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Dick Cheney, Benghazi, and White House Lies

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - May. 15 (Opinion) - Dick Cheney has never been short on chutzpah. Jumping aboard the GOP scandal-mongering machine, the former vice president appeared on Fox News (where else?) and declared to Sean Hannity (who else?) that President Barack Obama and his aides "lied" about the attack in Benghazi last September that left four Americans dead. "I think it's one of the worst incidents frankly that I can recall in my career," Cheney huffed—as if 9/11 had never happened. The former veep went the full Monty and echoed (discredited) right-wing charges that the Obama administration refused to deploy military forces to help Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans when they were assaulted in Benghazi.

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12 Animals We Wish We Could De-Extinct

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By — By Maggie Severns, the Mother Jones news team - May. 15 (Comment) - Do you miss the mammoth? Dream of dodos? Long for Lycaena dispar dispar ? After centuries of driving species after species to extinction, we're now tantalizingly close to bringing some of them back. Using advances in genetic sequencing and molecular biology, s cientists across the world are mining extinct animal specimens for ancient DNA to try to resurrect disappeared species. The science is complicated— National Geographic has a great rundown—and so are the ethics involved. But who can resist dreaming up a de-extinction "wish list"? With more species nearing the extinction danger zone every dayâ€‹, there's no shortage of candidates, but some are more scientifically suited for resurrection than others. And even if we could bring a species back, should we? We looked to scientists to explain who they'd like to bring back, and which are best left in the past. T. rex , extinct for 65 million years Designed for "maximum bone-crushing action," Tyrannosaurus ...

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Anna Jarvis, the Radical Behind Mother's Day

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Steve Brodner - May. 12 (Comment) - This cartoon was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

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This Crater in Siberia Reveals the Future of a Globally Warmed Planet

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Damian Carrington - May. 10 (News Report) - This story originally appeared in The Guardian . The future of a globally warmed world has been revealed in a remote meteorite crater in Siberia, where lake sediments recorded the strikingly balmy climate of the Arctic during the last period when greenhouse gas levels were as high as today. Unchecked burning of fossil fuels has driven carbon dioxide to levels not seen for 3 million years when, the sediments show, temperatures were 46 degrees higher than today, lush forests covered the tundra and sea levels were up to 40 meters higher than today. "It's like deja vu," said Prof Julie Brigham-Grette, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the new research analyzing a core of sediment to see what temperatures in the region were between 3.6 and 2.2 million years ago. "We have seen these warm periods before. Many people now agree this is where we are heading." Continue Reading ...

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The Most Controversial Chart in History, Explained

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - May. 09 (Opinion) - Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade"). The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN's ...

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TIMELINE: Deinstitutionalization And Its Consequences

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Deanna Pan - Apr. 29 (Investigative Report) - 1773 The first patient is admitted to the Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds in Williamsburg, Virginia. The rebuilt Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds in Williamsburg. Wikipedia 1841 Boston schoolteacher Dorothea Dix visits the East Cambridge Jail where she first sees the horrible living conditions of the mentally ill. Believing they could be cured, Dix lobbies lawmakers and courts for better treatment until her death in 1887. Her efforts lead to the establishment of 110 psychiatric hospitals by 1880. Dorothea Dix Wikipedia 1887 On assignment for New York World , Nellie Bly feigns lunacy in order to be admitted to the Women"s Lunatic Asylum on New York"s Blackwell"s Island. Her exposé, " Ten Days in a Mad-house ," detailing the appalling living conditions at the asylum, leads to a grand jury investigation and needed reforms at the institution. Wikipedia 1907 ...

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Why Your Supermarket Only Sells Five Kinds of Apples

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Rowan Jacobsen - Apr. 26 (Special Report) - Every fall at Maine's Common Ground Country Fair, the Lollapalooza of sustainable agriculture, John Bunker sets out a display of eccentric apples. Last September, once again, they covered every possible size, shape, and color in the wide world of appleness. There was a gnarled little yellow thing called a Westfield Seek-No-Further; a purplish plum impostor called a Black Oxford; a massive, red-streaked Wolf River; and one of Thomas Jefferson's go-to fruits, the Esopus Spitzenburg. Bunker is known in Maine as "The Apple Whisperer," or simply "The Apple Guy," and, after laboring for years in semi-obscurity, he has never been in more demand.

