Tag Archives: brown

Here’s What’s Been Happening in Ferguson as Tensions Rise Again

by RomaVanwagenen Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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On August 9, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Brown, an African American, was unarmed. The killing sparked a wave of protests, some of them violent, and calls to formally charge Wilson. With a grand jury decision on the shooting investigation expected imminently, residents and law enforcement agencies in Ferguson and across St. Louis are bracing for a new round of protests and possible violence.

More MoJo coverage of the Michael Brown police shooting


10 Hours in Ferguson: A Visual Timeline of Michael Brown’s Death and Its Aftermath


Michael Brown’s Mom Laid Flowers Where He Was Shotâ&#128;&#148;and Police Crushed Them


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Ferguson Shooting and the Science of Race and Guns


How Many Ways Can the City of Ferguson Slap You With Court Fees? We Counted


Here’s Why the Feds Are Investigating Ferguson


Meet the St. Louis Alderman Who’s Keeping an Eye on Ferguson’s Cops

Here are some of the latest developments:

Michael Brown’s parents testify before U.N. committee
Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden flew to Geneva this week where they spoke before the United Nations Committee Against Torture to present a report suggesting police tactics in Ferguson were a key factor in Brown’s death.

“Whatever the grand jury decides in Missouri will not bring Michael back,” Brown’s father told members of the U.N. “We also understand that what you decide here may save lives. If I could have stood between the officer, his gun, and my son, I would have.”

The Ferguson Police Department is currently under federal investigation to review its police tactics and determine if they meet federal standards.

Police get additional training
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said that 1,000 officers from multiple agencies went through 5,000 hours of additional training in preparation for possible reactions to the upcoming grand jury announcement. According to Officer Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department, “Our training consisted of tactics and response to civil disturbance, as well as a review of the 1st, 4th, and 14th amendments.” To help ensure the rights of protesters and the media, Schellman told Mother Jones, “each officer will carry a laminated card with these amendments listed.”

Police stock up on riot gear
Should protests turn violent again, the St. Louis County PD has been stocking up on riot gear. “If the police face assaults that could cause injury or worse, they will have riot gear at their disposal,” Schellman said, adding that law enforcement efforts will be run by “a unified command that consists of commanders from the St. Louis County Police, St. Louis City Police, and MO State Highway Patrol.”

Police tactics used in August were widely condemned for being overly aggressive and callous toward the local community.

Uptick in gun sales

Ahead of the grand jury announcement, guns shops in the Ferguson area have reported an increase in purchases by both black and white residents.

Brown autopsy report leaked
The autopsy, which was leaked to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, revealed Brown had been shot in the hand at close range with Wilson, putting into question whether Brown had had his hands up in the air, as some witnesses claimed. The St. Louis medical examiner, however, cautioned about jumping to conclusions over the leaked report. “As you look at this report, people are grabbing onto one thing, trying to make a whole case on this one finding,” Graham told PBS. “You can’t do that.”

Supporters rally for Wilson
Soon after Brown’s death, supporters emerged in defense of the embattled Ferguson police officer, whose whereabouts since the killing have been unknown to the public. In one instance during a rally for Brown, police were forced to remove one Wilson supporter holding a sign that read, “Justice is for everybody even P.O. Wilson.”

Weeks later at a Cardinals game, Ferguson protesters got into an argument with Wilson supporters, one of whom had a sign “I am Darren Wilson” attached to his jersey.

Lesley McSpadden investigated
Ferguson police are investigating claims of a reported fight between members of Brown’s family over the selling of “Justice for Michael Brown” t-shirts. Pearlie Gordon, Brown’s paternal grandmother, told police she was in a parking lot trying to sell the items, when McSpadden and a group of about 20 people “jumped out of their vehicles and rushed them,” allegedly telling Gordon “You can’t sell this s**t.” Gordon says she and the other vendors were beaten.

