Category Archives: Mop

Nancy Pelosi Repeatedly Calls Steve Bannon a “White Supremacist”

by MarionTillery Posted on February 2, 2017

Mother Jones

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has added her name to a growing list of Democrats to denounce Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, as a “white supremacist”—a label she repeatedly used on Thursday to criticize Bannon’s recent appointment to the National Security Council.

“What’s making America less safe is to have a white supremacist named to the National Security Council as a permanent member, while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Director of National Intelligence are told, ‘Don’t call us we’ll call you,'” Pelosi said during her weekly press conference.

“It’s a stunning thing that a white supremacist would be a permanent member of the National Security Council,” she continued.

President Trump’s decision to grant Bannon a permanent seat at the National Security Council, a role that will provide the former Breitbart CEO access to the most sensitive pieces of government information, has sparked an outcry of opposition from those protesting his deep roots to the alt-right community and record of spreading Islamophobia.

The increased alarm also comes amid outrage over some of the Trump’s latest policy announcements, including an executive order temporarily stopping all refugee resettlement, and barring immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. Bannon, along with White House adviser Stephen Miller, reportedly helped write the executive order.

The Trump administration is also reportedly considering restructuring a counter-terrorism program to no longer include a focus on white supremacists by instead concentrating its efforts solely on Islam.

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Nancy Pelosi Repeatedly Calls Steve Bannon a “White Supremacist”

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Could This Anti-Immigrant Hardliner Grab a Top Border Patrol Spot?

by AdriannHaggard Posted on February 2, 2017

Mother Jones

As the Trump administration rolled out its “Muslim ban,” detaining hundreds of travelers and sparking protests at airports across the country, the agency in charge of implementing the order was operating without a chief of staff. Who might get the No. 3 spot at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) remains a mystery despite reports that it will be an anti-immigration hardliner.

Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that President Donald Trump had named Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), as CBP’s new chief of staff. That report was based on a tweet by an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, as well as a Politico story that reported that Kirchner was serving “a temporary political appointment” at CBP.

However, CBP has not officially named Kirchner or anyone else as its new chief of staff. After issuing several cagey responses to questions about the alleged appointment, the agency’s press office confirmed that Kirchner is working as “an advisor to the commissioner’s office” and “her status hasn’t changed.” Attempts to reach Kirchner for comment were unsuccessful. Trump named his new chief of Border Patrol, Ronald Vitiello,* on Tuesday.

If Kirchner is indeed Trump’s pick, it would be another sign that he’s doubling down on his promises to crack down on immigrants. Like Trump, Kirchner has characterized immigrants and refugees as dangerous and costly. Last September, Breitbart published parts of a statement written by Kirchner, who was then working as an adviser to the Trump campaign. “Before President Obama’s failed presidency comes to an end, he is trying to force Americans to accept 30 percent more refugees—providing ISIS a path for their terrorists to enter the country,” she claimed. “In recent years, hundreds of foreign born terrorists have been apprehended in the United States alone.” She also wrote that “instead of providing free healthcare to millions of refugees, we must focus on rebuilding our inner cities and bringing jobs back to America.”

Kirchner joined FAIR in 2005 as its director of government relations. In 2007, she became the organization’s executive director. During her tenure, FAIR launched an initiative to end the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision, which grants citizenship to all children born on American soil, regardless of whether their parents are legal residents. In 2010, FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, had a hand in crafting Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which required police to detain individuals suspected of being illegal immigrants and made it a misdemeanor for immigrants not to carry their immigration papers. (The Supreme Court subsequently found most of SB 1070’s provisions unconstitutional.)

FAIR describes itself as a nonpartisan organization focused on limiting all immigration. The Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized it as a “hate group” with nativist ties. In return, FAIR has called SPLC a “basket of partisan propaganda artists masquerading as public policy advocates” and has filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that the group is engaged in illegal political activity.

FAIR and its representatives have a history of taking extreme stands and making racially charged statements. In a 1997 Wall Street Journal article, Tucker Carlson quoted FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein, as saying, “Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not those with high ones?” One of FAIR’s field representatives wrote in 2005 that Mexicans were at risk of turning California into a “third world cesspool.” FAIR’s founder and former director John Tanton has warned of the “Latin onslaught” and has said the United States should remain a majority-white country, writing, “One of my prime concerns is about the decline of folks who look like you and me.” After a 2011 New York Times article exposed Tanton’s racist statements and ties to Holocaust deniers, eugenicists, and racists, he quietly dialed back his role in the organization. He remains on its advisory board.

Trump’s ties to FAIR also extend through Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, who conducted polling and research for the group beginning in the mid-1990s. Last December, Stein, FAIR’s president, said Conway’s work for FAIR had a visible impact on Trump’s immigration policies: “We saw that influence helping to shape Donald Trump’s positions and statements once she came on board.”