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6 Ways College Admissions Offices Game Their Rankings

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By By Marian Wang, ProPublica - Apr. 24 (Investigative Report) - As college-bound students weigh their options, they often look to the various statistics that universities trumpet—things like the high number of applications, high test scores, and low acceptance rate. But students may want to consider yet another piece of info: the ways in which schools can pump up their stats.

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Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dave Gilson - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - More MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings Perhaps the most unusual thing about the Boston Marathon bombing is that it happened at all. While we've seen all manner of terrorist bomb plots since September 11—the Times Square bomber , the underwear bomber , even the guys who fantasized about destroying the Sears Tower —all have been thwarted by the FBI, the perpetrators' own bumbling, or both . If one or both of the suspects in last week's attack, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were motivated by radical Islamic beliefs , then they will have the dubious distinction of being the first domestic jihadists to have set off a bomb on American soil since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. While America has been fixated on the threat of Islamic terrorism for more than a decade, all but a few domestic terror plots have failed. Between September 11 and the end of 2012, there were no successful bomb plots by jihadist terrorists in the United States. Jihadists killed 17 ...

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Obama Poised to Deliver Another Blow to Whistleblower Protections

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dana Liebelson - Apr. 24 - The Obama administration entered the White House pledging to be the most transparent in history. Since then, the administration has hit more nat-sec whistleblowers, who are arguably in a position to expose the worst abuses of government power, with the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, often lumping them in with criminal leakers and spies. But Obama defenders point out that, thanks to the president's Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, other types of federal whistleblowers have gained unprecedented protections , including compensation in successful cases and stronger penalties against retaliatory managers. Now that silver lining could vanish, a casualty of a lengthy legal battle between whistleblower advocates and defense agencies. The case, Berry v. Conyers , involves two Department of Defense employees, neither occupying a high-level or particularly sensitive position: One did stockroom management and the other was an accounting technician (basically a ...

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Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Moises Velasquez-Manoff - Apr. 22 (Special Report) - A few years before Super Size Me hit theaters in 2004, Dr. Paresh Dandona , a diabetes specialist in Buffalo, New York, set out to measure the body's response to McDonald's —specifically breakfast. Over several mornings, he fed nine normal-weight volunteers an egg sandwich with cheese and ham, a sausage muffin sandwich, and two hash brown patties.

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While West, Texas, Burned, Its Famous Czech Bakery Kept the Kolaches Coming

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dana Liebelson, Jaeah Lee, Tasneem Raja - Apr. 19 (News Report) - There's a Czech bakery, deli, and gas station combo in tiny West, Texas that's world-famous for serving up fruit kolaches and hot chubbies to locals and tourists driving on I-35 between Dallas and Austin, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the last 29 years. Last night was no exception. In the wake of the massive explosion and fire that rocked a fertilizer plant just three miles down the road, Czech Stop kept its doors open—and the kolaches coming—almost without interruption. "I rushed up there after it happened because one of my employees said the ceiling was falling in," says Barbara Schissler, president of the Czech Stop empire, who"s worked there since it opened in 1983. "One of our freelance carpenters recommended that we close the doors, but when I showed up, I saw only the ceiling tiles were buckling, so I reopened.

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GOP Goes Hunting For EPA Emails About Turducken

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tim McDonnell - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - Earlier this month, when a burst pipe spilled thousands of gallons of heavy oil into an Arkansas suburb, the message from the White House went something like: "Everybody chill, the EPA has it under control." But reporters on the scene found the cleanup orchestrated by the same company, ExxonMobil, that allowed the spill, and heard only crickets when they asked the EPA about its involvement. Turns out, on some of the nation's most pressing environmental health issues, the EPA's transparency record isn't exactly crystal-clear. So with a vote on President Obama's new pick to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy, coming up as soon as next week , it perhaps isn't a surprise that Congressional scrutiny of her nomination has centered more on the agency's secret-keeping habits than on its environmental enforcement goals. At a hearing last Thursday before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, McCarthy got grilled on EPA's transparency record by Republican members, led by Louisiana's David Vitter. ...

