?

by IvaGabbard Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

Flu-stricken soldiers at Camp Funston in Kansas. US Army/Wikipedia

Remember the Spanish Flu of 1918? Of course you don’t. That’s the freakishly deadly influenza strain that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919, wiping out 30 million to 50 million people. It infected about one in four Americans and killed about 675,000. It didn’t just kill little kids and the elderly, either, like most flu strains. This one was unusually devastating in young, healthy people—although why the “mother of all pandemics” behaved as it did is not fully understood.

This week, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, an influenza researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (which happens to be my hometown), published a new study—”Circulating Avian Influenza Viruses Closely Related to the 1918 Virus Have Pandemic Potential.” It describes the creation of a highly pathogenic flu virus that varies by just 3 percent from the Spanish Flu. “To assess the risk of emergence of a 1918-like virus and to delineate the amino acid changes that are needed for such a virus to become transmissible via respiratory droplets in mammals, we attempted to generate an influenza virus composed of avian influenza viral segments that encoded proteins with high homology to the 1918 viral proteins,” he and his coauthors wrote.

Needless to say, some of Kawaoka’s scientific peers think he’s insane to do such a thing. As Harvard epidemiologist Mark Lipsitch told the Guardian, “I am worried that this signals a growing trend to make transmissible novel viruses willy-nilly, without strong public health rationale. This is a risky activity, even in the safest labs. Scientists should not take such risks without strong evidence that the work could save lives, which this paper does not provide.”

This isn’t the first time Kawaoka’s work has created a stir. I’ve written previously about how his lab and Ron Fouchier’s came under fire after they created potential pandemic flu strains that could be spread by air between ferrets—a reliable model for human-to-human transmission. Back in 2002, in fact, I telephoned Kawaoka to ask whether, in the wake of 9/11, he felt it might be dangerous to publish techniques for reconstituting killer viruses, as his lab had previously done. His response was prickly. “That has to be published,” he said. “That’s science. If you say you shouldn’t publish this or that, we should say you shouldn’t make knives or guns—or airplanes, because that was used as a weapon in September.”

It would require a high level of expertise to do the work, he argued, and a terrorist would first have to acquire the sequence. When I countered that the sequences were published, he said, “You can do it, but it would take forever.”

Not so long these days, thanks to advances in equipment and methodology. “This is not rocket science,” the Nobel Prize-winning virologist Peter Doherty told me last year. “Anyone with a basic training in molecular virology can do these experiments. People can do it in their garage if they were sophisticated and they had a bit of money.” He added: “We published the sequence of the resurrected 1918 virus with very little controversy around 2000, I think it was. Nobody made much fuss and it’s a deadly virus—anyone could’ve rebuilt that virus.”

It’s been done, actually. And now Kawaoka has come pretty darn close using using gene segments from modern viruses. “It’s madness, folly,” virologist Simon Wain-Hobson told the Guardian. “It shows profound lack of respect for the collective decision-making process we’ve always shown in fighting infections. If society, the intelligent layperson, understood what was going on, they would say ‘What the F are you doing?'”

The debate is no longer even about terrorism. It’s about whether the scientists themselves can keep these things in check. The risk here is accidental infection, perhaps from a laboratory mishap. The scientists who work with these viruses, Doherty assured me, are really top-level people working “under extraordinary security conditions.” And yet, shit happens. In a study published last May in the journal PLOS Medicine, Harvard’s Lipsitch calculated that “a moderate research program of ten laboratories at high safety level standards for a decade would run a nearly 20% risk of resulting in at least one laboratory-acquired infection, which, in turn, may initiate a chain of transmission.”

When the next terrifying flu emerges, we are at least more equipped to deal with it than we were back in 1918. “We’re incredibly better at monitoring it and reacting quickly,” Doherty says. “There’s a great global network of influenza centers, and the technology is infinitely better. A lot of people in 1918 probably died from secondary bacterial infections. We’ve got antibiotics to deal with bacteria, and so we’d do better there. Also, it looks as though we’ll be able to make a lot of flu vaccine very fast. At the moment, it takes us at least six months to get much out there.”

Then again, there’s this.

Clarification: At the suggestion of a reader, a PhD student in virology, I updated the story to note that the actual 1918 flu was reconstituted in a lab in 2005. Kawaoka created a similar virus using modern sequences. “To be honest, even after reading the paper I’m not sure why,” the student noted.

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Is It “Madness” to Rebuild a Flu Virus That Wiped Out 50 Million People?

