Despite what Trump says, some see no crisis

On Texas border, despite what Trump says, some see no crisis

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Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A Honduran girl, fleeing poverty and violence in her home country, waited with her mother along the border bridge after being denied into the Texas city of Brownsville on Saturday.

By Manny Fernandez and Linda Qiu New York Times  June 23, 2018

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — The mayor of this Texas border city has been dealing with a crisis.

This past week, he declared a state of emergency. Drones filled the skies and emergency vehicles raced down the streets. But none of it had anything to do with illegal immigration.

It had to do with the weather.

A severe thunderstorm caused widespread flooding throughout the Rio Grande Valley in recent days. That other crisis — the one that President Donald Trump says has been unfolding on the border because of the illegal entry of immigrants — is largely a fiction, the mayor, Tony Martinez, and other Brownsville residents and leaders said.

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“There is not a crisis in the city of Brownsville with regards to safety and security,” said Martinez, who has lived in Brownsville since the late 1970s. “There’s no gunfire. Most of the people that are migrating are from Central America. It’s not like they’re coming over here to try to take anybody’s job. They’re trying to just save their own lives. We’re doing fine, quite frankly.”

Martinez is a Democrat in a mainly conservative state, and many Republicans in Texas, like Trump, have raised an alarm over the numbers of migrants still flowing into Texas. But there is evidence, in federal data and on the ground in places like Brownsville that the immigration crisis Trump has cited over the past week to justify the separation of families is actually no crisis at all.

There has been no drastic overall increase in the number of immigrants crossing the border, and while the rugged frontier along the Rio Grande Valley has long been a transit point for drugs and the trouble that goes along with them, the violence of Mexico’s drug wars seldom spills into the United States.

In remarks and news releases this past week, Trump has repeatedly sounded alarm bells on the “crisis” and “mess” of illegal immigration at the southwestern border. At an event Friday with families whose loved ones have been killed by unauthorized immigrants, Trump suggested that immigrants commit more crimes than citizens do. And at a campaign rally Wednesday, he said that “illegal immigration costs our country hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“We have to do something about immigration in this country,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting Thursday. “For 50 years, and long before that, it was a disaster. But over the last 20, 25 years, it’s gotten worse.”

The numbers suggest that this is not true.

Unauthorized crossings along the border with Mexico have sharply declined over the past two decades, according to government data. From the 1980s to the mid-2000s, the government reported annually apprehending around 1 million to 1.6 million people who illegally attempted to cross the southwestern border. That number has been halved in recent years. By month, border apprehensions averaged more than 81,588 under President George W. Bush, declined to more than 34,647 under President Barack Obama and now stand at 24,241 under Trump.

The president is correct in citing a spike in illegal border crossings that occurred in March: The 37,393 individuals apprehended was a 203 percent increase over the same period in March 2017, though the number was lower than in 2013 and 2014.

Research shows that incarceration rates of both legal and illegal immigrants across the country are lower than those of native-born Americans, and that the net economic impact of immigration is positive. Trump’s reference to illegal immigration costing “hundreds of billions of dollars” likely came from a heavily flawed study from an anti-immigration group that pinned the cost at $116 billion annually. Adjusting for the flaws, the impact would more accurately be stated as $3.3 billion to $15.6 billion, according to the libertarian Cato Institute.

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As the numbers show, there is a stark disconnect between Trump’s border rhetoric and the reality of border life in cities like Brownsville.

In a way, this is old news: Washington rhetoric has been colliding with realities on the ground for decades, regardless of the topic or the administration. But the president’s repeated descriptions of a chaotic, crime-ridden border have frustrated millions of Americans who live and work on the Southwest frontier.

“There’s this misconception that we’re in this lawless land, and it’s the wild, wild frontier, and it’s not,” said Brownsville’s police chief, Orlando C. Rodriguez. “We see actually a downward trend in crime in Brownsville over the past few years, and the numbers are just getting better every year.”

There were a total of six homicides in Brownsville in 2017, up from four in 2016. Aggravated assault cases were at 259 in 2017, down from 264 in 2016 and from 292 in 2015. Robbery was at 133 in 2017, up from 130 in 2016 but down from 154 in 2015. Asked whether the city’s population of unauthorized immigrants was committing widespread crime, Rodriguez said they were most definitely not.