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Here's Why the NRA Won and Gabby Giffords and Mike Bloomberg Lost

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Andy Kroll - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - More MoJo coverage of the Senate's failed background check bill. Also read our special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings. On NBC's Meet the Press last month, National Rifle Association honcho Wayne LaPierre, the face of the American gun lobby, delivered this message to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg: "He's going to find out that this is a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, and he can't spend enough of his $27 billion to try to impose his will on the American public. He can't buy America." The day before, Bloomberg had announced that he would spend $12 million of his own money on an ad blitz pressing members of Congress to pass new legislation expanding background checks for gun purchases. LaPierre went on national television to tell the mayor that all those millions wouldn't make the difference in the fight in Congress over new gun laws. Guess what? LaPierre was right. The Manchin-Toomey background check legislation that died in the ...

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What These Tweets Tell Us About Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dana Liebelson, Adam Serwer - Apr. 19 - More MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings Dzhokhar Tsarnaev apparently maintained an active Twitter account. A high school classmate of the at-large Boston Marathon bombing suspect has confirmed to BuzzFeed that the @J_tsar Twitter account belongs to Tsarnaev, and multiple Twitter users who say they are friends of Tsarnaev have pointed to this Twitter feed as his. The tweets on the @J_tsar account cover a variety of topics, including religion and pop culture, and contain much trash talk about women. The user of this account kept on tweeting after the bombing. On April 15, hours after the attack, he tweeted, "Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people." On April 17, he tweeted, "I'm just a stress free kind of guy." Here's a sampling of odd, mundane, and chilling tweets from the account from the past year, including one in which the user laments, "the value of human life ain't shit nowadays." I'm a stress free kind of guy — Jahar (@J_tsar) April 17, ...

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What We Know About the Huge Explosion at the West, Texas, Fertilizer Plant

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - Apr. 18 (News Analysis) - Shortly before 9 p.m. on Wednesday a massive explosion rocked the Central Texas town of West, following a fire at a fertilizer plant. Early reports are conflicting, but it appears that hundreds of people have been injured, dozens of homes and businesses have been damaged or destroyed, including a high school and a nursing home. Authorities are concerned that winds could carry the toxic fumes into residential areas. At a press conference on Wednesday night, mayor Tommy Muska, (who is also a volunteer firefighter) said, "A lot of people won't be here tomorrow...it's a cut across our hearts." Complicating matters is the location: A volunteer fire department serves the town of 2,700, and casualties are being transported to the nearest hospital in Waco—20 miles away. The fire escalated so fast because of its fuel: To put #West , TX in perspective, 4,800 lbs of fertilizer were used in OKC bombing. That fit in a Ryder truck. This was an ENTIRE PLANT. — Drew Tuma (@DrewTumaABC3) ...

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Meet the 45 Senators Who Blocked Background Checks

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dana Liebelson - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - An amendment proposed by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to require background checks for commercial gun sales (but not for sales between "friends and neighbors") was shot down Wednesday afternoon in a 54-46 vote, failing to capture the 60 votes it needed to advance. The bill would have been a modest victory for gun control advocates, while ceding numerous concessions to the gun lobby (the NRA initially called it a "positive development.") Nevertheless, only four Republicans voted for the proposal, with 41 voting against it. Five Democrats rejected the proposal as well (Reid was a special case; see below). Standing with families of Sandy Hook victims, President Obama said that "there was no coherent argument for why we wouldn't do this. It came down to politics." Here's a list so you can see how your Senator voted: Republicans Who Voted for the Proposal Susan Collins (R-ME) Mark Kirk (R-IL) John McCain (R-AZ) Pat Toomey (R-PA) Democrats Who Voted Against the ...

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Not Every Republican Hates Obama's Progressive Labor Secretary Nominee

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Adam Serwer - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - Thomas Perez, the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division and President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Department of Labor, is getting some support from unexpected corners: Republicans, particularly in his home state of Maryland. "I think he's going to be a very fine secretary of labor for us," says Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee who first met Perez when he was a member of the Montgomery County Council and Steele was Lt. Governor of Maryland. "He's honest, direct, approachable and willing to work hard to get it right." Steele isn't the only Maryland Republican praising Perez. "He's just a trustworthy guy," says John Kane, a former chair of the Maryland GOP. "If I had to put a trust together to manage my affairs after I was gone, Tom would be one of the top three guys I would pick to do that, even though I disagree with him more than half the time." Monday, John R. Dunne, a Republican who was head of the civil rights division during the ...

