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Holocaust Survivor Slams Top Immigration Official: "History Is Not on Your Side"

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a surprise appearance at a White House press briefing to announce that the Justice Department would begin cracking down on so-called sanctuary cities that fail to comply with federal immigration laws. If local governments refuse to cooperate with federal efforts to detain undocumented immigrants, Sessions said, as much as $4 billion in grants across the country could be withheld.

Despite the stark warning this week, many residents opposing Trump’s anti-immigration policies don’t appear to be deterred. In the case of Sacramento County, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan was invited to speak at a town-hall style meeting Tuesday, hundreds of people turned out to blast the ongoing sweeps targeting undocumented immigrants in the state. The most powerful moment arrived when an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor named Bernard Marks took to the mic to warn Homan and Sheriff Scott Jones that “history was not on their side.”

The remarks, as noted by CBS Sacramento, below:

When I was a little boy in Poland, for no other reason but for being Jewish, I was hauled off by the Nazis. And for no other reason I was picked up and separated from my family, who was exterminated in Auschwitz. And I am a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau.

I spent five and a half years in concentration camps, for one reason and one reason only—because we picked on people, and you as the sheriff, who we elected as sheriff of this county—we did not elect you for sheriff of Washington, DC. It’s about time you side with the people here. And when this gentleman stands up there and says he doesn’t go after people, he should read today’s Bee. Because in today’s Bee, the Supreme Court Justice of California objected to ICE coming in and taking people away from the courts. Don’t tell me that this is a lie.

You stand up here Mr. Jones. Don’t forget—history is not on your side.

The remarks were met with loud cheers from the audience. Homan responded to the speech by saying his agency will continue to arrest undocumented immigrants inside courthouses.

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Holocaust Survivor Slams Top Immigration Official: "History Is Not on Your Side"

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Obamacare Has Now Been MIA in Two Debates

Mother Jones

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In the first Republican debate, Obamacare was barely mentioned. Over at National Review, Ian Tuttle notes that last night it was also MIA:

Beyond a few brief in media res mentions from candidates, a repeal line in Cruz’s closing address, and an allusion or two (e.g., the question about John Roberts), the president’s signature piece of legislation was a non-issue.

Which makes one wonder: Is it a non-issue?….I suspect that the anti-Obamacare fervor is in a period of quiescence. We have now seen Obamacare implemented sans “death spiral.” The website works. The Supreme Court has handed the Obama administration two affirmative Supreme Court decisions. And the president has made sure to do much in the interim — immigration executive actions and Iran deals, for example — to draw fire away from his healthcare law. Conservative heads have a limited supply of steam.

Tuttle is right. Obamacare has become a brief, pro forma applause line these days, but not much more. Partly this is for the reason Tuttle rather surprisingly concedes: It’s up, it’s running, and it’s working reasonably well. The nation still stands, and it’s hard to keep whipping up hysteria for years and years over something that, it turns out, just isn’t affecting all that many people.

I don’t think this means that Obamacare is going away as a political issue. But I do think that the repeal movement has lost a lot of steam as a winning issue for Republicans. The tea party types are starting to realize that nothing in their lives has changed, and the more moderate types realize—maybe via personal experience, maybe via news reports—that it’s doing a lot of good for poor and working class folks. So it’s become something of a wedge issue: Pounding on it loses about as many votes as it gains.

This is becoming a real problem for the GOP. A lot of issues that used to be pretty reliable winners have now turned into dangerous wedge issues: gay marriage, taxes, terrorism, illegal immigration, military adventurism, abortion, crime, education, global warming, Ukraine, free trade, Social Security cuts—the list goes on and on. And this is coming at the same time that their bread and butter, the angry white guy demographic, is declining. I’m not sure what they’re going to end up doing about this. The GOP has a tough decade ahead.

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Obamacare Has Now Been MIA in Two Debates

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Robby Mook Just Took the Hardest Job in Politics—Saving the Clintons From Themselves

Mother Jones

By Andy Kroll and Patrick Caldwell | Thurs Apr. 9, 2015 06:00 AM ET

Robby Mook awoke on November 14, 2014, with a knife in his back.

At 6:01 that morning, ABC News published what it billed as a juicy scoop revealing the existence of a loyal, clubby group of Democratic staffers who called themselves the “Mook Mafia,” so named for the star political operative, who was then a leading contender to run Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. In leaked emails, Mook, the group’s self described “Deacon,” urged his friends to “smite Republicans mafia-style.” Mook’s on-again, off-again colleague Marlon Marshall—a.k.a. “Most High Grown Ass Reverend Marlon D”—echoed his friend’s bro-ish, mock-dramatic tone. “F U Republicans,” he wrote to the list. “Mafia till I die.”

ABC didn’t name its source but described the person as a Mook Mafia list member who “does not support the idea of Mook or Marshall holding leadership roles” in a second Clinton presidential run. By leaking a cherry-picked series of emails, this source sought to knock Mook out of the running for the campaign manager job. Clinton’s campaign was still in the earliest stages, and the infighting had already begun.

