March 24, 2018

NY Daily News photo gallery March For Our Lives

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/march-lives-rallies-country-gallery-1.3893539?pmSlide=1.3893527

March 24, 2018

Hundreds of Thousands of People Are Marching Against Gun Violence Today

Source: Mother Jones

It’s the largest demonstration for gun control in US history.

Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the US—and even the world—are planning to take part in over 800 rallies and marches scheduled for Saturday to protest the epidemic of gun violence in the United States and to call for stricter gun control measures. The “March For Our Lives” in Washington, DC, and companion protests worldwide, were organized by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, after the mass shooting there on February 14 took 17 lives. Organizers are expecting 500,000 people in Washington, DC, alone.

The high school students, including Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg, are leading a new wave of activism around this issue. Though Florida enacted new gun control restrictions after the shooting (along with a measure to arm teachers), Congress has done nothing. The National Rifle Association also reportedly persuaded President Donald Trump not to push for tougher gun regulations.

Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/hundreds-of-thousands-of-people-marching-against-gun-violence-today/

March 24, 2018

March for Our Lives: hundreds of thousands demand end to gun violence live

Source: The Guardian

1.54pm 13:54

Ryan Deitsch, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas, is on stage challenging the notion we should arm teachers with guns.

Instead, he says, teachers need to be armed with school supplies. And students need to be armed with facts and education.

He’s also challenged the notion that the school walk out protests have disrupted education.

“We are done hiding,” Deitsch said. “We are done being full of fear.”

“This is the beginning of the end. From here, we fight.”

He, like so many other people to take the stage today, is focusing on the midterm elections and voter registration.

“Register, educate, vote.”


Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2018/mar/24/march-for-our-lives-protest-gun-violence-washington

March 23, 2018

Trees older than America: a primeval Alaskan forest is at risk in the Trump era

Tongass is the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, with trees more than 1,000 years old. But a pro-logging effort could uproot them

by Brendan Jones in Sitka, Alaska

At south-east Alaska’s last industrial-scale sawmill, wheel loaders stack debarked logs two storeys high on the frozen ground. A bumper sticker on a battered Ford in the parking lot reads “Cut Kill Dig Drill”, a mantra that many in the 49th state appreciate repeating.

Viking Lumber Company employs 34 people and sustains itself primarily on old-growth trees harvested from the Tongass, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. Many of them have been around longer than the United States – some for 1,000 years.

Under the Trump administration, the future of these ancient trees is uncertain. The Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski is pushing for more old-growth logging, and has sought to attach pro-logging provisions to the omnibus bill on US government spending that is being negotiated this week in Congress. If such efforts are successful, the country stands at risk of losing some of its last remaining coniferous old growth in order to sustain south-east Alaska’s last industrial-scale sawmill.

Bryce Dahlstrom, the Viking vice-president, who declined to comment for this article, has said elsewhere that his mill cannot afford to modernize equipment dating from the 1940s to accommodate smaller-radius young and second growth. If he runs out of old growth, his mill will shut down. Meanwhile, conservationists – joined by a growing number of fishermen and tourism representatives – insist that the Tongass, and the region, cannot afford to cut more old-growth trees.

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/22/alaska-tongass-forest-at-risk-logging-trump

March 20, 2018

The Best Presidential Speech of My Lifetime, Half a Century Later

"There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem."

By Charles P. Pierce
Mar 15, 2018

It was 53 years ago today that President Lyndon B. Johnson stood before a joint session of Congress and delivered the finest address given by an American president in my lifetime. A week earlier, peaceful civil rights marchers were brutally attacked in Selma, Alabama, by the state-sanctioned forces of white supremacy. John Lewis was nearly killed. A minister from Boston named Jim Reeb actually was.

Then, on March 15, LBJ came to Capitol Hill, a speech largely crafted by the great Dick Goodwin in his pocket, and he laid it on the line in front of god, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and the world. The president of the United States, a son of Texas, had had by god enough of this.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19445682/lbj-civil-rights-speech/

[Much more at link]

March 13, 2018

Inside the Right-Wing YouTube Empire Trying to Turn Millennials Conservative

The viral videos from Dennis Prager’s “university” have clocked more than 1 billion views.

Mark Oppenheimer

In the weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, Americans flocked to the internet with pressing questions. Some inquired about immigration to Canada. Others Googled “sanctuary city.” A few wanted to know what a “manafort” was. And millions were newly curious about the Electoral College, which for the second time in recent memory was going to contravene the will of the majority. What was it? Why was it? Could electors defy their voters’ wishes?

People turned to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Fox News, and even the Constitution for answers. But few sources were as widely consulted as “Do You Understand the Electoral College?” a five-minute video hosted by retired lawyer and television pundit Tara Ross. Her genial lecture, illustrated with colorful cartoons and pop-up text—”pure democracies do not work”—can be found at Prager University, an online video portal curated by the conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager. The Electoral College video had about 850,000 views before the election, says Allen Estrin, Prager’s producer and consigliere. “Two weeks later, it had 50 million.”

[...]

At PragerU, police are not biased against black men, and man-made climate change is debatable. You’ll find takes on animal rights (against), the $15 minimum wage (against), the gender wage gap (doesn’t exist), and why the South turned Republican (nothing to do with race). Prager has hosted a few dozen videos himself, including “Just Say ‘Merry Christmas,'” his take on the “war on Christmas” genre, and “He Wants You,” an apologia for men who ogle women. He personally approves every item, edits every script, and courts “faculty,” including heavy hitters such as Dinesh D’Souza, Steve Forbes, and former White House press secretary Dana Perino. Some presenters, like Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, are credentialed. Others, like comedian Adam Carolla, merely speak with the confidence of people who are.

