Mike Ditka Just Showed Why the NFL’s National Anthem Protests Are Necessary

“There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.”

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By Jack Holmes October 10, 2017

Mike Ditka is a Hall of Fame football player and coach who made a damn good cameo in Will Ferrell’s Kicking and Screaming. He is also the latest standard-bearer for the growing number of Americans completely allergic to historical reality. You need only look to his latest comments on the so-called national anthem protests in the NFL, in which a group of primarily black players have demonstrated during pregame festivities in various ways to bring attention to racial inequality in the criminal justice system and a lack of accountability for police who kill unarmed black citizens.

Like many people—including the president—Ditka has conflated the vehicle for their protest with the subject of the protest. (Again, the players are not protesting the anthem or the flag, and their stated intention has nothing to do with disrespecting the armed forces. No player has criticized the troops.) But Ditka also took things to a new level of unreality.

It’s one thing to contend there’s no racial injustice in this country right now. Although that flies in the face of reality—the statistics on criminal justice are quite clear—it is not yet a settled matter of historical record. But the idea that there has been “no oppression in the last 100 years”—since 1917—is a statement beyond comprehension.

Mike Ditka is 77 years old. He was alive during the Civil Rights Movement, when African-American citizens were dragged off to jail for sitting at the wrong lunch counter or in the wrong part of the bus. He was alive when black Americans were sprayed with firehoses and had police dogs sicced on them because they dared march for equal rights in Birmingham, Alabama. He played in the NFL, with black teammates, throughout the 1960s as the movement hit its prime. Did he never speak to them about their experience in America, as Martin Luther King, Jr. marched on his TV screen? Did he ever wonder why John Lewis, now a United States congressman, was willing to nearly die marching alongside King in Selma?

A 1963 civil rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama.

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This is all within the last 60 or so years. The 1920s—still within Ditka’s gobsmacking historical window of racial harmony in America—was the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the Klan’s methods of enforcing white supremacy and the oppressive regime of Jim Crow—also a fixture of the real Ditka-era America—was lynching. According to the The NAACP, there were 4,743 recorded lynchings between 1882 and 1968. This is the reality. This is what happened in parts of the United States of America as recently as 50 years ago.

And this is also why the national anthem protests Ditka finds so unacceptable are so necessary. While Ditka’s apparent ignorance is certainly extraordinary, his basic unfamiliarity with the experience of being black in America is not. Put simply, many white people are often unaware that injustice exists because it does not affect them personally, as the rest of The Washington Post‘s writeup of Ditka’s conversation shows:

Later on Monday, Gray asked Ditka, “For those who want social justice, and for those who look back at the lives of Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens, and John Carlos and Tommy Smith, your response would be?”

“I don’t know what social injustices have been,” the Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee replied. “Muhammad Ali rose to the top. Jesse Owens is one of the classiest individuals that ever lived. I mean, you can say, are you talking that everything is based on color? I don’t see it that way.

“I think that you have to be colorblind in this country. You’ve got to look at a person for what he is, and what he stands for and how he produces, not by the color of his skin. That has never had anything to do with anything.

“But all of a sudden, it’s become a big deal now, about oppression. There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.

“Now maybe I’m not watching it as carefully as other people. I think the opportunity is there for everybody. Race, religion, creed, color, nationality—if you want to work, if you want to try, if you want to put effort into yourself, I think you can accomplish anything.”

In the United States, only white people have the luxury of pretending that people can be colorblind. (In fact, this was a running joke on The Colbert Report.) People of color know this is not the case, and the national anthem protests—like Muhammad Ali’s or Jon Carlos’ and Tommie Smith’s before it—are an attempt to make the wider population (that is, white people) aware that inequalities and discrimination exist. If you have never been discriminated against personally, it is much easier to believe there is no discrimination and the system is just. That was the power in Martin Luther King’s decision to march peacefully, knowing the reaction from southern whites would be violent. It demonstrated to the wider world how the system actually worked.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic Games.

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Ditka’s belief that “if you want to work, if you want to try…you can accomplish anything” is also simply not true across the board. Racial discrimination in hiring processes is real and pervasive. In one study, résumés with “white-sounding names” got 50 percent more callbacks than résumés with “black-sounding names.” If you’re black in America, wanting to work is not always enough.

“There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.” – Mike Ditka

In another demonstration of historical illiteracy, what Ditka and other opponents of today’s protests don’t seem to understand, is that MLK and Muhammad Ali were deeply unpopular in their time. Like Colin Kaepernick and those who have followed him, they were reviled by many as ungrateful upstarts who were always choosing the wrong place and time to protest. Except that is the very point of protest: It is supposed to be at the wrong place and time. It is supposed to make people uncomfortable and frustrated, because that is the baseline experience of the oppressed classes in society. If the status quo works for you, you’re unlikely to change the status quo—unless others can show you that it is morally indefensible.

The reactions from others around the National Football League have begun rolling in. That includes one from Martellus Bennett, a tight end for the Green Bay Packers whose brother, Michael, had a telling experience of his own this year when Las Vegas police reportedly told him they would “blow his fucking head off” when they mistook him for a criminal suspect after the Mayweather-McGregor prize fight in August.

Michael Bennett’s teammate on the Seahawks, Richard Sherman, weighed in as well:

Martellus Bennett @MartysaurusRex Hasn’t seen oppression in 100 years bruh?….

