You’ll probably have to get used to the idea of Twitch streaming a bunch of Amazon Prime Video shows. Starting at 4PM Eastern on April 5th, three of Prime Video’s spring pilots will air on repeat for 24 hours on the Twitch Presents page, which just f…
Now that your ISP will soon be able to sell your browsing history to advertisers, it’s good to know which companies have your back, privacy-wise. Around the web, the recent switch to HTTPS encryption has been a step in the right direction, but adult…
Last September, I wrote a very stupid blog post based around a plot line on FXX’s You’re the Worst, in which Jimmy is horrified to learn that his live-in girlfriend Gretchen doesn’t wash her legs while in the shower. As I confessed then, neither do I. The reaction to this news was…stronger than anticipated.
Most of the major smartphones of spring have been announced, and we noticed something curious. The LG G6 and Samsung Galaxy S8 are both rocking big displays with an aspect ratio larger than the 16:9 you’re used to on your phones, television and desktop displays. These phones have some of the widest aspect ratios ever…
While this latest flurry of news stories, Nobel laureate commentaries and late-night “Daily Show” mockery has exposed the fallacies of the Trump administration’s union-busted coal miners pageant, the media continues to overlook a crucial part of the great coal debate:
Coal miners do not work in a vacuum.
Call it: the reckoning. Or, the true cost of living in a national sacrifice zone. And its flip side is the extraordinary resiliency of those who are defending their communities and attempting to change the narrative to ways of regenerating a mined-out community after coal.
Huge segments of our population continue to deal daily with the devastating and often deadly realities of coal mining pollution.
Still cranking out 700–plus million tons of coal a year, our country has never come to grips with the fact that huge segments of our populations, namely 20-odd coal mining states from Appalachia to Alaska and in indigenous First Nations, continue to deal daily with the devastating and often deadly realities of coal mining pollution and cancer-linked toxic discharges, undrinkable and contaminated water, egregious health impacts from faulty coal slurry and coal ash impoundments, forced displacement and removal from historic communities, black lung and injury among coal miners, and an intergenerational state of trauma from living amid the ruins of an absentee outlaw industry that has rarely been held accountable for its violation-ridden operations, and placed a stranglehold on any economic diversification.
This is before we even consider the impact of mining and burning coal on our climate.
“They say we’re collateral damage,” Larry Gibson once told me on the edge of a massive strip mine in West Virginia, standing defiant as a coal miner’s son and one of the most fearless critics of mountaintop removal strip mining. “Well, I ain’t collateral damage. I am somebody.”
It’s 2017. We need to end this oversight and normalization of collateral damage in so-called coal country.
It’s 2017. We need to end this oversight and normalization of collateral damage in so-called coal country—in the media, in our daily conversations, and finally, in the halls of power in Washington and our state houses.
For starters: Among the scores of amazing films that have provided the historical context and ground-level realities of living in coal mining regions, check out these recent films, among so many others that I don’t have room to list:
“AFTER COAL”: Explores the successes and the failures of Welsh programs to clean up mine waste, retrain miners, and develop wind farms – comparing these efforts to similar projects planned in Appalachia.
”BLOOD ON THE MOUNTAIN”: History of coal miners and communities, and their struggle for justice, in Appalachia
”MOVING MOUNTAINS”: Coal miner’s wife stands up to the industry’s contamination of her community’s water.
” CURSED BY COAL: MINING THE NAVAJO NATION”: Vice News Report
”IN THE SHADOW OF COAL”: Stories from Montana’s Coal Country
”OVERBURDEN”:Mining tragedy brings together a coal miner’s sister and community advocate for change
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It’s déjà vu all over again.
As the Trump-Russia story continues to stutter forward, comparisons to Watergate are everywhere — and justifiably so. The revelations and denials, the slow unraveling of deception, the critical role of a free and independent press challenging the cover-up and digging for the truth are all very familiar, especially to those of us who actually were in Washington back during those peculiar days and nights of Richard Nixon.
But another inside-the-Beltway, historic parallel struck me last week when reports emerged of House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) suddenly jumping from his Uber car into another and covertly racing to the White House grounds, where he met with who-knows-who about who-knows-what. (The New York Times reported on Thursday that White House officials Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis gave Nunes access to “intelligence reports that showed President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.” Early Thursday evening, The Washington Post added to the list John Eisenberg, legal adviser to the National Security Council.)