Reports of media access blocked
The Associated Press uncovered audio recordings suggesting efforts by Ferguson authorities to limit media coverage by calling for “no-fly zones” to block news helicopters from documenting the protests in August. Ferguson police denied the allegations. Attorney General Eric Holder said he had no knowledge of the purported media restrictions and indicated his support for transparency. “Anything that would artificially inhibit the ability of news gatherers to do what they do I think is something that needs to be avoided,” he said.

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Here’s What’s Been Happening in Ferguson as Tensions Rise Again

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

by Celia34Vuvukbw Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Alec MacGillis writes that there was a very specific reason for the surprising Republican win on Tuesday in the Maryland governor’s race:

I knew Democrat Anthony Brown was in trouble in the race for Maryland governor when every single voter I spoke with Tuesday—including several who voted for Barack Obama—at a polling station in a swing district in Baltimore County, just outside the Baltimore city line in the Overlea neighborhood, brought up the rain tax.

The rain tax is a “stormwater management fee” signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley in 2012 that requires the state’s nine largest counties, plus Baltimore city, to help fund the reduction of pollution in Chesapeake Bay caused by stormwater runoff. The tax is hardly draconian—in Baltimore County, homeowners pay a flat fee that can range from $21 to $39, while commercial property owners are assessed based on the proportion of impervious surfaces (parking lots, roofs, etc.) on their land.

As a native Californian, this naturally brings back memories of the infamous “car tax,” which Arnold Schwarzenegger cynically rode to victory in a special election in 2003. And this wasn’t even a new tax. A few years earlier the vehicle license fee had been lowered under Governor Gray Davis, but with a proviso that it would go back up if state finances deteriorated. Sure enough, when the dotcom boom turned into the dotcom bust, the state budget tanked and eventually Davis signed an order restoring the old VLF rates. But the VLF never actually increased; it merely returned to the same level it was at before it had been cut.

It didn’t matter. Schwarzenegger ran endless TV commercials starring ordinary citizens who simply couldn’t believe that anyone expected them to survive if they had to pay the outrageous Democrat car tax. It was just more than a body could bear. (Yes, that really was the tone of the ads. I’m not making it up.) All this caterwauling was over an average of about $70 in taxes that everyone had been paying with no noticeable distress just four years earlier.

And Arnold won. Cutting the VLF made California’s finances even worse, of course, as did Arnold’s cynical-beyond-all-imagining bond measure a couple of years later to make up for the revenue shortfall. As usual, Californians were somehow suckered into thinking that this was free money of some kind, not something that would cost more in the long run than just paying the VLF in the first place.

Anyway, this is just a long-winded way of saying that lots of liberals have spent the past few years predicting the end of the tax revolt. I plead guilty to this once or twice myself. It generally seems to happen whenever some state or another successfully passes a tax for something, but as California showed a decade ago and as Maryland showed yesterday, it ain’t so. I think it’s fair to say that raising taxes is no longer an automatic kiss of death, but it’s still pretty damn dangerous. For the most part, we still live in Grover Norquist’s world.

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead 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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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

by ReneCogburn Posted on October 20, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s good to be Elizabeth Warren. The senior senator from Massachusetts spent her weekend campaigning for Democrats in Minnesota, Colorado, and Iowa, and by all accounts, she tore it up, and got more than a few calls to run for president. (Breaking: she still insists she isn’t going to.) These were some of her biggest red-meat lines from the campaign trail:

1. “The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it. We can whine, we can whimper or we can fight back, and we’re here to fight back. We know what we’re fighting for and what we’re up against. We’ve got our voices, or votes and our willingness to fight. This is about democracy, about your future, and about the kind of country we want to build.”

2. “Who does this government work for?…Does it work just for the millionaires, just for the billionaires, just for those who have armies of lobbyists and lawyers or does it work for the people? That’s the question in this race.”

3. “Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers.”

