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If You Don’t Click on This Classy Post, You Are a Loser and a Moron

Mother Jones

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Four days after mocking Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for being captured in Vietnam, Donald Trump is at the top of the Republican presidential polls. Despite his history of political flip flops, Trump has gained traction with red-meat-loving conservatives by skewering and belittling establishment figures such as McCain and Karl Rove, questioning President Barack Obama’s legitimacy, and attacking undocumented immigrants. But he’s also been quick to fling insults at anyone who ever says anything bad about him—other celebrities, journalists, legislators, and this one poor guy from Bermuda. Donald Trump insults people.

And now you, too, can be insulted by the tirade-prone tycoon—with the Mother Jones Donald Trump Insult Generator™. Just enter your name (or your friend’s name, or the name of your favorite stupid clown political pundit with bad ratings) and give it a spin. Just don’t expect an apology:

var get_name = function()
var form = $(‘#name_form’);
form.hide();
var name = form.find(‘inputtype=”text”‘).val();
tabletop_callback = function(response)
data = process_data(response);
data’user_name’ = name;
register_templates();
init_headline_generator();
check_query();

start_random_sentence_maker(spreadsheet, proxy);
return false;
};

var spreadsheet = “1eTi1J0Fc_uC_ODlnpNgIQWvTw1h0kcI_3T2P-7sqSWU”;
var proxy = ”;
var fb_description = ‘Trump Insult Generator’
var fb_picture = ‘http://www.motherjones.com/sites/all/themes/mobile/images/mobile_logo.png’;
var fb_app_id = ‘119572928091379’;
var templates =
‘subjectnametwice1 user_name subjectnametwice2 user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘user_namesubjectnamefirst predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,
‘subjectnamesecond user_name predicate insult3 kicker’,

var shorturl = ”

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If You Don’t Click on This Classy Post, You Are a Loser and a Moron

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Issa’s New Scandal: An Obama Plot Against Gun Dealers

Mother Jones

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Having been booted off the Benghazi beat, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is firing up conservatives about yet another Obama scandal: a supposed White House plot to put gun dealers and other lawful merchants out of business by denying them banking services. Issa, who chairs the House oversight and government reform committee, alleges that Operation Choke Point, a Justice Department program that cracks down on fraud by scrutinizing banks and payment processors, is being used by the Obama administration to target gun sellers and other businesses the administration doesn’t fancy. “Operation Choke Point is the Justice Department’s newest abuse of power,” Issa said, in a report released May 29.

Issa wants the program dismantled, and he is deploying some of the same tactics he’s used to slam the administration on Benghazi and the so-called IRS scandal—dumping documents, whipping the conservative media into a frenzy, and accusing the administration of overstepping the law—to get his way. The same day Issa’s report came out, the House approved an amendment to the annual Justice Department spending bill that strips the program’s funding.

Meanwhile, some Democrats are mystified that conservatives are up in arms about an anti-fraud program, and the Justice Department is emphasizing this effort has nothing to do with limiting gun-selling.

Operation Choke Point compels banks to take greater steps to prevent fraud and not engage in financial transactions with companies they suspect might be breaking the law. Under Choke Point, the Justice Department has opened civil or criminal investigations into at least 15 banks and payment processors—which serve as the middleman between banks and businesses in credit card transactions—to determine if these firms have enabled fraud.

The Justice Department is working with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on the initiative. The controversy began in part because the FDIC in 2011—years before Operation Choke Point launched—issued a list of businesses associated with high-risk activity that financial institutions should watch out for. These include enterprises peddling firearms, pornography, drug paraphernalia, and racist materials. The FDIC noted that financial institutions that “properly manage these relationships and risks are neither prohibited nor discouraged from providing payment processing services to customers operating in compliance with applicable law.” In other words, there was no reason for a bank not to handle payments for these businesses just because of the goods they sell.

Nonetheless, Issa’s report alleges that the Justice Department is using the FDIC guidance as a hit list. “The FDIC’s policy statements on firearm and ammunition sales carry additional weight in light of FDIC’s active involvement in Operation Choke Point,” the report reads. But a Justice Department official tells Mother Jones that this conclusion is incorrect. “We’re not using the FDIC’s list at all,” the official says. “There’s been a lot of misunderstanding, there’s been accusations were going after gun owners…None of our cases involve gun merchants or porn.”