When it comes to paralleling Nunes and his car switcheroo, there hasn’t been such noteworthy bolting from a vehicle in the District of Columbia since a South American stripper named Fanne Foxx dashed from the limousine of House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills and jumped into the Tidal Basin. That was in 1974, just a couple of months after Nixon’s resignation. Foxe and Rep. Mills were having an affair and soon after his companion’s 2 a.m. dip, Mills, who was considered by many to be the most powerful man on Capitol Hill, had to give up his chairmanship. Foxe had her 15 minutes of fame, during which her exotic dancer sobriquet was changed from “The Argentine Firecracker” to “The Tidal Basin Bombshell.”
No word as to what Rep. Nunes’ stripper name will be, but I’m open to suggestions. Certainly Devin “D for Dumb” Nunes is a real possibility. Which brings to mind another congressional highlight of 1974, and I’m not talking about the superb work of the House Judiciary Committee passing articles of impeachment against Nixon. It also was the year that a start-up magazine, New Times, made a splash with its cover story naming, “The 10 Dumbest Members of Congress.” It was written by Nina Totenberg, now NPR’s star legal affairs correspondent.
No. 1 on her list was Sen. William Scott, Republican from Virginia, a one termer whose stupid-is-as-stupid-does behavior reportedly included racist and anti-Semitic remarks.
During a defense briefing that included information about missile silos in Russia, Scott is alleged to have said, “Wait a minute! I’m not interested in agriculture. I want the military stuff.” Nor did he seem to know the difference between the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf, so thank God he never was anywhere near the nuclear codes.
To make matters worse, when the article appeared, Scott called a press conference in his office to angrily denounce the story, giving it even wider coverage and proving once and for all that he really was exactly who Totenberg and the magazine said he was.
Which brings us back to Devin Nunes. Certainly, in this current Congress he already has a lot of competition for dumbest. The Texas House Republicans alone include an impressive array of top-tier candidates. (And I say that as a Yankee who nonetheless received half his chromosomes from a smart and capable Texan.)
Or maybe Nunes is dumb like a fox. Between his feckless dashing about Washington like a barely housebroken Scooby-Doo and his postponement of more open hearings that might further reveal the administration’s culpability, he has done his best to obfuscate and obstruct. He’s certainly a tool, his fumbling mistakes and misrepresentations thoroughly mucking up his committee’s investigation, probably beyond redemption. Which doubtless is just what his White House pals wanted.
Hard to believe he wants to go out this way (and he should resign, recuse himself or be replaced by House Speaker Ryan). There are even those who say that when the committee room doors are closed, in private he has been a helpful colleague — until now.
Apparently, Nunes been played and played big-time, a cog in the Steve Bannon machine designed to subvert the current investigations. That classified — and said to be anonymous! — information about which Nunes insisted he had to brief President Trump but at the same time hide from the eyes of his committee turns out to have been leaked to him by the supposedly leak-averse White House itself. In other words, he was briefing the White House on documents he got from the White House. Huh?
And what was in those documents? According to the Times:
“The intelligence reports consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle before his inauguration, officials said…
“Mr. Nunes has acknowledged that the incidental intelligence gathering on Trump associates last year was not necessarily unlawful, and that it was not specifically directed at Mr. Trump or people close to him. American intelligence agencies typically monitor foreign officials of allied and hostile countries, and they routinely sweep up communications linked to Americans who may be taking part in the conversation or are being spoken about.”
Shocker — not. And far removed from the myth of Barack Obama “wiretapping” Trump Tower, as the current president claimed.
Now, how about the men who allegedly handed off the info to Rep. Nunes? There’s Michael Ellis, who’s in the White House Counsel’s office. He used to work for Nunes at the intelligence committee and now reports to the aforementioned National Security Council attorney John Eisenberg.
And you may remember Ezra Cohen-Watnick – he’s s the guy who national security adviser H.R. McMaster recently wanted to bounce from his position as the National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence. Cohen-Watnick, 30, went running to his protectors, Steve Bannon and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. They then went to Trump, who overruled McMaster and saved the kid’s job. After Trump sent his scurrilous tweets about wiretapping, Cohen-Watnick apparently wanted to pay his debt to the boss and seems to have set about trying to find something, anything, that might be interpreted as supporting his president’s fantasy.
