16 April 21
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Founder, Reader Supported News
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15 April 21
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Charles Pierce | Republicans Aren't Interested in the Civil Rights Division Doing Anything About Civil Rights
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "The Senate Judiciary Committee, Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) presiding, heard from two administration nominees for critical positions in the Department of Justice. Todd Kim was nominated to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources. But he wasn't the main event."
A Senate hearing on Joe Biden's nominee to lead the Justice Department section reinforced a decades-long pattern.
he Senate Judiciary Committee, Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) presiding, heard from two administration nominees for critical positions in the Department of Justice. Todd Kim was nominated to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources. But he wasn’t the main event. That was Kristen Clarke, whom the administration wants to be the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Done correctly, this position is where all the hottest issues of the day come together, from police violence to voting rights to systemic racism.
Over the past two decades, it’s been one of the flashpoints of every confirmation process in a new administration. It was the job to which President Bill Clinton tried to appoint Lani Guinier only to chicken out when the Wall Street Journal’s button men raised hell about Guinier’s writings on election law. (Guinier didn’t even get a hearing in the Senate.) The George W. Bush administration worked to dismantle the Civil Rights Division’s mandate and shift the division’s focus from racial and economic discrimination to a new concentration on alleged threats to “religious liberty.”
President Barack Obama had the devil’s own time filling the job. In 2016, his initial choice was Philadelphia lawyer Debo Adegbile, but Adegbile’s work as an NAACP lawyer in the successful effort to get convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal off death row—and, it should be noted, into a life sentence—was enough to throw the Republicans in Congress into a frenzy, and to drive timorous Democrats under the bed. Seven of them joined the Republicans to defeat the nomination before the whole Senate. Agdebile was replaced in the job by Vanita Gupta, who most recently was the Biden administration’s choice to be Associate Attorney General. Donald Trump nominated Eric Dreiband, who, in his white-shoe career at D.C. power firm Jones Day, had defended North Carolina’s embarrassing “bathroom law.” So recent history indicates that Republicans would rather the position not exist but, if it must, it should do as little as possible in the area of civil rights.
Clarke already had a taste of this before Wednesday’s hearing. A quite organized campaign of innuendo, half-truth, and outright smears was waged against her, and they weren’t even original smears, either. From New York:
Thursday presented a new tactic. Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the Philadelphia police officer whom activist Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing in 1982, was a guest on the [Tucker Carlson] show. Clarke, said Carlson, had “worked very hard to get Abu-Jamal free. Clarke even referred to him as a ‘political prisoner.’” Faulkner went for it. “She hates white people, that’s my honest to god true feeling. And she wants to defund the police. She’s a vile woman. And she’s dangerous.”
Carlson mined Clarke’s writings from her undergraduate days at Harvard to find things with which to gin up phony outrage. She’s even been accused of being anti-Semitic based on a speaker she engaged for a group she headed as a Harvard student. So, at the very least, when the Judiciary Committee’s Republicans trotted out this threadbare garbage on Wednesday, we all knew what was coming.
The first moment of hilarity came when Senator John Cornyn of Texas tried to bring up a satirical column Clarke had written in college, prefacing his question with the one Martin Luther King quote that every conservative knows. (Oh, come on, you know which one.) The column was a spoof of The Bell Curve in which Clarke proposed the genetic superiority of Black Americans.
“This op-ed opened with a satirical reference to the statement you just read,” Clarke replied.
This caused Cornyn to reply, with a look like a dog confronting a duck, “So this was satire?”
After Cornyn, Senator Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah, quizzed Clarke about the famous Philadelphia New Black Panthers video from 2008, the one in which two Black men stood around a polling place, opening doors for old ladies and being so intimidating that a woman came out of the building and made a phone call right behind them. Then Lee moved on to a “voter fraud” case brought by the Bush DOJ, which was notoriously corrupt on the subject, back in 2006, a case involving a Black political organizer named Ike Brown, who a federal court said had discriminated against the white voters of Noxubee County.
