Tag Archives: 2016 elections

Elizabeth Warren’s Latest Comment About Running For President Is the Most Cryptic Yet

by FrankieReeder Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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With 106 weeks until the next presidential election, speculating about a potential Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) candidacy is like going on a long car ride with a six-year-old. “Are you running?” No. “How about now?” No. “Now?” No. “Now?” No. “What about now?” No. “Are you running?” No. “Are you running?” exasperated sigh “Aha!”

But Warren does continue to do the things people who are considering a run for president tend to do—flying to Iowa to rally the troops on behalf of Rep. Bruce Braley, for instance, and going on tour to promote a campaign-style book. Her latest venture, a sit-down interview in the next issue of People magazine, isn’t going to do much to quiet the speculation, even as she once more downplayed the prospect of a run:

Supporters are already lining up to back an “Elizabeth Warren for President” campaign in 2016. But is the freshman senator from Massachusetts herself on board with a run for the White House? Warren wrinkles her nose.

“I don’t think so,” she tells PEOPLE in an interview conducted at Warren’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home for this week’s issue. “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”

She just doesn’t see the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being one of them. Not yet, anyway. “Right now,” Warren says, “I’m focused on figuring out what else I can do from this spot” in the U.S. Senate.

“Amazing doors”; “I don’t think”; “right now”—what does it all mean? Warren’s not really saying anything we haven’t heard from her before. But after then-Sen. Barack Obama’s furious denials about running for president eight years ago, no one’s ready to take “no” for an answer. At least not yet, anyway.

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Elizabeth Warren’s Latest Comment About Running For President Is the Most Cryptic Yet

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Scott Brown’s Big-Money Sellout

by KimberlHiggs Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Name a major super-PAC or dark-money outfit and there’s a good chance it has helped Republican Scott Brown, the former senator from Massachusetts now trying to oust Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Karl Rove’s American Crossroads? Check. The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity? Check. The US Chamber of Commerce, billionaire Joe Ricketts’ Ending Spending, FreedomWorks for America, ex-Bush ambassador John Bolton’s super-PAC—check, check, check, and check.

Despite being a darling of conservative deep-pocketed groups, Brown once was a foe of big-money machers. As a state legislator in Massachusetts, he sought to curb the influence of donors by stumping for so-called clean elections, in which candidates receive public funds for their campaigns and eschew round-the-clock fundraising. But during his three years in Washington—from his surprise special-election win in January 2010 to his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Warren in November 2012—Brown transformed into an insider who embraced super-PACs, oligarch-donors such as the Koch brothers, and secret campaign spending. On the issue of money in politics, there is perhaps no Senate candidate this year who has flip-flopped as dramatically as Brown. Here’s how it happened.

In November 1998, Brown won a seat in the Massachusetts House. That same year, voters in the state approved a ballot measure to implement a clean elections system; the proposal passed by a 2-1 margin. By law, however, ballot measures can’t allocate taxpayer funds, and the fight to implement the new system moved to the legislature in Boston.

Brown allied himself with supporters of clean elections. As part of the state House’s tiny Republican caucus, Brown clashed with the old-guard Democratic leadership, including House Speaker Tom Finneran, who viewed clean elections as inimical to incumbents. Brown did quibble with reformers over some details of the proposed clean-elections system, but he voted in 2002 against a plan that would have gutted the program.

David Donnelly, who spearheaded the clean elections effort in Massachusetts, remembers Brown as a reliable supporter of clean elections: “Over those years, Scott Brown was not only a consistent vote, but a consistently outspoken supporter of the clean-elections program.” In a June 2001 letter to the editor in the Boston Globe, an activist with Common Cause, the good government group, hailed Brown’s support for clean elections as “not only courageous, but gutsy and heroic.”

When Brown ran for state Senate in 2004, he billed himself as “the person that bucks the system often.” He frequently mentioned his support for clean elections as evidence of his reformer bona fides. “As a state representative,” he said then, “I fought House Speaker Thomas Finneran’s pay raise bill and supported the voters’ will on Clean Elections.” Brown won the special election and served in the state Senate from 2004 to 2010.

In 2010, Brown ran for the US Senate seat that had been held by Ted Kennedy for 46 years. Most people remember his ubiquitous pickup truck, the one he drove everywhere and used to burnish his regular-guy image. What’s less remembered is how Brown again bragged about his support of campaign finance reform on his way to becoming a US senator.

Here’s what Brown told NPR the day after his upset win over Democrat Martha Coakley:

Maybe there’s a new breed of Republican coming to Washington. You know, I’ve always been that way. I always—I mean, you remember, I supported clean elections. I’m a self-imposed term limits person. I believe very, very strongly that we are there to serve the people.

That reformer approach vanished as soon as Brown joined the Senate Republican caucus.

In the summer of 2010, Senate Democrats heavily lobbied Brown to be the decisive 60th vote on the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would beef up disclosure of spending on elections by dark-money nonprofit groups, including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. But Brown instead joined the Republican filibuster that killed the bill. In an op-ed explaining his vote, Brown said the bill was an election year ploy that exempted labor unions, which traditionally back Democrats, from some disclosure requirements. (In fact, the bill applied the same requirements to corporations and unions, and the AFL-CIO opposed it.) But he praised the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law as “an honest attempt to reform campaign finance” and wrote that genuine reform “would include increased transparency, accountability, and would provide a level playing field to everyone.” This gave some reformers hope that Brown might support a whittled-down version of the bill.

