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Here’s Where Your State Stands on LGBT Rights

by MylesBarton Posted on December 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a time of uncertainty and anxiety for LGBT rights advocates, and with plenty of battles left to fight, 2016 showed some encouraging signs for broader protections at the state level, according to a new analysis by the country’s biggest LGBT advocacy group.

Over the past year, state legislatures saw an uptick in bills affecting the LGBT community—with a whopping 753 such bills introduced. Some of the most famous, like North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” sought to restrict their rights. But many more bills—two-thirds of them, in fact—pushed to improve protections for the LGBT community, the Human Rights Campaign found in a report published Wednesday. “There has definitely been some good to come out of the last 12 months,” says Lynne Bowman, a field director for the advocacy group, which put out the report in collaboration with Equality Federation Institute.

Sixteen nondiscrimination laws passed this year, including in Massachusetts, which enhanced its law in July to give trans people the right to use public bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. Governors in Montana, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania signed executive orders expanding protections for gay and trans state employees (though a Louisiana judge struck down the governor’s protection this week.)

Courtesy of the Human Rights Campaign

Hate crime laws were also expanded in a dozen states to include crimes targeting people for their sexual orientation or gender identity. (Check out how your state stacks up, in the map above.) The number of hate crime laws proposed more than doubled from 2015, with attacks on the LGBT community gaining national attention in the wake of the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Florida that left 50 people dead this summer.

In five states—Hawaii, Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—lawmakers pushed through legislation to stop health care insurers from excluding trans patients. Meanwhile, half a dozen states passed bills relating to youth suicide prevention and anti-bullying in schools, and Vermont and New York joined the list of states banning conversion therapy.

But it wasn’t all good news for LGBT rights. State legislators proposed more than 250 anti-LGBT bills this year, more than in any other year since 2009. The most high-profile setback was North Carolina’s House Bill 2, which removed anti-discrimination protections for LGBT workers and required trans people to use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex, not their gender identity. Gov. Pat McCrory and North Carolina’s legislators met immediate pushback, losing an estimated $395 million in business in the state and sparking a Justice Department lawsuit. Even so, 14 other states proposed their own bathroom bills this year—though none of them passed. Of the 252 total bills seeking to restrict LGBT rights, only 8 passed. It “took a lot of collective work” to make sure this restrictive legislation didn’t go through, HRC’s Bowman said.

Courtesy of the Human Rights Campaign

And there’s still a lot of work to do. Eight states don’t allow teachers to discuss LGBT topics in schools, while 19 states exclude transgender people from state Medicaid. More than half of all states still don’t have nondiscrimination laws protecting gay or gender-nonconforming people in employment, housing, public accommodation, or education. (See more in the map below.)

Courtesy of the Human Rights Campaign

Even with so many anti-LGBT bills shot down this year, Bowman said we should expect more to crop up in 2017, particularly “religious freedom” bills and additional laws that discriminate against transgender people. Of course, this is all just at the state level. Donald Trump’s administration, along with a prospective Cabinet of LGBT rights opponents, could pose a whole new set of hurdles in the years to come.

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Here’s Where Your State Stands on LGBT Rights

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The Price Is Wrong

by EduardoShultz Posted on December 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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The American Medical Association, the country’s largest professional group of doctors, wasted no time in throwing its support behind Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) after he was announced on November 29 as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be secretary of health and human services. “His service as a physician, state legislator and member of the U.S. Congress provides a depth of experience to lead HHS,” the AMA said in a press release that same day. “Dr. Price has been a leader in the development of health policies to advance patient choice and market-based solutions as well as reduce excessive regulatory burdens that diminish time devoted to patient care and increase costs.”

It’s not surprising that the organization, which has battled against various health care regulations, would be eager to see Price appointed. The former orthopedic surgeon has long complained that doctors face, as the AMA put it, “excessive regulatory burdens,” and his proposals would lead to increased pay for doctors. But they would also reverse reforms that have kept health care spending in check during Barack Obama’s presidency and could send costs skyrocketing once again.

For all of the controversy over health care under Obama, there has been general agreement on one area of success: Growth in health care spending has slowed. The Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, created new schemes for paying doctors and hospitals that helped sharply reduce the annual increase in national health care spending and keep it below pre-recession levels. Both Republicans and Democrats have supported these provisions, which have centered on charging for the overall quality of care rather than for each service performed. But now Price, a longtime booster of freeing doctors from government restrictions, appears eager and able to undo them.

David Cutler, a Harvard professor who served as Obama’s senior health adviser during the 2008 campaign and helped craft the ACA, is worried that the progress on slowing health spending would stall or reverse under Price. “Price has expressed skepticism about many of the payment changes that have been ongoing and have bipartisan support,” he says. “This is quite scary, as they are starting to pay off. He seems to want to go back to the days when price was based on the volume of services provided, not the value. I don’t know if it’s a product of being an orthopedic surgeon, where that is how one earned a lot of money. In any case, I don’t think it bodes well for the vast changes in the health care landscape that are taking place.”