“To say that illegals are running around in Brownsville causing problems, we just don’t see it,” the chief said.

Trump has often cited crimes committed by the transnational gang MS-13 in cities as far from the southern border as New York. Gang members have indeed been responsible for a wave of violence, though some of them were born in the United States, and much of their mayhem is targeted at immigrant communities.

It is also true that Brownsville and other Southwest cities have their share of crime, poverty and social ills as a result of their proximity to the border.

The drug trade fuels public corruption. Stash houses in residential neighborhoods hide smuggled people and drugs. Police chases of smugglers’ vehicles often end in tragedy — in deadly collisions, fatal shootings and rollovers.

But such incidents often happen on or near “the line,” as many people refer to it — the physical border along the Rio Grande — or around the Border Patrol’s traffic checkpoints farther north. Out in the towns and neighborhoods, in the malls and the movie theaters, the border is at times a world away.

“Everybody was, and I think probably to a large extent still is, going about their way,” said Rep. Filemon B. Vela Jr., whose district includes Brownsville. “If you were in the city of Brownsville, and you wanted to witness anything related to this whole story, you’d have to break into one of the Southwest Key facilities to even know that there’s anything going on,” he added, referring to the nonprofit that runs a migrant children’s shelter at a former Walmart.

Like other issues, the border-crisis debate is a partisan one. Vela and Martinez, the mayor, are both Democrats, as are numerous other community leaders and residents in a region that has long been a blue outer edge of a red-dominated state.

The Republican leadership in Texas sees the situation differently, and has often highlighted evidence of killings, assaults, shootings and kidnappings on Texas soil that they say are directly related to Mexican drug cartels.

Sergio Sanchez, a Republican activist and commentator in nearby McAllen, agrees with Trump’s portrayal of the border and his hard-line approach to illegal immigration.

“The crisis is real,” said Sanchez, former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party and the host of a conservative talk-radio show called The Wall. “The crisis is immediately south of the border, and it bleeds over to our side. Mexico is literally a lawless land and they need to come to grips with that. The crisis has been going on for decades. It’s been a fact that the border is porous, and has been porous through too many administrations.”

When it comes to national immigration policy, Texas’ Republican lawmakers have been largely supportive of the president’s moves to build a border wall and prosecute illegal border crossers.

Yet even state Republicans have balked at the latest turmoil created by the zero tolerance policy that has led to the separation of thousands of migrant children from their families. Several Republican lawmakers, including the speaker of the state House and both U.S. senators, publicly opposed breaking up families.

On Friday afternoon, in any case, now that the skies were dry and many of the streets were, too, Martinez’s border looked and felt far different from Trump’s.

You could literally see it, or, more accurately, smell it — moist beef brisket, smoked for up to 16 hours, selling for $9.49 by the half-pound at 1848 BBQ, the barbecue joint Martinez owns downtown. Far from the former Walmart that has become a national symbol of the president’s now-rescinded family-separation policy, the flat-screen TVs here were carrying World Cup soccer, not Trump’s live remarks on immigration Friday.

Martinez greeted the congressman’s wife, Rose Vela. The chief pitmaster, Abraham Avila, had a package for her (and her two French bulldogs): rib bones.

At one table sat Hector Rivera-Marrero, 22, who works part time at 1848 and graduated in May from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley with a degree in chemistry. Rivera-Marrero has lived in Brownsville since he was 10. His mother is an optometrist. His application to medical school awaits.

“It’s very strange because people have this idea, this notion of the border,” said Rivera-Marrero, whose family is from Puerto Rico. “But in reality it’s very quaint, very relaxed.”

Brownsville, a city of 183,000, feels more like a town of 1,830. Families have lived here not for years but for generations, and everyone knows nearly everyone else, and their mothers and fathers. Local officials have been busy with plans to build a new airport. SpaceX’s launch site has been taking shape nearby at Boca Chica Village.

Not long after Trump spoke in Washington, Rivera-Marrero left the restaurant for a few hours on an extended lunch break. On the mean streets of the border, he had stuff to do. He picked up his sister from math boot camp. And he got his tires rotated.

Above is from:  https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2018/06/23/texas-border-despite-what-trump-says-some-see-crisis/QaoM9zynEmfzgCfMF4noaL/story.html

Setback on Boone’s solar ordinance–100 feet—maybe?

