Sarah Laskow

The emergency preparedness community is pretty good at handling the sort of problem that the tsunami poses to Hawaii and the West Coast today. There’s plenty of lead time to warn people to get away from the coasts and onto high land. But as FEMA warns in this report on tsunami preparedness, there’s a category […]

In the annals of “things that would never happen in America,” Spain has decided to temporarily knock 10 km/h (8 mph) off speed limits on certain roads in order to decrease the country’s energy use. This action has kicked up some opposition, as the BBC reports: The main opposition Popular Party has labelled the idea […]

For James O’Keefe, “defunding NPR is obvious.” He hasn’t expanded on his reasoning, but the Republican line on NPR funding, in general, is that our deficit-ridden nature can’t afford these kind of luxuries. What we can afford, apparently, is to subsidize O’Keefe’s work. He’s applied for a 501(c)3 designation for his organization, Project Veritas, which […]

Los Angeles doesn’t have a reputation as a great biking city, even though, unlike Portland, Minneapolis, or San Francisco, it’s warm year round and generally pretty flat. But (transpo geek alert!) if you look at this fantastic reference guide that the National Association of City Transportation Officials put out this morning, as part of its […]

What most people heard about Vivian Schiller‘s tenure at NPR was that she let Ellen Weiss fire Juan Williams and, now, that her head of fundraising doesn’t feel too warmly toward the Tea Party. But Schiller’s most important and less-juicy contribution as the organization’s leader was to transform NPR’s clunky digital presence into a more […]

Climate change–denying Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are taking this morning’s hearing on climate science as an opportunity to compare themselves to Copernicus and Galileo. Like these visionaries of the past, Republicans and who don’t believe in climate change and their few allies in the scientific community are, apparently, brave geniuses using […]

As Aswini wrote this morning, Rep. Peter King’s hearings on radicalization are a jarring contrast to the images that have flooded in over the past few weeks of peaceful, democracy-seeking Muslim communities around the world. But King doesn’t seem to care, and I think it’s because he believes his constituents don’t care. A few weeks […]

Yesterday, a jury decided when Tim DeChristopher, an environmental activist, bid almost $2 million that he didn’t have on oil and gas leases being auctioned off by the government in 2008, he broke the law. His crimes were making a false statement to the government and disrupting the auction. Since the judge ruled out a […]

Fundraising is one of the least savory parts of a politician’s job. Leave it to New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt to find clever ways to bring in cash. Holt’s making the most of the attention showered on him this week after he held his own against IBM’s Watson computer in a game of Jeopardy. After […]

Whenever I read a bit of news like this one — that Rep. Nick Rahall, a Democrat from West Virginia, is co-sponsoring a bill that would keep the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions — my first instinct is to look at who’s been funding the offending politician. Since Rahall is from West Virginia, I […]