Much of the attention paid to Price’s plans for dismantling the ACA has focused on his proposal to undo the expansion of health insurance coverage. In short, Price would wipe away the Medicaid expansion that has given millions of poor people access to health insurance. The effect, as Sarah Kliff explains in Vox, would be to make the individual market more expensive for people who have been sick.

But the ACA wasn’t just an effort to expand health insurance. Until the 2008 recession slowed it, the cost of health care was rising at an alarming rate, accounting for an increasing share of the country’s total spending, and the trend lines projected unsustainable spending levels in the future. The ACA introduced a host of reforms and pilot programs for different schemes to reward doctors based on health outcomes in order to keep spending under control. The exact mechanisms were complex, but the basic idea was simple: The fees charged by US doctors and medical facilities were far higher than worldwide norms, and the best way to slow the growth of health care spending was to keep those pay rates in check.

Despite the hoopla this fall over rising premiums in the ACA marketplaces, the growth in health care spending slowed immensely during the Obama years, before a recent uptick. That growth peaked in 2002, at an 9.6 percent annual rate. During the recession, the rate dropped sharply, to 4.5 percent in 2008. But even as the economy rebounded, health care spending growth continued to decline, dipping to 2.9 percent in 2013—the lowest growth rate in more than half a century. It inched back up again in 2014, and earlier this month the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced a 5.8 percent growth rate for health spending in 2015—still below pre-recession levels, even though the ACA expanded insurance coverage to 20 million more Americans. A study from the Urban Institute earlier this year found that the amount the United States spent on health care under the ACA was far lower than anticipated—$2.6 trillion lower over five years.

Price has never been shy about his advocacy on behalf on doctors. When he first ran for Congress in 2004, he complained that people who lacked a background in the medical field were setting regulations and policy. Health professionals are by far the largest group funding his congressional career, having donated $3.6 million to his campaigns. The insurance industry is second, with more than $800,000 in donations.

Easing the restrictions doctors face when accepting patients with government-funded health insurance has been a central part of his health care policy proposals. When he reintroduced his Obamacare replacement plan earlier this year, he described it as “one that empowers patients and ensures they and their doctor have the freedom to make health care decisions without bureaucratic interference or influence.”

One of his key pushes over his time in Congress has been “private contracting” that would give Medicare patients access to doctors who don’t normally accept Medicare because of the lower rates it pays. But there’s a catch: The patients must pay extra fees to the doctor, on top of the rate Medicare pays the doctor. That gives doctors a perverse incentive to abandon Medicare so that they receive more from those patients than they’d get under Medicare alone. The consequence would be a reduction in Medicare participation among doctors, which would in turn reduce the government’s bargaining power in negotiating prices.

Price’s background as an orthopedic surgeon might be part of the reason he’s disinclined to support payment reforms, says Len Nichols, director of the Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics at George Mason University. Nichols notes that specialists who see patients only for specific problems have different incentives from doctors who see patients repeatedly. “They are almost perfectly tailored for fee-for-service, episodic, fix your knee, they make sure it works, goodbye,” Nichols says. “Because of that, as a class they tend to be rather skeptical of all this bundling, payment reform, incentive stuff, because they look at it like: I have a price for your knee, I fix your knee, then I’m done with you, you’re done with me.”

Price has been harshly critical of the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, an office created by the ACA to conduct experiments in new ways of compensating doctors that can, if successful, be expanded without congressional approval. Price spearheaded a letter from Republican members of Congress in September demanding that CMMI stop all of its mandatory payment reforms. “CMMI has overstepped its authority and there are real-life implications—both medical and constitutional,” Price said at the time. “That’s why we’re demanding CMMI cease all current and future mandatory models.”

Price did join the majority of both Democrats and Republicans in the House voting in favor of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, which will eventually require doctors to bill Medicare patients based on quality, rather than quantity, of care. But he’s since sounded a more skeptical note, objecting earlier this year to the Obama administration’s rulemaking language on the bill because it would move doctors away from a fee-for-service model.

“He was a founding member of the tea party caucus,” Nichols says. “Skepticism of government is in his veins. If you have a natural, professional distaste, disinclination, distrust of these payment reform things, and you couple that with they’re coming from government, then it’s a double whammy.”

Price has also proposed some more extreme health care reform ideas, such as privatizing Medicare and turning Medicaid into a block grant program—in effect reducing the amount of money spent on poor people’s health coverage over time. But these large-scale changes would require acts of Congress. Many of the programs for cost control experiments and pilot programs, by contrast, are at the direction of HHS—leaving the prospective secretary in broad control of the way doctors and hospitals are paid.