But no. Brown later opposed two newer, slimmer versions of the DISCLOSE Act and refused to cosponsor a national clean-elections bill similar to the measure he had backed in Massachusetts. (A spokeswoman for Brown’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Brown has gone on to accept millions from the interests most opposed to campaign finance reform. In 2011, he was caught on camera practically begging David Koch, the billionaire industrialist, for campaign cash. “Your support during the 2010 election, it meant a ton,” Brown told Koch. “It made a difference, and I can certainly use it again.” In his 2012 race against Warren, he benefited from a super-PAC funded largely by energy magnate Bill Koch, the youngest Koch brother and also a billionaire, and casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands company. And though he agreed that year to the “People’s Pledge”—a pact intended to keep outside spending out of the campaign—Brown refused to make the same pledge in his current campaign against Shaheen.

As a state legislator, Brown bragged that he was someone who “bucks the system often.” Today, he is relying on the system—dominated by millionaires and billionaires, overrun with money, and cloaked in secrecy—to get back to the Senate.

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Scott Brown’s Big-Money Sellout

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RED 3: Mitt Romney May Be Retired, But Still Extremely Dangerous

by ReedHuittww Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Byron York says that Mitt Romney aspires to be the Harold Stassen of the 21st century:

Romney is talking with advisers, consulting with his family, keeping a close eye on the emerging ’16 Republican field, and carefully weighing the pluses and minuses of another run. That doesn’t mean he will decide to do it, but it does mean that Mitt 2016 is a real possibility.

….A significant number of Romney’s top financial supporters from 2012 have decided not to commit to any other 2016 candidate until they hear a definitive word from Romney. They believe they are doing it with the tacit approval of Romney himself.

….If Romney did run, one thing the loyalists expect is a change in his top strategists. Recently one veteran Republican operative who was not involved in the Romney campaign said, “All his people want him to run again because they made so much money off it the last time.” Now, Romney supporters say that if he mounts another campaign, they would demand that Romney not employ Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer, the Republican strategists who played key roles in the 2012 campaign. Who would take their place is an open question.

I know that Romney doesn’t want my advice, but here it is anyway: Just pay all these guys a bunch of money to go away and stop dreaming about a chance to light more of your money on fire. It will be cheaper in the long run, and your eventual job description will be the same too.

But as long as we’re supposedly taking this seriously, let’s put on our analytical hats and ask: could Romney beat Hillary Clinton if they both ran? On the plus side, Hillary’s not as good a campaigner as Barack Obama and 2016 is likely to be a Republican-friendly year after eight years of Democratic rule. On the minus side, Romney has already run twice, and the American public isn’t usually very kind to second chances in political life, let alone third chances. Plus—and this is the real killer—Romney still has all the problems he had in 2012. In the public eye, he remains the 47 percent guy who seems more like the Romneytron 3000 than a real human being.

Still, snark aside, if you put all this together I guess it means Romney really would have a shot at winning if he ran. We still live in a 50-50 nation, after all, and for the foreseeable future I suspect that pretty much every presidential election is going to be fairly close. And Romney certainly has a decent chance of winning the Republican nomination, since he’d be competing against pretty much the same clown show as last time.

So sure: Run, Mitt! I hear that Eric Cantor is available to be your vice president.

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RED 3: Mitt Romney May Be Retired, But Still Extremely Dangerous

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle: Obama’s Done Okay But Economic Benefits Need to Be “Broadly Shared”

by NCJWillatrm Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Hillary Clinton doesn’t think much of her old employer. “Congress increasingly…is living in an evidence free zone,” she said Thursday, “where what the reality is in the lives of Americans is so far from the minds of too many.” Speaking on a panel about women and economics hosted by the Center for American Progress (a liberal think tank run by Clinton’s ex-policy advisor Neera Tanden), Clinton gave a few hints of which domestic policy proposals could anchor her presumed 2016 presidential campaign.

Speaking in non-partisan terms, Clinton slammed Congress for its lack of action on raising the minimum wage, with the former secretary of state saying that a failure to boost the wages of the working poor is particularly damaging for women. She noted that two-thirds of minimum wage jobs are held by women. “The floor is collapsing—we talk about a glass ceiling, these women don’t even have a secure floor under them,” she said.

Boosting the minimum wage has become a standard Democratic talking point. But Clinton went beyond that standard fare and emphasized the plight of tipped workers, such as restaurant servers, bartenders, and hair stylists. “Women hold nearly three-quarters of the jobs that are reliant on tips,” she said. “And in fact, they don’t get the minimum wage with the tips on top of it.”

Although the federal minimum wage has been set at $7.25 per hour since 2009, there is an exemption carved out for workers who receive tips. Employers only have to pay those people $2.13 an hour (steady since 1991); the tips are presumed to make up for the difference. But often times the tips don’t suffice, and employers, who are supposed to fill the gap, don’t always do so.

These workers are “at the mercy not only of customers who can decide or not to tip,” Clinton said. “They’re at the mercy of their employers who may collect the tips and not turn them back.”

Clinton didn’t dive into the policy details on how to fix this problem. But the Center for American Progress released a report right after the event that suggested raising the tipped wage up to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage (which the report proposed bumping to $10.10 per hour).

The general tone of Clinton’s speech suggested how she’d thread the needle by supporting President Barack Obama’s record while crafting her own agenda when she hits the campaign trail. “The president came in—he deserves an enormous amount of credit for stanching the bleeding and preventing a further deterioration and getting us out of that ditch we were in,” she said. “But we know that unless we change our policies, a lot of the benefits are not going to be broadly shared, and that’s what we’re talking about here.”

