US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5361

The federal government is investigating prisons throughout Alabama in an inquiry that is “possibly unprecedented”. The investigation comes after a series of strikes and riots that have revealed the state’s prisons are in turmoil.

“It’s a giant investigation. This is rare,” said Lisa Graybill, a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is conducting an investigation of its own. Previously Graybill worked for the federal unit that will investigate Alabama, and said the closest comparison in memory was an examination of Puerto Rico’s juvenile jails. “Taking on a whole state is unusual and possibly unprecedented,” she said.

According to the Department of Justice (DoJ) the investigation will focus on whether prisoners are protected from physical and sexual abuse by other prisoners and guards, and whether living conditions are sanitary and safe in general at men’s prisons.

Alabama’s prisons – particularly the notorious Holman prison – were at the forefront of a nationwide call for prisoners to strike from work, last month. On 9 September prisoners across the US began a strike that lasted several days, in some places. And at Holman, guards joined striking prisoners by staying home from work.

Those strikes also came on the heels of two riots at Holman. During the riot inmates had stabbed warden Carter Davenport and another guard. They set fire to the dorm and carried prison-made swords. The warden and guard survived the attack, and special security squads swept in to quash the riot. But a few days later another riot started after one inmate stabbed another. Davenport, who declined to speak with the Guardian about the unrest, recently resigned his position.

“Our obligation is to protect the civil rights of all citizens, including those who are incarcerated,” US attorney Joyce White Vance, of northern Alabama, wrote in a press briefing on Thursday.

Her counterpart in southern Alabama, US attorney Kenyen R Brown, said prisoners “should expect sanitary conditions of habitation that are free of physical harm and sexual abuse”.

Graybill said the uproar has pulled back a veil that previously obscured Alabama’s prison conditions. Litigation in California and Arizona have recently brought reform but Alabama’s prisons are the most overcrowded, operating at about 183% capacity. “There is a national recognition that Alabama is in crisis,” Graybill said.

The federal government is stepping in because although prisons are run by states, they are beholden to the US constitution.

On October 07 2016 07:50 GGTeMpLaR wrote:


This is pretty stupid

This shit happens every year in Florida it's hurricane season.

I haven't heard anyone claim 'man-made' climate change is causing more and bigger hurricanes

On October 07 2016 13:08 Danglars wrote:

ThinkProgress ran a piece I linked to earlier. Weather vs Climate & the line between predicting more frequent hurricanes in future (the 'extreme weather events' crowd) and diagnosing current phenomenon as warming-caused.

On October 07 2016 13:16 Nyxisto wrote:


Well climate change increases the chance for more extreme weather events to occur including this one. Whether some single event "is caused by climate change" isn't really a question that makes sense. The probability and frequency simply goes up. Human influence on climate is real and climate is responsible for weather events. There's not two categories "caused by man/not caused by man"

On October 07 2016 13:44 Danglars wrote:

I responded in context of the thinkprogress piece, which I linked in a twitter link/response earlier. So does it go to far in blaming GW for this specific weather event? And if it doesn't go to far, why get mad when skeptics bring up cold years as evidence against AGW?

On October 07 2016 13:44 Danglars wrote:

I responded in context of the thinkprogress piece, which I linked in a twitter link/response earlier. So does it go to far in blaming GW for this specific weather event? And if it doesn't go to far, why get mad when skeptics bring up cold years as evidence against AGW?

In its Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world under the auspices of the United Nations, concluded there's a more than 90 percent probability that human activities over the past 50 years have warmed our planet.

The industrial activities that our modern civilization depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million to 400 parts per million in the last 150 years. The panel also concluded there's a better than 90 percent probability that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years.

They said the rate of increase in global warming due to these gases is very likely to be unprecedented within the past 10,000 years or more. The panel's full Summary for Policymakers report is online at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf.

On October 07 2016 05:38 GreenHorizons wrote:


Except that's not what was said, and like Trumps taking advantage of poorly written tax law, we're talking about doing bad things that are within the law (or at least appear so).

I didn't draw the connection to 2000 either, that was a quote from Acro's article. If you're going to act holier than thou at least try to keep up.

EDIT: for Rebs cosigning Ticklish's point which was about something I never even said. Holy crap people. Please reread the whole thing. I'm not going to keep correcting what was even said.

On October 07 2016 15:38 Acrofales wrote:

No? The article I posted didn't draw any connection with the 2000 election. It mentioned it as an example of how hotly contested a swing state Florida is, and thus emphasize the importance of all voting groups there, including the 150,000 Haitians, who normally vote Democrat, but might not like Clinton.

Note that the NYT article doesn't take a stance on whether actual wrongdoing occurred, but described how the Clintons are perceived by Haitians.

On October 07 2016 15:47 GreenHorizons wrote:... My original point, which seems to have been completely lost by everyone who engaged with their version of it, was that she might not want to bring up disaster relief considering the Haiti baggage.
...

On October 07 2016 15:32 Kickstart wrote:
Are there people here who don't think climate change is a thing and that we contribute to it with our emissions? Most reasonable people I've seen don't even argue those points, they just argue what, if any, policy decisions should be made. Denying these things at this point is just ignoring what the consensus of experts in the field has been for years.


Source

On October 07 2016 15:58 Aquanim wrote:

That point presupposes that there is Haiti baggage with some validity in the first place, does it not?

The Clinton campaign is growing increasingly nervous that a lack of enthusiasm among Florida’s black community could cost them the state. Against this backdrop, skepticism toward the Democratic presidential nominee within Florida’s Haitian-American community threatens to exacerbate that problem.

Among Haitians, Clinton has at least two obstacles to overcome: there is deep skepticism about the work the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has done on the island after a devastating earthquake there in 2010, according to interviews with community leaders. Compounding the problem for Clinton, the Obama administration last month suddenly lifted a six-year pause on deportations to Haiti it had implemented in the wake of the 2010 earthquake.

“We’re smack dab 30 days from the election and you’re saying deportations can begin?” said Francesca Menes, an organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition, who is rallying for Clinton but finding it hard to persuade people to vote.

The bigger fear is that people will instead stay home, activists and leaders of the Haitian-American community say. While vocal, the population of Haitians in Florida isn’t overwhelming. The Census bureau puts the number at slightly under half a million, and only about half of those have the citizenship required to vote. More than half of those who are citizens are under 18, meaning that Trump and Clinton are fighting over a voting pool that could be as low as 100,000 people. Haitian attitudes, though, can influence perceptions among other Caribbean-Americans. There are around 1.5 million non-Cuban Caribbean-Americans in Florida. (Cuban-Americans are far more likely to vote Republican than other Caribbean-Americans.)

On October 07 2016 07:50 GGTeMpLaR wrote:

I haven't heard anyone claim 'man-made' climate change is causing more and bigger hurricanes

On October 07 2016 10:01 Nyxisto wrote:
Christians praying for the oil and gas industry is so out there that satirists would be accused of being lazy if they'd make it up. What is happening to evangelical America

On October 07 2016 10:01 Nyxisto wrote:
Christians praying for the oil and gas industry is so out there that satirists would be accused of being lazy if they'd make it up. What is happening to evangelical America

On October 07 2016 19:36 Yoav wrote:


Uh, basically, in the media and political sphere we've redefined the term "evangelical" to mean crazy white uneducated people, so yeah.

There are, of course, lots of sane evangelicals, lots of black evangelicals, lots of educated evangelicals, etc. But the term has been so muddied that its political use and its use in the religious field (where it come from) are by now, if not divorced, certainly separated on bad terms with a lot of facebook sniping.