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The Price Is Wrong

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Trump and a Bunch of Silicon Valley Moguls Had an Awkward Little Talk Today

by Valenci2942 Posted on December 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Executives from Facebook, Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, and other Silicon Valley tech giants had a much-anticipated meeting with Donald Trump this afternoon, despite the rocky relationship between tech groups and Trump during his campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, the president-elect struck a “conciliatory tone,” leading off the meeting with the reassurance that he wants “to help you folks do well.”

“We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation,” he continued. “Anything we can do to help this go along we’re going to be there for you.”

That tone is in sharp contrast to the more critical, sometimes hostile words exchanged between Silicon Valley leaders and Trump in the months leading up to his election. Many tech moguls repeatedly lambasted Trump, characterizing his views on immigration and trade as “a disaster for innovation,” while Trump castigated tech executives for, among other things, sending jobs overseas. In one notable instance, Trump also accused Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for buying the Washington Post—temporarily blacklisted by Trump for its unfavorable coverage of his campaign—to keep taxes low and avoid antitrust scrutiny.

The only tech billionaire at the meeting who supported Trump during his campaign was Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist who founded PayPal. Thiel, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in July and is now on Trump’s transition team, helped decide who from Silicon Valley should be invited to the meeting. One striking omission from the guest list was Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was reportedly excluded as retribution over a failed “crooked Hillary” emoji hashtag.

According to sources close to the meeting, the official agenda was focused on jobs and the role of technology in government. It’s unclear whether other issues important to the attendees were topics of discussion at the meeting. Climate change, for example, which Trump has repeatedly denied, is a priority for Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who acquired the solar panel company SolarCity only a week before the election. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of Lean In, has forcefully advocated better women’s workplace rights.

On Tuesday, Bill Gates paid a visit to the president-elect only a day after launching a $1 billion fund to fight climate change with clean energy innovation. “We had a good conversation about innovation, how it can help in health, education, impact of foreign aid, and energy,” Gates said after the meeting.

Many in Silicon Valley remain wary of how a Trump presidency will change the industry following its exponential growth during the Obama administration. But Trump is doing his best to be liked. “I’m very honored by the bounce,” he said during the meeting Wednesday in reference to the recent uptick in stocks. “Everybody’s talking about the bounce, so everybody in this room has to like me at least a little bit.”

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Trump and a Bunch of Silicon Valley Moguls Had an Awkward Little Talk Today

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Trump Wants to Deport Millions of Immigrants. Here’s One Way to Slow Him Down.

by KrystynaK18 Posted on December 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump ran on a staunchly anti-immigrant platform, vowing to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and deport millions of “criminal aliens” in his first hours in office. Last week, Democratic legislators in California—home to about one-fifth of the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants—introduced a series of measures aimed at protecting the state’s immigrants under Trump’s policies. Two of those bills could help immigrants facing deportation in a crucial way: by making sure they have legal representation in court.

Unlike defendants in criminal courts, immigrants facing deportation aren’t guaranteed a right to a court-appointed attorney. These immigrants have to bear the costs of securing a lawyer on their own, and this can be a costly and difficult process, especially for those held in detention centers. Nationally, only 37 percent of immigrants facing deportation proceedings have access to a lawyer, according to a study released by the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. Immigrant detainees have it even worse: Only 14 percent receive legal representation. Studies have shown that one of the most important factors in determining an immigration case is whether immigrants had a lawyer—women and children, for instance, are up to 14 times more likely to win some form of relief from deportation or be released from detention when they have access to legal representation.

Together, California’s Assembly Bill 3 and Senate Bill 6 would provide funding so immigrants facing deportation would have access to free legal assistance, as well as set up state-funded trainings in immigration law so defense attorneys and public defender’s offices can better assist immigrants. Nearly 70 percent of detained immigrants in the state do not have legal representation, according to a report by the California Coalition for Universal Representation, and without it, only 6 percent of immigrants have won their cases over the past three years.

State Sen. Ben Hueso, a Democrat from San Diego who introduced SB 6, estimates that the state could allocate between $10-$80 million to fund these efforts. The measures “send a clear message to undocumented Californians that we won’t turn our backs on them,” said Hueso. “We will do everything in our power to protect them from unjustified deportation.”

The measures would require a two-thirds majority to be enacted, and with Democrats holding the majority in the state Legislature, the bills are likely to pass. Gov. Jerry Brown has yet to comment specifically on the legislation, taking a more cautious tone at a press conference last week, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I’m going to take it step by step and work in a collaborative way, but also defend our principles vigorously,” Brown said. “I think that’s the wiser course of action.” The measures will be voted on next month.