Richard Sherman @RSherman_25 Some only see what they want to see

Sherman may indeed have made the essential point. It seems Ditka, likes millions around the country, has developed an entire world-historical view tailored to the idea of unequivocal American greatness. There can’t be racial discrimination, because there hasn’t been for a century. When you mold your own reality, even basic history isn’t safe. That can have dangerous consequences for the present.

Editor’s Note: It was Michael Bennett, not Martellus, who was involved in an incident with Las Vegas police in August. We regret the error.

Northern California firestorm ‘literally exploded,’ killing 15 and destroying hundreds of homes

ThinkProgress

Northern California firestorm ‘literally exploded,’ killing 15 and destroying hundreds of homes

More than 200 have been reported missing after fast-moving fires devastate communities north of San Francisco.

Natasha Geiling October 10, 2017

Flames from a massive wildfire burn in Napa, CA. (CREDIT: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

High temperatures and fast winds are fueling more than a dozen wildfires across California, forcing more than 20,000 northern California residents to evacuate their homes and communities. At least 15 people have died, and more than 200 have been reported missing, after several fires spread rapidly throughout Monday.

The fires ignited late Sunday night and into Monday morning and have since spread over 50,000 acres across Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying at least 2,000 structures and sending at least 100 to the hospital with injuries ranging from burns to smoke inhalation. The Tubbs Fire — which is currently burning at 27,000 acres — has prompted the evacuation of at least 10 neighborhoods in the city of Santa Rosa, which has a population of 125,000. Two hospitals have also been evacuated after the fire jumped across Highway 101 between Sunday night and Monday morning.

Aerial photographs show entire neighborhoods of the city completely destroyed by the fire, which as of Tuesday morning was zero percent contained. Smoke from the wildfires caused the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to issue an air quality warning for the region on Monday; as of Tuesday, much of the area north of San Francisco was still experiencing unhealthy air quality.

The cause of the fires is still under investigation, but officials are confident windy conditions combined with an excess of dry grass and underbrush helped the fuel the fires’ rapid growth. According to the National Weather Service, “fire literally exploded and raced along the landscape” aided by fuel at “all time record dry levels.”

September and October tend to be the worst months for California’s fire season, as strong winds can combine with low humidity and dry vegetation to turn a single spark into a major incident. At the beginning of September, fast-moving winds and record-heat sparked the largest wildfire in Los Angeles’ history, burning more than 5,000 acres north of the city. The worst wildfire in California history — the Cedar Fire of 2003 — started in October and burned more than 273,246 acres, destroying 2,820 structures and killing 15. Already, the scope of this weekends’ fires rivals the destruction of the Cedar Fire.

Fast-moving winds and low humidity aren’t rare in California, and neither are October wildfires, but it’s likely climate change made these fires even more destructive. After years of historic, prolonged drought, which studies have linked to climate change, California experienced record-setting rains that fueled the growth of grasses and underbrush — young vegetation that dries easily during the summer and is especially susceptible to ignition. Because warmer atmospheric temperatures can hold more water, experts have suggested that the cycle of drought followed by intense precipitation could be linked to climate change.

Even the state’s characteristic winds — known in the northern part of the state as Diablo Winds and in the southern part of the state as Santa Ana winds — could be getting worse because of climate change. The Santa Ana and Diablo winds occur when high inland pressure pushes air down the sides of mountains (Mt. Diablo in northern California and Mt. Ana in southern California), whipping wind through the canyons and hillsides outside major population centers like Los Angeles and San Francisco. According to a 2015 study lead by researchers at University of California, Los Angles, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and the U.S. Forest Service, a warming climate will likely make these winds both more frequent and stronger, fueling potentially destructive fires.

Across the country, warm, dry conditions have fueled a record-breaking fire season. The National Wildfire Coordinating Group currently lists 179 active wildfire situations throughout much of the Western United States, from Colorado to Washington. The largest active fire in the United States is the Chetco Bar Fire in southern Oregon, which has burned over 191,121 acres and is 97 percent contained. As of October 6, wildfires have burned 8,469,590 acres across the United States — the third largest total acreage burned in the last 10 fire seasons.

According to an analysis by Climate Central, climate change has increased the length of the annual fire season, a reference to the time of year when conditions are ripe for wildfires, by 105 days since 1970. Over the same period of time, the average number of wildfires over 1,000 acres has doubled across the western U.S. Since 2000, at least 13 states have experienced their largest fires on record.

As climate change is fueling longer fire seasons, human activity — both through an intense focus on fire suppression, rather than forest management, and an decreasingly populated rural-urban boundary, are making fires more destructive and deadly. A longer and more active fire season is also stretching the bounds of the Forest Service’s budget, with 2017 fire suppression costs already exceeding $2 billion, making this the most expensive year on record.

Unlike disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes, wildfires don’t qualify for federal disaster funding under the Disaster Relief Act; instead, the Forest Service is forced to pay for fire suppression costs in excess of the budgeted amount by borrowing from other Forest Service programs. That means in especially active fire years, the Forest Service is taking money from programs meant to prevent fires and using those funds to fight existing fires — a cycle that critics of the current set-up argue puts the Forest Service at a perpetual disadvantage when it comes to anticipating and preventing forest fires.