Cohen-Watnick is a protégé of McMaster’s short-lived predecessor as national security adviser, the notorious Michael Flynn, who lost his job for, among other sins, purportedly lying to Vice President Mike Pence and others about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. At least that was the cover story. He also may have been involved in a private, half-baked scheme to kidnap Turkish opposition leader Fethullah Gulen from exile in Pennsylvania and turn him over to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and certain death, thus avoiding formal extradition.
Still with me? Earlier reports had indicated that Flynn might be cutting a deal with the FBI, copping a plea in exchange for telling everything he knows about Donald Trump’s team and Russia, including possible collusion in that country’s interference with the 2016 election. Now The Wall Street Journal reports that according to officials, Flynn has offered to be interviewed by the agency and the congressional intelligence committees in exchange for immunity, “but has so far found no takers.” His lawyer wrote, “Gen. Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit.” I’ll bet, but it may take a while; no one seems anxious to grant Flynn’s request anytime soon. And it’s pretty funny coming from a fellow who last September told Meet the Press, “When you are given immunity, that means you probably committed a crime.”
Which brings us back to Watergate. When Woodward and Bernstein started writing their articles in June 1972, there was frustration, because while they were on the front page of The Washington Post almost every day, their reporting was buried in other newspapers around the country and the story got little traction — much as the Russia story has been ignored or denied by Trump’s base. Richard Nixon won re-election in a landslide.
In my memory, Watergate finally began to really crack open months later when the burglars appeared for sentencing in March 1973. One of them, James McCord, had written a letter to Judge John Sirica and then met with him in chambers, begging for a deal and singing like the Vienna Boys Choir about who at the Nixon White House had asked the burglars to take the rap and remain silent in exchange for a payoff.
So maybe now a similar agreement eventually will be reached with Flynn. Add to that the seeming seriousness of Republican Richard Burr, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who as of this week — and unlike the hapless Nunes — seems committed to getting honest answers, much as his fellow North Carolinian, Democrat Sam Ervin, sought when he chaired the Senate Watergate Committee. (That said, the apparent commitment of Burr — and Democratic vice chair Mark Warner of Virginia — does not yet negate the real need for an independent, bipartisan inquiry and a special prosecutor.)
Senators of both parties serving on the intelligence committee were stunned Thursday when Clinton Watts, a senior fellow at the George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, told them in a public hearing that not only had Russia hacked Hillary Clinton but also other GOP presidential candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries, including Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham. What’s more, Watts said, “the commander in chief has used Russian active measures at times against his opponents.”
In part, he noted, that’s why Russia was so successful — Trump played such a willing (if possibly unwitting) role in their scheme: “… Part of the reason these active measures work, and it does today in terms of Trump Tower being wiretapped, is because they [Trump’s associates] parrot the same lines.”
Sure, there’s a chance this will all lead to naught. But we have to find out. Every piece of this puzzle inexorably leads us to the big looming questions one longs to ask Trump and his cohort under oath: If there’s really nothing going on, why are you working so hard to keep the truth from coming out? What exactly are you hiding?
Or is this a knee-jerk authoritarian response to anyone who dares challenge the leader, a dictatorial reaction that will only worsen with time and the consolidation of power? That may be the most frightening question of all.
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As a precursor to our Moto G5 Plus Review, the following is an up-close look at the features that this smartphone has that no other phone has – in this price range. As the Motorola Moto G5 Plus’ specs might suggest, this is a phone that isn’t about to compete with devices like the Galaxy S8 or LG G6. While … Continue reading
Remember when Beyoncé was vegan? This is pretty much the opposite of that.
A London-based creative agency teamed up with a group of artists and designers to create Queen Bey’s likeness in cheese. We can’t decide if we want to eat this replica, aptly titled “Brie-Oncé,” or preserve it until the end of time.
The sliceable sculpture is modeled after Beyoncé’s iconic pregnancy announcement in February. It’s made from about 45 pounds of cheddar cheese and took 28 hours to create. (And they say Rome wasn’t built in a day!)
Brie-Oncé, which was created for The Robin Collective by sculptors David Bradley and Jacqui Kelly, creative director Brandy Klingelpuss and designers Guy Roberts and Robin Fegen, will be on display at a wine and cheese festival in London this weekend.