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle: Obama’s Done Okay But Economic Benefits Need to Be “Broadly Shared”

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23 Reasons Why Jeb Bush Should Think Twice About Running for President

by AbbyHoinville Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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For months, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has been mentioned as a possible 2016 candidate, with the conventional wisdom holding that he was the one GOP contender the party’s donor class could unite behind. “Jeb has the capacity to bring the party together,” Fred Malek, a top Republican operative, told the Washington Post in March. Bush has yet to signal whether he’ll seek to follow in the footsteps of his older brother and their father by launching a bid for the White House, but the Wall Street Journal reported last week that his advisers have reached out to key fundraisers and consultants to ask them to hold off on throwing in with a presidential candidate until Bush makes up his mind sometime after the November election. One Bush family confidant told the Journal that there was a better than 50-50 chance that Bush would run.

But there are plenty of reasons why Bush should think long and hard before subjecting himself (and his family) to the ruthless scrutiny of a presidential campaign. His history is an opposition researcher’s dream—clouded by embarrassing family episodes, allegations of philandering, offensive comments to black voters, and dubious business dealings.

Many of these past deeds and misdeeds will no doubt be put under the microscope should Bush run in 2016. Here are 23 reasons why he might want to take a pass—and it’s only a partial list:

The shopaholic: Customs agents detained Bush’s wife, Columba, in 1999 at the Atlanta airport and fined her $4,100 for failing to declare the more than $19,000 in clothes and jewelry she’d purchased in Paris.

The addict: In 2002, Bush’s daughter Noelle was arrested for trying to purchase Xanax with a bogus prescription. In rehab, she was caught with a “white rock like substance” thought to be crack cocaine. Between 1995 and 2002, she racked up seven speeding tickets, five other traffic violations, and was involved in three wrecks.

The stalker: In 1994, Bush’s eldest son, George P., broke into his ex-girlfriend’s house. After fleeing her father, George returned to the scene and drove his SUV into their front lawn. His ex told the police that young George had “been a problem” since the breakup. Her father declined to press charges.

The other son: In 2000, cops discovered Bush’s 16-year-old son “Jebby” boffing a 17-year-old girl in a car in a mall parking lot. The police reported the incident of sexual misconduct, but Jebby wasn’t arrested.

The black sheep brother: Volumes have been written about Jeb’s siblings, especially former president George W. Bush. But his brother Neil, who helped bankrupt a savings and loan and once toured Asia with the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon while he was promoting the development of a 51-mile underwater highway between Russia and Alaska, will give reporters plenty to chew on.

The fraudster: In 1986, Camilo Padreda, who had been a counterintelligence officer for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, hired Bush to find tenants for office buildings financed with US Department of Housing and Urban Development-backed loans. Bush took the gig, despite the fact that four years earlier Padreda had been indicted for embezzling $500,000 from a Texas savings and loan. Those charges were dropped, but in 1989 Padreda pleaded guilty to defrauding HUD of millions. (Bush was not involved in that scam, and it’s unclear whether he was aware of the savings and loan indictment when he teamed up with Padreda.)

The international fugitive: In 1986, Miguel Recarey, who’d done 30 days in jail for income tax evasion in the 1970s, paid Bush $75,000 to help him find a new headquarters for his health care company. The company never moved, but while Bush’s father was serving as vice president, Bush lobbied the US Department of Health and Human Services to help Recarey access millions in Medicare funds. Bush also helped arrange for Recarey’s company to provide free medical care to the Nicaraguan contras. Recarey was later indicted for a massive Medicare fraud scheme but fled the country before trial. He is now an international fugitive.

The bribery case: In 1988, Bush formed a company with GOP donor David Eller to market water pumps manufactured by Moving Water Industries, another Eller business, to foreign countries. The company used Bush’s White House ties to drum up business. In 1992, at the behest of MWI, the Export-Import Bank approved $74 million in US-backed loans to Nigeria to buy water pumps from Eller’s company. The Justice Department later alleged in a 2002 civil suit that about $28 million of those loans were used to bribe a Nigerian official. Bush was not implicated, but in November 2013, a jury found MWI guilty of making 58 false claims to the Export-Import Bank on its applications for the Nigerian loans. A federal judge fined the company $580,000. Bush escaped testifying after the judge determined his testimony wouldn’t be relevant to the central issue in the case.

The fortunate son: Cuban American real estate developer Armando Codina was the Florida chair of George H.W. Bush’s unsuccessful 1980 bid for the GOP presidential nomination. He loved the Bush family so much that when Jeb first moved to Miami in the early 1980s, he made Bush a partner in his real estate company and gave him 40 percent of the profits—even though Jeb had no real estate experience or money to invest. In 1985, Bush and Codina bought an office building partially financed by a savings and loan that later failed. The $4.56 million loan went into default, but federal regulators gave Bush and his partner a pass. Instead of foreclosing, they merely asked them to repay $500,000 of the loan. Taxpayers picked up the rest. In 1991, Bush and Codina sold the building for $8 million.

The shady company: In 2007, Bush joined the board of InnoVida, a building materials-manufacturing startup founded by a businessman whose previous company had gone bankrupt under suspicious circumstances. Bush and his fellow board members subsequently failed to notice that InnoVida officials had used forged documents to fake solvency, hidden the company’s financial problems, and misappropriated $40 million. The company’s Maserati-driving founder eventually went to jail for money laundering, and investors lost their shirts when the company went bankrupt in 2011. Last year, Bush agreed to repay the $270,000 he was paid by the company as a consultant to reimburse defrauded investors.