Above is from:  http://www.rrstar.com/news/20180620/boone-county-preserves-its-drafted-solar-rules

A simple cure to Alcoholism?

A Landmark Study on the Origins of Alcoholism

By studying rats in a smarter way, scientists are finally learning something useful about why some drinkers become addicted and others don’t.

Ed YongJun 21, 2018

Only 15% of regular drinkers become dependent on alcohol. Axel Bueckert / Shutterstock

For Markus Heilig, the years of dead ends were starting to grate.

A seasoned psychiatrist, Heilig joined the National Institutes of Health in 2004 with grand ambitions of finding new ways to treat addiction and alcoholism. “It was the age of the neuroscience revolution, and all this new tech gave us many ways of manipulating animal brains,” he recalls. By studying addictive behavior in laboratory rats and mice, he would pinpoint crucial genes, molecules, and brain regions that could be targeted to curtail the equivalent behaviors in people.

It wasn’t to be. The insights from rodent studies repeatedly proved to be irrelevant. Many researchers and pharmaceutical companies became disillusioned. “We cured alcoholism in every rat we ever tried,” says Heilig, who is now at Linköping University in Sweden. “And at the end of every paper, we wrote: This will lead to an exciting treatment. But everything we took from these animal models to the clinic failed. We needed to go back to the drawing board.”

Heilig doesn’t buy that mice and rats have nothing to teach us about addiction. It’s more that researchers have been studying them in the wrong way. Typically, they’ll let the animals self-administer drugs by pressing a lever, which they almost always learn to do. That should have been a red flag. When humans regularly drink alcohol, only 15 percent or so become dependent on the stuff. Why them and not the other 85 percent? That’s the crucial question, and you won’t answer it with an experiment in which every rodent becomes addicted.

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Eric Augier, who recently joined Heilig’s team, tried a different approach—one pioneered in his former laboratory to study cocaine addiction. After training rats to self-administer alcohol, he offered them some sugary water, too. This better mimics real life, in which drugs exist simultaneously with other pleasurable substances. Given a choice between booze and nectar, most rats chose the latter. But not all of them: Of the 32 rats that Augier first tested, four ignored the sugar and kept on shooting themselves up with alcohol.

“Four rats is laughable,” says Heilig, referring to the study’s small size, “but 620 rats later, no one’s laughing.” Augier repeated the experiment with more rats of various breeds, and always got the same results. Consistently, 15 percent of them choose alcohol over sugar—the same number as the proportion of human drinkers who progress to alcoholism.

Those alcohol-preferring rats showed other hallmarks of human addiction, too. They spend more effort to get a sip of alcohol than their sugar-preferring peers, and they kept on drinking even when their booze supply was spiked with an intensely bitter chemical or paired with an electric shock. “That was striking to me, as a clinician,” says Heilig. “Embedded in the criteria for diagnosing alcoholism is that people continue to take drugs despite good knowledge of the fact that it will harm or kill them.”

Many lab studies treat animals as if they were identical, and any variation in their behavior is just unhelpful noise. But in Augier’s work, the variation is the important bit. It’s what points to the interesting underlying biology. “This is a really good study,” says Michael Taffe, a neuroscientist at the Scripps Research Institute who studies drug addiction. “Since only a minority of humans experience a transition to addiction, [an approach] such as this is most likely to identify the specific genetic variants that convey risk.”

That is exactly what the team did next. They compared the alcohol-preferring and sugar-preferring rats and looked for differences in the genes that were active in their brains. They focused on six regions that are thought to be involved in addiction, and found no differences in five. “But in the sixth, we did,” says Heilig. “And it made me smile because I started out doing my Ph.D. on the amygdala.”

The amygdala is an almond-shaped region that sits deep within the brain, and is heavily involved in processing emotions. When Augier looked at the amygdala of alcoholic rats, he found signs of unusually low activity in several genes, all of which are linked to a chemical called GABA.

GABA is a molecular red light: Certain neurons make and release it to stop their neighbors from firing. Once that’s done, the GABA-making neurons use an enzyme called GAT3 to pump the molecule back into themselves, so they can reuse it. But in the amygdala of alcohol-preferring rats, the gene that makes GAT3 is much less active, and makes just half the usual levels of the pump. GABA accumulates around the neighboring neurons, making them abnormally inactive.