In August 2015, Kirchner left FAIR to join Trump’s campaign as an immigration adviser. During her time with the campaign, Trump made his promises to build a massive border wall and implement a ban on “Muslim immigration.” Last August, Trump visited Arizona to deliver an inflammatory speech on immigration. “We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate,” he said. “It is our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here.” Trump emphasized immigrants’ ties to violent crime and claimed that illegal immigration costs the United States $113 billion annually—a figure taken from a debunked study published by FAIR under Kirchner’s watch.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Ronald Vitiello.

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Could This Anti-Immigrant Hardliner Grab a Top Border Patrol Spot?

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Students With Valid Visas Are Trapped in Limbo Abroad

by TommieGrout Posted on January 30, 2017

Mother Jones

On Saturday morning, Niki Mossafer Rahmati got off her flight from Tehran in Doha, Qatar to board a connecting flight to Boston, when she got caught up in the chaos set off by President Trump’s immigration order.

Rahmati, an MIT junior studying mechanical engineering, had been home with her family for winter break when she received word Wednesday morning of the pending executive order. She changed her flight to return to Boston right away, only to find that order had gone into effect in the middle of her connecting flight to Doha. She and some 30 other Iranians with legal visas were blocked from boarding the plane and sent back to Tehran. Among them, Rahmati says, were two women traveling to their pregnant daughters to help them through their last trimester.

“Do any of the people sound like illegal immigrants?” Rahmati asked in a public Facebook post after arriving back home in Tehran. “This will not secure the borders from terrorism and illegal immigrants. It will only increase racism in the American society. The president is trying to make Islamophobia a norm and policy by which he wants to lead the country.”

“My inbox is flooded with messages and emails of love and support,” she also wrote. “But I cannot believe all this love is coming from the same country that banned me from entering its borders just a couple of hours ago.”

Rahmati is just one among many students from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen who have been barred from returning to school. MIT alone has 38 students from Iran, 1 from Iraq, 5 from Syria, 2 from Sudan, and 1 from Somalia; two, including Rahmati, were reportedly unable to board flights back to Boston. According to the New York Times, students from Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, among other universities, have also been affected.

Yesterday, after thousands of protesters stormed US airports to fight for the release of people detained upon arrival, a federal judge in Brooklyn blocked part of President Trump’s order by temporarily allowing valid visa holders who had landed in the US to stay. Federal judges in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington quickly followed suit, with the Massachusetts order additionally restraining enforcement of the order for visa holders traveling back to the US in the next seven days.

In response, MIT issued an statement urging students and staff to “fly back to Boston—directly to Logan Airport—as soon as possible, and before February 4.” Whether or not the court order will be respected by Custom and Border Protection officials abroad is unknown.

Rahmati is a member of the sorority Sigma Kappa and counselor for the MIT chapter of Camp Kesem, a national nonprofit that operates free summer camps for children whose parents have had cancer. For weeks before heading home for break, Rahmati had been fundraising for this summer’s camp. After the election, Rahmati encouraged her friends to keep an open mind to Trump supporters, according to her roommate.

As news of her situation has spread, the MIT community sprang into action, calling elected officials and circulating a White House petition. At this writing, her ability to return to MIT to finish her undergraduate remains uncertain.

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Students With Valid Visas Are Trapped in Limbo Abroad

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The Long History of "Nazi Punching"

by MaureenPaten444 Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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By now many have seen the video of an unidentified man punching white nationalist Richard Spencer in the face during inauguration weekend. Much in the way that the new president’s vicious campaign rhetoric gave voice to the deeper resentments of some of his supporters, the assault on Spencer seems to have offered a cathartic and even comedic outlet for those on the left who were angered by thoughts of Trumpians goose-stepping through the streets of DC as Trump entered the White House. Since the video emerged, social media users have set the footage to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and the Hamilton soundtrack, and comedian Tim Heidecker even wrote his own tune to celebrate the bashing. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted, “I don’t care how many songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.” Journalists for the New York Times and other major outlets were soon mulling over the question at hand: “Is it OK to punch a Nazi?” A website, isitokaytopunchanazi.com, answered with a gleeful loop of the attack, with one neon-yellow word superimposed atop it: “Yes.”

Yet, this was more than just a morbid social-media sideshow: The attack on Spencer is part of a perennial conflict that may again be escalating. For decades, far-right extremists have faced the militant wrath of “antifas” (short for anti-fascists). With Trump’s campaign having summoned all sorts of white supremacists and other trolls from under their bridges, the old war—which I first got a front-row glimpse into a decade ago—appears ready to re-ignite.