The Big Finance fail: Bush signed on as a paid adviser to the financial giant Lehman Brothers in 2007, just as the firm was on the brink of collapse. The company hoped he would use his political ties to rescue it, but he couldn’t even convince Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to throw some money into that pit.

The terrorist: In 1989, Bush successfully lobbied his father, who was then serving as president, for the release of Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who allegedly orchestrated the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people in 1976 and other terrorist attacks. Bosch, who was in a federal prison on an immigration violation and dubbed an “unrepentant terrorist” by then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, was a cause célèbre for Miami’s influential Cuban population—a voting bloc that Jeb needed to launch his political career.

The black vote: During his first failed campaign for governor in 1994, Bush was asked in a debate what he would do to help African Americans. “Probably nothing,” he replied. In 2000, his administration purged 12,000 eligible voters from the rolls because they were incorrectly identified as convicted felons. More than 40 percent of them were African Americans.

The welfare wife: During his 1994 campaign, Bush said that women on welfare “should be able to get their life together and find a husband.”

The Playboy bunny: In 1999, Bush appointed Cynthia Henderson as his secretary of business regulation. Bush later transferred Henderson, who had worked her way through law school as a bunny at the St. Petersburg Playboy club, to another job in his administration, after she got caught taking a trip to the Kentucky Derby on a corporate jet owned by a company she regulated and accepting lodging and tickets to the event from an association of race track regulators. (Henderson’s boyfriend, a Florida real estate developer, eventually paid the cost of the trip.) Rumors that Henderson and Bush were having an affair forced him to publicly deny philandering.

The socialist: While at the elite prep school Andover, Bush was briefly a member of the socialist club. He also smoked pot.

The failed charter school: After wining just 4 percent of the black vote in his first failed run for governor, Bush teamed up with the Greater Miami Urban League to start Florida’s first charter school. In 1999, the state implemented a school grading system at Bush’s insistence. His own charter school received a D. By 2008, the school had earned a C- and was $1 million in debt; the state shut it down that year.

The shady charter school operator: In 2010, Bush gave the commencement speech for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an Ohio online charter school owned by William Lager, a big GOP donor who has served on Bush’s Digital Learning Council, which promotes for-profit online schools like ECOT. (Lager’s companies have also sponsored conferences hosted by Bush’s education foundation.) The school was far from a model for the future. At the time Bush gave his speech, ECOT’s graduation rate had never exceeded 40 percent. A 2001 state audit found that though the state had paid the school tuition for more than 2,000 students one month, only seven students had logged on to ECOT’s computer system. When state auditors couldn’t find the rest of the school’s alleged student body, ECOT was forced to repay Ohio $1.7 million. School founder William Lager’s private companies have earned more than $100 million from online schools that perform worse than any of Ohio’s worst brick-and-mortar public schools.

The cheaters: In 2010, Bush and his education reform organization, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, created a group of school superintendents and other high-ranking officials called “Chiefs for Change” to advance the Florida model of education, which emphasizes accountability and emphasized giving schools letter grades based on performance, especially standardized test scores. One of the original eight chiefs was caught inflating the grade of a lackluster charter school funded by a Republican donor. The office of another was caught manipulating test score data.

The IRS complaint: In October, a New Mexico advocacy group filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education failed to disclose thousands of dollars it paid to bring public school superintendents, education officials, and lawmakers to the group’s events, where they had private “VIP” meetings with the foundation’s for-profit ed-tech company sponsors. The complaint alleges that Bush’s foundation disguised travel payments as “scholarships” to hide the fact that the nonprofit was facilitating lobbying between big corporations and public officials. The IRS has not commented on the complaint. Bush’s foundation issued a statement dismissing the allegations as politically motivated.

The immigration book: Last year, Bush published Immigration Wars, a book that took a hardline position against a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. After going on TV to push the book’s anti-path-to-citizenship position—and being accused of having changed his position to avoid offending the tea party—he quickly reverted to his previous stance of supporting citizenship.

The Reagan comment: In 2012, Bush said publicly that Ronald Reagan would have had trouble getting his party’s presidential nomination today—meaning that the tea party had driven the GOP too far too the right. He told editors at Bloomberg, “Back to my dad’s time and Ronald Reagan’s time—they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support.” Reagan “would be criticized for doing the things that he did.”

The mother: In April, former First Lady Barbara Bush appeared on the Today Show and said that her son would be “by far the best qualified man, but…we’ve had enough Bushes.”

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23 Reasons Why Jeb Bush Should Think Twice About Running for President

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GOP Candidate Asks Residents to Mail Him Their Pee

by MatthiaSwinburn Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the run-up to this fall’s rematch against Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-Ore.), Republican Art Robinson is making an unusual ask.

“My name is Art Robinson,” read one of the mailers he sent to 500,000 Oregon residents in March. “I am a scientist who has lived and worked in Josephine County for 34 years. My colleagues and I are developing improved methods for the measurement of human health. Please consider giving us a sample of your urine.”

Robinson is a scientist, and that’s part of the problem. For the last three decades, when he’s not running for office, the Caltech-educated chemist has run a research nonprofit out of a family compound in the mountain town of Cave Junction, near the California border. In a monthly newsletter called Access to Energy, Robinson has used his academic credentials to float theories on everything from AIDS to public schooling to climate change (which he believes is a myth). In perhaps his most famous missive, Robinson once proposed using airplanes to disperse radioactive waste on Oregon homes, in the hopes of building up resistance to degenerative illnesses.