The consequences of this are unclear, but Heilig thinks that all this extra GABA hampers the rats’ ability to deal with fear and stress. They are naturally more anxious, which might explain their vulnerability to alcohol. He predicts it will take another five years of work to fully close this loop. But for now, his team have definitely shown that GAT3—the GABA-recycling pump—is important. They took rats that prefer sugar and deliberately reduced the levels of GAT3 in their amygdala. This simple procedure was enough to convert those resilient rodents into addiction-prone, alcohol-preferring 15-percenters.

At this point, the team submitted their result to a journal, which agreed to publish them. Good news—but after Heilig’s long history with rat-shaped dead-ends, he wanted to do one more experiment. “Curing alcoholism in rats is not important,” he says. “What’s important is what this looks like in humans with alcohol addiction.”

As it happens, it looks much the same. Heilig’s colleagues examined postmortem tissue samples from people who had donated their brains to research, some of whom had alcohol addiction. As in the rats, they found nothing unusual in five of six brain regions. But in the amygdala, they found low levels of GAT3.

Others scientists have found connections between alcoholism, the amygdala, and GABA-related genes. But by identifying rats that are particularly vulnerable to alcoholism, Heilig’s team has begun fleshing out the details behind these somewhat hazy links. “It is a very significant study that will impact the alcohol research field deeply,” says Jun Wang from Texas A&M University. “Identifying GAT3 is not that important because alcoholism is controlled by multiple genes, but [the team’s new approach] will help to find those genes. It’s a wonderful method for modeling human alcoholism.”

There are other signs that what Heilig found is relevant to humans as well as rats. A decade ago, a French cardiologist named Olivier Ameisen claimed to have cured his own alcoholism by taking a drug called baclofen. “That was met with skepticism, and there was no basic science to support his claims,” says Heilig. But there is now: Baclofen stops neurons from releasing GABA. If individuals with alcoholism aren’t good at recycling this chemical, it might be possible to compensate by producing less of it in the first place.

But baclofen is controversial. It has been tested in several clinical trials, to mixed results. Two recent studies, which analyzed the results from these trials, concluded that the drug’s ability to treat alcoholism is only “slightly above placebo effects” and its growing use is “premature.” It can be harmful, too. People quickly build up a tolerance to it, which prompts them to seek higher doses. They can experience severe side effects, and France has seen more than 100 cases of people inadvertently poisoning themselves with baclofen. “It’s a terrible drug,” Heilig says.

Other drugs like benzodiazepines also exert their effects through GABA, but like baclofen, they’re easily abused themselves. “They’re a good alternative for alcoholism in the short term but they’re not safe in the long term,” says Lara Ray from UCLA.

But Heilig’s study suggests that other chemicals, which could influence GABA levels in more subtle ways, might help people to control their addictions. Several such substances are in development, and Heilig’s team can see if they change the choices of their alcohol-preferring rats.

“It’s just such an impressive breakthrough for the field of alcoholism, with real potential for therapies,” Ray adds.

Ed Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.

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Above is from:  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/a-landmark-study-in-the-origins-of-alcoholism/563372/

ALSIC Award? Rep Kinzinger’s mailer to seniors.

We recently received a costly mailer paid by the American Life Science Innovation Council lauding Mr. Kinzinger’s great accomplishments regarding health care particularly Senior health care.  The following article and similar ALSIC awards shows the organization’s primary purpose is granting awards and advertising support to candidates friendly to the drug industry.

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

What a boring-sounding award reveals about the creative lengths to which lobbyists will go to influence members of Congress

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By Sam Brodey | 02/22/18

Office of Rep. Erik Paulsen

Rep. Erik Paulsen receiving the Champion of Health Care Innovation Award from the American Life Science Innovation Council.

In August 2017, Rep. Erik Paulsen, via his Twitter account, posted an announcement: “Honored to receive Champion of Health Care Innovation Award from American Life Sciences Innovation Council.”

Included in the tweet was a photo of Paulsen sitting at a conference table with seven men and women, looking thoughtfully engaged in a conversation about health care innovation. “Thank you for the recognition!” Paulsen exclaimed in the tweet.