This beef goes back to before World War II, when in Europe, a nascent authoritarian movement inspired by Hitler, Mussolini, and Francisco Franco squared off against a popular front coalition of liberals and radicals. At the Battle of Cable Street, in October 1936, Oswald Mosley brought 2,000 members of his British Union of Fascists to march through London’s Jewish East End neighborhood and 100,000 anti-fascists showed up to oppose them. In the resulting melee, Jews, Irishmen, Communists, anarchists, and socialists beat Mosley’s men with sticks, rocks, and sawed-off chair-legs. Local women dumped their chamber pots out of windows onto the heads of Mosley’s men.

Similar conflicts played out several decades later in America. In 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, the American Communist Party organized a rally called “Kill the Klan Day.” TV crews filmed as a nine-car caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis suddenly showed up and shot at marchers, murdering five participants, though no one was ever convicted of the crime. (In 2014, one self-proclaimed participant, Frazier Glenn Miller, went on a shooting spree at a Jewish cultural center in Kansas, murdering three people. The 74-year-old had just been diagnosed with lung cancer; he said that he “wanted to make damned sure I killed some Jews or attacked the Jews before I died.”)

In 1982, a street gang in Minneapolis named the Baldies began committing what they described as “righteous violence”—a term apocryphally attributed to Henry David Thoreau to describe John Brown’s attack at Harpers Ferry—against neo-Nazis who had started to appear in the city. The Baldies and their opponents both adopted the fashion of British punks—bomber jackets, bald heads, boots and braces—and kicked the Nazis, quite literally, out of town. On one occasion they even collaborated with now Congressman Keith Ellison, then a law student at the University of Minnesota, to lead a protest. “I remember he and the rest of the Black Law Student Association were friendly with us,” a founder of the Baldies told the Minneapolis City Pages. “I think they were just intrigued because we were so young and because we were anti-racist skinheads, which was weird to them.”

The battles in the Twin Cities were followed by a wider spread of neo-Nazi violence. In 1988, three members of a gang called White Aryan Resistance beat a 28-year-old Ethiopian student named Mulugata Serew to death in Portland, Oregon. In 1998, skinheads murdered Daniel Shearsty and Spit Newburn, a pair of anti-racists and best friends from Las Vegas—one black, one a white Marine—in the Nevada desert. The next year, a member of the racist cult World Church of the Creator went on a shooting spree in Indiana, gunning down nine Orthodox Jews, an African-American man, and a Korean graduate student before killing himself.

Anti-fascist groups like Anti-Racist Action, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, and the Love and Rage Anarchist Federation fought back. Their members advocated “direct action” against white supremacists, eschewing legislative efforts in favor of physically preventing Nazis from organizing, distributing literature, and speaking in public. To their supporters, these groups merged the moralism of America’s abolitionist tradition with the nihilism of punk rock, and boiled the culture wars down to their most primal element: vicious brawls over racism, sexism, and homophobia. The logic of their direct action was that, if a white-supremacist leader inspired someone to commit a hate crime, police couldn’t intervene until after a violent action had taken place. Anti-fascists wouldn’t wait. “Racism is an idea,” one anonymous ARA member said in the 2000 documentary Invisible Revolution, but “fascism is an idea mixed with action. It took fascism to establish Jim Crow and before that, slavery….Anti-Semitism has been around a long time but it took fascism to make the Holocaust….When you cross that threshold, you negate your rights to a calm, collective conversation.”

My own introduction to what anti-fascism looked like took place in South Philadelphia in 2004, where I attended a house party arranged around a half-keg of High Life in the kitchen. At the center of the gathered crew of mohawked kids was a man named Joe, whose skinny crimson suspenders strained over a swell of jiggling belly. A leader of ARA’s Philadelphia chapter, Joe regaled us with a story about a stranger in a pub who’d once called him a faggot. “So I grabbed this motherfucker by the collar,” he said, “and I dragged him outside.” In the parking lot, Joe explained, he beat the man unconscious. The tale was horrific. But it was also surprising—because Joe was gay, it turned out, as were many of his Philly ARA comrades. He wasn’t insulted by being called a faggot; he was insulted that someone would think there was anything wrong with being one.

“How does it feel!” Joe thundered, when he’d gotten to the climax of his yarn, in which he knocked his antagonist down and kicked him in the head repeatedly. Everyone laughed as Joe pantomimed his victory over the man by stomping the floor of the kitchen with his steel-toe combat boots: “How does it feel to get your head kicked in by a faggot?”

With the dawn of the Trump era, the Joes of the country may be stirring, and Spencer and his fans seem to sense it. On Tuesday, Spencer’s supporters offered a $3,000 bounty to anyone who could identify the alt-right leader’s assailant, and Spencer called for the formation of alt-right vigilante squads to prevent future attacks. “The ANTIFA thug who violently assaulted Spencer hid his face behind a mask,” an anonymous commenter said, “but some think they caught a glimpse of his face. There’s not much to go on—but let’s identify the ANTIFA criminal who punched Richard Spencer.”