But the real star was Senator Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapstick from Arkansas, and perhaps the most humorless human being on whom I have ever laid eyes. Cotton went all around Robin Hood’s barn trying to get Clarke to say whether or not she thought Officer Darrin Wilson should have been charged in the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Clarke dodged, not too adroitly to my mind, but the whole damn spectacle was absurd. Cotton hammered away until Durbin asked him to let Clarke finish an answer and Cotton started bellyaching at him. “Could you please stop your pattern of interrupting me repeatedly?” Cotton then moved on to asking Clarke if the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin last March was justified. (The officer was cleared this week of all charges and returned to duty.)
It was plain that the point of the Republican attack on Clarke’s nomination was purely racial; they made it clear that they expected her to go soft on supposed Black election fraud, and harsh on white police who kill Black citizens. (Hell, Lee even ran down a list of things that Clarke has referred to as “racist” in one forum or another. It was stunning.) They have nothing but that now, even if they have to reach back a decade to find examples. They’re not shy about it anymore, not at all.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Pelosi, Durbin Oppose Moving Ahead With Supreme Court-Expansion Legislation Until Further Study
Joseph Choi, The Hill
Choi writes: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday she has 'no plans' to bring a Democratic-led bill to expand the Supreme Court to the House floor for a vote, while saying such an idea is 'not out of the question.'"
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Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Alexei Druzhinin/Getty)
Biden Hits Russia With New Sanctions in Response to Election Meddling
Andrew Roth, Guardian UK
Roth writes: "The Biden administration has announced the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats and broad sanctions against Russian officials and companies in retaliation for Moscow's interference in elections and cyber-espionage campaigns such as the SolarWinds hack."
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A UH-72 Lakota helicopter operated by the D.C. National Guard hovers over protesters in downtown Washington on June 1, 2020. (photo: Sam Ward)
DC Guard Misused Helicopters in Low-Flying Confrontation With George Floyd Protesters, Army Concludes
Alex Horton, The Washington Post
Horton writes: "The D.C. National Guard's deployment of helicopters to quell racial justice demonstrations in Washington last summer, a chilling scene in which two aircraft hovered extremely low over clusters of protesters, was a misuse of military medical aircraft and resulted in the disciplining of multiple soldiers, the Army said Wednesday."
he D.C. National Guard’s deployment of helicopters to quell racial justice demonstrations in Washington last summer, a chilling scene in which two aircraft hovered extremely low over clusters of protesters, was a misuse of military medical aircraft and resulted in the disciplining of multiple soldiers, the Army said Wednesday.
In an announcement, the Army said one helicopter “hovered under 100 feet” over the heads of people in the nation’s capital on June 1 as D.C. police and federal agencies worked to disperse crowds protesting police brutality after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis days earlier.
An Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid, acknowledged that a UH-72 Lakota helicopter at one point hovered a mere 55 feet off the ground. A Washington Post investigation last year estimated the height was 45 feet.
As military commanders rushed to support law enforcement that night, the D.C. Guard ordered five helicopters into the sky.
Senior officials, including then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, have maintained that the mission was to observe crowds and help police track people’s movements, and they have dismissed assertions that the maneuvers were intended to frighten and scatter protesters on the streets after a curfew had been imposed.
But a redacted investigative report released Wednesday appears to contradict those claims, with some soldiers involved in the operation telling investigators they believed their mission was to deter looting and vandalism with their helicopters. “Be loud … fly low over the crowds,” said one unidentified member of the Lakota crew, describing the mission parameters as they understood them.
The low maneuvers shocked former pilots, human rights groups and military law experts, some of whom also were disturbed that some of the helicopters bore red crosses indicating their primary role as medical transports. Witnesses described the helicopters as making a deafening noise and filling the air with a violent swirl of debris. One Post reporter who observed the maneuvers later recounted pulling shards of glass from her hair.