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This 25-Year-Old Occupy Protester Could Be Sentenced To Seven Years In Prison Monday

by KatheriOBWN Posted on May 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, 25-year-old Cecily McMillan became one of the only Occupy Wall Street protestors to face serious jail time when a jury convicted her of assaulting a police officer. Her conviction has sparked outrage amongst progressives because McMillan alleges she involuntarily elbowed NYPD officer Grantley Bovell after he grabbed her breast, and because the judge refused to admit as evidence in the trial certain accusations of police brutality against Bovell and other cops the night of the incident. Assaulting an officer, a felony offense, carries a sentence of between two and seven years’ prison time.

McMillan is currently locked up in Rikers Island jail in New York City, awaiting her sentencing on Monday. Though the judge, Ronald Zweibel, could end up giving her a sentence as mild as a stint of community service, when I chatted with her Friday in a sterile cement room at Rikers, she seemed prepared to do serious time. She was wearing prison-issued Velcro sneakers, her own hipster-ish long johns, and horn-rimmed glasses. “I’ve had two years to think about the decision” to go to trial instead of accept a plea deal, the 25 year-old said, surprisingly upbeat. “What kind of activist would I be if I wouldn’t go to jail?”

McMillan, a graduate student in liberal studies at the New School in New York City says she was raised in a trailer park in the “all white, racist” town of Beaumont, Texas, where she says her mother supported her and her brother on $12,000 a year. She saw her brother and many of her friends thrown in jail. McMillan spent her summers in Atlanta with her grandparents, who had been heavily involved in the civil rights movement. From a young age, she noticed racial and economic differences between the two worlds in which she was raised. She was inspired to follow in her grandparents’ footsteps. “To me activism isn’t political so much as personal,” she says. “It’s whatever I can do to make life better” for her family and friends—and now her fellow inmates.

As an undergraduate at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, McMillan got into activism, and afterwards began working for the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States. She considers herself an anarcho-syndicalist, someone who believes in an anarchic society in which workers take control of the economy. After visiting an Occupy Wall Street encampment in 2011, she decided to get involved in the movement.

The night of March 17th, 2012, though, McMillan wasn’t protesting with other Occupiers. She says she was passing through an encampment in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti park to pick up an acquaintance after having had a few beers with a friend nearby. As NYPD officers were attempting to escort protestors out of the park, McMillan says Bovell grabbed her breast from behind and she instinctively jabbed her elbow back into his eye. That night, the police officers arresting her used excessive force, according to her lawyer, and she suffered a seizure before being hospitalized for bruises and cuts on her shoulders, back, head, and breast.

During the trial last month, Judge Zweibel forbade the jury from viewing video clips taken that night that purport to show police beating protestors, and would not let jurors hear about an allegation that Bovell had banged another protestor’s head against a bus seat that night. The judge also ruled against allowing McMillan’s lawyer to bring up certain previous allegations of police brutality against Bovell. A grainy 52-second video of the incident convinced the jury that Cecily was guilty of deliberately elbowing Bovell. (Once the jurors found out that McMillan could be sentenced to up to seven years, though, nine of them sent a letter to the judge asking him not to send her to prison at all.)

McMillan was immediately sent to Rikers Island, where she’s been held for two weeks. She says her experience there so far has been a concentrated reminder of America’s failure to adequately address all manner of social ills: drug abuse, mental illness, racism, poverty. “You can see really fucking clearly how fucked up everything is about our society,” she says, her voice rising.

On a personal level though, McMillan says jail life hasn’t been too bad. McMillan sleeps in a dorm with about 40 other women who “all rushed to take care of me” when she arrived. And she has made fast friends with a lady named Fat Baby who hissed and cat-called McMillan when she first got there. “I told her she sounded like a damn construction worker,” McMillan says, and then they bonded.

If Judge Zweibel goes easy on McMillan and forgoes a prison sentence, McMillan says she’ll finish her master’s degree—her thesis is on Bayard Rustin, a leader of the civil rights movement in the 1940s—and keep organizing. She has grand visions about how to fix society. First, she says, we need to start with democratic socialism “to get America on par with the rest of the Western world. Then socialism, then communism, then anarcho-syndicalism.”

But if she’s handed a couple years in jail, McMillan is ready to take it in service of the cause. Maybe “it’s all part of the plan,” she wrote to supporters earlier this month.

And what if the judge gives her the maximum sentence of seven years? She looks down. “Seven years would be really, really a lot,” she says slowly. “I’ve got a lot of plans.”