But the attempt to kneecap Mook backfired. Instead, the episode illustrated the dysfunctional, cutthroat atmosphere surrounding the Clintons and underscored the need for a campaign chief who could manage the competing factions within Hillary Clinton’s universe. Embarrassing though the leak may have been, it bolstered the case for Mook, who’s known for inspiring loyalty and handling outsize egos, to take the reins of Clinton 2016.

Within days, Clinton is expected to officially launch her next presidential bid—and Mook will be her campaign manager. He has the formidable task of repackaging perhaps the most widely known and picked-over public figure in modern politics and convincing a weary electorate that she should lead the country for the next four years. He will have to hold together the many tribes and fiefdoms within the Clinton community, while sidestepping—and surviving—the sort of backstabbing that felled his predecessors.

Clinton Inc. Planet Hillary. Hillaryland.

Whatever it’s called, this is the vast network of advisers, fixers, donors, lackeys, celebrity pals, old campaign hands, State Department staff, friends of Bill, friends of Hillary, and friends of Chelsea that surrounds the Clintons. “They just keep building on all of the people who are well intentioned, well meaning, extremely loyal, but all have an opinion and want to be heard,” says Patti Solis Doyle, a former aide and friend of Hillary dating back decades.

Solis Doyle was the first campaign manager of the former first lady’s 2008 presidential run. But Hillaryland’s warring factions and score-settling press leaks proved too much. In the thick of the 2008 nomination fight, Clinton relieved her of operational duties—via email and a surprise conference call—and so Solis Doyle quit.

Mook, for his part, got a sense of what it will be like to manage the Clintonworld cast of characters when he ran the campaign of Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Bill and Hillary who was elected governor of Virginia in 2013. McAuliffe’s first run for governor, in 2009, was a disaster. He lost the Democratic nomination by 23 points. Four years lat­er, with Mook at the helm, McAuliffe’s campaign was so focused and disciplined it caught some of the candidate’s own friends by surprise. One senior McAuliffe aide says he couldn’t recall a single leak from a campaign surrogate.

Hillary Clinton took note of Mook’s work on the McAuliffe campaign. She wants desperately to avoid the mistakes of her last race and run a low-drama campaign. Knowing this, advisers and former aides say, it’s not surprising she chose Mook. “He’s cut from a very different cloth from the bold, brash campaign managers that we hear about so often,” says pollster Geoff Garin, who worked with Mook on McAuliffe’s 2013 run. “He does not seek out the spotlight and in fact does everything he can to avoid it.”

Mook is widely known as Robby, not Robert, and at 35, he’s still boyish—handsome and clean-shaven with close-cropped brown hair. His usual uniform consists of chinos and bland dress shirts rolled up to the elbows. He couldn’t be more different from, say, James Carville, the loudmouth Ragin’ Cajun who advised Bill Clinton’s first presidential bid and now makes a living as a consultant and TV commentator. Mook rarely appears in news stories or on TV. He did not respond to repeated interview requests. He has no Facebook page. He has a Twitter account but never tweets and has forgotten the password.

Mook, who will be the first openly gay manager of a major presidential campaign, is largely unknown beyond the insular world of Democratic staffers but well liked within it. In addition to the email listserv, his loyal following—the Mook Mafia—plans yearly reunions, during which they return to a state where they once operated for a weekend of bar-hopping mixed with volunteering for a local campaign.

Mook’s friends and colleagues struggle to identify any particular policy issue that drives him. Mark Penn-style theories about key demographic groups (remember Soccer Moms?) don’t inspire him either. He’s a political nerd who lives and dies by data and nuts-and-bolts organizing. At heart, according to those who know him, he’s a mechanic. “What drives Robby is the opportunity to run a better campaign than he did the last time,” says Tom Hughes, who hired Mook for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.

Yet in the McAuliffe race, relying on data, organizing, and a test-everything standard wasn’t enough. The secret sauce in Mook’s stewardship of the McAuliffe operation was his ability to manage and harness all the friends and well-wishers in the candidate’s orbit, from Bill and Hillary Clinton down to the lowliest county chairman. “This is where temperament comes in,” says Paul Begala, a former adviser to Bill Clinton who helped out on the campaign. “Robby corralled us, engaged us, channeled us, used us, but didn’t let us hijack all his time or the campaign.”

Think of Mook, then, as the Hillaryland Whisperer. But Mook can’t focus on Clintonworld alone. He will also need to manage the influx of Obama alums expected to join Hillary’s team and ensure that old grudges and bad habits from the 2008 campaign don’t resurface. (John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff who went on to lead Obama’s transition team and now chairs Hillary’s presumptive campaign, might be able to help with that.)