Paulsen was not the only lawmaker to receive this recognition: In 2017, at least eight other members of the U.S. House and Senate, both Republicans and Democrats, took to social media or to press statements to announce that they, too, had been honored by the American Life Sciences Innovation Council for championing health care innovation.

As with Paulsen, other politicians who received the award offered little information about anything specific he or she did to deserve the honor. Tweets from accounts belonging to Sen. Joe Donnelly, an Indiana Democrat, and Rep. Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican, are similarly ambiguous in relaying the blandly positive news.

That’s largely because there is not much to say about this award — or the organization that awards it. There exists little evidence of what the American Life Sciences Innovation Council does, beyond giving out its “champion” award. There is also scant information about who supports the group: Because it is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization, it does not need to disclose to the public who funds its activities, and by how much.

To experts, however, ALSIC bears the signs of an industry-backed operation: It has no full-time staff, lists as its address a UPS Store in Washington, D.C., and has a five-person board of directors with deep ties to the pharmaceutical industry. The last public event touted on the group’s thin website was in February 2012.

This obscure organization, and the even more obscure award it hands out, offer a revealing glimpse into a decidedly not obscure phenomenon: powerful industries and interests seeking to influence Washington politics. Sometimes that is done through lobbying campaigns — and sometimes it is done by other, more creative means.

Championing a pharmaceutical industry agenda

The American Life Sciences Innovation Council was founded in October of 2011, and was granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service in 2012. It joined a sea of some 86,000 tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organizations that were active in 2012, according to the IRS.

This nonprofit designation is reserved for groups that have a mission of “social welfare,” a broad category that includes everything from local volunteer groups to big advocacy organizations like the Sierra Club. They are not required to disclose their donors, though they must make their IRS Form 990, which includes basic information like how much the organization raises and spends, available to the public each year.

There are restrictions in the law over the extent to which 501(c)(4) organizations can engage in political activity, but many of them skirt these limits by not using certain words in their communications, like “vote” and “ballot.” They instead emphasize their stances on issues — an activity that can, under the law, include running ads with strong stances on certain issues in the run-up to an election.

ALSIC does not run ads on issues, nor does it appear to engage in any explicitly election-related activity, though voters in various districts around the country have reported receiving mailers from ALSIC touting particular members of Congress.

The statements that exist to express the group’s mission reveal its priorities are to promote policies friendly to the pharmaceutical industry. According to its tax filings, ALSIC’s mission is “to educate the public and policymakers about the effects of government regulation on key factors that drive life science innovation,” including intellectual property protection, a “transparent and predictable” regulatory environment, and “adequate reimbursement driven by market forces.”

To pharmaceutical industry watchdogs, those factors “driving innovation” align closely with drug companies’ policy goals in Washington. According to Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen, an advocacy group critical of the pharmaceutical industry, the ALSIC statement offers “all code terms, or in some cases, not even code, for the pharma corporations’ lobbying priorities in Washington.”

“Strong intellectual property protection,” Maybarduk explains by way of example, reflects the industry’s desire to preserve a status quo in which government regulators routinely grant to companies lengthy rights to exclusively market certain drugs — sometimes, even, ones that were made possible through taxpayer-funded research.

This state of affairs, Maybarduk says, “is the basis of high drug prices … there is no market competition — not much effective market competition. When they say ‘strong intellectual property protections,’ what we hear is increasing efforts to expand monopoly power.”

ALSIC’s criteria for awarding its “Champion of Health Care Innovation” honor also line up with the pharmaceutical industry’s priorities. The group says it “acknowledges House and Senate members who have demonstrated leadership” on four issues. One of them is “expressing concern or calling for repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board,” which was an initiative included in the Affordable Care Act intended to bring down Medicare costs through an evidence-based, not political, process.

The IPAB has not yet become operational — and the U.S. House voted to kill it earlier this month — but it has been a frequent target of criticism by the pharmaceutical industry and its powerful trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, which lobbies actively in Washington. ALSIC’s website says IPAB “was designed to be immune from the impact its decisions have on innovators and other employers in the life sciences arena and could lead to drastic policy changes with serious consequences to American jobs.”

A lean operation

ALSIC says a key part of its mission is to “share its research and policy positions with policymakers.”

There is, however, no evidence ALSIC has done any of its own research on any of these issues; instead, the “recent news and studies” page on its website shares research and opinion papers from other publications and journals.

