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How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops
By ERWIN CHEMERINSKY
IRVINE, Calif. — LAST week, a grand jury was convened in St. Louis County, Mo., to examine the evidence against the police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, and to determine if he should be indicted. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. even showed up to announce a separate federal investigation, and to promise that justice would be done. But if the conclusion is that the officer, Darren Wilson, acted improperly, the ability to hold him or Ferguson, Mo., accountable will be severely restricted by none other than the United States Supreme Court.
In recent years, the court has made it very difficult, and often impossible, to hold police officers and the governments that employ them accountable for civil rights violations. This undermines the ability to deter illegal police behavior and leaves victims without compensation. When the police kill or injure innocent people, the victims rarely have recourse.
The most recent court ruling that favored the police was Plumhoff v. Rickard, decided on May 27, which found that even egregious police conduct is not “excessive force” in violation of the Constitution. Police officers in West Memphis, Ark., pulled over a white Honda Accord because the car had only one operating headlight. Rather than comply with an officer’s request to get out of the car, the driver made the unfortunate decision to speed away. The police chased the car for more than five minutes, reaching speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Eventually, officers fired 15 shots into the car, killing both the driver and a passenger.
The Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and ruled unanimously in favor of the police. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the driver’s conduct posed a “grave public safety risk” and that the police were justified in shooting at the car to stop it. The court said it “stands to reason that, if police officers are justified in firing at a suspect in order to end a severe threat to public safety, the officers need not stop shooting until the threat has ended.”
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/opinion/how-the-supreme-court-protects-bad-cops.html
Obamacare Premiums Projected To Decrease In Arkansas
Source: TPM
Health insurance premiums for plans sold under Obamacare in Arkansas are projected to decrease by an average of 2 percent next year, Gov. Mike Beebe's office announced Tuesday.
"This is an aggregate projection, meaning that some individual consumers will see a small increase in premiums, and others will see their costs drop more than two percent," Beebe's office said of the new estimates from the state insurance department.
As the Arkansas Times reported last week, Arkansas's 2015 rate filings were accidentally leaked from the insurance department. Beebe's office said Tuesday its official projections were being released "in light of incomplete information that was inadvertently posted on an Insurance Department Web site."
Arkansas has been a key state in Obamacare's rollout. Beebe pioneered the "private option" for Medicaid expansion that used Medicaid dollars to pay for private plans purchased through the state's insurance exchange. It has since been emulated by several other states. Arkansas is also a Senate battleground state where incumbent Democratic senator Mark Pryor has been attacked over the law.
Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/arkansas-obamacare-premiums-decrease
Choking the Oceans With Plastic
By CHARLES J. MOORE
LOS ANGELES — The world is awash in plastic. It’s in our cars and our carpets, we wrap it around the food we eat and virtually every other product we consume; it has become a key lubricant of globalization — but it’s choking our future in ways that most of us are barely aware.
I have just returned with a team of scientists from six weeks at sea conducting research in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — one of five major garbage patches drifting in the oceans north and south of the Equator at the latitude of our great terrestrial deserts. Although it was my 10th voyage to the area, I was utterly shocked to see the enormous increase in the quantity of plastic waste since my last trip in 2009. Plastics of every description, from toothbrushes to tires to unidentifiable fragments too numerous to count floated past our marine research vessel Alguita for hundreds of miles without end. We even came upon a floating island bolstered by dozens of plastic buoys used in oyster aquaculture that had solid areas you could walk on.
Plastics are now one of the most common pollutants of ocean waters worldwide. Pushed by winds, tides and currents, plastic particles form with other debris into large swirling glutinous accumulation zones, known to oceanographers as gyres, which comprise as much as 40 percent of the planet’s ocean surface — roughly 25 percent of the entire earth.
No scientist, environmentalist, entrepreneur, national or international government agency has yet been able to establish a comprehensive way of recycling the plastic trash that covers our land and inevitably blows and washes down to the sea. In a 2010 study I conducted of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers, we extrapolated that some 2.3 billion pieces of plastic — from polystyrene foam to tiny fragments and pellets — had flowed from Southern California’s urban centers into its coastal waters in just three days of sampling.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/opinion/choking-the-oceans-with-plastic.html
Charles P. Pierce -The Passion of Big Chicken (AKA Chrispie Christie)
I suspect that the Chris Christie Comeback is not going to be based on the model of governance that he brought to New Jersey. I suspect that may be beyond even the vast talents of the various porcine cosmeticians in the national media. There are a couple of reasons for this.