The Justice Department insists it’s committed to ensuring its anti-fraud campaign doesn’t inhibit lawful merchants. Issa, though, claims that Attorney General Eric Holder knew that banks would drop clients deemed “high risk” by the government, such as gun-sellers, as a result of Operation Choke Point. His report cites a recent Washington Times article reporting that a number of firearms merchants had their bank accounts shut down, supposedly because of the Obama administration. “The experience of firearms and ammunitions merchants…calls into question the sincerity of the Department’s statements,” the report states. Fox News promoted this charge, declaring, “The Obama administration, after failing to get gun control passed on Capitol Hill, has resorted to using its executive power to try to put some in the firearms industry out of business, House Republican investigators say.”

The Justice Department maintains there’s no reason banks should feel threatened by the government for doing business with certain industries, including gun-dealers. The Justice Department official notes that when the department subpoenas banks, it’s looking for payment processors that might be engaging in fraud. “We’re not saying give us all the docs you have on risky businesses,” the official says.

What about the gun-sellers who say their bank accounts were shut down? One of the gun-merchants who was cited in the Washington Times, and who says he’s a victim of Operation Choke Point, first complained publicly about his dispute with Bank of America long before the initiative was launched. The other banks in the story wouldn’t say why they closed the accounts. The Justice Department official says the agency isn’t sure why the gun merchants’ accounts were allegedly shut down, because the information its investigations have obtained does not include any links to gun dealers. “Banks are making their own assessments, that’s not something we can control,” the official says. (Last month, when several news outlets reported that JPMorgan Chase & Co shut down the accounts of people in the porn industry because of Operation Choke Point, a Chase official told Mother Jones that the government program had nothing to do with the bank’s action.)

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and a number of other Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), support Operation Choke Point. “It is a mystery to me why Chairman Issa is attacking the Department of Justice for cracking down on fraud against American consumers,” Cummings tells Mother Jones. “Contrary to the chairman’s accusations, documents produced to the committee show that the Department is using lawful investigative techniques to reduce consumer fraud.” In over 850 pages of internal Justice Department documents that Issa released, there isn’t a single mention of firearms dealers.

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Issa’s New Scandal: An Obama Plot Against Gun Dealers

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Elizabeth Warren: Big Banks Should Reveal Their Donations to Influential Think Tanks

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on the biggest US banks to disclose their donations to think tanks, which influence laws that affect them.

Under current law, banks and other corporations are not required to publicly report their contributions to think tanks. That means that lawmakers who use think tank data and analysis to shape laws and regulations designed to police banks do not know how much bank money influences that research. “A lot of the power of big banks over DC comes from donations to think tanks, who then put out ‘studies’ favorable to certain ways of doing business,” says one Democratic aide. In a letter to the CEOs of the nation’s six largest financial institutions—JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley—Warren called on the companies to start voluntarily reporting their donations to these policy shops.

“To prevent future economic crises,” Warren says in the letter, “policymakers need access to objective, high-quality research, data, and analysis about our consumer and financial markets…Private think tanks are extremely well-suited to provide this research and analysis, but for it to be valuable, such research and analysis must be truly independent.”

Corporations are required to tell the public when they lobby members of Congress or government agencies, Warren says, so “the same transparency should exist for any indirect efforts banks make to influence policymaking through financial contributions to think tanks.”

Warren’s demand for think-tank money transparency is yet another approach to curbing too-big-to-fail—the problem of the biggest Wall Street banks being so large and loosely regulated that their failure would endanger the entire financial system. One of the reasons too-big-to-fail is still a problem, five years after the financial crisis, is that banks are good at weakening the laws and regulations meant to rein them in.

One way to do that is through think tanks. The Roosevelt Institute, for example, recently published a report on the successes and failures of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act. If the Institute had received loads of Wall Street cash, it might have been motivated to minimize the failures of the law, and thus further regulation.

Warren’s letter comes a few days after the president and vice-president of the centrist think tank Third Way wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed warning Democrats against following Warren over a “populist cliff.” The Nation reported this week that Third Way employs a Washington consulting firm that represents financial institutions including MasterCard and Deutsche Bank.

The letter also comes on the heels of a recent defeat for corporate contribution transparency advocates. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a Wall Street regulator, considered forcing corporations to disclose the money they spend on campaigns and elections. But just this week, the agency announced it had dropped that issue from its 2014 priority list.