For a group tasked with influencing the debate over health care policy, ALSIC is a lean operation. Its annual tax filings reveal that it has no full-time paid staff, nor any office expenses. The address listed on its website — formatted to look like that of an office suite — is for a UPS Store in northwest Washington, D.C.

ALSIC’s 2015 tax filing shows its largest disbursement in 2015 was a $685,000 payment to Mohler Consulting LLC, a firm owned by David Mohler, one of the five members of ALSIC’s board of directors. (“Organization used services from Mohler Consulting LLC to handle production & execution of media advocacy campaigns,” the filing reads.)

On a board where each member has some kind of connection to the pharmaceutical industry, Mohler’s connections run perhaps the deepest. He is the founder of Washington-based East End Group, which bills itself as a “full-service federal government affairs firm focused on health care and the life sciences.” In 2017, East End Group did $2.4 million worth of lobbying, including a combined $480,000 of work for pharma giants AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline. East End was also retained by PhRMA, which paid for $180,000 worth of East End Group's services in 2017.

Before founding East End Group, Mohler worked for PhRMA as the pharmaceutical industry’s “chief policy and political advocate in Congress, the White House, and executive branch agencies,” according to the biography on his firm’s website.

Also on the board of directors of ALSIC is Steve Knuth, the president of the Public Affairs Company, an all-purpose political services shop with offices in Minneapolis and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Knuth, who has a background in Republican politics, “currently provides alliance development services throughout the United States for PhRMA,” according to Public Affairs Co.’s website. (The address on ALSIC’s tax filing is that of the Public Affairs Co., in downtown Minneapolis.)

Mohler and Knuth did not respond to requests for comment for this story. (Calls to the 1-800 number listed on ALSIC's website were not returned.) The other three members of the board of directors are associated with various health care, pharmaceutical, and medical technology companies, some of which are no longer in operation.

Links to a powerful industry

Though there are several indications that ALSIC is linked to the pharmaceutical industry, because of its status as a 501(c)(4) organization, information that would comprehensively reveal the extent to which industry interests support the group is not available to the public.

(Public records do show that, in 2011, ALSIC received a $935,000 grant from the Council for American Medical Innovation, another Washington-based 501(c)(4) organization that shares an agenda friendly to the pharmaceutical industry.)

Because of the lack of conclusive information about funding, it’s impossible to say how deeply linked ALSIC and pharmaceutical interests are. To money-in-politics experts, however, ALSIC’s characteristics are common among industry-backed “social welfare organizations” with political agendas.

Robert Maguire, who researches political nonprofits at the Center for Responsive Politics, says he looks for several signs when considering a nonprofit’s links to a specific interest, including a “small board with ties to an industry in particular,” disbursements to consulting firms tied to members of the board, “no clear social welfare or trade association function beyond one small set of things,” and the lack of regular office space or paid staff. “It seems like this group has a lot of these characteristics,” Maguire says.

Steven Knievel, a health policy advocate with Public Citizen, says it’s not uncommon for the drug industry to be behind groups like ALSIC, or other groups that present themselves as broadly supportive of public health or innovation.

“It’s one of the many influence mechanisms at their disposal, whether it be direct lobbying, or through contributions to campaigns — it’s one more tool they use to prevent reforms they don’t want.”

Indeed, the pharmaceutical industry already spends a fortune on lobbying campaigns in Washington, and funding campaigns of members of Congress. It spent $277 million on lobbying in 2017 — its most ever — and over $100 million more than the next biggest-spending industry, insurance, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending.

CRP finds that the “pharmaceutical and health products” industry has given over $10 million to candidates for the 2018 election cycle. Paulsen has received the sixth-most of any U.S. House member — a total of $133,000 — in campaign money from the industry so far in this election cycle. (Paulsen’s 3rd Congressional District has a strong health industry presence, and is home to medical tech giant Medtronic, among others.)

DFL Sen. Amy Klobuchar and GOP Rep. Jason Lewis got the next-most in the Minnesota delegation from the pharmaceutical and health products industry, per CRP, both receiving around $24,000 for this campaign cycle.

‘The influence game’

ALSIC’s function as a “social welfare” group, which includes giving out the award received by Paulsen and others, may offer a benefit to pharmaceutical interests that lobbying and campaign contributions cannot, experts say.