Mook can’t eliminate all of the internal chaos that sunk Solis Doyle. He can’t reshuffle Hillary Clinton’s inner circle to his liking. His charge will be handling the egos, absorbing the sharp elbows, and putting to good use the brains, money, and connections of the ever-expanding Clinton universe.

“Hillary’s not going to dispense with Maggie Williams. She’s not going to dispense with Cheryl Mills. She’s not going to dispense with Huma Abedin just because the new boy’s on the block,” says one Democrat close to the Clintons, listing three of Hillary’s closest longtime advisers. “The new boy on the block has to learn who those people are, how to accommodate them, and, importantly, how to harness them towards the common enterprise. They all want Hillary elected, but they also all have their own turf.”

The political education of Robby Mook began at the local dump. “Everybody has to go to the dump on weekends,” he told the Vermont weekly Seven Days in 2013, in one of the few interviews he’s ever given. “My earliest memory campaigning was going to the dump to get petition signatures or handing out literature.” The son of a Dartmouth physics professor and a hospital administrator, Mook organized phone banks for the Clinton-Gore ’96 campaign as a 16-year-old. He parlayed a freshman-year bit part in Hanover High’s production of Molière’s comédie-ballet The Imaginary Invalid into a volunteer gig for the play’s director, Matt Dunne, a 24-year-old then running for his second term in the Vermont state Legislature. (Dunne says Mook’s Invalid audition was one of the funniest he’s ever seen.) A few summers later, Dunne asked Mook to launch a political action committee to raise funds for Vermont’s House Democrats. Mook was a rising college sophomore who could not yet legally drink a beer, but he won the trust of the state party’s old guard. After graduating from Columbia in 2002 with a degree in classics, Mook spent a year as the Vermont Democratic Party’s field director. Soon after the 2002 election, the state party’s former executive director, Tom Hughes, recruited Mook to join the New Hampshire staff for Howard Dean’s insurgent presidential run.

When Mook signed on in the spring of 2003, Dean, the former governor of Vermont, had just 425 official supporters—nationwide—and $150,000 in the bank. The New Hampshire team set up shop in a decrepit, asbestos-riddled mill warehouse in Manchester. “It looked like where Walter White might make meth,” one Dean staffer recalls. Hughes, who shared a Manchester apartment with Mook, says Mook arrived with a futon, a few changes of clothes, and a pair of dumbbells. Steve Gerencser, the Dean campaign’s deputy political director in New Hampshire, recalls Mook buying groceries and taking them straight to the office fridge.

“Mini-Mook”: For Mook’s 24th birthday, his colleagues at the Dean campaign bought a life-size, stand-up cardboard cutout of him. Meryl Levin / Originally published in Primarily New Hampshire

At 23, “Mookie” quickly became the heart of the New Hampshire operation, former colleagues say, the rare boss beloved and respected by his charges, a workaholic who would put on a wickedly funny Scottish accent, a raconteur quick to deploy a joke or funny story at staff parties. (For Mook’s 24th birthday, his colleagues bought a life-size, stand-up cardboard cutout of him—”Mini-Mook”—looped a red-white-and-blue lei over its shoulders, and made sure it was waiting when he arrived at his party at a local sports bar.) John Hagner, who interned on the Dean campaign and worked with Mook for years afterward, recalls his old colleague’s knack for motivating those around him. When Mook asked Hagner to stay on with Dean after his internship, Hagner didn’t hesitate. “Of course I’ll quit my job,” he says, “sleep on a someone’s floor, get paid $800 a month—and be grateful for it.”

At some point, the Deaniacs in New Hampshire realized that their strategy—paying canvassers to knock on doors and make phone calls—was not going to reach enough voters to win the primary. So on a broiling hot day in July 2003, the campaign staff gathered at the University of New Hampshire for a retreat with organizing guru Marshall Ganz, a wise, crusty Harvard professor who had worked with Cesar Chavez and members of the civil rights movement. As if the yoga and team-building exercises weren’t hippie-dippy enough, the campaign held Ganz’s crash course on community organizing in a rustic yurt. Ganz told the staffers they should ditch paid canvassers promoting Dean with a cookie-cutter script and instead organize a network of volunteers who would speak to their neighbors and friends and share their personal reasons for supporting Dean. With these techniques, Ganz argued, the Deaniacs could assemble an army of local volunteers and organizers capable of turning out huge numbers of voters. The Dean campaign embraced it.

As if the yoga and team-building exercises weren’t hippie-dippy enough, the campaign held a crash course on community organizing in a rustic yurt.

But as Mook would learn, a well-designed ground game can’t compensate for a flawed candidate. Dean’s infamous scream after the Iowa caucuses sapped the New Hampshire campaign’s momentum. Still, with the help of 4,500 volunteers working on Election Day, Dean outperformed the polls and finished second in the primary behind then-Sen. John Kerry, who went on to win the Democratic nomination.