Four of the five helicopters that flew that night were medical aircraft. It was a violation of Army regulations to use them on nonmedical missions without specific approval, the report found. Brig. Gen. Robert K. Ryan, who oversaw the mission, did not seek approval and did not know of the requirement, the report said.
Spokespeople for the D.C. Guard did not respond to a request for comment.
Although leaders lacked an understanding of how to employ helicopters for civil-disturbance missions, it was “reasonable” to deploy them, given the emergency situation, an Army official said. Doing so, the official added, was not a violation of the law.
Ryan did not direct the helicopters to scatter protesters, the report found, but an unidentified subordinate misunderstood or “modified” the general’s intent and told others the mission included crowd dispersal.
The panel of Army officials who briefed reporters on the investigation’s findings said some soldiers received administrative discipline but did not specify whom. Nor would they say whether any commanders were punished. The aircrews acted in “good faith” and executed the mission they understood, the report concluded.
Tension was palpable throughout the city well before the aircraft appeared. Earlier in the day, protesters were beaten and gassed outside the White House as law enforcement cleared Lafayette Square so that President Donald Trump could walk across the street to pose for photographs with a Bible in hand outside St. John’s Church.
Aggressive statements attributed to Ryan and others appear to have contributed to the charged atmosphere surrounding the helicopter mission.
Ryan declared it was “D-Day for the National Guard,” an operations officer recalled, according to the report. “I think that perhaps framed the mission from there on.”
The mission’s execution was flawed from the beginning, the report shows. Investigators found that no National Guard official was tasked with fielding requests from police, so that responsibility was left to an officer who “had to piece it together,” the report found.
Police and the helicopter crews didn’t use the same radio frequencies and so could not communicate directly. Some police complained that the helicopters were flying too low, interrupting communications and dispersing the tear gas they had fired.
And as video and photos of the maneuvers spilled onto social media, one of Ryan’s subordinates, who is unidentified in the report, exclaimed to his boss in a text message, “your helicopters are looking good!!!”
“OMG! I am out here too,” the general replied. “Incredible. I got special permission to launch. Full authorities.”
The next day, as D.C. officials and members of Congress demanded answers, Army officials informed Ryan there were concerns about the helicopter flights. Ryan told them the mission had been “fully vetted” by Trump.
Investigators found “no evidence,” the report says, that the use of air assets was ever discussed among senior leaders coordinating the military’s response that night.
Lillie McCray (R) receives a COVID-19 vaccine from Walgreens healthcare professional Ghassan Ayyad (L) at the Victor Walchirk Apartments in Evanston, Illinois, U.S., February 22, 2021. (photo: Kamil Krazaczynski/Reuters)
Covid-19 Showed the US How It Could Make Universal Healthcare Work
Katherine Ellen Foley, Quartz
Foley writes: "The US has always relied heavily on private insurance to cover its citizens."
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President Biden will withdraw all American combat troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021. (photo: Jim Huylebroek/The New York Timids)
NATO Initiates Full Withdrawal From Afghanistan
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Wednesday agreed to pull out all of their armed forces from Afghanistan after the United States announced that its troops would leave the country by Sept. 11."
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Mother black bear with her cubs in Virginia. (photo: Bridget Donaldson/Virginia Transportation Research Council)
Towards a World Without Roadkill: Appalachians Make the Case for Wildlife Crossings
Frances Figart, In These Times
Figart writes: "In Southern Appalachia, highways fracture the habitat of bears, elk, deer and other wildlife. Locals are pushing to make roads safer for animals and drivers."
In Southern Appalachia, highways fracture the habitat of bears, elk, deer and other wildlife. Locals are pushing to make roads safer for animals and drivers.
ean Loveday is driving her husband, Tom, home from a doctor’s appointment in Johnson City, Tennessee. Their Toyota pickup truck is winding along Interstate 26, not far from the North Carolina state line north of Asheville.