4. When conservatives came to power in the 1980s, the first thing they did was “fire the cops on Wall Street. They called it deregulation. But what it really meant was have at ’em boys. They were saying in effect to the biggest financial institutions: Any way you can trick or trap or fool anybody into signing anything, man, you can just rake in the profits.”

5. “They ought to be wearing a T-shirt that says…’I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ We can hang back, we can whine about what the Republicans have done…or we can fight back. Me, I’m fighting back!”

Contrast Warren’s rock star treatment with the President’s reception this weekend: he spoke at a campaign event in Maryland, and attendees filed out as soon as he started speaking. Obama is being kept at arms’ length in close races—Warren, on the other hand, will head to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign for Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who’s running against Warren’s old nemesis, Scott Brown.

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

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Rand Paul Is the Best-Dressed Man in Washington

by AlbertoGurney Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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With election day less than a month away, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is hitting the campaign trail to stump for Republican candidates. On Wednesday he’ll be in Virginia with Senate candidate Ed Gillespie and congressional hopeful David Brat. He’ll be in New Hampshire on Thursday with former Sen. Scott Brown. He’s been in North Carolina with Rep. Walt Jones and Senate nominee Thom Tillis, and Kansas with Sen. Pat Roberts and Gov. Sam Brownback.

But for Paul, fall is about something more than just laying the groundwork for a 2016 presidential campaign. It’s turtleneck season.

He’s taken his licks in the past. An otherwise flattering profile in Vogue mocked his “dad jeans” and “notorious sartorial taste.” That’s one way of looking at it. Another—more accurate—way of looking at it is that Rand Paul is the leading fashion visionary of DC, nay, the world. The Nebuchadnezzar of Normcore, Sultan of the Sartorial, the Thelonius of Threads.

Here’s a quick guide.

Pleated khakis, blue-grey Polo Ralph Lauren sweater, black turtleneck, in October 2010:

Billy Suratt/Apex MediaWire/ZUMA

Black blazer, black turtleneck, button, January 2012:

Charles Dharapak/AP

Blazer, black turtleneck, Ray-Bans. Burger by In-N-Out. En route to the Reagan library in 2013:

Rand Paul/Facebook

Olive-green sweater vest, black turtleneck, button, while discussing the mythical NAFTA Superhighway in Montana, winter 2008:

fatkidinabucket/YouTube

Trenchcoat, split-pea vest, black turtleneck:

Metallic tan blazer, black turtleneck, while discussing taxation on Kentucky Tonight in 2008:

Kentucky Tonight/YouTube

Pleated khakis, black blazer, metallic blueberry on creamsicle, fall 2010:

Charles Bertram/Lexington Herald-Leader/ZUMA

Royal denim shirt with gold-standard combo:

Billy Suratt/ZUMA

Christmas:

Boston Liberty Project/YouTube

Technicolor dreamcoat while grabbing lunch with Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), August 2014:

Matt Hildreth/YouTube

Blazer, tie, JNCO jeans, 2012:

Charles Dharapak/AP

Candy-striped belt with JNCOs:

Jeff Blake/The State/ZUMA

So where does he get his style from? We’ve got one guess:

Charles Dharapak/AP

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Rand Paul Is the Best-Dressed Man in Washington

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Scott Brown Promises Women He Has Supported Contraception Since He Was Barely Legal

by RowenaCracknell Posted on October 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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In an effort to defend his record on supporting women’s access to contraceptives, Scott Brown has potentially shared more information than any single voter wants to know.

“To think that I don’t support women’s rights and ability to get contraception is just a false premise,” Brown said during a Monday debate with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). “I have since I was 18 years old.”

Brown, who is the GOP senate candidate in New Hampshire, was responding to a question regarding his past co-sponsorship of legislation opposing Obamacare because of its requirement mandating employers provide healthcare coverage (birth control being the most controversial) to workers.

He did not elaborate on the exact fundamental shift that occurred when he turned 18. Perhaps, Brown was overwhelmed by his newfound civic duty to vote in a presidential election?