“It’s not necessarily that they’re trying to help someone win an election,” CRP’s Maguire says, “but they’re trying to help them burnish their record, to help the member have something to put on their résumé that most people won’t look back on.”

Some constituents have looked a little deeper, however. Paulsen’s announcement of his award on Twitter is clogged with comments skeptical of the honor and the group. (Paulsen’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

A letter to the editor from Roger Renfrew — who said he received a mailer from ALSIC touting GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin, who had gotten its award — appeared in the the Daily News of Bangor, Maine, in September 2017. He noted the pharmaceutical connections of ALSIC’s board.

Another letter to the editor appeared in the Modesto Bee of Modesto, California, in 2013, expressing skepticism about ALSIC and its support for GOP Rep. Jeff Denham.

According to Maguire, “What it looks like they’re doing is, basically, this is a small industry nonprofit that gives these members something they can tout in political ads, to show as an accomplishment to their constituents, and some constituents aren’t buying it.”

Tyler Cole, legislative director at Issue One, a nonprofit that focuses on political and government ethics reform, emphasizes there’s nothing untoward or illegal about interest groups recognizing members of Congress.

“That’s pretty standard. I’d say most groups seem to have more reportable activity,” Cole said, explaining that groups that give awards typically also have more traditional functions, like lobbying or giving out campaign contributions. “We can’t seem to find other activities they do,” he said of ALSIC, “other than give awards.”

“Voters and citizens are entitled to have the full context of the actions of their members of Congress,” he said, saying that recipients of the ALSIC honors could be more forthcoming about the circumstances of the award. (One recipient, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-North Dakota, did include ALSIC’s four-point criteria in her announcement that she received the award.)

“It’s hard for me to say exactly what should be done, because you can’t force a member of Congress to be honest,” Cole said. “It’s part of the D.C. influence game, and it’s the reason they do it.”

Above is from: https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2018/02/what-boring-sounding-award-reveals-about-creative-lengths-which-lobbyists-wi

Letter: Kinzinger doing nothing to help separated families

Letter: Kinzinger doing nothing to help separated families

10:29 pm

To the Editor:

Is anyone else besides me in the 16th Congressional District of Illinois livid with Adam Kinzinger for doing nothing about the children at the border?

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump are separating children, (some younger than 4 years old, some only months old), from their mothers and fathers. They are not even being told for how long.

How can anyone stomach that?

Children, we are told (according to a New York Times’ June 7 article), cry themselves to sleep every night, and moan all night long. The caregivers are complaining, saying they’ve never seen anything like this. Some shelter workers are quitting, dismayed by the inhumanity.

Morning comes, the children wake up, they cry, “Mama, papa,”all day long.

How can anyone stomach that?

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., what is our U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Channahon, doing about it? Answer: Absolutely nothing.

The real question to the 16th District is this: Are you OK with that?

Adam Kinzinger is a GOP foot soldier who does what he is told.

Sixteenth District, are you OK with that?

Deb Legorreta

Neponset

Above is from:  http://www.daily-chronicle.com/2018/06/19/letter-kinzinger-doing-nothing-to-help-separated-families/ago7p7o/

Kinzinger expects immigration solution, opposes separating children

Political opponent says congressman has not done enough

By Derek BarichelloEmailFollow

June 19, 2018

U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger said he is looking forward to a "spirited discussion" with President Donald Trump on Tuesday regarding immigration policy, and fully expects Congress to act on a solution this week.

Kinzinger's Democratic opponent in the 16th Congressional District Sara Dady, an immigration attorney from Rockford, said the congressman has not worked hard enough to protect children known as "dreamers" as national attention builds around the Trump administration's immigration policy, saying Kinzinger has not co-sponsored the Dream Act.

The Associated Press has reported nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new "zero-tolerance" policy that refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution.

The policy change was meant to deter unlawful crossings — and Sessions issued a warning last month to those entering the U.S. illegally that their children "inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions," according to the Associated Press.

Kinzinger, who co-sponsored the Recognizing America's Children Act, has said he believes undocumented children who have only known the U.S. to be home deserve the opportunity to be in the country legally.

"I do not support separating children from their parents, and I am alarmed by these recent reports," the Channahon Republican said in an email statement Monday to questions from The Times.

