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Keeping tabs on President Obama’s same-sex marriage endorsement

By Zachary Green
on May 10, 2012

Jase Peeples watches a television broadcast of President Obama declaring his support of same-sex marriage Wednesday, May 9, 2012, at The Mix bar in San Francisco. Peeples, who has lived with his partner for nine years, welcomed the news. Photo: AP Photo/Ben Margot

A few weeks ago, nationally syndicated sex-advice columnist and LGBT rights activist Dan Savage discussed President Obama’s evolving attitudes toward gay marriage in a candid interview: “Barack Obama pretends that he opposes gay marriage and gay people are honor-bound to pretend to believe him.”

All that changed yesterday when the president told ABC News, “For me personally it is important … to go ahead and affirm that … same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

To understand why the White House decided to back marriage equality at the start of a fraught general election season, I spoke with Richard Kim, executive editor at The Nation, who has written extensively about LGBT issues.
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The Climate Desk

Video: No president is an island

By Hannah Yi
on April 25, 2012

A new documentary “The Island President” profiles Mohamed Nasheed as he tries to save his island nation of the Maldives from sinking into the Indian Ocean. Rising sea levels and coastal erosion are slowly destroying the island nation’s fishing industry and contaminating its clean water supply.

If this trend isn’t reversed soon, the Maldivian people will eventually lose their home. Nasheed’s priority as the country’s first democratically elected president is to convince other nations to join his cause and take action.

As we see in the documentary, climate change isn’t the only challenge Nasheed has to confront. He is also haunted by the specter of the country’s 30-year dictatorship: This past February, Nasheed was forced to resign his presidency at gunpoint by police and army officers in a coup d’etat. And even as the country prepares itself for a new election, it does so against a bleak backdrop of continuing erosion and decay. A grim reality that Nasheed underscores when he asks, “How can there be a democracy if there is no country?”

I recently spoke to director Jon Shenk about how his film came together and the craft of documentary filmmaking.
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Photo of the day

Photo: Obama on the bus

By Karen Brazell
on April 19, 2012

President Barack Obama sits on the famed Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum following an event in Dearborn, Mich., on April 18, 2012. Photo: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

The Climate Desk

Video: How dirty is the cloud?

By James West and Tim McDonnell
on April 17, 2012

You’ve heard about the Foxconn factory in China where your iPad is assembled. But have you ever considered the energy required to store your emails, photos, and videos in the cloud? As worldwide demand for data storage skyrockets, so do the power needs of the servers where all our digital archives live. While some companies (like Facebook) have made great progress in ditching dirty fossil-fuel energy for cleaner renewables, a few internet giants lag far behind. Climate Desk visited Maiden, N.C., for a close-up view of what will soon be one of the world’s biggest data centers — owned by Apple and powered by the coal-heavy power behemoth Duke Energy.

Apple’s new Maiden, N.C., data center is only one of many coal-fueled server farms across the country. The map below shows 52 of the largest, owned by companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Twitter. Mouse over a point on the map to see who owns the plant, and how reliant on coal it is, according to Greenpeace estimates. (Some data centers are clustered close together; zoom in on a particular area to see each one in more detail.)

See a full-screen version here.

The figures in the map are for individual data centers. To give you a better sense of the big picture, here’s an overview of how much of each company’s overall energy comes from coal, according to Greenpeace estimates:
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Beyond vérité

By Hannah Yi
on April 2, 2012

Kevin Knoblock spent three days looking for a photograph of a Doberman Pinscher drowning in an icy pond or falling through a sheet of ice. The closest thing he could find was video footage of a Doberman Pinscher playing in the snow.

“Newt called me after he watched the documentary,” said Knoblock, the director and writer of the web biopic “Rebuilding the America We Love” about and commissioned by Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. “His first comment was, ‘How come you didn’t get the Doberman Pinscher part right?’ We laughed when I told him how impossible it was to find the right picture.”

Young Newt Gingrich, as seen in his campaign video featured at at www.newt.org.

Knoblock dedicated a solid three minutes of the 16-minute video exploring Gingrich’s love for animals. ”I wanted to do a get-to-know-the-candidate video,” said Knoblock, about how “softer” personal details are often sidelined by weightier topics on the campaign trail. “We wanted to load it up with emotions and feelings.”

On March 9, this video was released on YouTube, available to stream on the campaign website under the “Meet Newt” page. The premiere was announced to the virtual world through Google+ posts, tweets and Facebook likes. In a week, it received more than 14,000 views on YouTube.