“Land managers can’t plan for restoration projects, even if they have huge fire benefits, if they don’t know whether the money is going to be there by the time they get around to doing the project,” Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, told ThinkProgress. “An account for a forest in Tennessee could be slashed to fight fires in Wyoming, and then all of the sudden you could have a terrible fire in Tennessee the next year, and you didn’t get the project done, so it ends up burning bigger, brighter, and longer than it would have if you had the projects completed.”

Driven by heat and high winds, wildfires are 10 times worse this year than average.

Climate change means that there is no such thing as a typical “fire season” anymore.

Since 2015, the Forest Service has spent more than 50 percent of its budget on fighting wildfires — more than a thirty percent increase from 1995, when fire suppression was just 16 percent of the agency’s budget. According to a 2015 report, future fires could consume even more of the Forest Service’s budget, to the point where by 2025, two-thirds of the agency’s budget could be spent on fire programs.

One legislative solution for the Forest Service’s budget woes currently being considered in Congress would allow the agency to draw from a separate pool of federal disaster funds, similar to what other agencies can do through FEMA after a disaster like a tornado or hurricane. That bill, known as the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of 2017, is sponsored by a bipartisan coalition of nine Western senators — five Democrats and four Republicans. In the House, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), has introduced a similar bill for the past three years. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) has urged Republicans in Congress to oppose the bill in the past, arguing that it would “result in increased federal spending.”

Fiscal conservatives in Congress have instead proposed a different way to address the rising costs of forest fires: loosen environmental regulations to allow timber companies more leeway to thin forests, thereby lessening the amount of fuel available for wildfires. One bill, introduced this year by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR), would do away with the public input and full environmental review process for thinning or logging projects of 10,000 acres or less (currently, only projects 3,000 acres or less are subject to less stringent environmental regulations). It would also allow the Forest Service to forgo required consultations with the Fish and Wildlife Service if the agency determined the project was unlikely to harm a federally protected species.

Westerman, who has received more than $142,000 from the timber industry since being elected to Congress in 2014, has argued that the bill would “provide protection to America’s forests by reducing the risks of wildfires through proper management techniques.” Westerman received a master’s degree in forestry from Yale Forestry School in 2001, and is the only licensed forester in Congress.

But environmentalists, conservationists, and Democratic lawmakers argue that the real problem with the growing cost of forest fires isn’t a lack of management techniques, but a lack of funds with which to implement them. Even Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has criticized the current funding structure of the Forest Service, saying in September that without a consistent stream of funding, “we’re asking for disasters.”

“You can have all the tools in the universe, but if you don’t have the resources to implement that, it doesn’t matter,” the National Wildlife Federation’s O’Mara said. “And that’s where we are right now.”

Update, 10/10/17, 4:29 p.m. EST: This story has been updated to reflect new estimates of the number of missing persons, fatalities, and destroyed structures.

Newt Gingrich compares Trump to former president who engineered genocide of native tribes

ThinkProgress

Newt Gingrich compares Trump to former president who engineered genocide of native tribes

“I think he’s… probably the biggest change agent since Andrew Jackson,” Gingrich said.

Melanie Schmitz October 10, 2017

Credit: CBS This Morning

In an interview with CBS This Morning on Tuesday, former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called President Trump a “remarkable” and “historic” figure, comparing him to the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson.

“I think Trump is a remarkable figure,” Gingrich said, responding to questions about the president veering off course and antagonizing his own party ahead of a major budget and tax reform battle. “I think he’s a historic figure, he’s certainly probably the biggest change agent since Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and 1830s.”

Despite the fact that it was intended to be complimentary, the Trump-Jackson comparison is unfortunate. Jackson, a historic figure with a number of military achievements under his belt, admittedly shares certain similarities with the current president, including his anti-establishment legacy and, as one onlooker at the time put it, the “rabble mob” he brought with him to the White House after his inauguration in 1829.

But the seventh president is also notorious for a number of troubling, inhumane reasons: Jackson was a slave-owner who offered rewards to anyone who gave escaped slaves especially cruel beatings. At the time of his death he owned approximately 150 slaves, though it’s been estimated that, over the course of his lifetime, he owned over 300.

Jackson is perhaps most famous for engineering one of the worst genocides in American history. A longtime proponent of removing native tribes who were taking up what he considered to be valuable land meant for white settlers, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, eventually forcing nearly 50,000 indigenous people off their lands and into the West. In the winter of 1838 alone, some 4,000 Native Americans died along the Trail of Tears.

In certain ways, the Trump-Jackson comparison seems depressingly fitting: since his own inauguration in January, Trump has become laser-focused on the removal of certain populations of people from the United States, including undocumented immigrants and their children, as well as on banning travelers and immigrants from several Muslim-majority nations. His antagonistic views toward social justice movements meant to draw attention to the deaths of minority populations, such as Black Lives Matter, has also drawn criticism. And as ThinkProgress’ Josh Israel pointed out in March, “Jackson, like Trump, preferred to ignore federal courts rather than enforce constitutional protections for all people.”

But, given Gingrich’s praise on Tuesday morning, it’s clear that many don’t view these comparisons negatively — quite the opposite, in fact.

