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Hillary Clinton Is One of America’s Most Honest Politicians

Mother Jones

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Jim Geraghty says that Hillary Clinton is a serial liar:

We know she lies when she’s cornered. Running from snipers in the Balkans, being “dead broke” upon leaving the White House, “all my grandparents” immigrated to America, her tale of trying to join the Marines, her claim she never received or sent any material that was classified on her private e-mail system, her claim to have started criticizing the Iraq War before Barack Obama did… she lies, and she lies, and she lies.

Seriously, Jim? I’ll give you the Balkans thing. That was a lie. But the others aren’t. The Clintons were in debt when they left the White House. Hillary’s great-grandparents were immigrants—she was off by a generation. Nobody knows if she ever tried to join the Marines, but there’s no evidence she didn’t. She didn’t knowingly send classified material on her private email system, and it’s hardly fair to judge her by the fact that some of her emails were retroactively classified. And her statement about the Iraq War was strained (she was talking about criticism after Obama joined the Senate), but it’s typical political exaggeration, not a lie.

Look: all politicians lie sometimes. That includes Hillary Clinton. But as the chart on the right shows, Hillary is one of the most honest politicians on the national stage. Here’s a similar conclusion from the New York Times.

I know it’s in their partisan self interest for conservatives to insist that Hillary is the world’s biggest liar. But she isn’t. Not by a long, long way. Republicans need to get the beam out of their own eye before they keep banging on about the mote in Hillary’s.

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Hillary Clinton Is One of America’s Most Honest Politicians

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Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor Invokes Jailed Relatives to Highlight Racism in Jury Selection

Mother Jones

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Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has referenced Dr. Seuss to get her point across during oral arguments. Justice Stephen Breyer on Monday drew an analogy to his grandson making excuses to avoid doing homework. Rhetorical devices take all kinds of forms on the bench. But Sonia Sotomayor might be the first justice in recent memory to invoke her own relatives in jail to make a point.

During oral arguments on Monday morning in Foster v. Chatman, a case involving racial discrimination in jury selection, Sotomayor questioned whether a Georgia prosecutor had used a bogus pretext to bounce an African American woman from a jury. The prosecutor had claimed he excused her because the woman’s cousin had been arrested on a drug charge. “There’s an assumption that she has a relationship with this cousin,” Sotomayor told Georgia deputy attorney general Beth Burton, who argued Georgia’s case before the court. “I have cousins who I know have been arrested, but I have no idea where they’re in jail. I hardly—I don’t know them…Doesn’t that show pretext?”

Her comments demonstrate the importance of her role as the first Latina justice on the court, an institution dominated by white men from privileged backgrounds. She asked the sort of question African Americans might welcome from Clarence Thomas, the only black justice, who rarely speaks from the bench. The insights she brings from her formative years in a Bronx public housing project are particularly applicable to racially charged cases like this one.

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Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor Invokes Jailed Relatives to Highlight Racism in Jury Selection

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Republican Clown Show on Obamacare Has Already Started

Mother Jones

Today’s hearing into the Obamacare website almost immediately descended into farce. Emma Roller provides the basics:

With a look of what can only be described as pure glee, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) pointed out a warning on healthcare.gov saying the information users enter is less private than typical medical forms.

He went on to press Campbell an executive at CGI, trying to get her to say the website violates the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. “You know it’s not HIPAA compliant,” he told her. “Admit it! You’re under oath!” Campbell demurred, and Rep. Frank Pallone swooped in to save the day:

Pallone: I started out in my opening statements saying there was no legitimacy to this hearing, and the last line of questioning certainly confirms that. HIPAA only applies when there’s health information being provided. That’s not in play here today—no health information is required in the application process, and why is that? Because pre-existing conditions don’t matter! So once again, here we have my Republican colleagues trying to scare everybody—

Etc.

That’s all funny enough. But the cherry on top comes from Sarah Kliff, who provides a snapshot of the HTML code that Barton is upset about:

The warning that Barton is objecting to isn’t even active code. The HTML tag in the pink oval means that everything which follows has been “commented out.” The seven lines of code above don’t show up anywhere on the actual website and are never executed in any way. It’s just boilerplate that was taken from somewhere else, and then edited.

This is what I was talking about earlier this morning when I suggested that Republicans are unlikely to hold serious hearings. This kind of thing is just embarrassingly ignorant. A few more like this, demonstrating that Republicans are flailing around looking for partisan cudgels rather than genuinely trying to investigate a procurement process gone wrong, and the press will simply lose interest. And they’ll be right to.

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Republican Clown Show on Obamacare Has Already Started

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Darrell Issa Has Yet Another Bombshell for Us

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen alerts me today to Darrell Issa’s latest bombshell: carefully edited excerpts from interviews with two IRS employees who say that the tea party targeting orders came from “Washington.” In a press release from Issa, in which he oddly quotes his appearance on CNN instead of just quoting himself directly, Issa says, “As late as last week, the administration was still trying to say the IRS targeting scandal was from a few rogue agents in Cincinnati, when in fact the indication is that they were directly being ordered from Washington.”

Right. In case you’re waiting on the edge of your seat for more from these whistleblowers, it’s worth noting that when they say “Washington,” they’re not talking about the White House. They’re talking about attorneys from the IRS’s EO division in Washington DC. EO stands for “Exempt Organizations,” so these are exactly the attorneys you’d expect to handle questions about tax exempt organizations. What’s more, the interaction between the line workers in Cincinnati and the EO attorneys in Washington DC is already well known, because it was covered in the Inspector General’s report that was released a couple of weeks ago.