Despite the loss, the merry band of Deaniacs would use Ganz’s teachings to reinvent Democratic campaigning. Jeremy Bird, a regional field director for Dean in New Hampshire, is one of the most sought-after consultants in Democratic politics, having masterminded Obama’s Ganz-like organizing strategy during the ’08 and ’12 campaigns. Karen Hicks, the head of Dean’s New Hampshire team, brought her grassroots chops to Clinton’s 2008 campaign. Ben LaBolt, a Dean field organizer, went on to become the press secretary for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Buffy Wicks, who worked in Iowa and New Hampshire for Dean, played key roles overseeing Obama’s get-out-the-vote efforts in ’08 and ’12; she now runs Priorities USA Action, the super-PAC aiming to raise upwards of $300 million to elect Hillary Clinton next year.

The Kerry campaign and party pooh-bahs in Washington were impressed enough to hire Hicks, Mook, and Bird for the general election. But in contrast to the scrappy Dean alums, Kerry’s senior staff sneered at using volunteers to win elections. Fucking drum-circle weirdos—that’s what some Kerry insiders called Mook and his colleagues. Mook, who hated being stuck in DC crunching numbers, would wander around headquarters slapping mailing stickers onto himself and colleagues in a not-so-subtle call for getting out of the office. He spent the campaign’s final weeks in Wisconsin, where Kerry won by a scant 11,000 votes.

George W. Bush’s reelection left Mook and Bird, now roommates in a tiny studio apartment in DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, searching for new gigs. Bird fondly remembers sitting around one night, the two roommates buried in books, Bird whipping through fiction while ribbing Mook for reading slowly. Mook’s excuse: He was reading in Greek. His bookshelves are still stocked with books in the original Greek and histories of esoteric topics including numismatics, the study of currency.

Mook could have sought a cushy job at a political consulting firm or a senior slot on a high-profile race. Instead, he decided to run the campaign of Dave Marsden, a candidate for state delegate in northern Virginia. “You could look at it and say, ‘Ew, that looked like a backwards move,’ but in fact it was very deliberate,” says Hicks, Mook’s boss on the Dean and Kerry campaigns. “He wanted to learn to manage from the ground up and wanted experience not just from the field side but from the entire campaign.”

Marsden was a first-time candidate, but Mook treated the campaign like a presidential run in miniature. He hired five full-time organizers to cover the tiny 13-precinct district and enlisted Bird to train them. Drawing on his Rolodex of friends, congressional staffers, and campaign operatives, he threw a packed keg party fundraiser for Marsden at a mansion on Capitol Hill, though few, if any, of the paying attendees could vote in the race. By Election Day, the campaign and its volunteers had so thoroughly blanketed the district that Mook’s master list of likely Marsden supporters showed one voter unaccounted for. Forty-five minutes before polls closed, Mook drove to her home, waited outside until she returned, and confirmed that, yes, she’d voted. Marsden won by 20 points in a toss-up district. “I don’t think Fairfax County had ever seen a campaign organized on this level before,” Marsden says.

The following year, Mook managed the Maryland Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign, a thankless job plotting strategy, keeping dozens of candidates on the same page, and fundraising for Dems up and down the ballot. “It’s a small state, but they have a lot of very big players,” says Josh White, who ran Martin O’Malley’s successful gubernatorial campaign that year. “It was important to have somebody who could literally coordinate everybody and try to keep everybody happy.” In Maryland, Mook met Marlon Marshall, who became a close friend and collaborator. He was as brash and effusive as Mook was unassuming. But the two shared a healthy helping of ambition, and in early 2007, they joined Mook’s old boss Karen Hicks on Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign. Mook and Marshall were dispatched to Nevada, where they set out to build a Dean-style, volunteer-powered, grassroots machine that could deliver Clinton an early caucus win.

Soon after her victory in the New Hampshire presidential primary, Hillary Clinton flew to Las Vegas. It was mid-January 2008, and there was a week to go before the Nevada caucuses. Huddled with her senior staff in a private room at a steakhouse, Clinton vented her frustrations.

She felt burned, having sunk huge amounts of time and money into the Iowa caucuses only to be routed by Obama, who was proving difficult to dispatch. Now, her campaign was broke. Why would Nevada—another caucus state, one where the most powerful labor unions had endorsed Obama—be any different from Iowa? Local elected officials bitched to Clinton about her Nevada operation’s progress. “Everybody was sort of freaking out about where we were,” Hicks recalls. Bill and Hillary said they’d just as soon skip Nevada and focus on Super Tuesday, the one-day primary bonanza in February.

The task of convincing Clinton not to retreat from Nevada fell, in large part, to Mook. Seated across from Clinton and her top aides, Mook pointed to strong levels of support in the state among women, Latinos, and low-income voters. Despite being starved for funds, Mook and his team had pulled out all the stops to win over key activists throughout the state. He had even attended, unbeknownst to his staff, a Celine Dion concert at Caesar’s Palace at the request of a local LGBT rights group. (He made it back to the Nevada campaign office on Tropicana Avenue in time for the nightly check-in call.)