Trump himself has touted those similarities in the past, using them to prop up his own legacy and play himself off as a change-maker. During a speech this past March at Jackson’s Nashville estate and plantation, The Hermitage, Trump noted, “It was during the revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar?”

California’s Raging Wildfires as You’ve Never Seen Them Before

Time

California’s Raging Wildfires as You’ve Never Seen Them Before

TIME Staff, October 9, 2017

Lake Fire | Big Bear June 2015

On the Front Lines of California’s Increasingly Devastating Fires

Video by Jeff Frost | Text by Josh Raab

Forest fires have long been a part of life in California, but not always like this. In recent years, artist Jeff Frost, based near Joshua Tree National Park, has watched as fires raged across the West Coast with increasing frequency and intensity. “Fire is a natural part of nature,” he says, “but what you’ll hear veteran firefighters say over and over, ‘I’ve never seen fire behavior like this.” Fire seasons are also starting earlier and ending later, on average 78 days longer than they were in 1970. On Monday, late in the fire season, Frost was chasing blazes in Sonoma and Napa counties, which have scorched tens of thousands of acres and led to widespread evacuations, including in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Four years ago, Frost, now 39, decided to begin documenting the fires. He put himself through the most intense fire-safety training courses he could find, enrolling in courses sanctioned by the U.S. Forest Service, then equipped his camper with a bed and a generator and headed to the front lines of California’s biggest fires.

Bluecut Fire | Cahone Pass Aug. 2016

Frost’s project, “California on Fire”, will be a feature-length art film combining his wildfire time lapses. The non-narrative film will look at forest fires loosely through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The stages will follow the life of wildfires, looking at their causes and effects from their ignition to the twisted metal and charred forests they leave behind. Frost is especially interested in exploring the role human involvement plays in these fires, both intentional and unintentional. “Human beings are stewards of the planet,” he says. “It’s just a question of whether we’re good stewards or bad stewards.”

On scene, Frost shoots sequences of hundreds of still photos, which he then combines into time-lapse videos. He previously used this approach at Joshua Tree National Park and at CERN, the research center renowned for building particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.

For the “California on Fire” project, Frost has shot more than 300,000 images at over 40 forest fires, resulting in over 500 time lapses ranging from 1 to 30 seconds. The blazes he has documented include the Erskine wildfire outside of Bakersfield in June 2016 that destroyed 386 structures and led to two deaths, and the King wildfire near Lake Tahoe in September 2014, which destroyed 80 structures and scorched almost 100,000 acres of land. While he is fascinated by fire, Frost’s obsession is to create an art piece that speaks to a larger reality: The role climate change plays in the fires.

Erskine Fire | Lake Isabella June 2016

“The intent is to show the effect of climate change right now, not just in the future,” he says. “Burning people’s houses down is not abstract.” Over the past three decades, climate change has doubled the area burned by forest fires in the western United States and the fire season has grown significantly longer. A number of climate-related issues are intensifying fires. Drier climates and more available fuel cause fires to start easier, burn longer and move faster. In addition, forest fires lower the number of trees that can absorb the carbon dioxide that causes climate change in the first place.

The federal cost of fighting forest fires has risen substantially. Fires cost the U.S. Forest Service more than $2 billion in 2015, over half of its annual budget, up from $240 million in 1985 (not adjusted for inflation).

LaTuna Fire | Los Angeles September 2017

While shooting the Rocky fire in Lake County in July 2015, Frost followed a firefighting team into a valley only to find himself completely surrounded by flames until a backup team arrived. “The wind was whipping across the hillside and catching grass on fire. I was sitting in the truck freaking out,” he says. “There were droves of insects running into the truck trying to get away from the fire. We had to wait for two hours before somebody could come in and retrieve us. That fire was a total of 70,000 acres but that day it burned 50,000.” Frost’s point-of-view video below documents his close call.

Rocky Fire | Clear Lake July 2015

After almost four years, Frost has shifted away from the front lines and turned his focus to covering the aftermath. He is shooting scorched landscapes and the remains of cars left behind. Recently, he started picking up pieces of charred aluminum, polishing them and displaying them in art exhibits to bring awareness to the power of forest fires. He expects to complete his time-lapse film in early 2018. A pre-public release will go out to his Patreon followers before he submits the film to Cannes and Sundance.

Jeff Frost is an artist based outside of Los Angeles. Follow him on instagram @frostjeff.

josh raab IS a multimedia editor at time. follow him on instagram @instagraabit.

Miles of Algae Covering Lake Erie

The New York Times

Miles of Algae Covering Lake Erie

By Jugal K. Patel and Yuliya Parshina-Kottas October 3, 2017

A potentially harmful algae bloom covered more than 700 square miles in the western basin of Lake Erie last week, turning the lake bright green and alarming residents and local officials.

Source: Landsat 8

Scientists say that algae blooms have been a growing problem for Lake Erie since the 2000s, mostly because of the extensive use of fertilizer on the region’s farmland.

The algae blooms contain cyanobacteria, which, under certain conditions, can produce toxins that contaminate drinking water and cause harm to the local ecosystem.

During last week’s bloom, the amount of toxins in the algae remained low at the intake points where towns draw water from the lake, according to officials.

Lake Erie’s algae blooms are driven by a landscape dominated by agriculture.

Rain causes nutrients from fertilizers on farmland to run off into rivers.