California could become the second state to help fund legal assistance for immigrants facing deportation, following an approach first implemented in New York: In 2013, nonprofit groups in New York City piloted a program that gave free representation to immigrants who couldn’t afford lawyers at one of the city’s immigration courts. Within a year, attorneys in the project won almost 70 percent of their cases, and the approach was so successful that the city fully funded the program. The model inspired similar programs in New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Despite a recent interview in which Trump appeared to soften his stance toward deporting so-called Dreamers, or young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, immigration advocates say they are preparing for a mass deportation plan under his administration. Shortly after the election, Trump insisted he would deport immigrants who had committed crimes, saying he still planned to remove some 2-3 million undocumented immigrants immediately. (A Migration Policy Institute report found that about 820,000 undocumented immigrants had criminal records, but some advocates worry that Trump will broaden his definition of a “criminal” immigrant to include people who have been arrested—though not necessarily convicted of a crime—to gain popular support for deportations.) And his nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general and appointment of Kris Kobach as an immigration adviser to his transition team have also concerned immigration advocates.

Francisco Ugarte, a public defender in San Francisco, where community groups and the city’s public defenders have asked the city to set aside $5 million for free legal assistance, says the funding is desperately needed. “We have to provide representation for any noncitizen facing deportation proceedings,” Ugarte says. “That’s how fairness works.”

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Trump Wants to Deport Millions of Immigrants. Here’s One Way to Slow Him Down.

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Russia Ran the Most Epic Ratfucking Operation in History This Year

by nydiapalazzi3 Posted on December 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Back during the campaign, I was vaguely aware that the Russians had hacked not just the DNC, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as well. For some reason, though, I never put two and two together long enough to think about what this hack might mean. In my defense, no one else seems to have given it much thought either—despite the fact that hacked documents were showing up in local races all over the country:

The intrusions in House races in states including Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina can be traced to tens of thousands of pages of documents taken from the D.C.C.C., which shares a Capitol Hill office building with the Democratic National Committee….The seats that Guccifer 2.0 targeted in the document dumps were hardly random: They were some of the most competitive House races in the country.

….In Florida, Guccifer 2.0’s most important partner was an obscure political website run by an anonymous blogger called HelloFLA!, run by a former Florida legislative aide turned Republican lobbyist. The blogger sent direct messages via Twitter to Guccifer 2.0 asking for copies of any additional Florida documents. “I can send you some docs via email,” Guccifer 2.0 replied on Aug. 22….“I don’t think you realize what you gave me,” the blogger said, looking at the costly internal D.C.C.C. political research that he had just been provided. “This is probably worth millions of dollars.”

The hacked documents played a big role in a Florida congressional primary between Annette Taddeo and Joe Garcia:

After Mr. Garcia defeated Ms Taddeo in the primary using the material unearthed in the hacking, the National Republican Campaign Committee and a second Republican group with ties to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, turned to the hacked material to attack him.

….After the first political advertisement appeared using the hacked material, DCCC chair Ben Ray Luján wrote a letter to his Republican counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee urging him to not use this stolen material in the 2016 campaign….Ms. Pelosi sent a similar letter in early September to Mr. Ryan. Neither received a response. By October, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a “super PAC” tied to Mr. Ryan, had used the stolen material in another advertisement, attacking Mr. Garcia during the general election in Florida.

The basic story here is simple: the Russians hacked, the media gave the revelations big play, and Republicans gleefully made use of the Russian agitprop. Altogether, the Russians released hacked documents from four different sources:

DNC
DCCC
The Clinton Foundation
John Podesta

But nothing was ever released from any Republican sources—despite the fact that, according to the New York Times, the Russians had hacked the RNC and possibly other Republican accounts as well. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a good chance they hacked a few people at the Trump Organization too. So here’s where we are:

The Russians ran a very sophisticated operation designed to hack into both US government servers and the servers of US political organizations.
They released only hacked documents from Democratic organizations. Republicans were left alone.
The intelligence community told high-ranking leaders of both parties what was going on, but Republicans flatly opposed any public acknowledgment of what was happening.
Republicans cheerfully made use of all the hacked material, even though they knew exactly where it came from.

At this point, you need to be willfully blind to pretend this was anything other than what it was: a ratfucking operation on an epic scale aimed squarely at Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. And while it was happening, Republicans were happy to play along.

It’s inevitable that more details are going to emerge about all this—about both the hacking itself and Republican complicity in making use of the Russian material. This is not something that can be forgiven quickly or easily. Republicans may or may not care about this, but they’re going to have live with a smoldering, bitter anger from their Democratic colleagues for a very long time.

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Russia Ran the Most Epic Ratfucking Operation in History This Year

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The EPA found that fracking can impact drinking water quality.

by FranceODowd1081 Posted on December 13, 2016

The company recently admitted that it has invested heavily in Canada’s tar-sands oil reserves, InsideClimate News reports — and it was not a good bet.

Tar-sands oil is difficult, expensive, and energy-consuming to extract, making it especially bad for the climate. It’s only profitable when oil prices are high. Exxon acknowledged in a public financial disclosure report this fall that it could be forced to take a loss on billions of barrels of tar-sands oil unless prices rise soon.

The company made this unwise investment despite long knowing, as InsideClimate News previously reported, that burning oil causes climate change and future climate regulations could make tar-sands oil unprofitable or impossible to drill.