Hillary and Bill thought it over. In the end, they agreed: Stay and fight it out. President Clinton planted himself in Nevada for the final week, and Hillary went door-to-door.

By midafternoon of caucus day, it was clear that Mook was right; Clinton won with 51 percent of the popular vote. (Obama, however, wound up with more of Nevada’s delegates.) The media, so eager to write off Clinton’s candidacy after Iowa, described her roaring back. Rory Reid, the Clinton campaign’s Nevada chairman, invited Mook to the Clintons’ suite in the Bellagio to celebrate. Mook had spent the previous two days in a frantic final push; grimy and sweaty, he arrived last to the suite. “When everybody else was celebrating,” says Reid, a son of Sen. Harry Reid, “he was trying to wash off the results of a 48-hour organizing effort.”

“He beat us three times; his footprint was on our back,” said David Plouffe. “Our sense was he did the best job of anyone over there.”

Despite the Clinton campaign’s top-down approach to winning the nomination, giving more weight to national polls and fundraising totals than state-level organizing, Mook did his part to bring the Dean style of campaigning to Clintonworld. His record wasn’t lost on his foes in the Obama campaign. “He beat us three times; his footprint was on our back,” David Plouffe, one of the architects of Obama’s presidential campaigns, told Bloomberg News. “Our sense was he did the best job of anyone over there.”

Clinton’s Nevada campaign was the birthplace of the Mook Mafia, with the core group following Mook and picking up additional members as Mook bounced from one state to the next for Clinton, winning primary victories in Ohio, Indiana, and Puerto Rico. The group’s name became official in Indiana, when the mafiosi surprised Mook with T-shirts emblazoned with a Marlon Marshall mantra: “Mook Mafia: Please Believe.”

After Clinton lost the nomination to Obama, Mook spent the fall of 2008 managing Jeanne Shaheen’s Senate race in New Hampshire. But he never strayed far from the Clinton camp. After Obama tapped Clinton to serve as his secretary of state, Mook had the option of taking a job in Foggy Bottom, but decided against it. Instead, he went to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party organization focused on electing Democrats to the US House of Representatives. There, Mook would learn the mechanics of congressional races from Maine to Hawaii. For his first job as political director, he recruited new candidates to run for office for the 2010 midterms, and he accumulated an obsessive knowledge of the nation’s 435 House districts. He was later promoted to a job presiding over the DCCC’s $65 million war chest for independent ad spending in 2010. He witnessed up close and personal the rise of the tea party and the shellacking the Democrats endured that year. During the 2012 cycle, when House Democrats upended pundits’ grim predictions by winning more than a dozen seats, he ran the entire organization.

Mook hadn’t yet left the DCCC when he agreed to run Terry McAuliffe’s second bid for governor. Going into Terry 2.0, Mook knew the job would require imposing discipline on the famously restive “Macker.” (“Sleep when you’re dead!” was McAuliffe’s refrain to his sleep-deprived staffers.) Despite McAuliffe’s prodigious fundraising abilities, Mook drew on the technological wizardry of the Obama ’12 campaign and the DIY culture of Dean ’04, borrowing furniture from local Democratic committees and putting staffers up at Super 8 motels; Mook’s own standing desk, one staffer recalls, was a stack of copy-paper boxes.

Mook assembled a team that included Mook Mafia members and top talent from Obama’s two campaigns. One of the first things he did was to call his old friend Jeremy Bird, fresh off Obama’s reelection, and ask which field organizers he should hire from the president’s campaign. Mook chose early on to invest in a statewide ground game—a decision that ultimately increased turnout across Virginia, especially among black voters. McAuliffe squeezed past Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and his 3-point win marked the first time in 40 years that a Virginia gubernatorial candidate won with a president from the same party in the White House.

There was a predictable flood of “How McAuliffe Won” stories after Election Day, but they did not spotlight the operatives behind the curtain, as campaign postmortems tend to do. That was no accident. According to Brennan Bilberry, McAuliffe’s communications director, a few weeks out from the election, Mook told the McAuliffe campaign’s press shop that there would be no glorifying of staff members or dramatic retellings of the moments when the contest hung in the balance. Even after victory, he insisted, the focus should remain on the candidate.

On March 10, Hillary Clinton stepped to the microphone at a hastily arranged press conference at the United Nations. A week earlier, the New York Times had reported that Clinton used a personal email when she was secretary of state, potentially in violation of federal recordkeeping rules. Her address—hdr22@clintonemail.com—was hosted on a private server registered to the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York, home, raising concerns about the security of the sensitive emails sent and received by Clinton while at State. Of the 60,000 emails from her four years as secretary of state, she handed over roughly half to the department and deleted the remaining 30,000 or so messages, which she claimed were personal. “Looking back,” she told reporters, “it would have been probably smarter” to have used a government email account.