“Hopefully she won’t lose her formation,” The Robin Collective’s Rosa Holmes told HuffPost. We’re melting.
The delicious-looking statue is a genius combination of two universally loved entities, and we have to admit everyone involved did a ***flawless job. Beyoncé was always the G.O.A.T., but now she’s the G.O.A.T. cheese, too.
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While the broader U.S. economy has been humming along, the farm economy is entering its fourth straight year of declining incomes and rising debt, thanks to low prices for crops like corn and wheat.
“We are on the cusp of another 1980s-style farm depression, where thousands of family farmers would lose their historical lands,” said Joe Logan, 68, who farms 450 acres in northeast Ohio.
President Donald Trump has said hardly anything about agriculture policy, though he’s made a lot of noise about trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement. That worries some farmers. While Trump complains that the U.S. as a whole imports much more than it exports, the farming sector has boasted a trade surplus for decades because people in other countries buy a lot of American crops.
“Talking about renegotiating NAFTA causes people some concern because from the agriculture perspective, NAFTA wasn’t a bad agreement at all,” said Joe Outlaw, a professor and agriculture expert at Texas A&M University. “What the president’s said about redoing trade agreements has caught everyone’s attention in agriculture.”
So far, the Trump administration has taken only baby steps on trade policy. Though Trump said he’d ditch NAFTA at the beginning of his presidency, it was only this week that his administration started making moves, and experts said the administration’s plans appear relatively modest.
But Trump’s harsh rhetoric has already had consequences. Lawmakers in Mexico, for instance, have proposed importing corn from countries other than the U.S. If Mexico stopped buying U.S. corn, prices for that commodity could drop even further, because the unsold corn would exacerbate the oversupply problem that’s already hurting prices.
“When we start bashing our trading partners and start threatening them,” Logan said, “we know we have the potential to screw up a market that is already in pretty bad shape.”
Logan and his brother raise corn, soybeans, wheat, hay and beef cattle. He said they lost money farming last year, and the outlook is not so good this year, either.
“If we’re lucky, and we don’t have serious machinery breakdowns or problems in the course of the year, we can plant crops and harvest them and just about pay our bills,” Logan said.
Farmers’ woes affect other workers, too. John Deere, a big manufacturer of tractors and other agricultural machinery, laid off more than 2,000 workers last year. The company, which is publicly traded, said in its most recent annual disclosure to investors that it expected agricultural equipment sales in North America to fall 5 percent to 10 percent this year, citing “low commodity prices and weak farm incomes.”
Tom Ralston, who represents John Deere workers as president of the local United Auto Workers union in Waterloo, Iowa, said he’s optimistic that things will get better ― partly because some workers had recently been recalled to work.
“My hope is that we’ve plateaued out and the only to go from here is up,” Ralston said. He cited the threat of trade policy and also domestic policy as reasons for concern, since tax changes, for instance, can play heavily into a farmer’s decision to buy a tractor. “If we have bad economic policies come out of Washington, it could drastically affect us.”
The federal government operates an array of programs designed to offset the risks of running a business sensitive to the vagaries of nature. Yet Trump, despite the support he’s gotten from rural America, has seemed indifferent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s farm safety net. He nominated his agriculture secretary last among other Cabinet positions, and he proposed cutting the department’s budget by 21 percent.
The Republican chairman of the Agriculture Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, which has been drafting changes to agriculture policy for next year, blasted the Trump budget. “I think it is very important to remember that net farm income is down 50 percent from where it stood just four years ago,” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) said.
Anna Weir said farmers’ laments are overblown. Weir is a policy analyst with the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that generally argues agribusiness is overly subsidized by the government.
“Most farmers depend on off-farm income,” Weir said, pointing to USDA data showing that despite declines in farm incomes, farm households are expected to earn more this year, thanks to money from other jobs, such as those held by farmers’ spouses.
We are on the cusp of another 1980s-style farm depression, where thousands of family farmers would lose their historical lands.
Joe Logan
Experts tend to dispute the idea that the current agriculture downturn is as bad as the one in the 1980s ― a crisis partly triggered by U.S. farmers losing access to the Soviet Union’s wheat market. But it’s still pretty bad, said Brent Gloy, an agricultural economics professor at Purdue University. He said the USDA data on farm household incomes doesn’t reflect reality for the subset of operations that grow the most food.