In 1991, Exxon’s Canadian affiliate Imperial Oil commissioned an analysis that found carbon regulation could halt tar-sands production. “Yet Exxon, Imperial, and others poured billions of dollars into the tar sands while lobbying against government actions that would curtail development,” according to InsideClimate News.

This news comes just after Donald Trump nominated ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state. The State Department is responsible for reviewing proposed pipeline projects that cross international borders, like Keystone XL, which would have carried tar-sands oil from Canada down toward U.S. refineries.

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The EPA found that fracking can impact drinking water quality.

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A Guy Who Exists Purely to Troll the Humane Society Was Just Hired by Donald Trump

by LouisBerrios Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update (12/13/2016): The buzz around Heidi Heitkamp as USDA chief continues to dissipate—Politico reports that “Donald Trump’s closest rural advisers are trying to torpedo” the push to choose her; and speculation that she would turn down the offer anyway is mounting. Meanwhile, Breitbart News, a far-right online journal whose former executive chair is a top Trump adviser, is pushing Rep. Timothy A. Huelskamp (R-Kansas), who lost his primary race this year and will soon be available for a new job. Huelskamp, a Tea Party stalwart, would represent quite a departure from Heitkamp.

Like a calf lurching about a rodeo field to evade a rope, President-elect Donald Trump transition has taken a chaotic course. And nowhere is that truer than at the US Department of Agriculture, the sprawling agency that oversees everything from food-aid programs to farm policy to food safety at meat inspection plants.

On Saturday, Politico reiterated a rumor that’s been circulating for weeks that Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) is Trump’s likely pick to take the USDA helm. Wait, a Democrat? She was a big supporter of the 2014 reauthorization of the farm bill, the twice-a-decade legislation that shapes US food and ag policy. While like all farm bill since the 1980s, this one was generally Big Ag friendly, Heitkamp supported some measures that contradict meat-industry interests, which seem to hold plenty of sway at Trump Tower. She took credit for “beating back efforts to repeal Country of Origin Labeling,” which tells consumers where their meat is raised and is hated by big meat-packing companies. She also helped fend off an effort to kill the farm bill’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards (GIPSA) Act rules, which charge the USDA with curbing the market power big meat packers can deploy against farmers. Nor has Heitkamp particularly been a magnet for ag-industry cash, though she has only run one campaign for federal office. But she’s a conventional Democratic farm-state senator, not an ag radical.

Choosing a centrist Democrat like Heitkamp would be quite a departure from earlier versions of Trump’s USDA short list, which included wild cards like Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who unapologetically shares fake news stories on his office’s Facebook page and once tried to bill taxpayers for a trip to take medical procedure called a Jesus shot. Charles Herbster has also appeared as a prime candidate for USDA chief— a man who currently runs a a multilevel marketing operation (a highly controversial business model that relies on a network of individual “distributors” to sell products) and who finances and helps lead a Big Ag federal super PAC also funded by Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and other agribusiness giants.

Indeed, a day before the Politico piece hailing Heitkamp as the likely pick, Trump had veered in a quite different direction, announcing a new member of the team overseeing the transition of the USDA: Brian Klippenstein, executive director of a group called Protect the Harvest. The brainchild of Forest Lucas—a right-wing oil magnate and cattle rancher who has himself emerged as a contender to serve as Trump’s secretary of the interior—Protect the Harvest seems to exist mainly to troll the Humane Society of the United States.

On its website, Protect the Harvest warns that HSUS seeks to “put an end to animal ownership.” This is nonsense—the Humane Society is by no means coming for your furry friend. Its website features “tools you need to help the pets in your home and beyond.” I asked Paul Shapiro, vice president for farm-animal protection at HSUS, whether his group opposes the keeping of pets. “That would certainly be news to the vast numbers of our staff who bring their dogs to work here,” he replied.

Protect the Harvest’s real beef with HSUS appears to be that the group promotes legislation that curtails some of the harsher aspects of factory-scale animal farming. The two groups recently clashed over a Massachusetts ballot measure this fall to ban tight cages in egg and pork production. Lucas personally donated nearly $200,0000 to defeat the measure, and Klippenstein actively campaigned against it. The measure passed with overwhelming support on Nov. 8.

Protect the Harvest’s zeal to fight regulation of animal farming extends even to “puppy mills“—large facilities that churn out dogs like factory farms churn out pigs. Back in 2010, the year Protect the Harvest was founded, it vigorously opposed a Missouri ballot measure to “require large-scale dog breeding operations to provide each dog under their care with sufficient food, clean water, housing and space; necessary veterinary care; regular exercise and adequate rest between breeding cycles”; and “prohibit any breeder from having more than 50 breeding dogs for the purpose of selling their puppies as pets.”