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10 Reasons the Background Check Bill Means Victory for the NRA

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Gavin Aronsen - Apr. 17 (Opinion) - Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) have been forced this week to consider further retooling their bill for expanded gun background checks, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters on Tuesday still lacks the 60 votes it needs to overcome a filibuster. The National Rifle Association and senators opposed to the bill continue to argue that it would unfairly burden lawful gun owners while doing nothing to prevent future tragedies like the one in Newtown. In fact, the bill does an awful lot that should please the pro-gun lobby. Which helps explain why, on Sunday, the gun-rights group Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms endorsed the bill and the "numerous advances for our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms that it contains." (Even the NRA, consulted during the compromise talks, initially called the bill a "positive development," as opposed to the stricter gun-control plan initially proposed by Sen. Chuck Schumer; the NRA later backtracked, ...

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These Soldiers Did the Boston Marathon Wearing 40-Pound Packs. Then They Saved Lives.

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tasneem Raja - Apr. 17 (Comment) - Tough Ruck soldiers clearing a path to victims Military Friends Foundation More MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings At 5:20 a.m. on Monday, four hours before the Boston Marathon's elite runners took off, a group of 15 active-duty soldiers from the Massachusetts National Guard gathered at the starting line in Hopkinson. Each soldier was in full combat uniform and carried a "ruck," a military backpack weighing about 40 pounds. The rucks were filled with Camelbacks of water, extra uniforms, Gatorade, changes of socks—and first-aid and trauma kits. It was all just supposed to be symbolic. "Forced marches" or "humps" are a regular part of military training, brisk walking over tough terrain while carrying gear that could help a soldier survive if stranded alone. These soldiers, participating in " Tough Ruck 2013 ," were doing the 26 miles of the Boston Marathon to honor comrades killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or lost to suicide and PTSD-related accidents after ...

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How Science Can Predict Where You Stand on Keystone XL

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Chris Mooney - Apr. 17 (Comment) - On February 17, more than 40,000 climate change activists—many of them quite young—rallied in Washington, DC, to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which will transport dirty tar sands oil from Canada across the heartland. The scornful response from media centrists was predictable. Joe Nocera of the New York Times , for one, quickly went on the attack.

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6 False Things You Heard About the Boston Bombing

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dana Liebelson, Tim Murphy - Apr. 16 (Opinion) - More MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings There's still a lot we don't know about Monday's bombing near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. We don't know if the bombs were set off by one person or multiple people; we don't know if it was an act of foreign or domestic terrorism; we don't know what the perpetrators(s) look like; we don't know what the motive was. One thing we do know: Many of the initial reports on media outlets on Monday and early Tuesday have proven to be false. That's inevitable during a breaking news event—and in this case, even some law enforcement officials did more to confuse than to clarify. But one day later, here's a look at some early storylines that have fizzled upon further scrutiny: 1. Cellphone service shut down in Boston. Reported by: the Associated Press , which credited the information to an unidentified "law enforcement official." But cellphone service continued uninterrupted in the city. Verizon spokesman Torod Neptune told ...

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Question Everything You Hear About the Boston Marathon Bombing

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Andy Kroll - Apr. 16 (Opinion) - Shortly after Monday's bombing near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, rumors began to fly about what exactly happened and who was behind it. The New York Post , citing an unnamed federal official, claimed 12 people were dead and that a "Saudi Arabian national" was a suspect. More MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings But it soon became clear that the initial death toll was two people (later updated to three), and by the following morning law enforcement officials said that they had identified no suspects yet. As for the Saudi national in question, federal law enforcement officials said on Tuesday that he was a witness to the bombing, not a suspect. Indeed, it's a perpetual lesson of past tragedies: Don't trust what you hear or read early on. Here are eight instances of early information from past attacks that turned out to be wrong: Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing, Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995: Claim: Jordanian American Ibrahim Ahmad and three ...

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What We Know About the Boston Marathon Explosions

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By — By Asawin Suebsaeng, the MoJo News Team - Apr. 16 (News Report) - To jump to our initial report and background, click here. UPDATE 5, Monday, April 15, 5:25 p.m. EDT : Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has released the following statement : This is a horrific day in Boston. My thoughts and prayers are with those who have been injured. I have been in touch with the President, Mayor Menino and our public safety leaders.

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The Enemy-Industrial Complex

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tom Engelhardt - Apr. 16 (Opinion) - This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website. The communist enemy, with the " world's fourth largest military ," has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration. Guam, Hawaii , Washington : all, it claims, are targetable. The coverage in the media has been hair-raising. The US is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending "nuclear capable" B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China , and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally. Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn't count on Guam either. ...

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