In other words, there’s almost certainly nothing new here. The EO attorneys tried to figure out what the IRS regs covering 501(c)4 groups meant, and had a hard time of it because the regs are hard to make sense of. In the end, the whole thing turned into a major league botch, but we already knew that. All you have to do is read the IG report if you want to know about how things played out between the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati and the EO lawyers in DC.

I’m sure we’ll hear more from Issa shortly. Just keep all this background in mind the next time you see him flailing away on TV.

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Darrell Issa Has Yet Another Bombshell for Us

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We’ve Hit the Carbon Level We Were Warned About. Here’s What That Means.

Mother Jones

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This interactive explainer originally appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Over the last couple weeks, scientists and environmentalists have been keeping a particularly close eye on the Hawaii-based monitoring station that tracks how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, as the count tiptoed closer to a record-smashing 400 parts per million. Thursday, we finally got there: The daily mean concentration was higher than at any time in human history, NOAA reported Friday.

Don’t worry: The earth is not about to go up in a ball of flame. The 400 ppm mark is only a milestone, 50 ppm over what legendary NASA scientist James Hansen has since 1988 called the safe zone for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, and yet only halfway to what the IPCC predicts we’ll reach by the end of the century.

“Somehow in the last 50 ppm we melted the Arctic,” said environmentalist and founder of activist group 350.org Bill McKibben, who called today’s news a “grim but predictable milestone” and has long used the symbolic number as a rallying call for climate action. “We’ll see what happens in the next 50.”

We could find out soon enough: With the East Coast still recovering from Superstorm Sandy and the West gearing up for what promises to be a nasty fire season, University of California ecologist Max Moritz says milestones like these are “an excuse for us to take a good hard look at where we are,” especially as the carbon concentration shows no signs of reversing course.

Scientists first saw the carbon scale tip past 400 ppm last summer, but only briefly; the record reported today by NOAA is the first time a daily average has surpassed that point. For the last several years concentrations have hovered in the 390s, and we’re still not to the point where the carbon concentration will stay above the 400 ppm threshold permanently. But that’s just around the corner, said J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society.

“It’s clear that sometime next year we’ll see 400 consistently,” he said. “Avoiding the future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in greenhouse gases.”

Most scientists, environmentalists, and climate-conscious policymakers agree this will require, at a minimum, slashing the use of fossil fuels, and in the meantime, taking steps to adapt for a world with higher temperatures, higher seas, and more extreme weather. For example, according to Hansen, the world will need to completely stop burning coal by 2030 if returning to 350 ppm is to remain possible. What’s the holdup? Texas Tech climatologist Katherine Hayhoe blames “the inertia of our economic system, and the inertia of our political system.” But she, like most of her peers, believe it can—and must—be done: “We have to change how we get our energy and how we use our energy.”

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We’ve Hit the Carbon Level We Were Warned About. Here’s What That Means.

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Infectious Salmon Anemia Threat Divides Scientists

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Codex: Tau Empire – Games Workshop

Codex: Tau Empire is your comprehensive guide to unleashing the might of the Tau upon the battlefields of the 41 st Millennium. This volume introduces the four Tau castes, the Ethereals, and their mercenary allies. This dynamic race has begun its Third Sphere Expansion, setting forth into the stars to grow the borders of their burgeoning empire and bring the […]

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Trident K9 Warriors – Michael Ritland & Gary Brozek

As Seen on “60 Minutes”! As a Navy SEAL during a combat deployment in Iraq, Mike Ritland saw a military working dog in action and instantly knew he’d found his true calling. Ritland started his own company training and supplying dogs for the SEAL teams, U.S. Government, and Department of Defense. He knew that fewer than 1 percent of […]

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Warhammer: High Elves – Games Workshop

Warhammer: High Elves is the indispensible guide to the mighty realm of Ulthuan, its regal lords and glorious armies. This book details Ulthuan’s turbulent history from the first cataclysmic war against Chaos, through years of schism, decline and determined defiance, and provides you with full rules to field a High Elf army in games of Warhammer. […]

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

A fresh look at what goes on inside the minds of dogs “that causes one’s dog-loving heart to flutter with astonishment and gratitude” (The New York Times Book Review)—from a cognitive scientist with a background at The New Yorker. As one of the millions of dog owners in America, Horowitz is naturally curious to learn what her dog thinks about and knows. And […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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The Honest Life – Jessica Alba

As a new mom, Jessica Alba wanted to create the safest, healthiest environment for her family. But she was frustrated by the lack of trustworthy information on how to live healthier and cleaner—delivered in a way that a busy mom could act on without going to extremes. In 2012, with serial entrepreneur Brian Lee and environmental advocate Christopher Gavigan, […]

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The Genius of Dogs – Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods

Brian Hare, dog researcher, evolutionary anthropologist, and founder of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, and Vanessa Woods offer revolutionary new insights into dog intelligence and the interior lives of our smartest pets. In the past decade, we have learned more about how dogs think than in the last century. Breakthroughs in cognitive science, pioneered by […]

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The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of German shepherds and as t […]

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All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition – Mel Bartholomew

Rapidly increasing in popularity, square foot gardening is the most practical, foolproof way to grow a home garden. That explains why author and gardening innovator Mel Bartholomew has sold more than two million books describing how to become a successful DIY square foot gardener. Now, with the publication of All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition , t […]

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Cesar Millan’s Short Guide to a Happy Dog – Cesar Millan

After more than 9 seasons as TV’s Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan has a new mission: to use his unique insights about dog psychology to create stronger, happier relationships between humans and their canine companions. Both inspirational and practical, A Short Guide to a Happy Dog draws on thousands of training encounter […]

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Infectious Salmon Anemia Threat Divides Scientists

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