Meanwhile, the same day that Spencer was assaulted, a 25-year-old anti-fascist was shot in the stomach during an inauguration protest at the University of Washington, allegedly by an alt-right sympathizer. New groups adopting an anti-fascist outlook such as Redneck Revolt, John Brown Militia, and the Bastards Motorcycle Club appear poised to revive the direct-action tactics of the 1980s and ’90s in order to confront white supremacists emboldened by Trump. Anti-Racist Action’s 20 or so chapters around the country have also promised to join the fray. The day after the inauguration, ARA’s branch in Louisville, Kentucky, posted on their website:

For decades, white supremacists were the face of the enemy and only a minute few dared show their true colors in public. This made them easy to dismiss, easy to ignore…However, recent events have proven that the fascist ideology has not only survived but thrived…Now, their labors of hatred have been rewarded with a sympathetic President-Elect and a federal Congress that is, at best, indifferent to their evil.

A warning to those who wish to destroy what we hold dear; We will resist you in the streets, in the poll booths and in the townhouses. Whether it’s in the bars, the concert halls, the conference centers or even City Hall, we will not allow a platform for your dangerous and divisive ideas. We will not allow history to repeat itself. We will shut you down everywhere you go. We will block your marches. We will interrupt your speeches. We will protest your legislation. We will be the thorn in your side. The glass in your bread. The pain in your ass.

Trump’s presidency is already promising to turn back the clock on American progress in multiple ways, with women’s rights, racial justice, and environmental protections under siege. The return of the war between fascists and anti-fascists is another expression of our current political atavism. This time, given a uniquely pugilistic president of the United States, the battle may rage hotter than ever.

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The Long History of "Nazi Punching"

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20 Unexpected Ways to Use Dish Soap

by JeremiahLongstre Posted on January 24, 2017

I am one of those gals who geeks out pretty quickly when I discover multiple uses for any given household product.

These days I’ve been a big fan of multi-use products like Castile soap, distilled white vinegar and baking soda; dish soap is a fabulous new addition to the list. Who knew?

Chances are, you already have a big bottle of this tucked underneath your kitchen sink. So, break out the dish soap and get ready to have your mind blown!

25 Unexpected Ways to Use Dish Soap

1) Remove greasy build-up in your hair.

Hair oil and daily grime can build up in your hair over time. Try mixing a little squirt of dishwashing liquid into your shampoo, then moisturize well for a renewed shine.

2)Deep clean your blender.

Rather than disassembling the entire unit to deep clean, fill your blenderpartway with warm water and a few drops of dishwashing detergent. Run for a few seconds, empty, rinse and air dry.

3) Wash away ants.

Ants can be an extremely invasive species; you don’t want them in your home! Get rid of ants with a 50/50 solution of water and white distilled vinegar, with a few drops of dish soap. Spray, wait a few minutes and wipe up the mess.

4) Kill weeds kindly.

Make a natural weed-killer that is free of harmful herbicides by mixing one teaspoon of dishwashing liquid with a cup of salt and one gallon of distilled white vinegar. Spray the solution on weeds that are taking root in the cracks of your sidewalks.

5) Freshen up your makeup brushes.

Make a light solution of warm water and a couple drops of dish soap then shake to combine. Gently swirl your brushes in the solution, then rub on your hand or a soft cloth to removeproduct from the bristles. Air dry.

6) Make bubbles.

This is an excellent activity to do with kids! Many people use this recipe in schools and at children’s museums: mix together 1/2 cup of dishwashing soap, 1/2 gallon of warm water and 1 tablespoon glycerin (available at any drug store). Stir gently, skim the foam off the top and dip in your bubble wand for endless fun.


7) Get grease out of your pet’s hair.

There’s a reason why Dawn is the International Bird Rescue Research Center’s cleaner of choice after an oil spill. Dishwashing soap like dawn removes greasewithout harming the animal’s skin. It’s also biodegradable and phosphate-free!

8) Shineyour windows.

Mix a few drops of dish soap in 1 gallon of water, then fill a spray bottle of your choice. Spray and wipe as you would with any conventional window cleaner.

9) De-ice the sidewalk.

Tis the season for icy weather. To de-ice your steps and sidewalk, mix 1 teaspoon of dishwashing liquid with 1 tablespoon of rubbing alcohol, and half a gallon of hot water. Pour over your walkways. They won’t refreeze!

10) Soften your cuticles pre-home manicure.

Soak your fingers in a shallow dish of dish soap. It will make your cuticles soft and malleable, while removing oils from your fingernails.

11) Scrub your linoleum floors.

Just a few drops of dish soap in 8-ounces of water makes for a great floor cleaning solution. Spray on the floor, or use with a mop, to remove dirt and debris.

12) Repel pests from your houseplants.

Don’t buy a chemical spray. Instead, remove pests on your houseplants (including aphids) by spraying with a mild solution of a drop or two of dish soap with warm water.

13) Clear foggy eyeglass lenses.

