May 3, 2017

Kids Suing Trump Hope the Courts Step Up on Climate Change

Congress and the White House aren't going to address the climate crisis anytime soon. Will judges?

By John Light | May 3, 2017

Last week, as hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Washington, DC for the People’s Climate March, 14 young Americans, ranging in age from 9 to 21, held a press conference in front the Supreme Court.

“We are not going to wait until someone in office is representing our voices,” 16-year-old Xiuhtzcatl Martinez told the assembled crowd of reporters, activists, and four US senators. “We need the action to come today. The threat upon our future is happening right now.”

Martinez and the 13 teens and tweens by his side were among 21 plaintiffs suing the US government to force it to take action on climate change. The government has known about the threat of climate change for decades, they argue, but has continued to take actions that contribute to climate change — like approving pipelines and subsidizing the fossil fuel industry — imperiling the lives of young Americans and future generations.

This, lawyers for these young plaintiffs allege, has violated their constitutional right to a habitable climate. The lawyers also argue that the atmosphere is a public trust, and that by continuing to allow American businesses to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the government has neglected its responsibility to protect this resource. The kids want immediate steps to bring CO2 levels in the atmosphere down to 350 parts per million, the amount scientists consider safe to protect the planet from continued global warming. CO2 levels have risen well above 400 ppm.

These arguments are groundbreaking, and take environmental law into areas it’s never been. But judges have also signaled that the arguments may hold up in court. Last November, Federal District Judge Ann Aiken allowed the case to move forward, ruling against a bid by the Obama administration to dismiss the case. In her decision, she argued that the lawsuit was “no ordinary lawsuit,” continuing:

LOts more:
http://billmoyers.com/story/kids-suing-trump-hope-courts-step-climate-change/

May 3, 2017

How Fox News & the Right-Wing Media Machine Totally Changed My Dad's Character & Made Him Crazy

This is from March but well worth checking out if you missed it. Friend just told me about it. Documentary chronicles how her dad changed completely over time from listening to right wing media.

"How Fox News and the Right-Wing Media Machine Made My Dad Crazy"

Jen Senko, director of the new documentary ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad,’ writes about how the right-wing hate machine drove her father to the brink of insanity.

Lots of snip

Slowly, my Dad’s openness to all people began to change. He started mocking feminists and defending SUVs. Now, I didn’t tell you something essential about my dad: he was a ‘saver.’ Coming from the Great Depression, he’d learned to be thrifty about everything. When we got old enough to drive, he had us mark down our mileage and how much gas we bought in a little book. This was his way to keep track of how many miles to the gallon the car got. So it shocked me when, after picking me up from the bus station one time, he became livid when I cracked a sarcastic joke about all the SUVs I saw on the road.

When he retired, he continued with his talk radio habit and started listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would rarely miss a Limbaugh lunch. And that’s when my Dad became angry all the time, argumentative, and hateful of particular groups of people. Of all things, he began lashing out against gay people. I couldn’t believe it. He would get red-in-the-face angry whenever I tried to ask him why he suddenly hated all things gay. And didn’t he still like my friends? I never got a coherent answer other than, “I just don’t want it in my face!”

When Clinton came into office he hated him so much it was disturbing—something I figured had to do with his hero, Rush Limbaugh. He called Al Gore an “asshole,” and even after he saw Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth years later, said it was “stupid.” He railed against “liberal universities.” He railed against illegal immigrants and Mexicans, and literally started telling my mother she should wait on him because he was the man of the house. He started calling my mother and aunts “girls,” and did not like it when I would correct him and say “women.” “Girls,” he’d repeat, his face filling with blood.

I saw the writing on the wall early on and mentioned it to my mother. She didn’t know what to do about it, so she downplayed it. No one took it too seriously at first. Then email came into play. My Dad joined and/or contributed to every right-wing organization, from the NRA to Christian right groups. Both of these choices struck everyone as especially strange considering he wasn’t a hunter and was a medic in WWII. And only a few years earlier, he’d announced he didn’t believe in God anymore.

He started sending us all a constant stream of far-right emails. Some of the stories were so clearly apocryphal it baffled me that he believed them. He would even pester me with them at work, like the one he sent me railing against the minimum wage. I couldn’t understand it. This was not an issue he’d ever talked about before and I could not imagine him even taking a side—but I was especially shocked at the side he took. It wasn’t until later when I was researching the subject that I discovered many of these “homespun”-sounding emails were simply written by a bunch of guys sitting in a room at some right-wing think tank, made to sound as if an “average Joe” wrote them.

snip

Once I started chronicling this character change in my film The Brainwashing of My Dad, I discovered I was not alone. This was a phenomenon. People from all over wrote me asking for advice about what to do to restore their relationship with their sister, or their brother, or their mother. Their concerns were many, from “We can’t even talk about the weather because then global warming comes up” to “My Dad keeps buying guns and ammunition waiting for the new Civil War.”

I often find myself pondering this new “civil” war. It’s truly become a war against civility that has poisoned families and divided our country in a way that it has not been divided since the Civil War, and it’s because of the concerted effort by right-wing media over the last 30 years to mislead and divide people.

snip

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/17/how-fox-news-and-the-right-wing-media-machine-made-my-dad-crazy

May 2, 2017

Fourth-Grade Class Touring White House Answers Trumps Questions About the Civil War

Satire from the Borowitz Report
Fourth-Grade Class Touring White House Answers Trump’s Questions About the Civil War

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A class of fourth-grade students touring the White House on Monday had a chance encounter with Donald Trump and were able to answer several of his questions about the Civil War.

The students, on a field trip organized by their Bethesda, Maryland, elementary school, happened upon Trump outside the Oval Office and “cleared a lot of things up for him,” their teacher said.

After Trump invited the children into his office, the ten-year-olds briefed him on the causes of the Civil War, including slavery, states’ rights, and regional economic differences.

“It was really cool,” Tracy Klugian, who had done a diorama about the Civil War while in third grade, said. “Someday I’ll be able to tell my kids that I met the President and taught him about history.”

But another student in the class, Zach Dorrinson, said that his attempt to explain the abolitionist movement to Trump was not successful.

“He needs to learn how to sit still for longer without fidgeting,” the fourth-grader said.



http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/fourth-grade-class-touring-white-house-answers-trumps-questions-about-civil-war?mbid=nl_050217%20Borowitz%20Newsletter%20(1)&CNDID=49083371&spMailingID=10935017&spUserID=MTgzMjI2MTM1NTc2S0&spJobID=1160165878&spReportId=MTE2MDE2NTg3OAS2

May 1, 2017

"Supergirl" star Melissa Benoist's protest sign from Womens March & a nod to Elizabeth Warren:

Melissa Benoist, star of Supergirl, marched in the Women's March. This was her sign:

"Hey, Donald, Don't try to grab my pussy- it's made of STEEL"

Couldn't copy photo but it's at the link:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPiCe8UDmg6/

Edited to add the photo, thanks to TexasProgressive in post #5:



Also here:

Our favorite TV superhero isn’t pulling punches in her final fight.

Entertainment Weekly reports that the season finale of the hit series “Supergirl” will be titled, “Nevertheless, She Persisted.”

The “Supergirl” finale title makes reference to a comment by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, after Sen. Elizabeth Warren attempted to read a letter by Corretta Scott King into the record during the confirmation hearings of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

snip

More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/supergirl-flies-with-elizabeth-warren_us_59075e27e4b0bb2d086fe259?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009