Klippenstein isn’t the only member of Trump’s USDA transition team. Recall that back in November, Trump picked a lobbyist whose client’s include Little Ceasar’s Pizza, the soda and smack industries, and the Illinois Soybean Association to lead the agency’s transition. He soon abruptly quit after Trump announced a ban on registered lobbyists serving in the transition.

But then, a few days later, Trump tapped Joel Leftwich, Republican staff director for the Senate Agriculture Committee, to help lead the USDA transition. Leftwich took the Senate job in 2015—after having spent the previous three years as the director government affairs for Pepsi. In 2010—just before another stint on the Senate ag committee staff—Leftwich had worked as a lobbyist for seed/chemical giant DuPont. In other words, Team Trump pushed out a current lobbyist for Big Soda and Big Ag—only to replace him with a guy who basically lives in the revolving door between government and agribusiness, and whose latest turn as a lobbyist ended way back in 2015.

So basically, we’ve got a two-time industry lobbyist and an anti-animal-welfare zealot teaming up to choose the next USDA chief.

What that means for the prospect of Heitkamp taking the USDA reins is unclear. She narrowly won her North Dakota Senate seat in 2012, and Trump won the state in 2016 with 63 percent of the vote. As a Democrat, she faces a hard fight for re-election in 2018, which may be why she agreed to meet with Trump on Dec. 2, in what was widely read a job interview. If she exits the Senate now, North Dakota would have to hold a special election to replace her, and the winner would almost certainly be a Republican. On Monday, Sen. Harry Reid (D.-Nevada), the soon-to-retire former Democratic leader of the Senate, sought to throw water on the Heitkamp-to-USDA rumor, telling CNN that “I would doubt very seriously” that she’d agree to join the Trump administration. Whether he has knowledge of Heitkamp’s intentions, or is just hoping to keep a Senate seat in the party fold, is unclear.

But as a centrist Dem, she seems like a bit of vanilla pick, given the characters who are running Trump’s USDA transition.

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A Guy Who Exists Purely to Troll the Humane Society Was Just Hired by Donald Trump

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Time to Fight Like Hell

by IJKMisty230991 Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Decades from now, when the election of 2016 is distilled to its essence, what will that be? Many hoped the central lesson would be a shattered glass ceiling and a cementing of the Obama legacy. An expansion of rights and tolerance.

Instead, a small electoral majority chose a candidate who openly embraced bigotry, who slurred war heroes and mocked the disabled, who bragged of sexual assault, who said he’d roll back the protections of a free press, who was cheered on by white supremacists, who said he’d upend our alliances and the world’s long-overdue climate deal, and who is ignorant and cavalier about the basics of safeguarding a nuclear arsenal.

There is no way to sugarcoat it. The election of Donald Trump is a brutal affront to women, people of color, Jews and Muslims, and all who value kindness and tolerance. Paranoia and divisiveness won the day. If we feared that the Trump campaign would give white nationalists and other political predators a road map for a lasting presence as a disruptive opposition, we have instead handed them the keys to the Oval Office, and the nuclear codes.

In the horrible months leading up to the election, there were moments we all crossed our fingers and hoped the Trump campaign’s predilection for inflaming bigotry might, ultimately, improve the health of the body politic. Maybe he represented a high fever that, once broken, would leave us more immune to old hatreds. Maybe, just as videos of police shootings shoved the most heinous forms of structural racism into the social-media feeds of white America, so would the actions of Trump and his most virulent supporters cast a light on an ugliness that needed to be confronted to be at last overcome.

January/February 2017 Issue

Except, it seems this ugliness was far, far more pervasive than we had let ourselves imagine. With every chant of “build the wall,” with every racist tweet, with every “Trump that bitch” T-shirt, his supporters hardened—to the horror of more than half of those who voted (and many who didn’t), and despite the entreaties of political, diplomatic, scientific, and economic experts.

It would be counterproductive to say, as some have, that all those who voted for Trump are stone-cold racists. People voted for him for various and complicated reasons. But it must be said that all who voted for Trump did not find naked bigotry and misogyny to be disqualifying. Some discounted it, and some thrilled to it. That is gutting.

The next weeks and months and years will be spent analyzing how we got here. It will be a grim accounting for every institution, and a painful airing of recriminations among families and friends.

As the author and comedian Baratunde Thurston put it, Trump’s campaign is best understood as a denial-of-service attack on our political system. Despite or perhaps because he is a thin-skinned, shallow narcissist, he instinctively found weaknesses in our national firewall. He knew that with 16 primary opponents, each would happily support his attacks on the manhood, looks, and dignity of the others, until it was too late and the momentum was on his side.

He realized that his bombastic, bigoted statements would be heralded by some corners of the media, mocked by others, and given wall-to-wall coverage by all. Newsroom traditions of putting separate teams of reporters on each candidate also helped ensure that Hillary Clinton’s email scandals were given the same weight as the mountain of evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing. The nation’s great newspapers and networks did vital work, but when it came to proportionality, they utterly failed. And the obsession with polling aggregators and fancy widgets, coupled with the failings of the polls themselves, lulled people into slacktivism, inaction, or even showy obstructionism.