The current holding areas have drawn widespread attention after journalists gained access to one site Sunday. At a McAllen, Texas, detention center hundreds of immigrant children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets, according to an Associated Press report.

"Separating children and parents in order to deter people from securing protection in this country is completely unprecedented," Dady said in a phone interview Monday. "This type of policy has never been used by any president's administration in my 10 years of practicing immigration law. I have never seen such an immoral action. In the U.S., we do not use the suffering of children to punish parents; that's something criminals do."

While Kinzinger supports the protection of children, he is more selective when it comes to their parents. He supports a border wall between Mexico and the United States.

“I also am not supportive of parents putting their children in danger by illegally crossing the border," Kinzinger said in his statement Monday. "These parents are putting their children at risk for human trafficking, amongst other dangers. I hope my colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, will support the compromised package that increases border security, provides a permanent solution for the Dreamers, and makes the necessary immigration reforms that will reduce these border crossings."

Dady said it is lawful to ask for asylum in the United States as a refugee and was critical of the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy.

"On a warrant issued by the attorney general, an alien may be arrested and detained pending a decision on whether the alien is to be removed from the United States," Dady said, citing law 8 USC 1226. "It says 'may,' it doesn't say 'shall' or 'must.' Congress put 'may' in intentionally to leave it in the discretion of the attorney general, and if Congress knew the attorney general was going to use it in this manner, it would not have passed this law.

"It's unbelievable Congress can't trust the attorney general and the president to make moral decisions to not hurt children."

Trump defended his administration's border-protection policies Monday, rejecting criticism the policy has resulted in inhuman and immoral conditions, as well as faulting Democrats, according to the Associated Press.

"The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," Trump said. "Not on my watch."

While Congress members have focused on a targeted fix, the White House signaled it would oppose any narrow fix aimed solely at addressing the plight of children separated from their parents under the immigration crackdown. Press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump's priorities, like funding a border wall and tightening immigration laws, must also be fulfilled as part of any legislation.

"We want to fix the whole thing," she said. "We don't want to tinker with just part of it."

Dady was critical of Congress for letting the immigration issue get to this level. She said Congress has had six years to pass the Dream Act and has failed to do so, despite bipartisan support.

She said immigration reform is needed to give a clear path to citizenship for 5,000 Illinoisans, which will create more taxpayers.

"The Senate had no problem passing (the Dream Act), but Speaker (Paul) Ryan will not call it," she said. "Kinzinger will not co-sponsor it. He's an empty suit. He pays lip service, but he doesn't solve any real problems."

Kinzinger recently said during a radio debate in May he supports a pathway to citizenship for immigrants. He wants the immigration process to be “generous” but ultimately based on job skills.

“That brings the kind of people we want here for the jobs we need filled in this country and the innovation we need in this country as well as family-based immigration,” Kinzinger said.

The congressman's office said they will release a more detailed statement Tuesday, after a scheduled House conference call.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Above is from:  http://www.mywebtimes.com/2018/06/19/kinzinger-expects-immigration-solution-opposes-separating-children/asqj4ml/

Boone County and Solar Farms

Above is from:  http://www.rrstar.com/news/20180619/boone-county-may-take-case-by-case-approach-to-solar-farms

Vacancy at District 100 Board of Education

Board of Education Member Vacancy Notice

6/11/2018

Belvidere Community Unit School District #100 has a seat available on the Board of Education for a term ending April, 2019.  Legal qualifications include:

1. Citizen of the United States for at least (1) year;

2. 18 years of age or older;

3. Resident of the State of Illinois and District #100 for at least one (1) year;

4. Registered voter;

5. Not holding the position of school trustee or school treasurer; and

6. Candidate cannot reside in Belvidere Township.

Such persons may be ineligible for Board of Education membership by reason of other public office held or certain types of state or federal employment.

Interested persons should submit the following:

1.Letter of interest indicating why they would like to be considered for the vacancy on the Board of Education; and

2.Resume outlining the qualities they would bring to the Board of Education.

Please submit letter and resume to Mr. Robert Torbert, President, Board of Education, Belvidere Community Unit School District #100, 1201 Fifth Avenue, Belvidere, Illinois 61008.

The deadline for receiving letters is June 29, 2018.