Place a small drop of dish soap on your finger and rub on your glasses lenses to remove streaks. Rinse with water and air dry or wipe with a dry cloth.

14) Clean the toilet bowl.

Keep a solution of a few drops of dish soap and water in a glass jar in your bathroom or cleaning closet. Pour into your toilet bowl and scrub as normal for a nice clean.

15) Soothe a poison ivy rash.

Poison ivy spreads via oil within rash blisters. To keep a poison ivy rash from spreading, wash it with dish soap to dry up poison ivy fluid and soothe the itch.

16) Degrease your tools.

Rub a small amount of dish soap over grease spots on your household tools. This will also prevent rust from forming on your items!

17) Pre-treat oil stains on clothing.

Dish soap is an excellent remedy to any oil-based stain. Great examples are butter, motor oil, cooking oil and lipstick. Just apply dish soap directly to the stain, then scrub with a small brush until the oil is removed. Launder normally.

18) Put togethera makeshift ice pack.

Here’s a fun one! Fill a zip-type sandwich bag with dish soap, close and freeze. It stays cold much longer than water and can be re-frozen indefinitely, while remaining malleable.

19) Remove paint from hands.

Paint can be tough to remove from the skin. Scrub with dish soap to dissolve oily paints and then wash as you would normally.

20) Unclog your kitchen sink disposal.

If your dish disposal has taken on more than it can handle, pour approximately 1/4 cup of dish soap down the drain, then follow with boiling water. Let sit. Test the drain.

Which of these tips do you think you’ll start using? Let us know in the comments!

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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20 Unexpected Ways to Use Dish Soap

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Riveting Moments From Donald Trump Inauguration Protests—Updated

by BarbaraNewcomer Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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In the coming days, crowds of Donald Trump supporters will take to the streets to welcome the new president, including at Thursday’s Make America Great Again rally at the Lincoln Memorial and Friday’s inaugural parade outside the White House.

But a whole lot of people are organizing to protest Trump, including more than 1 million people who are expected to participate in women’s marches around the world.

Here are highlights from some of the protests. Come back here for more news as we update this story.

January 20

Mother Jones reporters are on the scene covering the protests ahead of today’s swearing-in ceremony:

January 19

Tensions are high as protesters confront Trump supporters attending the “Deploraball,” an inauguration celebration at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

Protesters rally outside the Trump International Hotel in New York, joined by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, filmmaker Michael Moore, actor Alec Baldwin, and other high-profile speakers.

January 18

Hundreds gather for a “Queer Dance Party” outside of Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s Chevy Chase house. Firas Nasr, founder of WERK for Peace, tells DCist that the event is meant to show that “homophobia and transphobia is wrong and should be resisted.” As Indiana’s governor, Pence had a poor record on LGBT rights, signing a bill to protect businesses that discriminated against gay people.

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Riveting Moments From Donald Trump Inauguration Protests—Updated

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Trump’s Pick to Oversee Obamacare’s Destruction Faces a Senate Grilling

by TrevorJaeztrwfd Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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When Donald Trump’s nominee to oversee the country’s health care system appears before the Senate on Wednesday morning, he can expect to face a barrage of questions not only about Republican plans to replace Obamacare, but also about whether he broke the law by profiting off health stocks.

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, is scheduled to testify Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, before he later visits the Senate Finance Committee, which will vote on his confirmation. An orthopedic surgeon who has made it his political mission to reduce regulation of the medical industry, Price has led Republican attacks on President Barack Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act. He’s one of the few members of Congress to lay out a detailed alternative, although his proposal has not been adopted by the president he hopes to work for. But Price’s ability to get confirmed in the Senate might depend less on policy than on a string of alleged ethical lapses that have come to light since his nomination was announced in November.

All of this portends a confrontational hearing and a less-than-warm reception from Senate Democrats. Here are the controversies that are most likely to emerge in the hearing.

Obamacare replacement

Republicans have stumbled toward a repeal of the Affordable Care Act since the new Congress convened at the beginning of the month. Both chambers have passed resolutions to preclude a Democratic filibuster of a repeal, but Republicans are still struggling to figure out what will take Obamacare’s place if they eradicate the law.

Price has introduced the same Affordable Care Act replacement bill in each session of Congress since the law was enacted in 2009. But Price’s plan would likely strip many poor people of insurance by ending the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid coverage to millions of low-income Americans. Price would also change the formula for determining who gets government subsidies for private insurance so that it doesn’t take income into account—meaning far more of the tax benefits would go to the wealthy than under the current system.

Is Price’s plan Trump’s plan? No one knows. Over the weekend, Trump said his plan to replace Obamacare would offer “insurance for everybody”—something Price’s plan does not seem to offer. CNN reported that Price has been excluded from the Trump team’s deliberations on health care reform so that he can avoid answering questions about those plans in his Senate hearing.