“If you look at the people who produce 90 percent of the farm products, they’re feeling the stress of [low commodity prices] significantly,” Gloy said. “They’re much less likely to have off-farm jobs and off-farm income.”
Gloy and Weir agree that while farm incomes are down and debt is rising, debt levels are still near historic lows, and farmland remains relatively valuable. Plus, the downturn that started in mid-2013 followed several years of strong growth that put money in farmers’ pockets.
Barry Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said the real problem is that farmers lack economic power due to decades of corporate consolidation. With fewer and fewer companies dominating food distribution and retail, for instance, food growers have diminishing ability to set prices for the crops they grow.
“Most farmers are selling into markets that are really not markets at all, they’re selling on a contract basis to corporations,” Lynn said. “They [the corporations] really don’t have any competition.”
The New America Foundation, a liberal think tank, has reported in recent years that consolidation in the food industry has not only hurt farmers, but also agriculture workers and consumers, who’ve been left with fewer choices in the supermarket. The foundation faulted the Obama administration for doing nothing to stop increasing monopolization. Nobody expects the Trump administration to be any more aggressive on antitrust issues.
“The system now is designed to put all the pain on the little guy at every single level,” Lynn said.
There has also been a lot of consolidation of farms themselves, as larger operations increasingly dominate agriculture production. Just 2.9 percent of U.S. farms accounted for 42 percent of all production in 2015, according to the USDA. The median size of farms has more than doubled since 1982, to 1,234 acres as of 2012.
Logan said he has no spouse and no other job, though he does serve as the president of the Ohio Farmers Union. He and his brother are the fifth generation of Logans to manage their farm in Kinsman, Ohio. Logan said his son and daughters have grown and moved to more urban settings. He’s talked to them about returning to work on the farm someday, and they like the idea, sort of.
“They all understand you can’t make any money or support a family doing that,” he said. “I’ve told them that I’m going to try to hold onto the farm as long as I can. That’s my objective right now. We’ll see if we’re successful or not.”
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“Fuller House” actress Candace Cameron Bure and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” veteran Bianca del Rio engaged in a heated Instagram exchange Thursday… over a T-shirt.
The feud began when Bure, 40, posted the following photo to her Instagram account.
The phrase “not today, Satan” was popularized by Rio, who said it on an episode of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in 2014. The drag queen has a merchandise line emblazoned with the phrase, and it also happens to be the name of her recent tour.
Once Rio caught wind of Bure’s photo, she quickly reposted it to her own Instagram, along with a caption blasting the former “View” co-host, who is known for her conservative Christian views, as “homophobic.”
Many of the drag queen’s followers then headed over to Bure’s page, where they blasted the actress in the comments below her photo for wearing the shirt, which does not appear to be one of the many sold on Rio’s website.
“People of the LGBTQ community are tired of straight cis people taking things from us and using it for their own and not crediting community,” one person wrote. Added another: “To go against gay rights, to sh*t on our lives, and then parade yourself around in OUR clothing and OUR phrases is insulting.”
Still, others came to the star’s defense. “Just because she’s Christian doesn’t mean she’s homophobic,” one person wrote. “She didn’t even say anything bad, it’s just how it got interpreted.”
The furor then prompted Bure to write to Rio directly on Instagram. The drag queen shared a screenshot of the comment.
“I’m not homophobic and [it’s] always sad when people think otherwise. Loving Jesus doesn’t mean I hate gay people or anyone,” Bure wrote. “You sent a bunch of hateful people to my page writing horrible things.” She then urged Rio to “spread love and kindness, even when you disagree with people.”
Of course, Bure has a checkered history when it comes to the LGBTQ community. In 2015, she defended bakeries who turn away same-sex couples looking to purchase wedding cakes, arguing that business owners’ decision to reject those customers was “freedom of association” and “First Amendment rights.” She also tweeted her support of Chick-fil-A after the fast food chain ignited a media firestorm when its president, Dan Cathy, spoke out against same-sex marriage.
Last year, however, she said she’d be open to a gay plotline on “Fuller House,” noting, “I’m an actress on a television show and I support all things that we go through as human beings and would love all our characters to explore whatever issues that are current in our culture and our society today.”
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