Mother Jones

Confidence Game

In May, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) asked federal agencies to investigate; Beck responded by asking his audience to send in pictures of the congressman with a "wiener nose." Which is good, because while we do take ads (even controversial ones), if we relied on corporate dollars to underwrite investigative reporting, the only place you'd find us these days is on eBay as an obscure collectible.

Backtalk

Growing, Growing, Gone Kudos to MJ Tor taking on the sacred cows of overpopulation ("The Last Taboo"), and economic growth ("Nothing Grows Forever"), subjects which few national magazines or environmentalists seem willing to address in a critical manner. Why is that still our goal, even after you admit that the average American mom with 2 kids has a carbon footprint equal to that of 136 Bangladeshi moms and their 337 kids? MAXWELL CIARDULLO Bronx, New York Don't Be Dense Nobody denies that t...

Correction

Spy Vs....Lawyer?

For its clientswhich have included Amnesty International, Human Rights First, and the ACLU-it offers services from public-records searches to locating victims and witnesses, from serving subpoenas to "collecting video, photographic, and physical evidence." [...] sources familiar with the operation say the goal of One World Research's surveillance effort was to allow defense lawyers to provide photo lineups (containing random people as well as cia personnel) to their clients so they could pic...

Conspiracy Watch: All the Gold in Fort Knox

Why all the secrecy? Because much - or all - of the gold has disappeared.

Summer in the City

Separation Anxiety

If at First You Don't Secede

Among the speakers were the author of The South Was Right; a man who'd done time for evading taxes while running a gold and silver "bank"; and Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court justice who lost his robes after refusing to remove a giant Ten Commandments from his courthouse. Though the Constitution provided many tools for battling the Bush administration's overreach- the Eighth Amendment bans torture, for instance-Boldin saw the Tenth as the ultimate check on federal power, all in a...

Fishin' Accomplished

Many were shipped last year to a hatchery in Wasit province, where it's hoped they'll help restore wetlands and "revolutionize the fishing industry," in the words of Col. LyIe Jackson, an Army veterinarian who oversaw the redeployment.

Hazing Arizona

In his report, Prutch wrote that he ran the Nissan's plates while following the car and found no driver's license data associated with the registered owner. The man who calls himself "America's toughest sheriff" has long had a knack for drawing media attention-reviving chain gangs, for instance, and humiliating county inmates by forcing them to don pink underwear. (In 2008, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care yanked Maricopa County's accreditation, saying its jails failed to...

The Hardest Job in Washington

Since Abraham Lincoln, the party of a first-term president has always lost House seats in the midterm election, with two exceptions-the year after fdr was inaugurated during the Great Depression, and the year after 9/11. [...] Vogel got on well with Emanuel, says John Lapp, who ran the dccc's independent expenditures program, because Vogel "knows how to hustle and how to take a punch." The Democrats are looking out for the middle class, and the Republicans are looking out for ^f??????ß. At ...

Send in the Drones

Seeing Green The makers of the $17,000 Draganflyer X6 helicopter say it's perfect for golf course owners who want "stunning pictures" of their fairways Drone Alone Private citizens can fly their own drones, so long as they stay below 400 feet.

'It's Bp's Oil'

" "[...] it wasn't BP that was yelling at us; it was the sheriffs office. The spill workers staying at my motel later tell me they've been instructed by BP not to talk to media, but they're pissed because BP tried to tell them that the glop they were swimming around in to retrieve an oil-containment boom was red tide, dish-soap runoff, or mud.

The Golden Fleece

Beck, whose various media enterprises brought in $32 million last year, according to Forbes, has a particular interest in plugging gold. Since 2008, Goldline has been one of his most reliable sponsors. [...] liberal hosts such as Ed Schultz and Thom Hartmann have advertised gold.

Goldbug Variations

1795 The US Mint produces its first gold coins, though most early American currency is silver. 1849 California Gold Rush increases supply of gold currency. 1862 To pay for the Union war effort, the Treasury prints "greenbacks"- bills not backed by specie, prompting gold hoarding. Knox opens its vaults to the General Accounting Office and the media- gold still there. 1974 President Ford reverses fdr's 1933 gold order, legalizing bullion once more. 1978 Bette Midler, fearing financial shocks, ...

Lonesome at the Top

Seeing Beck, cohost Steve Doocy switched the subject to President Barack Obama's upcoming White House "beer fest" with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the police officer who had arrested Gates outside his home nearly two weeks earlier. Glenn Beck's ad roster became a rump of direct-marketing companies, gold dealers (most notably Goldline), "free" credit-score sites, seed banks, ideological allies such as The Weekly Standard and TeaPartyExpress.org, and corporate fronts including ...