And social media failed us most of all. Even as armies of Trump’s toxic trolls—some real, some bots—started harassing reporters, activists, and ordinary people with racist and anti-Semitic images and general filth, Twitter twiddled its thumbs. Even as Macedonian teens eager for ad revenue exploited Facebook’s algorithm by flooding the zone with fake news designed to appeal to Trump supporters, Facebook did nothing. Actually, it did do something: It repeatedly changed its algorithm and protocols in ways that may have enabled fake news. And oh yeah, the founder of virtual-reality pioneer Oculus went so far as to gleefully fund a “shitpost” factory to promote Trump. Deliberately or not, tech tools were used to pervert our political dialogue, and a good chunk of the tech elite either didn’t care or relished it in the name of “disruption.” Consider, too, that venture capitalist (and Facebook board member) Peter Thiel’s yearslong secret campaign to eviscerate Gawker Media took out the news organization best positioned to challenge the tech titans and root out organized trolling, just months before the election.

Some—maybe a lot—of the social-media cesspool can be laid at the feet of Vladimir Putin, known for using similar tactics to destabilize Ukraine and other European countries. The Department of Homeland Security says Russia was behind the hack that allowed WikiLeaks to air the emails of Democratic National Committee officials, which enraged Bernie Sanders supporters. Days after the election, a former State Duma member linked to cyberattacks on Estonia said the Kremlin “maybe helped a bit with WikiLeaks.” A few days ago the CIA presented lawmakers with a new analysis: Putin had intervened in our election with the express intent of helping Trump and harming Clinton. The revelation prompted Trump to attack the CIA, which in turn helped prompt senior Senators of both parties to a call for a bipartisan investigation. How far back into the election cycle do fake news and organized disinformation go? And who is responsible for what? We don’t yet know, but in retrospect, those who shouted down concerns over Russian involvement as “neo-McCarthyism” might have better directed their fact-finding at these questions.

In any case, WikiLeaks and the trolls found fertile ground after 30-plus years of GOP Hillary hate, and in a country in as much denial about sexism as it is about racism. Trump was also aided by FBI Director James Comey and his bizarre letter to Congress that seemed to reopen the Clinton email investigation. Comey, for his part, may have been dealing with a clique of agents determined to keep digging into the allegations laid out in Clinton Cash, a book written by an editor at Breitbart News, the site that hails itself as “the platform for the alt-right,” whose former executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, is now one of Trump’s senior White House advisers.

And then there was Trump himself. He deftly wove fears of the left together with fears of the right. He stoked fear of loss in status, fear of economic marginalization, fear of the other. He never ever, not once, offered us anything but fear. He made all of us—even those who fought valiantly—smaller by dragging us into his swamp of hate and depravity.

And if we let him, he will continue to do so. The circular firing squads on the left have lined up. The reasonable right—and yes, many did distinguish themselves by repudiating Trump—is abandoned to an uncertain fate. Those who didn’t vote or protest-voted have all come under fire, as have those who helped champion Clinton.

Constructive postmortems are great. There’s a lot to chew on. But in the weeks following the election, the analysis has been dominated by hot takes based on incomplete exit poll data or ax-grinding to fit various agendas. That really needs to stop. There is no time, no room, no space to do anything but make common cause—on the left and beyond it—and push back against what, in part, this seems to be: not just a protest vote by rural whites who feel left behind, but the coming out of an authoritarian nationalist movement eager to stir racial discord. And the dawn of an era of nepotism and graft on a scale that could leave future historians gobsmacked.

Authoritarian movements rise by dividing us and can only last so long as they do. My heart broke on election night to see my Twitter feed full of quotes like “I knew my country hated me, but I didn’t know how much,” or “I don’t recognize my country.” In the days after the election, there was a surge of hate crimes. Parents had to answer questions like: What will happen to my friends? What will happen to us? Why does he hate us?

This is a dark hour, and to say otherwise would be a lie. It is—by orders of magnitude—the worst electoral outcome our country has faced in many generations. But let us not forget those who have pushed back already. The women born before the passage of the 19th Amendment, who struggled against infirmity and efforts to suppress their vote to get to the polls. The myriad Latinos and Asian Americans who registered for the first time to repel the hate that too many whites voted for. The African Americans who stood up for equality at a far greater rate than any other group, as they always have.

Trump appealed to America’s worst impulses. Now it’s on all of us to show, to prove, that this is not all that America is. This is a time when we’re called on to do things we may not have done before. To face down bigotry and hate, and to reach beyond our Facebook feeds in trying to do so. To fight disinformation instead of meeting it with the same. To listen to the anxieties of Trump supporters and the critiques of allies and to learn.