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Elizabeth Warren: Big Banks Should Reveal Their Donations to Influential Think Tanks

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Why Climate Change Skeptics and Evolution Deniers Joined Forces

green4us

New research offers some fascinating clues. Are religion and end times thinking now wrapped up with the denial of global warming? Igor Zh./Shutterstock All across the country—most recently, in the state of Texas—local battles over the teaching of evolution are taking on a new complexion. More and more, it isn’t just evolution under attack, it’s also the teaching of climate science. The National Center for Science Education, the leading group defending the teaching of evolution across the country, has even broadened its portfolio: Now, it protects climate education too. How did these issues get wrapped up together? On its face, there isn’t a clear reason—other than a marriage of convenience—why attacks on evolution and attacks on climate change ought to travel side by side. After all, we know why people deny evolution: Religion, especially the fundamentalist kind. And we know why people deny global warming: Free market ideology and libertarianism. These are not, last I checked, the same thing. (If anything, libertarians may be the most religiously skeptical group on the political right.) And yet clearly there’s a relationship between the two issue stances. If you’re in doubt, watch this Climate Desk video of a number of members of Congress citing religion in the context of questioning global warming: Indeed, recent research suggests that Christian “end times” believers are less likely to see a need for action on global warming. And now new research by Yale’s Dan Kahan further reaffirms that there’s something going on here. More specifically, Kahan showed that there is a correlation (.25, which is weak to modest, but significant) between a person’s religiosity and his or her tendency to think that global warming isn’t much of a risk. Perhaps even more tellingly, Kahan also found that among highly religious individuals, as their ability to comprehend science increases, so does their denial of the risk posed by global warming. Here’s some data he presented: Among the highly religious, more science comprehension translates into less concern about global warming. Dan Kahan There are two major possibilities. And there is probably some truth to both of them.”I have to say, those effects are bigger than I would have expected,” wrote Kahan of his findings. The researcher went on to say that he isn’t sure why greater religiosity predicts greater denial of climate change. But in his data—with a representative sample of over 2,000 Americans—it clearly does. There is the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory. In other words, anti-evolutionists and climate deniers were both getting dumped on so much by the scientific community that they sort of naturally joined forces. And that makes sense: We know that in general, people gather their issue stances in bunches, because those stances travel together in a group (often under the aegis of a political party). But there’s also the “declining trust in science” theory, according to which political conservatives have, in general, become distrustful of the scientific community (we have data showing this is the case), and this has infected how they think about several different politicized scientific issues. And who knows: Perhaps the distrust started with the evolution issue. It is easy to imagine how a Christian conservative who thinks liberal scientists are full of it on evolution would naturally distrust said scientists on other issues as well. Further research will no doubt unravel what’s going on here. In the meantime, we can simply observe: In the political science wars that have wracked America for well over a decade, both sides are consolidating their forces.

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Why Climate Change Skeptics and Evolution Deniers Joined Forces

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Why Climate Change Skeptics and Evolution Deniers Joined Forces

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The Filibuster Is Dead (Partly)

Mother Jones

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CNN reports that by a vote of 52-48 in the Senate, the filibuster of judicial and executive branch nominees has been eliminated. The nuclear option has been detonated.

UPDATE: I was in the middle of writing a post about this when the vote was taken. Here’s what I was writing:

A few minutes before the vote, Dana Bash was on CNN talking about the Democratic effort to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominees. “It’s going to make things a lot more tense in the Senate, if you can believe that,” she said. “I imagine it will provoke a lot of anger on the Republican side,” said another anchor. This was followed by some back-and-forth about just how angry Republicans would get and how they’d take advantage of this during next year’s midterms.

This is typical, and telling. Republican anger is always taken as a given, and always treated as genuine. But for some reason Democrats don’t get the same consideration. This despite the fact that Democrats stepped away from this brink several times already earlier this year, and the only reason they’re going forward now is because Republicans have finally pissed them off beyond endurance. Even the moderates have reached the end of their ropes. If things are tenser now in the Senate, Republican need only look in the mirror to find the cause. They’re no longer even pretending that they’ll allow President Obama to perform the normal functions of his office—functions that every other president in history has performed without any serious obstacles.

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The Filibuster Is Dead (Partly)

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