Full Metal Racket

GOLDLINE INTERNATIONAL Founded in 1960 by Nicholas Deak, an ex-spy described by Time as "the James Bond of the world of money," who minted "Deak Dollars" with his profile on them. [...] endorsed by George Noory, host of Coast to Coast AM, the top conspiracy/paranormal radio show: "Lear showed me warning signs in the economy and told me why gold could be one of the best investments for years to come."

Disaster Capitalism

If a firm's bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate-say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise (see "BuhBye East Coast Beaches," page 40)-then it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Spend a couple of hours wandering through the websites of various industrial associations-aluminum manufacturers, real estate agents, wineries, agribusinesses, take your pick-an...

Risk Mismanagement

Say you're an electronics manufacturer who is pretty sure that climate change is going to wallop Bolivia, resulting in political unrest and a spike in the price of lithium. In many cases, they will make more money as the effects of climate change become increasingly visible and expensive, since they'll simply raise premiums on everybody while refusing to insure the most vulnerable at any price.

Risky Business

[...] there's so much more online: * Could national and international courts allow people to sue carbon emitters? * Will a warmer climate roil the political landscape? *Arnold Schwarzenegger's master plan to say hasta la vistato climate change * Global warming=more kidney stones? * Rules for geoengineering's planet hackers * Experts weigh the new sec climate change rules * How patent law can spur business adaptation * Which investment banks reneged on their green promises For all our coverage...

Grapes of Wrath

[...] there is much more to the question of wine and climate change than the character of pinot noir. Because wine grapes are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature, the industry amounts to an early warning system for problems that all food crops-and all industries-will confront as global warming intensifies. Numbers like that help explain why climate change is poised to clobber the global wine industry, a multibillion-dollar business whose decline would also damage the much larger indust...

Buh-Bye East Coast Beaches

Having the name beach,* he discovered, is not a very good predictor of having a beach. [...] he's kept an eye out for other beach towns that have lost their namesakes-Maryland's Masons Beach and Tolchester Beach, North Carolina's Pamlico Beach, and many more. The National Association of Home Builders, the housing industry's largest trade group, has no policy on adapting coastal projects to account for rising sea levels.\n Arnold Schwarzenegger directed state agencies to plan for sea-level r...

Fair And... Carbon Neutral?

Sudan says, "I would say our initiative overall has benefited the company financially." Since Palo Alto began using Hara in 2009 to help it cut emissions by 15 percent over the next three years, the city has identified $2.2 million in budget savings.

What's Killing the Babies of Kettleman City?

In 15 of the 22 years since California's public health department began tracking birth defects, all babies in the town were healthy, and in five other years, only one birth defect occurred. A couple of miles south on Highway 4 1 , at the junction with Interstate 5, sits an agglomeration of motels, gas stations, an In-N-Out Burger, and a Starbucks, but the town itself has no pharmacy, high school, or movie theater.

Kettleman City's Toxic Web

A recent epa investigation found pcbs in the soil outside a storage building and concluded that Waste Management had improperly disposed of waste. * Gas fumes The California epa says pollution from gas stations - there are 5 in the town of 1,500 - could be linked to the birth defects. * Petroleum deposits Potential contamination from oil and gas drilling in the Kettleman Hills includes toluene, which has been linked to birth defects. * Food desert Cleft palates and neural tube defects are ass...

Meet the Real Death Panels

[...] you don't think about death, per se, as much as you do about dying-about when and where and especially how you're going to die. [...] many conservatives are motivated less by deficits and more by free-market ideology:

Click and Dagger

Since its launch in December 2006, WikiLeaks has published everything from the operating manuals of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to nato's secret plan for the Afghanistan war and inventories of US military matériel in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus plenty of dishier stuff-Sarah Palin's hacked emails and Wesley Snipes' tax returns, as well as fraternity initiation books and a trove of secret Scientology manuals. According to WikiLeaks' credo, to refuse a leak is tantamount to helping the bad...

Bomb at the Box Office

Skoll and his partners had created Participant in 2004 to produce quality movies that could inspire filmgoers to become activists. Besides Bender's An Inconvenient Truth, they'd made Syriana; Good Night, and Good Luck; The Kite Runner; and Charlie Wilson's War. According to one person who worked on the film, viewers at early screenings complained that the film's graphic descriptions of a nuclear blast were, well, too graphic.

Comic Art Propaganda: A Graphic History

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Citing sources ranging from Plato and Wittgenstein to cognitive psychologists and celebrity divorce lawyers, her stories of doomed exploration, foolish love, and unfulfilled millenarian hopes remind us that "to fuck up is to find adventure"-that humiliation, heartbreak, and disillusionment are opportunities to acquaint ourselves with the raw uncertainties of life and the vast complexity of our inner landscapes.