The nutrients travel along rivers, eventually reaching Lake Erie.

In the Maumee River, the largest tributary to any of the Great Lakes, green algae was visible last week in an aerial photograph.

According to experts, excess nutrients that are transported by the Maumee River can be a good indicator of how severe an algae bloom in the lake will be.

Source: Aerial Associates Photography, Inc., Zachary Haslick

Millions of people get drinking water from Lake Erie. Previous blooms have been toxic.

While not all algae blooms are toxic, they can produce a type of toxin called microcystin that can cause serious liver damage under certain conditions. Dangerous levels of the toxin caused Toledo, Ohio, to shut down the drinking water supply of a half million residents for three days in 2014.

In total, almost 3 million people get drinking water from the central basin of Lake Erie. Officials have been testing the intake pipes in the lake where towns draw water and report that the current toxin levels are low.

Source: NASA MODIS Note: Only intake points for towns and cities in Ohio are shown.

The blooms are hurting the region’s economy.

Lake Erie attracts millions of visitors for beaches and recreation like fishing, and many businesses stand to lose money during large algae blooms.

David Spangler, vice president of the Lake Erie Charter Boat Association, describes the algae as a musty-smelling, lime-green skin on the lake’s surface that’s so thick you could write your name in it.

“An awful lot of money may go someplace else other than Ohio if we continue having these issues in the lake,” Mr. Spangler said. He noted that in 2015, an algae bloom kept boats out of the lake for six to seven weeks.

The algae blooms are getting larger.

Since the 2000s, algae blooms in Lake Erie have become much more extensive.

According to one study by the Carnegie Institute for Science and Stanford University , most of the increase in the size of the blooms can be attributed to a rise in the amount of dissolved phosphorus flowing into the lake.

In the 1980s, researchers started tracking algae blooms in Lake Erie. They were mostly small, but changes in farming practices caused them to spike.

The blooms are expected to grow more harmful as global warming changes rainfall patterns.

According to local experts, storms have become more intense in the region, carrying more nutrients from the farmland into the lake.

Another study from the Carnegie Institution for Science shows that extensive algae blooms will continue to grow throughout the continental United States and around the globe, especially in Southeast Asia.

The mayor of Toledo, Paula Hicks-Hudson, wrote a letter to President Trump on Sept. 26, calling on the federal government to declare Lake Erie impaired, which would allow for the lake’s nutrient loads to be regulated under the Clean Water Act.

“There is something very wrong with our country when our rivers and lakes turn green,” Ms. Hicks-Hudson wrote in her letter. “As I look out my office at a green river, I can tell you one thing: The status quo is not working.”

Correction: Oct. 5, 2017

An article on Wednesday about an algae bloom in Lake Erie misidentified a toxin produced by algae blooms. It is microcystin, not microcystis.

Ohio mayor asks Trump for help combating Lake Erie algae

Washington Post

Ohio mayor asks Trump for help combating Lake Erie algae

In this Sept. 20, 2017 photo, a catfish appears on the shoreline in the algae-filled waters at the end of 113th Street in the Point Place section of North Toledo, Ohio. The 2017 algae bloom has stretched along the shores of Ohio, Michigan and Ontario, Canada, and will be among the largest in recent years. The 2015 bloom was the largest on record, covering an area the size of New York City. (Andy Morrison/The Blade via AP) (Associated Press)

By John Seewer | AP October 7, 2017

TOLEDO, Ohio — Three years after toxic algae in Lake Erie tainted the drinking water for more than 400,000 people, many are still leery about what’s coming out of their faucets.

Some have taken to stockpiling bottled water in the summer months when algae blooms blanket the western end in the shallowest of the Great Lakes.

Store shelves were emptied of bottled water a week ago when algae pushed into a river that flows through downtown Toledo into the lake, turning the river fluorescent green and sparking rumors that another “do not drink” advisory was looming.

It wasn’t the first time there’s been a run on bottled water even though there have been no water warnings since the first one in 2014.

Toledo’s mayor has asked President Donald Trump for help from the federal government in cleaning up the lake and wants the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to declare the western end impaired, which would allow for increased pollution regulations.

“There is something very wrong with our country when our rivers and lakes turn green,” Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson wrote in a letter sent to Trump last week. “As I look out my office at a green river, I can tell you one thing: the status quo is not working.”

A message seeking comment on the letter was left with the White House.

Scientists largely blame farm fertilizer runoff and municipal sewage overflows for feeding the algae growth. While there are a number of efforts to tackle the problem, it won’t be solved for years.

This year’s algae bloom has stretched along the shores of Ohio, Michigan and Ontario, Canada, and will be among the largest in recent years. The 2015 bloom was the largest on record, covering an area the size of New York City.

The uncertainty some still have about the Toledo’s drinking water, the mayor said in an interview Wednesday, shows there’s a general mistrust about what some hear from government leaders and how easily rumors spread.

She pointed to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and how residents there were told the water was safe for months despite dangerous lead levels.

“We’re going to do what we can to regain their trust,” said Hicks-Hudson, a Democrat who’s up for re-election in November. “That’s all we can do.”

She said she has spent many hours talking with residents and reassuring them the water is safe. “Some will give me a suspicious look,” she said.

The tap water, she said, is tested daily and more often than the state requires. The city also has invested in upgrading its treatment plant and there’s an early warning system in the lake to notify the plant’s operators when toxic algae is increasing.