“All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean—or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases,” Robinson wrote in 1997. He added, “If we could use it to enhance our own drinking water here in Oregon, where background radiation is low, it would hormetically enhance our resistance to degenerative diseases. Alas, this would be against the law.” (Robinson has since clarified that such proposals would be politically untenable.)

In another essay, he called public education “the most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism in the United States,” leaving people “so mentally handicapped that they cannot be responsible custodians of the energy technology base or other advanced accomplishments of our civilization.”

Robinson theorized that the government had overhyped the AIDS epidemic in order to force social engineering experiments on those aforementioned public school students. The truth, he contended, was far more complex:

There is a possibility that the entire ‘war’ on HIV and AIDS is in error. U.S. government AIDS programs are now receiving $6 billion per year and are based entirely upon the hypothesis that HIV virus causes AIDS. Yet, the articles referenced above and numerous additional publications by scientists who have become involved in this controversy state that: attempts to cause AIDS experimentally with HIV have completely failed; thousands of AIDS victims are HIV-free; and HIV shows none of the classical characteristics of a disease-producing organism. Moreover, AIDS is not a unique disease—it is an increased susceptibility to many ordinary diseases presumably as a result of depressed immune response. This depressed immunity can result from many other factors including those especially prevalent in the AIDS afflicted population—drug abuse and unhygienic exposure to very large numbers of different disease vectors. Moreover, large numbers of HIV carriers who are symptom-free are being treated by powerful life-threatening drugs that kill people in ways very similar to AIDS.

Those writings have become an albatross in his repeated challenges to DeFazio, who has publicized Robinson’s work. Robinson lost by 10 points in 2010, and then by 20 two years later in a district that had become more Democratic after redistricting. Last year, he entered the GOP primary yet again (on a whim one day while driving past the clerk’s office), and won the nomination by default in May when no other candidates materialized. Adding to the uphill odds is the fact that Robinson now has a second job: Since last August, he’s served as the chair of the Oregon Republican Party.

As for the urine samples, Robinson told the Roseburg (Ore.) News-Review he received 1,000 in response, which will go toward a study on aging. His campaign might not be worth a bucket of warm piss. But at least he’ll have plenty of it to fall back on.

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GOP Candidate Asks Residents to Mail Him Their Pee

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Is the 6-Year Itch Spelling Doom for Obama?

by KourtneyLeane Posted on August 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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The theory of the six-year itch is well-known phenomenon: American presidents suffer all too often during their second terms from an onslaught of scandals that hobble their ability to act. Larry Summers thinks this is a good reason to ditch the limit of two four-year terms and instead switch to a single six-year term. Jonathan Bernstein isn’t buying it:

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He can point to all sorts of second-term miseries going back to Franklin Roosevelt. But the apparent pattern doesn’t hold up that well. A classic example is Richard Nixon. Yes, Watergate dominated and ruined Nixon’s second term, but the series of abuses of power that cost him the presidency—and the initial cover-up—occurred during his first term. Similarly, George W. Bush’s second term was spoiled to a great extent by the Iraq war (which Summers bizarrely omits from his summary); Iraq, too, was a first-term decision.

Quite right. But I’m not sure this makes the point Bernstein wants it to make. Back in 2004 I predicted that if George Bush were reelected, he’d suffer through a bunch of scandals, and that turned out to be right. I suggested there were three reasons that second terms tended to be overrun by scandal, and this was No. 2:

Second, there’s the problem that second terms are, well, second terms. It takes more than two or three years for a serious scandal to unfold, and problems that start to surface midway through a president’s first term usually reach critical mass midway through his second term…George Bush is especially vulnerable to this since his first term already has several good candidates for scandals waiting to flower. Take your pick: Valerie Plame? The National Guard? Abu Ghraib? Intelligence failures? Or maybe something that hasn’t really crossed anybody’s radar screen yet, sort of like the “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate Hotel that no one took seriously in 1972.

I think Bernstein and I are saying similar things here. In Bush’s case, there were indeed some new problems in his second term: Katrina in 2005 and several assorted scandals that revolved around Jack Abramoff in 2006. The same has happened to Obama. Regardless of whether you think that things like Fast & Furious or Solyndra were genuine scandals (I don’t), they have the same effect. More recently, you can add the IRS and Benghazi. And again, regardless of whether these are real scandals or invented ones, they work the same way. Low-information voters don’t always pay attention to whether a scandal is “real.” They just keep hearing about one thing after another, and eventually conclude that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

As it happens, I’d say that Obama has done a remarkably good job of running a clean administration, and I suspect that scandalmania isn’t actually hurting him much. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to pretend otherwise, there’s just not much there. You can hate his policies or his personality or his competence or his leadership ability, but the truth is that he’s run a pretty clean shop on the scandal front.

Still, if you accept the general proposition that scandals tend to pile up over time, that means you’re likely to have a fairly impotent president by year six. And maybe that means a single six-year term would be for the best.

The problem with this is that there’s not much evidence for it. If six years really is some kind of magic scandal number, then you’d expect to see it at work elsewhere. But do you? How about in Britain, which has indeterminate terms? Or Germany, where Angela Merkel is heading into her ninth year in office? Or in cities and states without term limits? More generally, in other jurisdictions with different terms, how much evidence is there that voters become highly sensitive to mounting scandals by year six?