Still, Price will have to offer some sort of vision for how the Trump White House will address the health system—and just promising to repeal Obamacare won’t be enough. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released a report finding that number of people without insurance would increase by 18 million under the first year of a repeal, with that number expanding to 32 million by 2026. Premiums for individually purchased insurance would also double beyond current projections over the next decade.

Conflicts of interest

Price has been the subject of ethics concerns since Trump announced his nomination. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Price has made more than $300,000 in trades in health care stocks over the past four years, while he continued to introduce health care legislation. Democrats called foul, with one House member writing a letter to federal financial regulators requesting an investigation into whether Price’s trading broke the law. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has pushed the Office of Congressional Ethics to examine whether Price’s stock trades violated laws prohibiting members of Congress from profiting off non-public knowledge.

Over the weekend, CNN reported that Price had bought between $1,001 and $15,000 in stock in a medical device company right before he introduced a bill that would have directly helped the company. On Tuesday, Schumer said that stock purchase “could very well be a violation of the law.”

Reproductive rights

Price is a staunch opponent of abortion rights. He has voted several times for a federal 20-week abortion ban, which stands in contrast to Trump’s pledge to send the abortion debate “back to the states” when his Supreme Court picks try to overturn Roe v. Wade. But abortion isn’t the only area where Price has fought against reproductive rights. Mother Jones reported in December on the myriad ways Price has tried to restrict contraception, including defunding Planned Parenthood, gutting Obamacare’s mandate that employer-sponsored insurance plans cover contraception without a copay, and passing “personhood” bills that would make certain IUDs and the morning-after pill illegal.

Payments to doctors

In addition to expanding insurance coverage, the Affordable Care Act changed the way doctors and hospitals are compensated in order to slow the growth rate of health spending. Throughout his career, Price has complained that the government burdens doctors with too many regulations and attacked proposals that would pay doctors for results rather than for each test ordered or procedure performed. Although he can’t repeal Obamacare’s insurance expansion without congressional action, he can reverse many of the law’s medical payment reforms, since these policies are largely at the discretion of the secretary of health and human services. Even as the American Medical Association has lavished praise on Price’s nomination, a faction of doctors has rejected the AMA’s endorsement and called for more scrutiny into Price’s attacks on the Obamacare reforms.

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Trump’s Pick to Oversee Obamacare’s Destruction Faces a Senate Grilling

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How the LGBT Community Can Fight Back Against Trump

by elaine07n53512 Posted on January 14, 2017

Mother Jones

After every major LGBT rights group in America campaigned in support of Donald Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, it came as little surprise that Trump won just 14 percent of the LGBT vote on November 8. Yet, one of Trump’s most vocal and controversial cheerleaders has been a gay man, political provocateur and Breibart News writer Milo Yiannopolous. Yiannopolous—who has penned columns such as “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “The Conservative Father’s Guide to Cutting Off Activist Children”—repeatedly made headlines last year for his inflammatory rhetoric. At his gays-for-Trump event at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last summer, Yiannopolous argued the Democratic Party was “nannying us about transgender pronouns” while “pandering to an ideology that wants me dead”—his take on Islam as an anti-gay religion. He declared Trump “the most pro-gay candidate in American electoral history,” arguing Trump would be great for gay people.

Last July, Yiannopolous was banned from Twitter after inciting his followers to make racist attacks against black actress Leslie Jones. More recently, he mocked a transgender student at a college campus where he was giving a speech. Stops on Yiannopolous’ campus tour have regularly been met with protests and calls for university administrations to cancel his appearances.

When gay magazine Out put Yiannopolous on its cover last summer, the backlash was fierce and swift—especially from LGBT people of color, who recognized all too well the dangers of “normalizing” champions of bigotry.

So how should queer folk react to Yiannopolous’ hatred, and what can we do to combat it? I talked to Preston Mitchum, an LGBT rights and racial justice advocate, to find out. Mitchum—whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Huffington Post, Ebony, and more—is also a policy analyst at the Center for Health and Gender Equity and a legal research professor at Georgetown University.

What follows is our conversation about racism and sexism in the LGBT community, and what queer solidarity looks like in the face of hatred.

Mother Jones: Milo is an admitted troll, and his rhetoric is over-the-top. Should we even take him seriously?

Preston Mitchum: Queer people of color have always taken those kinds of hateful ideas—and the actions that flow therefrom—seriously. Bias is not new to the LGBT community. Our community is racist, sexist, and transphobic. But Milo feels different because of the extreme nature of his statements. His views aren’t common. But he is setting the stage for what vitriol can look like in the community if left unchecked.

Preston Mitchum

MJ: Queer folk—even white ones—are marginalized too. Why would some be receptive to ideas like Milo’s?