Suddenly Loveday sees something black tumbling down the mountain and out into the highway in her peripheral view. “Oh no, Tom, oh no!” she mumbles. Loveday realizes it’s a bear cub hurtling toward them. She attempts to avoid hitting it by steering into the median, but vehicle and animal seem destined to collide.
“It all happened so fast,” she says today. “I don’t know where its mother was, whether the cub was following her or on its own. We stopped. It moved for a few minutes, and then was still. All I could think for days was, ‘I killed a bear cub!’ I hope I never, ever have to go through that again.”
Loveday is overwhelmed with emotion as she relates this sad memory, one shared by many motorists in the Southern Appalachians.
“I don’t care where you are on the political spectrum, no one wants to hit an animal with their vehicle,” says Jeff Hunter, senior program manager for National Parks Conservation Association, an organization devoted to protecting and enhancing the national parks system for future generations.
Highways pose lethal hazards to animals looking for food, water and other resources. Photo courtesy of National Parks Conservation Association and Wildlands Network.
In early 2017, Hunter convened a group of people who were concerned about the rising numbers of bear, deer and elk being hit on another highway that straddles the Tennessee – North Carolina border — Interstate 40 near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Some years have seen as many as 70 road-killed bears in this curvy 28-mile section of road alone, and elk reintroduced to the park in 2001 are now crossing the highway to expand their range.
“Human infrastructure is making it increasingly difficult for wildlife to follow their natural patterns of movement across the landscape,” says Hugh Irwin, a landscape conservation planner with The Wilderness Society who raised concerns back in the 1990s about I‑40 being a barrier to wildlife movement. “Historically too little thought and planning has gone into wildlife needs, and our current infrastructure fails to provide for wildlife passage.”
Passionate discussions led to action, and soon more than 80 individuals from nearly 20 federal, state, Tribal, and non-governmental organizations were collaborating to make this section of roadway more permeable for wildlife and safer for people. This year, in late February, the group announced itself publicly as Safe Passage: The I‑40 Pigeon River Gorge Wildlife Crossing Project.
Roadkill’s “Pernicious Twin”
The intersection of roads and wildlife is a safety issue that is not unique to North Carolina and Tennessee. According to the Federal Highway Administration, an estimated two million large mammals are hit on roads in the United States each year, resulting in more than 26,000 human injuries and at least 200 human fatalities.
For years, road ecologists around the world have been working to mitigate highways that were originally designed without consideration for wildlife. Europe, Canada, Mexico, and many U.S. states have already created effective wildlife road crossings. Recent articles and videos featuring large wildlife overpasses in Utah and Texas have been shared widely on social media.
Senior Research Ecologist Marcel Huijser (pronounced ‘Houser’) with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University in Bozeman has contributed to road ecology studies for more than two decades. He cites three main reasons why people care about this issue: the desire for wildlife conservation, concern for human safety, and economics. “No matter who you are, where you live, or what you do for a living, you’re going to care about at least one of these,” he says.
On Nov. 26, 2019, The Atlantic ran an auspicious road ecology article by Ben Goldfarb titled “How Roadkill Became an Environmental Disaster.” Focusing on the giant anteaters of Brazil, whose range is — you guessed it — bisected by a huge highway, the epic, riveting story introduces readers to Evelyn the anteater and a cast of road-weary researchers. One particular Goldfarb quote became the motto for researchers assessing wildlife movement and mortality in the Pigeon River Gorge: “Collisions may be road ecology’s most obvious concern, but fragmentation is roadkill’s pernicious twin.”
Conservationists point out the gravity of individual animals being killed on roads. But when they no longer try to cross, it can signal an even more dire situation.