Not much, I think, though I suspect that voters do just generally get tired of politicians and parties after about six years or so. After all, by then it’s clear that all the stuff they promised won’t happen, so why not give the other guys a shot? Hell, lots of people are complaining these days about Obama failing to bring postpartisan peace and harmony to Washington, DC, as if there were much he could ever have done about that in the face of unprecedentedly unanimous obstruction from Republicans starting on day one. But still: He did say that was one of his goals, and he sure hasn’t delivered it. So let’s throw him out. The next president will be able to do it for sure. Right?

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Is the 6-Year Itch Spelling Doom for Obama?

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Meet the GOPers Trolling Hillary From the Left

by DakotaLhotsky Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Hillary Clinton declined to attend the annual Netroots Nation conference in July, the most vocal outcry came not from the progressive base, but from a Republican super-PAC founded by former staffers for Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee. “Despite flying over Detroit, MI – the home of Netroots Nation 2014 – Hillary Clinton will not strategize with Democratic activists at the United States’ ‘largest progressive gathering’ this weekend,” the group wrote on its website. “Instead, she will be traveling from Connecticut to Minnesota in order to $ell her book.” That condemnation was paired with a meme-ified graphic of Clinton waving goodbye to the “grassroots” as she flew by.

Officially, Hillary Clinton is still a private citizen contemplating a possible 2016 presidential campaign. But everyone else in the political world is treating her as if she were a formal candidate. A slew of right-wing books targeting Clinton have been published this summer. And a bevy of Democratic super PACs have sprung into existence to defend Clinton and expand her base of support. “I’ve been amazed at what a cottage industry it is… If it all stopped, a lot of people would lose their jobs,” Clinton said recently on the Daily Show of the hype machine that revolves around her potential candidacy.

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Meet the GOPers Trolling Hillary From the Left

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Rand Paul: Republicans Are "Too Eager for War"

by CharlieGKR Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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On the Sunday morning television shows this past weekend—against the backdrop of an Iraq in flames—former Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) continued their ongoing feud and the battle for the (national security) soul of the Republican Party. In recent months, as Mother Jones has reported that Paul in 2009 accused Cheney of using 9/11 as an excuse to launch the Iraq invasion to benefit Halliburton (the corporation Cheney once led) and called on the GOP to disassociate itself with the former vice president, Cheney’s allies have slammed the senator for expressing reckless positions. During a private speech in March, without mentioning Paul by name, Cheney contended that Paul’s skepticism about US intervention abroad would endanger the United States. On ABC News’ This Week on Sunday, Cheney explicitly assailed Paul as “basically an isolationist”—a term of profound derision in the neocon wing of the GOP. Meanwhile, on Meet the Press, Paul was asked if Cheney could be considered a credible critic of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and Paul, without saying Cheney’s name, replied, “The same questions could be asked of those who supported the Iraq war. You know, were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? That’s what the war was sold on. Was democracy easily achievable?…They didn’t really, I think, understand the civil war that would break out.” This was obviously a jab at the former vice president.

But though Paul, who is mulling a 2016 presidential bid, has not hesitated to challenge the hawks of the GOP, he has softened his language. He no longer accuses Cheney of pushing the Iraq war to reap corporate profits. (He even recently claimed that was not what he had meant to say.) And in these latest rounds, Paul has not voiced his previously stated view that the GOP is the party of war-mongers at odds with true Christian beliefs.

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Rand Paul: Republicans Are "Too Eager for War"

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The Definitive Guide to Every Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theory (So Far)

by UXMAnnetta Posted on June 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Long before she let Benghazi happen, Hillary Clinton was the center of a swirl of inventive rumors about sex, drugs, and murder. For entertainment purposes only, we’ve rounded up some of the greatest (i.e., most scurrilous). We’ll add more as they inevitably bubble up in the run-up to the 2016 race.

Benghazi on the brain

Concussiongate
Rumor: Then-Secretary of State Clinton faked the flu and a concussion in December 2012 to avoid testifying to Congress about Benghazi.
Rumormongers: 2016 presidential dark horse John Bolton and Fox News contributor Monica Crowley

#TCLOT
Rumor: As if a phony head injury wasn’t bad enough—Hillary faked a blood clot, an even more serious medical condition, to further delay her Benghazi testimony.
Rumormonger: Glenn Beck, who added that “if she really had some weird thing in the hospital, then it should prohibit her from ever becoming president.”

Brained by Bush’s brain
Rumor: The clot was real, and Hillary suffered lingering brain damage that could render her unfit for office.
Rumormonger: Fox News analyst Karl Rove, who backtracked the next day.

The CLINTON Body Count

Fostering doubts
Rumor: Various theories hold that former Clinton White House chief of staff Vince Foster didn’t commit suicide in Virginia’s Fort Marcy Park. One posits that he was killed because he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton.
Rumormongers: Former Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) once shot a watermelon (or a pumpkin—it’s unclear) to prove that Foster was shot by someone else. Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine took out an ad in the New York Times to note that the FBI had failed to investigate “semen in Foster’s shorts, blond hair on his T-shirt and trousers and multicolored carpet fibers on all his clothing.” (Bonus: Anne Coulter once joked, “If you attack the Clintons publicly, make sure all your friends know that you are not planning suicide.”)

Ron Brown’s body
Rumor: Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others were killed in a plane crash orchestrated by the Clintons to prevent him from spilling the beans to special investigators about selling seats on trade missions.
Rumormonger: The Clinton Body Count, a website linking the first family to more than 90 deaths.