Politico‘s write-up of the press conference, quoting “sources in the Clinton camp,” revealed the internal divisions over how best respond to the email controversy. Several Clinton advisers had encouraged her to sit for one-on-one interviews with TV networks, rather than the harder-to-control atmosphere of a traditional press conference. Mook had pushed for a quicker, more aggressive pushback. The debate inside Clinton’s political operation, Politico noted, took on a “generational cast.” (A Clinton spokesman disputed this description of the campaign’s internal debate.)

Clinton’s campaign-in-waiting had yet to sign an office lease, and already internal deliberations were spilling out into public view. The mess indicated that Mook had a long way to go to get control of the lumbering ship he would soon be piloting.

Mook, though, is doing his best to recreate his past drama-free campaigns. He’s brought on his old friend Marlon Marshall, McAuliffe senior staffers Michael Halle, Brynne Craig, and Josh Schwerin, and a mix of respected Obama alums.

At this early stage, it’s unknown whether stocking the Clinton campaign with Mook mafiosi can bring order and discipline to Planet Hillary. No doubt, a series of contretemps, slipups, and scandals (real or trumped-up) will hit the Clinton campaign in the months to come. And in the past—with or without scandals—the competing elements of Clintonworld have always seemed to find a way to create conflict of their own.

Can Mook impose an inner calm and make sure Team Clinton focuses on one imperative: electing Hillary? “It’s very difficult,” Patti Solis Doyle says with a resigned laugh, “I will tell you that.” But should Mook succeed, nothing could be more dramatic.

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Robby Mook Just Took the Hardest Job in Politics—Saving the Clintons From Themselves

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The Great Wage Slowdown Finally Takes Center Stage

Mother Jones

I’m feeling better today, but still not really in good blogging condition. So just a quick note: it appears that the great wage slowdown is finally getting lots of mainstream attention. Why? Because apparently the midterm results have persuaded a lot of people that this isn’t just an economic problem, but a political problem as well. In fact, here’s the headline on David Leonhardt’s piece today:

The Great Wage Slowdown, Looming Over Politics

Josh Marshall makes much the same point with this headline:

Forget the Chatter, This is the Democrats’ Real Problem

Both are saying similar things. First, growing income inequality per se isn’t our big problem. Stagnant wages for the middle class are. Obviously these things are tightly related in an economic sense, but in a political sense they aren’t. Voters care far less about rich people buying gold-plated fixtures for their yachts than they do about not getting a raise for the past five years. The latter is the problem they want solved.

Needless to say, I agree, but here are the two key takeaways from Marshall and Leonhardt and pretty much everyone else who tackles this subject: (1) nobody has any real answers, and (2) this hurts Democrats more than Republicans since Democrats are supposed to be the party of the middle class.

I’d say #1 is obviously true, and it’s a huge problem. But #2 is a little shakier. Sure, Republicans are the party of business interests and the rich, but voters blame their problems on whoever’s in power. Right now, Democrats have gotten the lion’s share of the blame for the slow economy, but Republicans rather plainly have no serious ideas about how to grow middle-class wages either. They won’t escape voter wrath on this front forever.

I’m not going to try to say more about this right now. I just wanted to point out that this is finally starting to get some real attention. And that’s good: it’s one of the great economic trends of our time, and therefore one of the great political trends as well. For a short rundown of the other great trends of our time, I recommend this piece. I wrote it a couple of years ago, and I continue to think these are the basic battlegrounds our politics are going to be fought on over the next decade or two.

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The Great Wage Slowdown Finally Takes Center Stage

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Mangroves are marching northward

Mangroves are marching northward

b-cline

Watch out, they’re coming for you!

A botanical sea change is underway along the Floridian coastline, where new research suggests that global warming is helping mangroves stretch their strange tentacle-like roots northward.

Mangrove forests — coastal trees and shrubs that live semi-submerged lifestyles – are among the world’s most productive and valuable ecosystems, home to many fish and other wildlife in tropical climates. But experts worry that their northerly march will come at the expense of other habitats.

Mangroves cannot survive if nighttime temperatures get too cold. The decline in frosty nights of less than 25 degrees appears to be helping them displace cold-tolerating marshy grasslands.

Scientists analyzed nearly 30 years of satellite data and concluded that the density of mangroves has doubled in some parts of Florida’s northeast corner.

“Our results indicate that mangroves are expanding poleward along the east coast of North America, and further suggest that this expansion is associated with recent warming,” the scientists wrote in a paper published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Other authors have documented expansion of mangrove into saltmarsh on local scales in Florida, Louisiana, and Australia, but with uncertainty regarding the mechanisms behind these expansions.”

Lead author Kyle Cavanaugh, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and at the Smithsonian Institution, warned that “there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty” regarding how such changes in mangrove areas will affect food webs as the globe continues to warm. ”The mangroves are expanding into and invading salt marsh, which also provides an important habitat for a variety of species.”

PNASClick to embiggen.