As for those of us at Mother Jones, we will continue to do what we always strive to do: shine light into dark corners, expose abuses of power, call out cronyism and corruption, and, in the words of our namesake, fight like hell for the living.

We’ve got our work cut out for us. All of us.

This essay expands and updates an original version that was written on election night and can be found here.

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Time to Fight Like Hell

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Help Grist hold Trump and his media enablers accountable

by GiuseppeYrw Posted on December 13, 2016

Remember that time Donald Trump told the New York Times he would keep an open mind about climate change? It was just a couple of weeks ago, when he met with the paper’s top reporters and editors. Their tweets sparked a slew of news reports that Trump might be “changing his tune” on climate.

Except that Trump did nothing of the sort. When Grist’s Rebecca Leber pored over the full transcript, it became clear that the president-elect was his usual climate-denying self, and the pliant news media had once again been suckered into making him look mainstream.

“Trump spun his climate denial to the New York Times and lots of people fell for it,” our headline read. “Grist expertly called out” the mainstream media’s failure to hold Trump accountable, The Huffington Post proclaimed.

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We’re going to need a lot more headlines like that in the coming years. And Grist needs your support to keep up our honest reporting and commentary — the kind you won’t hear from this administration or the bamboozled media.

I joined Grist as executive editor nine months ago with a mission: Take a publication beloved for its irreverent and unorthodox approach to environmental journalism and fuse that sensibility with a focus on deeper reporting, sharp analysis, and stories that matter.

As part of Grist’s fall fundraising drive, we’ve just spent the past couple of weeks celebrating some of those results. We sent reporters to cover injustice in Alaska and Standing Rock, told the amazing true story of the slideshow that saved the world, uncovered black-and-white evidence of a huge Trump climate flip-flop, won awards for our fun video explainers, launched a mobile-friendly daily news product, even explored what it takes to be a non-judgmental vegan.

Now we’re asking for your support so we can do more. That’s what it takes to run an independent, nonprofit media shop that doesn’t answer to deep pockets and has the freedom to take on corporate and political power.

I didn’t anticipate the election of Donald Trump, but I’m proud to say that Grist has made significant headway in building a journalistic operation capable of providing tough, fearless coverage of the president-elect and his polluter pals, who are about to have all the power they ever wanted to gut environmental laws, plunder our natural resources, ignore the warnings of climate science, and increase the environmental burdens plaguing vulnerable communities.

It’s become a cliche in the past few weeks to say that strong, honest journalism is needed now more than ever — but cliches gain power because they’re true.

Grist doesn’t have the resources of the New York Times or Washington Post, or even Mother Jones or ProPublica. Those institutions will need your support, too, to cover the range of corruption and assaults on civil liberties that the Trump administration portends.

What Grist does have, though, is a dedicated and skilled staff that’s intensely focused on a set of issues that are about to come under immediate attack from the Trump administration. We understand them — and their impact on people and communities — like no other publication.

And don’t just take my word for it. (I am the editor, after all). Bill Moyers’ website tells readers that if they want “more and better media coverage of these issues” they should “contribute to specialized nonprofit online outlets like Grist. … Robust news coverage will matter more than ever during an administration led by the purveyors of fake news and anti-science propaganda.”

So if you care about safe air and water, sustainable food, livable cities, a clean, inclusive economy, a survivable climate, and environmental justice for all, Grist is the publication you’ll need to cling to in the coming years. We’ll ferret out fake news, seek and spotlight solutions, tell you where progress continues to happen and who is standing in the way, stand up for what’s right and just, reach across ideological lines, give you the tools and advice needed to make a difference, and bring big brains together to spark ideas and innovation.

This is the Grist we need now more than ever. And it can’t happen without your support. Please give today.

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Help Grist hold Trump and his media enablers accountable

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Global divestment from fossil fuels has doubled since last year.

by EnidLorenzo Posted on December 12, 2016

Concentrations of the potent greenhouse gas rose faster and faster in the last decade, and particularly in the last two years, according to two new studies.

“If methane keeps going up, we could easily see a degree Fahrenheit increase, independent of CO2,” by the end of the century says Stanford earth scientist Robert Jackson, a coauthor of both studies. “That would be a worst-case scenario.”

The cause is largely biological. It’s too soon to pin the blame on one factor, whether flooded rice paddies, growing cattle herds, belching landfills, melting permafrost, or gassy wetlands, but agriculture deserves particular attention, the studies show. That doesn’t mean we can ignore the methane contributions of oil and gas exploration, Jackson cautions, but rather that ag deserves “the same level of scrutiny.”

Today, atmospheric methane is up 150 percent from preindustrial levels, so every little bit to reduce emissions counts. Switching up rice varieties, feeding cattle a less gassy diet, and catching emissions from landfills before they’re belched are all important steps, scientists say. Spiking methane isn’t good, but it is a growing opportunity to fight back against changing climate.

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Global divestment from fossil fuels has doubled since last year.

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