Whitewater whitewash
Rumor: After agreeing to cooperate with special investigator Ken Starr, Whitewater partner James McDougal died in prison—allegedly at the hands of Clinton henchmen. “Chalk up another body to Clinton,” as one Rush Limbaugh caller put it. An alternative theory: McDougal faked his death to avoid ratting out his benefactors.
Rumormonger: The Clinton Body Count

Kittycide
Rumor: Former Clinton aide Kathleen Willey alleged that after her cat went missing, a suspicious-looking jogger told her to watch what she said. Then her new cat turned up dead.
Rumormonger: Willey, in the the 2007 pseudo-documentary Hillary: The Movie (which triggered the Citizens United Supreme Court decision).

The condoms must be on the other side of the tree. AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee

The Sex stuff

Gay until inauguration
Rumor: After majoring in lesbianism at Wellesley, Hillary entered into a sham marriage with Bill Clinton to cover up the truth. At one point, a former classmate moved to Little Rock to continue an affair with Hillary.
Rumormonger: Edward Klein, author of The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President

Bisexual after inauguration
Rumor: Bill confided that his wife was a bisexual who, as she put it, “had eaten more pussy than he had.”
Rumormonger: Former Clinton mistress Gennifer Flowers, in a 2013 interview with the Daily Mail

Webb of lies
Rumor: Associate attorney general Webb Hubbell was really Chelsea’s father. (And Vince Foster was possibly killed because he knew.)
Rumormonger: This guy on the Internet who keeps emailing me and every other DC journalist.

Bermuda shorts
Rumor: Forget Webb Hubbell. Chelsea was conceived when Bill forced himself on Hillary during a vacation in Bermuda.
Rumormonger: Klein, keeping it classy.

Troopergate
Rumor: Hillary looked the other way when then-Gov. Bill Clinton used Arkansas state troopers to set up sexual liaisons with dozens—maybe hundreds—of women.
Rumormonger: Former right-wing operative-turned-Media Matters honcho David Brock, who later wrote in his book, Blinded by the Right, that “none of the trooper allegations that could be independently checked turned out to be true.”

Bill’s black love child
Rumor: Bill fathered a son after after luring a prostitute into a cocaine-fueled orgy. Hillary dutifully covered it up.
Rumormongers: Little Rock businessman Robert McIntosh circulated a flier noting the resemblance between 13-year-old Danny Williams and a young William Jefferson Blythe during the 1992 campaign. A 1999 Drudge Report exclusive featured Williams’ mother’s on-tape confession. “What becomes immediately obvious to the viewer watching the videotaped confession is that this is clearly not gossip, rumor or anonymous charges being maliciously directed at a politician,” wrote Drudge, before learning three days later that the child was not Clinton’s.

Come all ye faithful
Rumor: As First Lady, Hillary decorated the White House Christmas tree with condoms, cock rings, and lords-a-leapin’ with erect penises.
Rumormongers: Disgruntled former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, in his 1996 tell-all, Unlimited Access; and Texas activist “Doc Marquis,” who seized on Aldrich’s claims as “proof positive that Hillary Clinton is a power, practicing witch.”

Sexual pagan
Rumor: No, it’s not the name of my new metal band—it’s Hillary Clinton’s orientation.
Rumormonger: Southern Evangelical Seminary president Richard Land, who leveled the charge in response to the secretary of state’s advocacy for gay rights in Africa.

The Drug stuff

Powder hungry
Rumor: When Bill was governor, the Clintons covered up a multimillion-dollar cocaine smuggling ring based in Mena, Arkansas.
Rumormonger: The Clinton Chronicles (below), a 1994 pseudo-documentary distributed by the Reverend Jerry Falwell

Boys on the tracks
Rumor: Seventeen-year-olds Kevin Ives and Don Henry weren’t hit by a train after passing out on an Arkansas railroad track; they were brutally murdered after witnessing a Clinton-assisted drug drop.
Rumormongers: Former Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.) and The Clinton Chronicles

Assorted Power madness

Four martini punch
Rumor: Reporter LJ Davis didn’t, as he claimed, pass out on his floor after drinking one too many martinis—he was assaulted in his Arkansas hotel room in 1994 by Clinton goons and robbed of four “significant” pages from his notebook. His crime: Asking too many questions about Clinton’s work at a Little Rock law firm.
Rumormongers: The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which cited the incident as evidence that Arkansas is a “congenitally violent place,” and Rush Limbaugh, who told his listeners, “journalists and others working on or involved in Whitewatergate have been mysteriously beaten and harassed in Little Rock; some have died.”

PC police
Rumor: As first lady, Clinton formed her own clandestine police force. Agents embedded in the FBI, the CIA, and the IRS harassed and eliminated critics.
Rumormongers: Richard Poe, author of Hillary’s Secret War, and American Evita author Christopher Andersen

Con air
Rumor: Hillary purged the White House Travel Office in order to set up a system of kickbacks for an Arkansas airline helmed by a childhood friend of Bill’s.
Rumormongers: Brock and current Virginia congressional candidate Barbara Comstock

Red, not blue
Rumor: A “meticulously documented” report exposed the Clintons’ links to a Marxist terrorist plot to take over the country, inspired by the Italian communist and grad-student favorite Antonio Gramsci. Exhibit A: Hillary’s failed health care reform plan.
Rumormonger: WorldNetDaily columnist Samuel Blumenfeld

Filegate
Rumor: Classified FBI files were requested and misused by First Lady Hillary Clinton to target enemies of the administration. White House Office of Personnel Security Craig Livingstone took the fall when Republican investigators caught wind.
Rumormonger: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who demanded FBI files be swiped for the First Lady’s fingerprints.