PM: Racism, sexism, and transphobia are foundational to this country. Queer people didn’t invent them, but we can’t separate them from the LGBT community. We internalize what we see every day. I think about people like Ben Carson, who pushes ideas that have been popularized by racists. We also learn from our experiences. So Milo being a gay man does not mean that he’s going to believe everything that I believe, because I am a black man who experiences racism and homophobia at the same time. Milo doesn’t have that experience. Part of fixing this is to first recognize that we are predisposed to discrimination and then intentionally work to undo what we have been taught about racism and misogyny.

MJ: A lot of people don’t get that.

PM: They don’t. They might understand what their own oppression looks like as a white gay man, but systemically that looks different for someone who is a woman and black and gay. People who are part of multiple marginalized communities face harsher treatment just because of their intersections. Many people don’t understand privilege. What’s worse is they don’t recognize that they contribute to other queer people’s oppression, either. The same goes for a lot of mainstream white-led LGBT organizations.

MJ: Talk about that.

PM: Mainstream white individuals and white-led organizations are oftentimes the ones who sweep statements like Milo’s under the rug. A lot of it has to do with responding to donors’ demands. If your donors are sending you money to advocate for marriage equality, that’s what you’re going to do. But there are other communities who also need the support of those groups but who have been made invisible because they don’t have the money to give them to focus on their needs. It’s incumbent on those organizations who say they care about all LGBT people to find it within their capacity to still do work on behalf of black and brown LGBT people even if they’re not paying for it. That’s what solidarity looks like.

In the past few years, I’ve noticed a more concerted effort to address certain racism, certain violence against black trans people—mainly black trans women. But I’m ready to see what that can look like big picture. What does it look like to have a black trans person on your board? What does it look like when you are actually starting something separate for black trans people in your organization? That is what I have yet to see.

At the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was led immediately by black queer and trans folk, you didn’t hear much from many white-led LGBT organizations, which was frustrating because a lot of the immediate leaders of the movement were black queer and trans people. And earlier than that, when there was a campaign to repeal DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, many white-led orgs sought the support of the NAACP. But when the crux of the Voting Rights Act was struck down by the Supreme Court that same year, there was silence from those same groups. I talked to people in LGBT organizations who were immediately defensive when that critique was brought to their attention. We have to be willing to have these conversations about racism that require us to be critiqued.

MJ: Why are those conversations difficult to have?

PM: Part of the problem is that progressives are so focused on unifying against conservatives. Unity is good, but it often silences more marginalized groups. We have to be honest about what’s happening within our own community if we want to push back against Trump. It’s easy to point out people who don’t identify as you and say, “You’re the bad person here.” It’s more difficult to look within our own community and say, “We identify and have some common ground, but there’s something about you that I know is vehemently opposed to me.”

MJ: How has this bias been manifest within the LGBT community historically?

PM: It’s hard to say. LGBT people have vocally been discussed only for the past 40 years. But even in that, the way we talk about our history is racist. Only in the past couple years have we started to mention some of the black and Puerto Rican trans women who were really at the start of Stonewall. Or acknowledge people like Bayard Rustin, who was the architect of the 1963 March on Washington. We know that is the whitewashing of history. LGBT history is no different.

MJ: How are queer people of color pushing back on that exclusion—and how can the larger community root out the bias that drives that exclusion?

PM: Black Youth Project 100—which I’m a part of—has been challenging that erasure of black queer and trans folk for the past two and a half to three years, and making sure that people who are marginalized within the LGBT community are centered and that work is done to organize around their needs. There are others doing this work. But there are things that everyone can do—and that many people have been doing. One is to come prepared with information to push back on racist and sexist rhetoric. Social media is a huge way people have been doing that. Black and brown people also need to be very blunt about how oppression treats us as queer and trans folk.

One of the things that I always want to discuss is believing the experiences of people of color. We often aren’t believed until a white person confirms our stories. I would also encourage people to donate money to organizations that do this work. That’s what people can do to help fix the problem.

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How the LGBT Community Can Fight Back Against Trump

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Today in Politics As I Experienced It

by TabathaAndrus Posted on January 14, 2017

Mother Jones

One of the benefits of being sick—oh, bollocks. There are no benefits to being sick. However, with a couple of short interludes, I slept until about 1:30 in the afternoon today, which is 4:30 for you elitist East Coasters. That means I missed the whole day. So when I finally felt well enough to reach over to the table for my tablet, I was able to take in the entire glorious panorama of 2017’s first Friday the 13th all at once. I shall now present it to you approximately as I experienced it.

Donald Trump met today with Steve Harvey, Geraldo Rivera, and a physicist who says global warming is going to be good for us.

Rep. Steve King unveiled his scale model of a wall on the Mexican border:

Very nice, don’t you think? The wall is made from graham crackers spray painted gray, and the razor wire is made from dental floss rolled around an empty saran wrap tube and stiffened using egg whites. All that’s missing is little tiny Mexicans on one side looking frustrated because they can no longer get into the United States.