“YouTube is free,” said Knoblock. “Traditionally all the money goes to buying television airtime but now campaigns have the option getting millions of eyeballs for free online.”
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Crime and punishment

The politics of punishment: Q&A with prison-reform advocate Marc Mauer

By Tamy Cozier
on March 30, 2012

This week, we look at Texas and the bipartisan efforts that have spurred widely admired prison reforms. I spoke to Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project and one of the country’s leading prison-reform advocates, to get his take on the impact of prison growth and reform in the U.S.

Tamy Cozier: During the 1990s, the nation’s crime rate dipped by 30 percent to its lowest levels in 35 years. During that tine, we also saw growing police forces, stricter drug laws and harsher sentencing. Don’t the numbers prove that a tough-on-crime approach works?

Marc Mauer

Marc Mauer: No. There were many developments that came around the 1990s that collectively contributed to reduction in crime. Part of that was the waning of the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and the violence that was associated with that.

Some of that [decline in crime] was due to more strategic policing, a better economy in the 1990s and better job opportunities for people who might have otherwise gotten involved in crime. And yes, some of that had to do with more people in prison, although research on that suggests that only about something in the range of 10 to 25 percent of the decline in crime was due to more incarceration. But, to the extent that prison had some impact on crime, that doesn’t tell us that [increased incarceration] is the most cost effective, let alone humane, way to address the problem.
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Postscript

Craig Newmark on voting rights

By William Brangham
on March 29, 2012

Just this morning, Craig Newmark came out swinging on his latest cause: drawing attention to the wave of new “voting rights” laws that could impact millions of voters come November.

Supporters argue these new laws are needed to crack down on voter fraud – where a vote is illegally cast by someone pretending to be who they’re not.  While cases of this kind of fraud have been very rare, states across the country have been passing laws to address it. These new laws tighten the types of I.D. a voter can use on election day, limit the use of early-voting, and beef-up the restrictions and penalties on voter-registration groups.

(Need to Know has examined the impact of these laws in a report from Ohio about its strict new voter-id legislation, and in an essay by civil-rights and voting-rights pioneer Bernard Lafayette.)
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Need to read

The connections

By William Brangham
on March 28, 2012

Photo: Stephanie Canciello, unali artists

Craig Newmark was one of the first programmers to demonstrate how connecting people over the Internet could fundamentally change entire industries. When he started Craigslist out of his apartment in 1995, it was intended as a simple listings of local happenings in San Francisco — posting everything from garage sales to gallery openings. In just a few years, Craigslist blossomed into one of the most popular online marketplaces in the country, radically remaking the classified marketplace (and dealing a serious blow to the revenues of countless newspapers). Seventeen years later, Craigslist is one of the most visited destinations on the Internet, with online marketplaces in cities all over the world.

Newmark has now stepped away from day-to-day operations of Craigslist, and instead is devoting much of his time to a new venture called CraigConnects: It’s Newmark’s effort to use the power of technology and social media to drive social change. The effort combines grant-making, research, and a good dose of evangelizing on a wide array of issues: consumer protection, good government, journalism, and veterans affairs.

Yesterday, I talked with Newmark about this new venture, which he describes as “using technology for the common good.”

Here’s a condensed, lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I’m struck by the logo — the mission statement — you have at the very top of your webpage which says, “Using technology to give the voiceless a real voice and the powerless real power.” In your mind, what is a “real voice” and what is “real power”?

 
How do you give small, genuine grassroots the ability to work with other small, four-wheeled, grassroots groups to combine for real power?
 

CRAIG NEWMARK: Well, if you’re talking about a real voice, the idea is that the net allows anyone to say what they wanna say. It’s not filtered. Someone else isn’t talking for them. And that represents quite a change, because in the past, other people — say, politicians, would pretend to represent a group, but the politician would not be acting in the interests of that group. Real power has to do with the groups who are coming together – spontaneously, online, to exert power in numbers, and power through effective communications.

Now, it’s a two-edged sword. For example, the Occupy people are managing to get together and do seem to be representing a genuine voice. On the other hand, within the Tea Party movements, and that plural is deliberate, there are some Tea Party groups who have stayed genuine and grassroots, but other alleged Tea Party groups are just really lobbyists pretending to represent a bunch of real people.

My focus has been on how do you give small, genuine grassroots the ability to work with other small, four-wheeled, grassroots groups to combine for real power?
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Need to read

‘I am Trayvon Martin’

By William Brangham
on March 23, 2012


In the wake of the tragic shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and with growing calls to stop what critics contend are racially-motivated police actions, I saw this powerful post on Facebook written by my friend Dawn Porter. Dawn and her husband Dave are black, and the parents of two boys not that much younger than Trayvon Martin. I asked Dawn if we could post her note, and she was happy to share it.
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