Brazilian whacks
Rumor: The Clintons forced former Hillary donor Peter Paul to spend two years in a Brazilian prison—including two months in a cellblock known as the “Corridor of Death”—after he filed a lawsuit against the couple claiming they knew about his illegal campaign finance dealings.
Rumormonger: Paul, in the 2007 pseudo-documentary Hillary Uncensored

Black helicopters
Rumor: Team Hillary used helicopters to surveil the Southampton home of 2006 Republican Senate challenger—and current Fox News contributor—K.T. McFarland.
Rumormonger: McFarland, at a campaign event on Long Island

Rush to judgment
Rumor: Rush Limbaugh’s 2006 drug bust for painkillers possession was a set-up by the Clinton machine.
Rumormonger: Poe again

Dressed to kill in 1993 AP Photo/James Finley

The Muslim stuff

Muslim Sisterhood
Rumor: Clinton and top aide/alleged lover Huma Abedin (wife of ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.)) are in cahoots with the ladies’ auxiliary of the Muslim Brotherhood. Which explains why Clinton has been secretly pushing us to spread Sharia law in America.
Rumormongers: “Huma’s mom is best friends with the new so-called First Lady of Egypt, who is also a member of the Sisterhood,” explained Rush Limbaugh. “Folks, it’s Peyton place—it’s too much to keep up with.” Rep. Michele Bachmann’s allegations of collaboration between Clinton and the Brotherhood was cited by protesters in the streets of Cairo.

Mullah moolah
Rumor: Clinton’s Islamofascist sympathies were secured with a bribe from Iran.
Rumormonger: Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman, who conscientiously adds, “I cannot prove it at this time.”

Ban on churches
Rumor: Clinton was working with Islamists to shut down Christian houses of worship in the United States before she left office in 2013.
Rumormonger: Conservative speaker and self-described “former terrorist” Kamal Saleem

Hillary Clinton with fellow Muslim sympathizer Barack Obama in Cairo, 2009. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

Just Plain Bizarre

Cold-blooded
Rumor: Like most of the Washington elite, Hillary is in fact a blood-drinking extraterrestrial lizard in disguise.
Rumormonger: “Reptoid hypothesis” creator David Icke

Everything is Illuminati’ed
Rumor: Wake up, sheeple. The Clintons belong to an 18th-century secret society that controls global governance and finance.
Rumormongers: Lots of crazy people on YouTube

Contra dancing
Rumor: In the 1970s, Hillary worked at a Little Rock law firm that helped funnel weapons to the Contras.
Rumormonger: The late Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn

Blood money
Rumor: The Clintons consented to the harvesting and selling of HIV- and hepatitis C-positive blood from prison inmates to China in the 1980s.
Rumormongers: Klein and WorldNetDaily conspiracy guru Joseph Farah

Starr crossed
Rumor: Why did the Clintons enjoy impunity for their myriad crimes? Easy: Ken Starr, the man tasked with investigating them, was a secret Clinton crony.
Rumormonger: Poe again

Get behind me, thetan
Rumor: Why did the did the movie version of Primary Colors, in which John Travolta plays a thinly-veiled Bill Clinton, go so easy on the first couple? Maybe because President Clinton pressured the German government to extend religious protections to the Church of Scientology.
Rumormonger: The New York Post reported that Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.) demanded an investigation into the matter; Faircloth denied this.

It’s a tax!
Rumor: As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was pushing a secret United Nations takeover of the Internet, to be paid for by a secret tax on American billionaires.
Rumormonger: Former Clinton aide Dick Morris

Goo goo for Gaga: Clinton’s State Department betrayed its true function as an “agent for Lady Gaga” when it helped the “Bad Romance” singer secure a gig at a gay pride event in Italy.
Rumormonger: Mission: America founder Linda Harvey

Here We Go Again…

Face the nation
Rumor: Clinton got a face-lift after leaving the State Department to “glam up” for 2016.
Rumormonger: Fox and Friends’ Steve Doocy, who tweeted afterwards that he was referring only to Clinton’s website.

Hey sole sister
Rumor: Clinton hired a mentally ill woman to throw a sneaker at her while giving a speech to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries in Las Vegas in April.
Rumormongers: Limbaugh and former Republican presidential front runner Herman Cain

Hill’s angels
Rumor: Hillary is a tool of the Dark Lord Lucifer sent to oppose Jesus Christ in the Last Days.
Rumormonger: Montana Republican congressional candidate Ryan Zinke, who called Clinton the “anti-Christ” at a January campaign event.

It takes a child
Rumor: Chelsea Clinton became pregnant at the behest of her parents, who believe that the former secretary of state will be viewed more favorably if she has grandkids.
Rumormongers: Fox News host Howie Kurtz, the Washington Free Beacon‘s Michael Goldfarb, and the New York Times‘ Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Vanity press
Rumor: The Clintons arranged for Vanity Fair to publish Monica Lewinsky’s recent essay two-and-a-half years before the next presidential election, so it would be forgotten by 2016.
Rumormonger: Prolific children’s author Lynne Cheney, who asked Bill O’Reilly, “Would Vanity Fair publish anything about Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t want in Vanity Fair?” (Yes.)

To be continued…

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The Definitive Guide to Every Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theory (So Far)

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