Reason The First: Remember that tough love part of his stump speech, where he justifies cutting the pensions in front of an audience of firefighters who eventually came around to Chris Christie's position that he was fleecing them for their own good? He loves to tell that story, especially in front of audiences made up of people from families that have not had to worry about retirement income since the Dutch fled Manhattan. Remember how the "reform" of (deliberately underfunded) pensions was such a big part of the "tough choices" that only a manly man like Big Chicken could make.
Yeah, not so much any more.
The state has sent more pension money to big-name Wall Street firms like Blackstone, Third Point, Omega Advisors, Elliott Associates and Grady's old firm, The Carlyle Group. Additionally, the amount of fees the state pays financial managers has more than tripled since Christie assumed office. New Jersey is now one of America's largest investors in hedge funds. The "maximized returns" have yet to materialize. Between fiscal year 2011 and 2014, the state's pension trailed the median returns for similarly sized public pension systems throughout the country, according to data from the financial analysis firm, Wilshire Associates. That below-median performance has cost New Jersey taxpayers billions in unrealized gains and has left the pension system on shaky ground. Meanwhile, New Jersey is now paying a quarter-billion dollars in additional annual fees to Wall Street firms -- many of whose employees have financially supported Republican groups backing Christie's reelection campaign.
Costing the state billions while simultaneously making your cronies rich? Is Chris Christie the governor of New Jersey or the prime minister of Griftylvania?
(Let us pause here and remember that, any time a politician tells you that you're better off putting money you've already earned into The Market, be that the Social Security trust fund or your earned-benefit pension, said politician is already halfway in your pocket. They are asking you to put your money down in a rigged casino. Politicians who make this pitch should find more honest work, like swindling the blind, or selling oregano for weed.)
more
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Big_Chicken_Loses_Big
A new look at Triton from Voyager 2
On August 25, 1989, Voyager passed within 40,000 kilometers of Neptune's large moon Triton, the last such visit the pioneering Voyager Project would make as it exited the then-known Solar System. In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of this event, a new high-resolution global map in 3-colors has been made of Triton, highlighting the young geologically active surface of the cold icy moon. The map is also in support of the New Horizons Pluto encounter next year in July, 2015.
The map has a nominal resolution of 600 meters and is in orange, green and blue, showing Triton in approximately natural colors. The dark areas to the north were not illuminated during the Voyager encounter. The map is centered on the Equator and extends to 180° W (at left) and 180° E (at right), and from North (top) to South poles (bottom).
Triton Movie
Voyager 2 made a hair-raising pass over Neptune’s large moon Triton in August 1989. Approaching from the deep south, Voyager passed over the north pole of cloud-swept Neptune, almost close enough to brush the far-attenuated upper atmosphere.The gravity of Neptune pulled the spacecraft down toward Triton, passing over the unlit north pole of that bitterly cold icy moon.This movie, using the best Voyager map, in color, recreates that encounter with Triton as Voyager 2 ended its tour of the Giant Planets and began its lonely trek into deep space.Triton is 2706 kilometers across.The map has a nominal resolution of 600 meters and is in orange, green and blue, showing Triton in approximately natural colors.The actual encounter as represented here begins about 3 days out from Triton (extending a week on the outbound trajectory) and at a speed of ~25 kilometers per second.
more
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/icy_moons/neptune/triton/
Charles P. Pierce -Quibbling about the price (Scott Walker)
Last Friday, rather late in the day, there came a massive document dump in connection with the investigation into the most recent corrupt campaign conducted on behalf of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest facility formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. Some of the more piquant of these had to do with e-mails in which Walker importuned various individuals and companies to kick into the Wisconsin Club For Growth, a pro-Walker front run by one of his former aides, in order to help fund the campaign to keep the voters of Wisconsin from tossing Walker out on his ear. Some of the more piquant details of these piquant documents involve a $700,000 donation to the WCFG by Gogebic Taconite LLC, the company that proposes to dig a monstrous four-mile open-pit mine in the woods of northern Wisconsin.