The city also has created a site that shows the daily tests on raw and treated water. But that’s not enough for some.

Tammie Nixon, of Toledo, said her family hasn’t drunk the city’s water since officials issued a “do not drink” for two days in September 2014. She was pregnant at the time and now also has a 3-month-old.

“Definitely not with the kids,” she said while loading jugs of milk and water into her car at the grocery. “It’s kind of scary. There’s only so much you can filter out.”

Chief justice: Pay no attention to the rigged election behind the curtain

Detroit Free Press-USA Today

Chief justice: Pay no attention to the rigged election behind the curtain

Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press Columnist October 8, 2017

SCOTUS is lined up to hear cases on topics like labor relations, gerrymandering and voters’ rights. Video available by Newsy Newslook

(Photo: Olivier Douliery, Getty Images)

For 12 years, Chief Justice John Roberts has worked overtime peddling the dubious conceit that he and his life-tenured colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court are above politics and determined to remain so.

Yet Roberts himself is a consummate politician — a strategist who worries about appearances and harbors a ward heeler’s contempt for the intelligence of the average voter. And his cynicism was on full display last week when justices took up the politically fraught problem of gerrymandering.

Plaintiffs in a case known as Gill v. Whitford want the Supreme Court to rule that Wisconsin legislators violated the U.S. Constitution when they drew district boundaries that systematically diluted the electoral clout of their state’s Democratic voters.

Dickerson: Has Justice Kennedy finally had enough of partisan gerrymandering?
More: State panel approves petition aimed at ending gerrymandering

A lower court ordered Wisconsin to draw a fairer map after concluding that evidence and voting data submitted by the plaintiffs proved Republicans had configured districts designed to preserve their party’s legislative majority even when Democrats win a majority of the popular vote.

Roberts, who knows a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs will jeopardize Republican gerrymanders in more than a dozen other states, wants his colleagues to stay out of a partisan process even simpatico conservatives like Justice Samuel Alito concede is “distasteful.” The chief justice says the public will lose respect for the courts if he and his colleagues stick their noses into all that distastefulness.

Buy Photo

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says voters would think the high court was throwing elections for Democrats if tried to put a stop to gerrymandering. (Photo: Mike Thompson/Detroit Free Press)

But what if a majority party uses its mapmaking prowess to effectively disenfranchise the opposing party’s voters? And what if those aggrieved voters can use the same technological advances their opponents exploited to prove an election was rigged, and even to quantify the advantage its rivals gained by manipulating a state’s political boundaries?

That’s exactly what has happened in the Wisconsin case, as one of the country’s premier scientists explained in a remarkable friend-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Mapping chromosomes and rigged elections

It’s rare for disinterested third parties to play a decisive role in landmark Supreme Court cases. But the arguments filed by Eric Lander, a geneticist and mathematician who oversees the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, may prove an exception.

Lander was one of the principal leaders of the decade-long effort to map the human genome, and he has advised the White House and the Pentagon on innovative uses of technology for national defense. In a brief that several justices cited during Tuesday’s oral arguments, Lander says the sort of data-crunching the federal government uses to assess whether a nuclear weapon will detonate properly or whether Miami is safely outside the path of a hurricane can be used to prove when political boundaries have been manipulated to guarantee one party the largest possible electoral advantage.

Lander’s argument is a crucial one, because lawsuits challenging the fairness of gerrymandered political districts have foundered on the high court’s doubts that challengers could propose an objective standard for evaluating partisan bias.

Lander says technological advances that allow mapmakers to project likely electoral outcomes in thousands of different scenarios mean that a party that controls the redistricting process can pick the map that yields the most extreme partisan advantage. But he adds that the same analytical methods allow courts to discover when district lines have been manipulated to produce the maximum distortion of the electorate’s will, whether by amplifying the impact of one party’s voters or minimizing its opponents’ ability to muster an electoral majority in most districts.

By comparing the district lines a state has adopted with all the other possible configurations that comply with state and federal law, courts can determine not only whether a given map handicaps one party’s voters, but also how much. Using these reliable analytical tools, Lander says, deciding which of several possible maps yields electoral outcomes most consistent with the majority’s druthers becomes “a mathematical question to which there is a right answer” — exactly the sort of objective test judges worried about the corrosive effects of gerrymandering have been seeking.

Gobbledygook?

Chief Justice Roberts, of course, doesn’t see it that way. During oral arguments last week, he dismissed the evidence Lander and other mathematical analysts have submitted as proof Wisconsin’s legislative elections are rigged as “sociological gobbledygook.”

In another exchange with the plaintiffs’ attorneys, the chief justice appeared to concede that the evidence he disparaged might be persuasive after all, once you took the time to digest it, but hinted that few voters had the patience or smarts to do so.

“The intelligent man on the street is going to say that’s a bunch of baloney,” Roberts insisted. If justices blow the whistle on Republican cheating, he believes, the public will inevitably conclude that they’re simply shilling for Democrats — “And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and the integrity of the decisions of this Court in the eyes of the country.”

Roberts’ argument amounts to a rejection of rational inquiry itself: If the evidence that Wisconsin has violated its citizens’ constitutional rights is too sophisticated for laymen to grasp at first glance, he says, the court would be better off to ignore it.