[...]

These instincts—Prager the Genial Radio Host and Prager the Gloomy Prophet—merge in PragerU, whose videos are too gentle in tone for the Infowars crowd and too conservative for committed liberals. Rather, they are engineered to sway those in the mushy middle, especially young people trying to figure out what they stand for. Prager’s radio show has about 2 million weekly listeners (to Rush Limbaugh’s 14 million), but PragerU’s appeal goes well beyond the graying talk-radio audience. More than 60 percent of its viewers are younger than 35, according to YouTube analytics.

[...]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/dennis-prager-prageru-videos-aims-sway-millennials-right/

[This thing is tax-exempt and encourages schools to use its content. Backers include fracking billionaires.]

March 12, 2018

How the baby boomers not millennials screwed America

“The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it."
By Sean Illing Updated Mar 12, 2018

Everyone likes to bash millennials. We’re spoiled, entitled, and hopelessly glued to our smartphones. We demand participation trophies, can’t find jobs, and live with our parents until we’re 30. You know the punchlines by now.

But is the millennial hate justified? Have we dropped the generational baton, or was it a previous generation, the so-called baby boomers, who actually ruined everything?

That’s the argument Bruce Gibney makes in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.

I spoke to Gibney about these claims, and why he thinks the baby boomers have wrecked America.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

[...]

https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16772670/baby-boomers-millennials-congress-debt

March 12, 2018

Thanks to Trump, This Senator Finally Gets Her Chance to Decimate Alaskas Environmental Protections

An industry-friendly White House helps Sen. Lisa Murkowski score long-sought gains.

Krista Langlois Mar. 11, 2018

This story was originally published by High Country News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski had been a member of the United States Senate for 15 years. She’d pulled off a historic write-in campaign, built a reputation as someone who thinks deeply about policy, and helped pass a sweeping bipartisan public-lands deal. But a year after gaining control over two of the Senate’s most influential energy and natural resource committees, Murkowski had made little headway in her plans to develop Alaska’s protected lands and waters.

Three changes in particular had eluded her. The federal “roadless rule” that spares old-growth forest in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest survived litigation, and Murkowski’s efforts to bypass it legislatively had fizzled. The Aleutian village of King Cove was still cut off from the rest of the world by the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. And one of President Obama’s executive orders kept the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge closed to drilling.

Murkowski, a lifelong Alaskan who believes that her constituents’ well-being is inextricable from access to the state’s natural resources, was furious. “There is no other way to describe it,” she said of the executive order, than “as a war. We are left with no choice but to hit back as hard as we can.”

Now, with help from an exceedingly development-friendly administration, Murkowski is successfully hitting back—and ushering in huge changes to some of America’s wildest landscapes. Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska regional director of The Wilderness Society, says she’s never seen “anything comparable to the full-on assault of Alaska’s land and waters that we’ve seen in the last year.

[...]

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/03/thanks-to-trump-this-senator-finally-gets-her-chance-to-decimate-alaskas-environmental-protections/

March 12, 2018

Eminem attacks NRA in awards show performance: 'They control the puppet'

At the iHeartRadio Music awards, the rapper castigated gun lobbyists, saying ‘they love their guns more than our children’

Ben Beaumont-Thomas Mon 12 Mar 2018

Eminem has continued his run of politically charged performances with an attack on the National Rifle Association during a set at the iHeartRadio Music awards in Inglewood, California.

Adding a new freestyle verse to his song Nowhere Fast, he rapped:

This whole country is going nuts, and the NRA is in our way

They’re responsible for this whole production

They hold the strings, they control the puppet

And they threaten to take donor bucks

So they know the government won’t do nothing and no one’s budging

Gun owners clutching their loaded weapons

They love their guns more than our children

The performance was introduced by Alex Moscou, one of the survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. He said he and his fellow students were “tired of hearing politicians sending their thoughts and prayers to us, and doing nothing to make the necessary changes to prevent this tragedy from happening again”.

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/12/eminem-nra-iheartradio-music-awards-rap-protest

March 12, 2018

Quiz: Whats the Worst Part of This Betsy DeVos Exchange?

By Margaret Hartmann March 12, 2018

One would think that after Betsy DeVos appeared unfamiliar with basic education policy during parts of her confirmation hearing – an incident she says was worse than a root canal – the Education secretary would study up. Yet in a rare interview on Sunday night, DeVos revealed that she still has a poor grasp on these subjects.

There were plenty of cringe-inducing moments during the 13-minute 60 Minutes segment, from DeVos opting not to say whether she thinks the number of false accusations of sexual assault is as high as the number of actual assaults, to her declaration that the federal government has “invested billions and billions and billions of dollars from the federal level, and we have seen zero results.”

But one exchange with Lesley Stahl on school choice, DeVos’s signature issue, was so bad that it’s hard to identify the worst part. Here’s a little pop quiz. Was it:

(a) DeVos’s attempt to explain how letting parents pull kids (along with taxpayer funds) out of bad public schools helps the other kids in the failing school.

[...]
[You gotta see the rest of the choices and transcripts, with the zinger end.]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/quiz-whats-the-worst-part-of-this-betsy-devos-exchange.html