Source
Poleward expansion of mangroves is a threshold response to decreased frequency of extreme cold events, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Fewer cold snaps: Mangroves head north, Brown University

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Mangroves are marching northward

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How Population Genetics May Help Explain Economic Growth

Mother Jones

Alex Tabarrok links to a short post today by a couple of researchers who study the transmission of ideas throughout history. Their conclusion is that the speed of diffusion depends on a country’s “genetic distance” from the source of the idea, and when I first read this I thought they were using genetic distance as a metaphor of some kind. That is, they were measuring the distance between various cultures, and the math happened to be similar to the math for measuring the genetic distance between human population groups, so that’s what they called it.

But no. The two researchers, Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg, are literally talking about population genetics:

Measures of average differences between vectors of allele frequencies (different genes) across any two populations provide a measure of genetic distance….The goal of this approach is not to study any genetic characteristics that may confer any advantage in development….On the contrary, they are neutral: their spread results from random factors and not from natural selection. For instance, neutral genes include those coding for different blood types….Instead, genetic distance is like a molecular clock — it measures average separation times between populations. Therefore, genetic distance can be used as a summary statistic for divergence in all the traits that are transmitted with variation from one generation to the next over the long run, including divergence in cultural traits.

Their hypothesis is that populations that are genetically more distant are also culturally more distant and are therefore more resistant to trading and adopting each others’ cultural traits. In the case of the Industrial Revolution, the epicenter was in Great Britain, so the adoption of new technology was strongly influenced by the genetic distance of different populations from Britain. Sure enough, they claim that was the case. The chart on the right shows the effect of genetic distance from Britain on the adoption of machine technology. It starts out fairly modestly, rises to a high level by 1913, and then declines as technology finally diffuses everywhere.

In a sense, this comes as no surprise. Genetic distance is pretty obviously correlated with both physical distance and cultural distance, so you’d expect that it might also correlate with the spread of ideas as well. Path dependence and deliberate policy (for example, colonial rules that deliberately inhibited the spread of technology) can then account for most of the rest. Spolaore and Wacziarg’s conclusion:

In sum, we find considerable evidence that barriers introduced by historical separation between populations are central to account for the world distribution of income….These results have substantial policy implications. A common concern when studying the persistent effect of long-term history is that not much can be done today. But if a major effect of long-term historical divergence is due to barriers, there is much room and scope for policy action. Populations that are historically farther from the frontier can benefit from policies that specifically aim at reducing barriers to exchange and communication.

Needless to say, “reducing barriers” is a two-edged sword. But it’s an interesting proposition nonetheless.

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How Population Genetics May Help Explain Economic Growth

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Is this a La Niña or El Niño year? Try La Nada

Is this a La Niña or El Niño year? Try La Nada

Shutterstock

C’mon Pacific Ocean, heat up or cool down. All this average crap is making us nervous.

Meteorologists base a lot of their long-term weather projections on temperatures in the globally influential Pacific Ocean. But for more than a year the world’s most expansive ocean has been devoid of its famed El Niño and La Niña patterns — anomalously higher-than-average or lower-than-average bands of sea-surface water that help govern major weather events.

For now, the Pacific is stuck in a stubborn La Nada state: near-normal surface height and temperatures. Scientists say it could last into the spring, but that’s not so unusual: La Nada rules the Pacific about half the time. But it makes life difficult for weather forecasters, and it threatens to ignite unpredictably extreme weather. From NASA:

“Without an El Niño or La Niña signal present, other, less predictable, climatic factors will govern fall, winter and spring weather conditions,” said climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Long-range forecasts are most successful during El Niño and La Niña episodes. The “in between” ocean state, La Nada, is the dominant condition, and is frustrating for long-range forecasters. It’s like driving without a decent road map — it makes forecasting difficult.”

Patzert noted that some of the wettest and driest winters occur during La Nada periods.

“Neutral infers something benign, but in fact if you look at these La Nada years when neither El Niño nor La Niña are present, they can be the most volatile and punishing. As an example, the continuing, deepening drought in the American West is far from ‘neutral,’” he said.

NASANASA uses satellite data to measure Pacific Ocean sea levels. Because warm water expands, that data helps scientists gauge the water temperature. All the green in this latest image means a whole lot average sea temperatures. And that means that La Nada is in town.


Source
‘La Nada’ climate pattern lingers in the Pacific, NASA

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Is this a La Niña or El Niño year? Try La Nada

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One Last Time: Here’s the Real Reason the Pentagon is Facing $20 Billion in Extra Cuts Next Year

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Why is the Pentagon facing an “extra” $20 billion in cuts under sequestration next year? Yesterday I said that it was due to a redefinition of “security” in the budget language between 2013 and 2014. Today, CAP’s Michael Linden tells me that although it’s possible this played a role, the real answer lies elsewhere. What follows is fairly number-heavy, and if you don’t want to read it, I don’t blame you. But I’ll try to keep it as simple as I can.