This is the same cynically anti-intellectual rationale cheerleaders for the fossil fuel industry have marshaled to discredit the evidence of climate change. Until “the intelligent man on the street” has a keener understanding of the role greenhouse gases play in global warming, why should elected officials kowtow to experts who do?

Of course, the same logic could be marshaled to discount the warnings of hurricane forecasters or military strategists trying to anticipate the likely consequences of a military confrontation in the Middle East or on the Korean peninsula. If we don’t understand their calculations, why should we pay any attention to them?

The answer, of course, is that democratic government, like many other aspects of daily life, requires a reasonable deference to those with superior expertise: the surgeon who does hundreds of bypass operations a year, the repair technician who diagnoses malfunctioning furnaces for a living, or the pilot with 10,000 hours of in-flight service under her belt.

Roberts is right to be worried about the credibility of the judiciary, and its capacity to command the confidence of citizens across the political spectrum. But he should be at least as concerned about the credibility of representative democracy itself.

As Paul Smith, who represents the plaintiffs challenging Wisconsin’s legislative map argues, the stakes in Gill v. Whitford are larger than the public’s perception of Justice Roberts and his colleagues.

“If you let this go, if you say … we’re not going to have a judicial remedy for this problem, in 2020 you’re going to have a festival of copycat gerrymandering the likes of which this country has never seen,” Smith warned Roberts near the end of Tuesday’s oral arguments. “Voters everywhere are going to be like voters in Wisconsin, and (say): No, it really doesn’t matter whether I vote.”

Contact Brian Dickerson: bdickerson@freepress.com

Poll Shows Majority Of Americans Want Government To Act On Climate Change, But There’s A Catch

DeSmog

Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science

Poll Shows Majority Of Americans Want Government To Act On Climate Change, But There’s A Catch

By Farron Cousins October 4, 2017

Image: Texas Army National Guardsmen assist residents affected by flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Aug. 27, 2017. Army National Guard photo by Lt. Zachary West.

New polling data provides some inspiring news about the prospects for climate change action in the United States. According to public policy polling conducted by AP-NORC and the Energy Policy Institute at The University of Chicago, 61% of American citizens believe that climate change is a threat that the federal government should actively work to prevent. The poll also reveals that majorities in both major political parties – Democrats and Republicans – accept the fact that climate change is actually happening and that human activity is making it worse.

This data reinforces previous polling data indicating that a majority of American citizens, regardless of party affiliation, believe that climate change is a serious issue demanding urgent political action.

What sets the new set of data apart from the rest is also the part that makes it slightly less uplifting.

The poll found that 51% of Americans are willing to pay $1 per month to combat the growing threat of climate change, but when you start look at numbers higher than a dollar per month, the willingness of American citizens to foot the bill begins to decline sharply.

Additionally, the poll found a majority of citizens are against fracking, especially when they learn about the negative health effects from the oil and gas drilling process. However, support for fracking rises to nearly 41% when citizens are told that it could save them a few hundred dollars each year on their electric bills.

The new data helps to provide a clearer picture of how American citizens tend to view most non-social issues, and that is through the lens of finance.

When presented with data showing that dirty energy is harmful — but might save them money (in the short term) — they gravitate towards the “saving money” rather “saving lives” side of the climate equation.

But the fact that most people are willing to shell out even one dollar per month is actually a giant leap forward in terms of Americans’ willingness to address the growing threat of climate change, even if they may have to foot part of the bill.

Another interesting point about these polls is that the data was actually collected prior to the devastating string of hurricanes that hit the US — Harvey, Irma, and Maria — that captured the attention of the public and brought the issue of climate change to the forefront, albeit for a brief period of time.

There’s no doubt that the federal government could and should devote a lot more taxpayer money to fight climate change. Instead, Washington is currently choosing to subsidize an industry that is struggling to survive, and is significantly responsible for the climate change that’s hurting us now.

Why Not Fund Climate Action With Polluter Profits?

Ultimately, when it comes to paying for action to combat climate change, American citizens might consider asking their representatives in Washington to hold polluting industry responsible for funding the US response to climate change. After all, the fossil fuel industry bears significant responsibility for our current and future global warming predicament.

A recent report found that subsidies to the fossil fuel industry top $5 trillion a year – money that could instead be spent on infrastructure to protect low-lying cities from flooding in the event of rising waters, for instance. That money could also be used to provide more subsidies to the renewable energy sector which is already growing at a pace that far exceeds that of the fossil fuel sector.

Perhaps if we end the federal life support going to fossil fuel companies — a form of corporate welfare that is far from necessary — we could finally start addressing climate change without having to ask taxpayers to cough up a few extra dollars every month.

Republicans Are Kicking People Off Food Stamps

Newsweek

Under Trump’s New Budget, If You Don’t Work, You Don’t Eat: Republicans Are Kicking People Off Food Stamps

By Christianna Silva October 7, 2017

UPDATE: The budget resolution passed by the House on Thursday will push millions of already struggling people off food stamps, leaving the neediest Americans—children and the elderly among them—without food.

The $4.1-trillion budget will take over $150 billion away from several poverty programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps low-income people keep food on the table, by giving them small amounts of supplemental money to spend on groceries—anywhere from $100 a month to $700 a month for a family of five, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

This budget isn’t the newest problem SNAP has had to face. The number of people on SNAP ebbs and flows with the economy, but only 75 percent of people who are eligible for SNAP actually participate in the program, the website Snap to Health says. And it’s because applying can get really complicated.