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This 25-Year-Old Occupy Protester Could Be Sentenced To Seven Years In Prison Monday

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GOP Operative Pulls Election "Shenanigans" In New York House Race

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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“What kind of shenanigans are going on now?” That’s what Darin Robbins, a Green Party member in Corning, New York, thought when he learned that a stranger had circulated a petition to place his name on the ballot for a House race.

Robbins had no plans to seek office, so he was shocked a couple of weeks ago when a Green Party secretary called to tell him that a petition had been filed in his name to run against GOP Rep. Tom Reed, the vulnerable first-term Republican who represents the 23rd congressional district in upstate New York.

The story gets stranger. A Republican operative was behind the attempt to put Robbins on the ballot. Aaron Andrew Keister, a notary public who has worked as a video tracker for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the political committee dedicated to electing GOPers to the House, filed ballot access petitions—each bearing the signatures of about 75 registered voters—for Robbins and a second Green Party member. If Keister’s plan had succeeded, it could have helped Reed—the Northeast regional chairman of the NRCC—by putting on the ballot a progressive candidate who would likely draw votes away from his expected Democratic opponent, county legislator Martha Robertson. But Keister messed up: Because he filed the Robbins petition late and got the other Green Party member’s address wrong, neither Green will appear on the ballot for the June primary or the November general election, according to New York election officials.

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GOP Operative Pulls Election "Shenanigans" In New York House Race

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A Federal Judge Just Struck Down Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law. Read The Decision.

by Seymour89E Posted on April 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin voters won’t be forced to present a photo ID to gain access to the ballot thanks to a new federal court decision. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman ruled on Tuesday that the state’s voter ID law violates the constitutional rights of minority and low-income voters. In his decision, Adelman cited the Voting Rights Act to invalidate the 2011 Wisconsin law—passed by the state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker—that implemented a photo ID requirement for all voters.

Voting rights advocates despaired last summer after the Supreme Court blocked Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a key provision of the law that required the government to approve any voting changes in states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination (Wisconsin was not one of those states). Since that decision, states previously covered by Section 5 have rushed to add voter restrictions. But based on Adelman’s logic, these controversial photo ID requirements that have been implemented across the country run afoul of a part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court left untouched.

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A Federal Judge Just Struck Down Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law. Read The Decision.

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Corn waste-based ethanol could be worse for the climate than gasoline

by Steven Posted on April 22, 2014

Corn waste-based ethanol could be worse for the climate than gasoline

By

Ron Nichols, USDA

Young corn growing in the residue of the previous crop.

A lot of carbon-rich waste is left behind after a cornfield is stripped of its juicy ears. It used to be that the stalks, leaves, and detrital cobs would be left on fields to prevent soil erosion and to allow the next crop to feast on the organic goodness of its late brethren. Increasingly, though, these leftovers are being sent to cellulosic ethanol biorefineries. Millions of gallons of biofuels are expected to be produced from such waste this year — a figure could rise to more than 10 billion gallons in 2022 to satisfy federal requirements.

But a new study suggests this approach may be worse for the climate, at least in the short term, than drilling for oil and burning the refined gasoline. The benefits of cellulosic biofuel made from corn waste improve over the longer term, but the study, published online Sunday in Nature Climate Change, suggests that the fuel could never hit the benchmark set in the 2007 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act, which requires that cellulosic ethanol be 60 percent better for the climate than traditional gasoline.

The problem is that after corn residue is torn out and hauled away from a farm field, more carbon is lost from the soil. This problem is pervasive throughout the cornbelt, but it’s the most pronounced in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, owing in part to the high carbon contents of soils there.

Researchers used a supercomputer to run models to estimate the effect of removing corn residue from 128 million acres of farmland in 12 corn-farming states. Removing the residue was found to release 50 to 80 grams of carbon dioxide from the exposed soil for every megajoule of biofuel produced. Add to that figure the biofuel’s tailpipe CO2 emissions and, voila, you get an average of 100 grams of CO2 released for every megajoule of power produced — which is 7 percent worse than emissions from regular old gasoline.

The key findings are shown in the following graph from the paper. The top line shows that soil organic carbon (SOC) is gradually lost over nine years when corn residue is left in place. But when the residue is hauled off to be turned into biofuel, as shown in the dashed lower line, the loss of soil carbon is more rapid. The loss of such soil carbon is a blow for the farm — crops need that material to grow. But it’s also a blow for the climate, because the carbon ends up in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

Nature Climate ChangeClick to embiggen.

The researchers found that the loss of soil carbon is an issue regardless of whether some of the residue is removed from a field or all of it. “If less residue is removed, there is less decrease in soil carbon, but it results in a smaller biofuel energy yield,” said report coauthor Adam Liska, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

The research was funded with $500,000 from the federal government — which was quick to pan the results.