The hundreds of pages of documents that became available Friday afternoon also showed Walker's team sought to solicit funds for the Wisconsin Club for Growth from an array of nationally known donors to fend off his 2012 recall. Real esate developer Donald Trump, industrialist billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson were all targets. Mining company Gogebic Taconite LLC's $700,000 contribution to the Wisconsin Club for Growth was not publicly known until Friday. "Clearly, Club for Growth favors economic growth in Wisconsin and has favored mining, so contributions to organizations that have a shared purpose, a shared interest, that is really all there is to it," Bob Seitz, a spokesman for Gogebic, said Friday. Seitz said that he did not know the source of the funds. Gogebic is owned by Chris Cline, a billionaire coal mine operator.
The Gogobic mine has always been one of the more embarrassingly obvious items in the all-u-can-pollute yard sale that Walker has made of Wisconsin's natural resources. Walker and his pet state legislature let Gogebic's people help write the bill that opened the loophole in the state's mining regulations that will allow the company to dig there. Since then, there have been a number of confrontations between angry local residents, environmentalists, and, in one memorable case, masked and armed company goons. These swell fellas were from Bulletproof Securities, a company-goon-for-hire agency run by a payday loan magnate in Arizona. Given that he's done everything except deliver a State Of The State Address festooned in Gogebic logos, it's hard to believe that Walker ever had to ask the company for anything. But there we are with the e-mails, so that's that, right?
Ah, no.
Walker didn't know a thing about it. Honest.
700 large for issue ads? How'd that happen?
more
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Scott_Walker_And_The_Mine
All of Us Are Beautiful, Perfect Angels, Except Mike Brown, Who Liked Rap Music
By Luke O'Neil
It took all of five seconds after the news of Ferguson, Missouri teen Mike Brown's shooting broke for the media to begin the standard image makeover that transpires whenever a black man is killed by authorities.
NBC News came hot out of the gates with an image of Brown perfectly tailored for speculation about his potential gang affiliations, for example. Fox News, predictably, has had a field day writing Mike Brown-based fan fiction, circulating the specious and since-debunked claim that Officer Darren Wilson had suffered a fractured orbital bone after being assaulted by Brown. The Ferguson police played directly to the crowd themselves, releasing the images of Brown's alleged convenience store robbery in an attempt to justify his being murdered.
Much like we saw with the Trayvon Martin fiasco, this is how the well is poisoned. The narrative shifts from the murder of an unarmed boy to the somewhat understandable use of force against an aggressive man to, by the time we're done digging through his trash, the heroic dispatching of a thug who had it coming. This is why the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag on Twitter was so poignant and telling: Which of us, if we were in Brown's shoes, particularly young black men, could not be made out as a violent criminal based on the images of ourselves available online?
Look no further than the hundreds of thousands of dollars being raised by so-called supporters of Wilson, many of whom have left the most vile comments imaginable, for evidence of how thoroughly this re-branding has worked. Hell, open any comments section on any website in existence, including this one, for reams of evidence for how absolutely convinced some people are that Brown was basically The Wire's Avon Barksdale incarnate.
more
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/beautiful-perfect-angels
A Hardy Welcome: Wyoming's U.S. Senate Challenger Rages Against the Money Machine
by Carl Gibson
Seventy-five-year-old Charlie Hardy, the former Catholic priest who just won the Democratic nomination in Wyoming’s U.S. Senate race, may be the only senatorial candidate this year not accepting money from corporations or PACs. Hardy told me about a recent call he made to Colorado Sen. Mark Udall’s campaign office, in which staffers told him they’d have to raise $20 million this election to keep Udall in office. Udall’s Republican opponent is expected to raise $16 million.
“Why is a senate seat that valuable?” Hardy said. “Where does that money come from? Who does that make you beholden to?”
Hardy is running against Mike Enzi, a three-term incumbent Republican who has proven himself a professional at soliciting money from corporate donors. According to Opensecrets.org, Enzi's chief campaign contributors are coal titans like Murray Energy and Peabody Energy, and health insurance corporations like Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Koch Industries has given $12,600 to Enzi, who has raised nearly $1 million from extractive industries and health insurance alone. And the senator’s voting record, available at ontheissues.org, reflects his deference to his donors.
- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/hardy-welcome-wyomings-us-senate-challenger-rages-against-money-machine
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