Evan Teske, a 26-year-old medical student, needed assistance while he was working for Americorps. After graduating from college in 2014, Americorps assigned him to Focuspoint Family Research Center, which focuses on education from childhood to adulthood. His stipend just wasn’t enough.

“So I had to apply for food stamps,” Teske told Newsweek.

The application process was pretty confusing, he said, but Americorps helped him apply. Then, after about a year and a half, he was taken off.

“I got taken off by the government against my will because every six months I had to update my paperwork so they could see how much they were giving me,” Teske said. “And at one point, when food stamps and a stipend still wasn’t quite enough, I had help from my parents and family members to help me out in a pinch. When I put that down in the updated documents, they didn’t call it an income, but they said it was extra. So they cut me off.”

Teske worked for Americorps for the next six months and then moved to New Mexico for medical school. He said SNAP and food stamps made his life more livable.

Teske was taken off food stamps because his family helped him when he was needing a bit more. If Trump’s budget proposal passes the Senate, as it has already passed the House, many more people will be bumped off SNAP—and a lot of them won’t have the familial safety net that Teske did.

“SNAP is the first line of defense against hunger in the U.S.,” Ellen Vollinger, the legal director who directs SNAP work at the Food Research and Action Center, told Newsweek. “It’s the one program that’s available all over the country to serve people who need food. It’s the most accessible and available to people.”

But lately, for two big reasons, fewer people have been taking advantage of SNAP. First of all, the economy is doing better, which means fewer people are struggling with poverty and fewer people need the program.

In 2009, about 32 million people received SNAP benefits. The number increased during the great recession to an annual high of 47.6 million in 2013. Then, as the economy began to improve, it was down to 43 million in April 2010. And it’s continue to show. From April 2015 to April 2016, it was all the way down by 1.9 million participants.

“The unemployment rate has often been a pretty good indicator for the need for SNAP. As it comes down, there might be a bit of a lag, but we see SNAP come down,” Vollinger said.

The second reason, however, is that some states are cutting corners by making it more difficult to apply for SNAP so they make more room in their budget.

“A lot of people don’t know that they’re eligible,” Ginger Zielinskie, president and CEO of Benefits Data Trust, a company that connects people with the services they need, told Newsweek. “The first barrier is awareness. … It can be a really complicated application process.”

Moreover, some state laws don’t allow people to stay on SNAP for longer than a few months unless they have jobs, are training for jobs or are doing community service. But in times of economic stress, there aren’t always jobs available for them.

Take, for example, Devon Bracher, who graduated from Vanderbilt with an engineering degree and was living with her two sisters in Portland, Oregon, when she applied to get on SNAP after not being able to find a job.

“Technically, my residency was in Virginia, but all my work experience was in Tennessee,” Bracher told Newsweek. “I didn’t have a job, I was looking for jobs. This was my first year after graduating. That was part of what’s complicated. I wasn’t an Oregon resident, but I didn’t have an official job in Virginia. Virginia told me to apply to Tennessee.”

So Bracher went through the online application for SNAP. But the system had her call a SNAP representative because she wasn’t a Tennessee resident.

“I probably called maybe like five different times and the line was always busy,” Bracher said. Eventually, she just gave up.

“I benefitted a lot from being able to live with family,” Bracher said. “My sisters helped a lot.”

Not everyone has a family like Bracher’s, and if the proposed cuts to SNAP make its way through, the states will be responsible to keep families from starving.

In Alabama, for instance, the number of able-bodied people on SNAP has dropped from around 5,000 to 800. Most of it is because of the regulations states are forced to place on the benefits so that they can make their budget, a trend that’s seen all over the U.S.

Californians have concerns people who need programs like SNAP won’t be able to access them under Trump’s new budget, according to Jared Call from California Food Policy Advocates.

“We try to think of people first, but this particular [budget proposal] … would really seek to shift a substantial share to the states or propose penalties to put states on the hook and that’s just not something that state budgets are prepared to absorb,” he told Newsweek.

“California would go down $1.8 billion to just keep even. So you’re faced with cutting other important services or education or other programs or cutting benefit amounts or cutting eligibility,” Call said. “We want SNAP to go to the people who need it, but this proposal does not work that way. There is no way to cut SNAP without impacting benefit levels or eligibility. Ninety-four percent of these funds go directly to benefits, there’s no fat to cut.”

One in six people in America faces hunger, more than almost any other country in the developed world. If this budget goes through, and important programs like SNAP are axed, that number will be on the rise.

Story was updated to clarify the number of SNAP participants between 2015 and 2016 and the number of able-bodied people on SNAP in Alabama.

The U.S. Could Learn From Australia’s Gun Control

Fusion is with Splinter

Two decades ago, Australia took action on gun control after a mass shooting.

Now, gun violence has drastically declined in the wake of some of the strictest gun laws in the world:

The U.S. Could Learn From Australia's Gun Control

Two decades ago, Australia took action on gun control after a mass shooting.Now, gun violence has drastically declined in the wake of some of the strictest gun laws in the world:

Posted by Fusion on Friday, October 6, 2017