“When wildlife finally stops even trying to cross, the highway has become a barrier,” says Hunter. “The ‘barrier effect’ is not to be confused with the concrete Jersey barriers that prevent many individual crossings. When a whole population stops crossing the road, that means their habitat is now fragmented, preventing the healthy genetic exchange that species need to thrive.”
Ron Sutherland works to restore, reconnect and re-establish wildlife corridors that have been fragmented throughout the eastern United States in his role as chief scientist with Wildlands Network, the organization that kicked off discussions about mitigation to I‑40 in 2015. He defines habitat connectivity as the degree to which organisms are able to move freely across the landscape.
“Habitat connectivity can be very high, such as in a remote and intact wilderness,” he says, “or it can be very low, such as in a city park surrounded on all sides by busy highways.”
Sutherland points out that people often get wildlife corridors and wildlife road crossings confused.
“A wildlife corridor is the term we use for a defined movement pathway that, if protected or restored, would provide essential habitat connectivity for one or more species,” he says. “They can be easy to see — such as a vegetated trail alongside a roadway — or nearly invisible and defined only by the movements of the animals.”
A wildlife road crossing, on the other hand, is “a structure that is designed to allow wildlife to safely cross over or under a busy road,” he says. “So, of course it follows that one of the best places to put wildlife road crossings is where you have a wildlife corridor that gets cut off by a highway.”
Captivating Research in the Gorge
The best places to put wildlife road crossings along the 28-mile stretch of winding mountainous terrain in the Pigeon River Gorge are precisely what researchers are working to figure out. For the past two years, National Parks Conservation Association and Wildlands Network have been collecting data that will help them identify key areas and strategies for mitigating the road between Asheville and Knoxville, preparing Safe Passage to make recommendations that can be implemented during planned road maintenance and bridge repairs.
Interstate 40 was built in 1968. Like hundreds of roads that now crisscross the Southeast, it sliced through a mountain landscape where animals had freely followed ancient wildlife corridors for millenia. Back in the ’60s, there were fewer vehicles and fewer animals. Today some 27,000 cars and trucks travel this road daily while, not far away, some of the park’s 1,900 black bears are searching for food, mates and shelter, which leads them to traverse the mosaic of wild, steep and rugged public and private lands that make up the gorge. What’s more, elk too are now attempting to cross these roads, sometimes joining their fellow ungulates, the prolific white-tailed deer, in sad deaths involving hours of suffering.
Researchers are stymied when it comes to finding a way to count the many individual animals who sustain severe injuries and make it off the roadway, only to die later in the forest.
“With both animal and human populations increasing alongside growing tourism in
the Smokies region,” says Hunter, “this situation is expected to get worse over the next decade.”
Wildlife crossings can only succeed if located where animals wish to cross the road, not just where it may be easy or convenient from a construction perspective. To this end, researchers have employed wildlife cameras to help them assess wildlife road mortality patterns in the gorge and examine how some animals use existing structures such as culverts designed to move water under the roads. They have also been tracking wildlife activity in the right-of-way alongside the road. To follow elk movement, wildlife biologist Liz Hillard is conducting a GPS-collar study.
“The topography is driving where these elk are moving,” says Hillard, a wildlife biologist with Wildlands Network. “They’re trying to spend the least amount of energy, so they follow low-slope areas, moving through the landscape in what we call the path of least resistance.”
Hillard works closely with Steve Goodman, NPCA’s wildlife researcher in the gorge, whose work is funded by the Volgenau Foundation. He has been servicing the 120 camera traps and collecting their data for the past two years.
“Regionally — and nationally — this area is widely considered to be of high conservation value and comprised of key habitat corridors that are critical for long-term flow of both plants and animals,” Goodman says. “The first step to mitigation is gaining an understanding of how these animals navigate the landscape. Where do they go, when, and why?”