An EPA spokeswoman told the AP that the study “does not provide useful information relevant to the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from corn stover ethanol.” And the biofuels industry complained that the researchers did not give a good explanation for why their conclusions contradicted other recent studies.

But the AP has previously exposed gaping holes in the EPA’s own studies, which have concluded that ethanol provides big climate benefits.

We asked Liska how officials could use his findings to help slow down global warming. He suggested that they start by using their ears (not the corn kind). “If emissions are going to be decreased, the EPA should accept these findings as valid,” he replied.


Source
Biofuels from crop residue can reduce soil carbon and increase CO2 emissions, Nature Climate Change
Study casts doubt on climate benefit of biofuels from corn residue, University of Nebraska
Study: Fuels from corn waste not better than gas, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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This GOP House Candidate Proposed Eliminating the Weekend

by AdelePlatz Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wisconites tired of relaxing on weekends and staying home on federal holidays are in luck: On Thursday, GOP state Sen. Glenn Grothman announced his challenge to 13-term moderate Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.). In a conservative district that went to Mitt Romney by seven points in 2012, Grothman hopes to channel dissatisfaction with Republicans in Congress whom he believes haven’t done enough to slow down the Obama administration’s policy agenda. But he comes with some baggage of his own.

In January, Grothman introduced legislation to eliminate a state requirement that workers get at least one day off per week. “Right now in Wisconsin, you’re not supposed to work seven days in a row, which is a little ridiculous because all sorts of people want to work seven days a week,” he told the Huffington Post. Eliminating days off is a long-running campaign from Grothman. Three years earlier, he argued that public employees should have to work on Martin Luther King Day. “Let’s be honest, giving government employees off has nothing to do with honoring Martin Luther King Day and it’s just about giving state employees another day off,” he told the Wisconsin State Journal. It would be one thing if people were using their day off to do something productive, but Grothman said he would be “shocked if you can find anybody doing service.”

MLK Day and “Saturday” aren’t the only holidays Grothman opposes. At a town hall in 2013, he took on Kwanzaa, which he said “almost no black people today care about” and was being propped up by “white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people’s throats in an effort to divide Americans.”

When he’s not advocating for people to spend more time working, Grothman has gotten in trouble for advocating that (some) people be paid less. “You could argue that money is more important for men,” he told the Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg, after pushing through a repeal of the state’s equal pay bill. And he has pushed to pare back a program that provided free birth control, while floating a bill that would have labeled single parenthood, “a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.” Grothman justified the bill by contending that women choose to become single mothers and call their pregnancies “unplanned” only because it’s what people want to hear. “I think people are trained to say that ‘this is a surprise to me,’ because there’s still enough of a stigma that they’re supposed to say this,” he said in 2012.

Enjoy the weekend.

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This GOP House Candidate Proposed Eliminating the Weekend

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Proposed Bill Seeks to Boost Clean Energy Curriculum in Public Schools

by Collette77S Posted on April 4, 2014

Photo: Flickr/calmenda

A proposed Senate bill seeks to expand “green” energy curriculum to public middle and high schools across the country.

Proposed by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the bill would provide grant funding to colleges with green energy curriculum to expand their programs to middle and high schools, reports local Wisconsin paper Manitowoc Herald Times. The goal, the paper reported, is to get students interested in green jobs earlier in their educational careers.

Speaking in favor of the legislation, the paper asserted: “That is a good idea, regardless of where one stands on the controversial issue of expanding green energy in the future. It is not a given that wind, solar and other forms of alternative energy are the panacea advocates claim.

“Baldwin’s legislation, however,” the reporter goes on, “will help broaden educational opportunities for middle school and high school students, which is what those schools are supposed to do.”

Dubbed the Grants for Renewable Energy Education for the Nation (GREEN) Act, the bill asks for $100 million in federal funding for grants, which would be administered by the U.S. Department of Education. The bill is a companion to the House GREEN Act, sponsored by Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.).

Introduced to the Senate floor in late January, the bill has already been endorsed by the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE).

ACTE Deputy Executive Director Steve DeWitt said the bill, “offers students exposure to the range of sustainable energy career options available today, while providing the education and training necessary to ensure that our nation’s workforce is prepared for the green jobs of the future.”

The fate of the bill is still to be decided, but Baldwin rightfully notes that jobs created in the clean energy field pay better than the average American job, with compensation rates 13 percent higher than the national average, meaning its passage may mean good things for the next generation.

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Proposed Bill Seeks to Boost Clean Energy Curriculum in Public Schools

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