Big banks continue to show gangbuster results on hopes that Trump and his congressional allies will get rid of all those annoying regulations that Obama passed after they nearly destroyed the world during the Great Crash. On the same day, Moody’s reminded us what all those regulations were about when it agreed to pay nearly a billion dollars to settle claims over “certain statements” it made during the runup to the Great Crash.

A few days ago FBI Director James Comey refused to say if the FBI was investigating Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. “I would never comment on investigations in an open forum,” he said to general snickering. Still, at least this left open the possibility that he’d inform Congress in a closed session.

No such luck—and Democrats are apoplectic. The Huffington Post collected a potpourri of comments: “No credibility…disappointed, outraged…not trust him at all…great sense of disappointment.” Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News: “I think there’s been a profound question raised as to whether director Comey is dealing in an evenhanded manner with the investigation of the Clinton emails and any investigation that may or may not be happening with respect to the Trump campaign.”

House Republicans decided by fiat that deficit spending caused by repealing Obamacare doesn’t count:

However, Newt Gingrich thinks this doesn’t go nearly far enough. The CBO is simply out of its depth dealing with the genius who fixed the Wollman Ice Rink thirty years ago. Trump is going to bring that same hard-charging, entrepreneurial spirit to Washington, and the CBO can’t deal with it:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is simply incompatible with the Trump era….It is a left-wing, corrupt, bureaucratic defender of big government and liberalism. Its scoring of ObamaCare was not just wrong, it was clearly corrupt.

….Every reform effort will get a false score from CBO. It is impossible for the current CBO to come anywhere close to an honest, accurate score of a red tape cutting, entrepreneurially hard charging system.

I’m pretty sure the proper translation of this is, “The CBO refuses to score massive tax cuts for the rich as deficit reducing.” But maybe I’m just being cynical?

The first leg of California’s bullet train will cost 50 percent more than currently budgeted, according to a review by the Federal Railroad Administration.

On the day that President Obama announced sanctions against Russia for its election hacking, the Trump national security team suddenly got as agitated as a teenage girl about to go to her first prom. Jonathan Landay and Arshad Mohammed of Reuters have the story:

Michael Flynn, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser, held five phone calls with Russia’s ambassador to Washington on the day the United States retaliated for Moscow’s interference in the U.S. presidential election, three sources familiar with the matter said.

The calls occurred between the time the Russian embassy was told about U.S. sanctions and the announcement by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he had decided against reprisals, said the sources.

I’m sure there was nothing untoward going on here. They were probably just asking each other what they planned to wear to the inauguration.

Finally, Max Sawicky writes something useful about Russia. Those of us who loathe Putin’s Russia are not engaging in latter-day red baiting, he says. Far from it:

Today, kleptocratic, capitalist Russia is among the moneyed interests in the world. It’s tempting but simplistic to see Russian leaders as a fairly narrow species of nationalist interlopers in U.S. domestic politics. More to the point, they are allied with germinating, reactionary forces internationally, if only lately inside the United States.

….These movements, need we be reminded, are viciously, violently racist, misogynist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. Similar groups run amok in Russia itself with the apparent indulgence of the authorities. The Trump campaign has brought like-minded creatures out from under the rocks of the U.S. right.

….The U.S. welfare/regulatory state with all its flaws contains many seeds for a better system. Trump, with an assist from a cavalcade of shady backers, including Putin’s Russian oligarchy, threatens to uproot these seeds. It’s possible to exaggerate Putin’s role, but it would be wrong to discount it altogether. Any complete survey of the forces colluding against progressive goals must now include the Russian state.

As they say, read the whole thing.

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Today in Politics As I Experienced It

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California’s drought causes a lot more pain than brown lawns and empty swimming pools.

by Oliva01Ush Posted on January 10, 2017

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, released a report Tuesday morning that adds up the many ways in which the incoming Trump administration could enrich the world’s largest oil company.

The report comes a day before Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s former CEO, starts his nomination hearing to be President-elect Trump’s secretary of state.

In that role, Tillerson could do a lot for his former employer. The oil giant has massive holdings in foreign oil reserves and remains one of the biggest investors in the Canadian tar sands, with rights worth around $277 billion at current prices.

As it happens, the State Department is responsible for approving the fossil fuel infrastructure that could bring Canadian tar sands oil to the U.S. market. Remember the Keystone XL pipeline? It could come back from the dead and get approved by Tillerson.

Tillerson could also undo sanctions on Russia that have blocked Exxon’s projects there, including a deal with Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, worth roughly $500 billion.

And then there are the Trump administration’s domestic plans to lift every restriction on extracting oil from public lands and offshore. The CAP report also figures that Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to investigate Exxon’s effort to mislead the public about climate change. Tally all the benefits and you get nearly $1 trillion.

So who was the biggest winner of the November election? According to the CAP report, ExxonMobil.

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California’s drought causes a lot more pain than brown lawns and empty swimming pools.

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