Here’s the main issue: it turns out that under the Budget Control Act, the baseline budget for domestic spending goes up between 2013 and 2014. But it stays flat for defense spending. In addition, the amount of the sequester goes up because (a) it’s for a full 12 months, and (b) the fiscal cliff deal reduced the 2013 sequester levels.

For 2014, the sequester amount is roughly $54 billion for both domestic and defense. However, about $17 billion of the domestic sequester is for mandatory spending (primarily in reduced Medicare reimbursements). Once that’s all netted out, here are the numbers for domestic discretionary spending:

As you can see, the net spending level in 2014 is the same as 2013 because the budget baseline went up enough to make up for the increased sequester. But here are the numbers for defense discretionary spending:

The net effect of all this is that defense spending has to decrease by $20 billion compared to last year, while domestic spending stays at the same level. This is a one-time effect, since the baselines for both domestic and defense spending rise slightly each year in 2015 and beyond.

So that’s the story. If you’re sorry you asked, join the club.

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One Last Time: Here’s the Real Reason the Pentagon is Facing $20 Billion in Extra Cuts Next Year

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Here’s how wind and solar can save more lives and prevent more pollution

Here’s how wind and solar can save more lives and prevent more pollution

Gary Chancey

These solar panels, being installed in Ohio, will not produce as much electricity as they would in California — but they will be better at reducing pollution.

America’s renewable energy boom could protect more lives and prevent more climate pollution if wind turbines and solar panels were being installed in different locations, a new study suggests.

Solar and wind energy is most valuable to society when it replaces coal burning. But most of the new solar and wind capacity is being installed outside America’s coal-powered states. It’s going where the wind blows the hardest, where the sun shines the strongest, or where states have renewable energy mandates or incentives.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University compared the benefits of installing a wind turbine in 33,000 locations across America, factoring in the positive impact of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and avoided death and disease. They repeated the exercise with a solar panel, comparing nearly 1,000 potential locations.

From their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Thirty percent of existing wind capacity is installed in Texas and California, where the combined health, environmental, and climate benefits from wind are among the lowest in the country. Less than 5% of existing wind capacity is in Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia, where wind energy offers the greatest social benefits from displaced pollution. …

[T]he combined health, environmental, and climate benefits from wind energy in Ohio are $100/MWh … compared with only $13/MWh in California.

An even greater mismatch exists between locations where a solar panel can produce the most electricity and where it can deliver the greatest health and environmental benefits.

This map shows the places where a solar panel would generate the most power, as indicated by darker shading:

PNAS

Compare to these next two maps, which show the places where a solar panel would provide the greatest climate and pollution-reduction benefits:

PNAS

Obviously this doesn’t mean that California, Texas, and other renewable-friendly states should ease up on solar and wind. What it means is that policy makers should consider how best to help other states catch up, particularly those where injections of new renewable energy provide the greatest benefits.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Missouri Gov. Vetoes Journo-Jailing Gun Bill

Mother Jones

Jay Nixon, the Democratic governor of Missouri, vetoed a sweeping pro-gun bill on Friday that received national attention earlier this year because it aimed to nullify all federal gun laws that state lawmakers decided were in violation of the Second Amendment. The bill also placed journalists in jeopardy of arrest for publishing virtually any information about gun owners—a measure far broader than the journalist-jailing bill signed into law last month by Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, and one that could still become law if the state legislature overrides Nixon’s veto later this year.

The Missouri bill, titled the “Second Amendment Protection Act,” would criminalize the publication of any information that identifies a gun owner or applicant by name by making this act a class A misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to a year in jail in the state. Unlike Louisiana’s new law, which only prohibits the publication of concealed handgun permit information, Missouri’s would ban the publication of “the name, address, or other identifying information of any individual who owns a firearm or who is an applicant for or holder of any license, certificate, permit, or endorsement which allows such individual to own, acquire, possess, or carry a firearm.”

“Under this bill, newspaper editors around the state that annually publish photos of proud young Missourians who harvest their first turkey or deer could be charged with a crime,” Nixon said in a statement explaining the veto.

The bill opens with a long-winded states’ rights discourse explaining why the legislation doesn’t violate federal law. It declares the National Firearms Act of 1934, which restricts machine gun ownership, and the Gun Control Act of 1968, which restricts interstate gun transfers, “null and void and of no effect in this state” because they “infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.”

Earlier this year, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, signed into law a similar bill that threatens federal agents with felonies for enforcing gun laws in the state. In response, US Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Brownback threatening litigation if the governor enforced the law, which Holder said was an unconstitutional defiance of federal law. Similar legislation has recently been introduced in about 30 other states.

Missouri lawmakers may receive their own letters from Holder before the end of the year: The state legislature can override Nixon’s veto when it reconvenes in September if both the Senate and House choose to do so by a two-thirds vote. That could easily happen, because both chambers overwhelmingly voted in favor of the bill.

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Missouri Gov. Vetoes Journo-Jailing Gun Bill

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