Goodman and Hillard are examining “hotspots” where the most animals are getting killed, as well as places where some fortunate bear, deer and elk are successfully getting from one side of the interstate to the other. Their data will prepare Safe Passage to collaborate with local departments of transportation on bridge improvements planned for the next five years. The first of these may begin as early as fall of 2021 at the Harmon Den exit near the intersection with the Appalachian Trail, where a herd of elk have dispersed from the population reintroduced in the Smokies 20 years ago.
Benefits Outweigh the Costs
When it comes to road ecology, the economic reality can be as shocking as the roadkill. But Huijser says, in the long term, the benefits outweigh the costs.
“Collision-related costs add up to roughly $12 billion annually in the U.S.,” he says. “The cost of a deer – vehicle collision averages around $6,000 and running into an elk can cost upwards of $17,000.”
Wildlife crossing structures and road mitigation have improved human safety and wildlife corridor connectivity at Snoqualmie Pass on I‑90 in Washington State, along the Trans-Canada Highway in the Rocky Mountains and Banff National Park, and on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana where Huijser worked for 13 years. In these examples, fencing successfully reduces collisions and guides wildlife to safe-crossing opportunities such as vegetated overpasses, open-span bridges, and large- and medium-mammal underpasses. Dozens of such wildlife corridor projects have led to an 80 – 95% collision reduction with large mammals like deer and elk since the mid-’90s.
Although road mitigation measures are good for human safety and for animals, they cost money. Fences may cost about $100,000 per mile, an underpass may require around half a million to build, and a single wildlife overpass can cost up to $10 million.
But Huijser the research ecologist says that society can’t afford not to.
“Implementing effective mitigation measures substantially reduces costs associated with wildlife – vehicle collisions by 80 – 100%,” Huijser says. “Bottom line: Even if people don’t care about human safety or wildlife conservation, it can still make economic sense. And if you consider the biological conservation aspect, the value expands to take in benefits to local tourism economies and other economic benefits of having healthy wildlife populations in the landscape.”
In 2020 and 2021, Wildlands Network worked with a coalition of Virginia partners to get landmark bipartisan legislation passed in support of wildlife crossings. These efforts direct the relevant agencies to collaborate, incorporating wildlife corridors and road crossings into their design and planning stages — a major step forward both in protecting motorists from collisions with animals and in addressing barriers to wildlife movement.
“Here in North Carolina, our coalition is analyzing an array of possible mechanisms that will best serve the agencies and goals of connectivity on the landscape to achieve significant reduction of collisions with wildlife,” says Christine Laporte, the Eastern program director at Wildlands Network. “Safety, conservation, economic considerations of crossing, and mitigation initiatives all benefit from a range of state-level mechanisms that support use of the best available science for effective designs and actual structures on the ground.”
Irwin of The Wilderness Society says, “Going forward, wildlife movement patterns and needs should be incorporated into infrastructure planning, and existing infrastructure should be retrofitted over time to enable better wildlife movement without the current high levels of wildlife mortality as well as human impacts and property damage.”
Whatever road mitigations and crossing structures are eventually implemented in the steep terrain of the Pigeon River Gorge, Safe Passage hopes its collaborative effort will become the model for others championing change on regional roads with similar issues. For example, elk often congregate near and on Highway 19 in Maggie Valley and Cherokee, North Carolina. In October of 2019, an elk was found dead on the shoulder of Interstate 26 in East Tennessee approaching Sams Gap, not far from the Appalachian Trail. This death alerted researchers to the fact that these large ungulates are beginning to cross rivers and disperse to create new herds far from their 2001 reintroduction site in Cataloochee on the southeastern side of the Smokies.
“Our research in the Pigeon River Gorge is now in its final stages,” says Hunter, “and we don’t have all the answers yet. But one thing we do know is that collaborative partnerships like Safe Passage are critical to finding the best path forward.”
The Safe Passage Fund Coalition comprises The Conservation Fund, Defenders of Wildlife, Great Smoky Mountains Association, National Parks Conservation Association, North Carolina Wildlife Federation, and Wildlands Network.
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