But hey! In the case, you are reveling in Brown’s likely personal detail, here are some photos of the former senator working out and loving it.

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Scott Brown Promises Women He Has Supported Contraception Since He Was Barely Legal

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Elizabeth Warren: The Feds Are Far Too “Cozy” With Wall Street

by MaricruMusselma Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Pointing to recently leaked audio recordings between officials at the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs bankers, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is slamming regulators for being far too timid and compliant when it comes to laying down the law with big banks.

“Well, ultimately this report tells us exactly what we already knew — that the relationship between regulators and the financial institutions they oversee is too cozy to provide the kind of tough oversight that’s really needed,” Warren said in an interview with NPR.

“We can keep making the rules tougher and tougher, but it won’t make an ounce of difference if the regulators won’t enforce the rules that are there,” she added. “If the regulators back down or back off whenever the banks tell them to, then it’s the banks—and not the regulators—who are running the show.”

While the secret recordings, which were captured by former bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Carmen Segarra, do not expose any flagrant wrongdoing by either side, they do reveal an uncomfortable, wholly inappropriate eagerness to please Goldman Sachs. And let’s keep in mind Segarra’s secret tapes were recorded in 2012, at least four solid years after the financial crisis.

After This American Life and ProPublica jointly released the tapes last week, Warren and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) have also called for a federal investigation into the dealings of the New York Federal Reserve.

The New York Fed has since “categorically rejected” the accusations, but Warren tells NPR the public needs more individuals like Segerra who are willing to speak up against institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

“We need to look at whether or not we’ve got the right tools to protect the kind of people who will speak up. But, but what we’ve got to start with is we’ve got to expose what happened here, we’ve got to look at what the available tools are, but we’ve got to give the message loud and clear to the Fed: Um, this isn’t gonna work — you work for the American people, you don’t work for the big banks.”

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Elizabeth Warren: The Feds Are Far Too “Cozy” With Wall Street

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Big Greens Are Spending Big Green In 2014 Midterms

by AngelinMurdoch Posted on October 1, 2014

green4us

How Tom Steyer is trying to make climate a winning political issue. Tom Steyer. Karl Mondon/MCT/ZUMA First there was a pickup truck. Then there was an ark. The vehicle of choice for drawing attention to the NextGen Climate Action Committee has been, well, vehicles. The climate change super PAC, funded by billionaire investor Tom Steyer, recently rolled a truck filled with fake oil barrels into New Hampshire to chide Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown. A few days later, the group began touring Florida with an ark to taunt climate change hedging by Gov. Rick Scott (R). The ark campaign was meant to draw attention to Florida’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, like rising sea levels, but also to highlight Scott’s unwillingness to talk about the causes of climate change. At its launch, organizers accused Scott of letting only “special interest campaign contributors” buy a “ticket on Scott’s Ark.” The truck and the ark, said NextGen chief strategist Chris Lehane, are part of the group’s “disruptive” approach to advocacy. “We want to be on the offensive as much as possible, force the other side to respond,” said Lehane, a Clinton administration veteran known for, as The New York Times put it, “his own extreme brand of performance politics.” Read the rest at The Huffington Post.

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Big Greens Are Spending Big Green In 2014 Midterms

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Big Greens Are Spending Big Green In 2014 Midterms

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Is This Deep-Fried-Yam Chef the Future of Texas Politics?

by DeniseAvelar Posted on September 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Milton Whitley’s gift to Texas was called twisted yam on a stick. You take a yam, cut it into a spiral, deep fry it, cover it in butter, smother it in sugar, coat it in cinnamon, eat. Is it healthy? Of course it’s healthy—yam is a superfood. The final product was a finalist at the 2009 Texas State Fair, before losing out to the eventual winner, deep-fried butter.

A native of Dallas County, Whitley started off as a catfish cook and worked his way up the comfort food chain to an appearance on national television presenting Oprah and Gayle with a homemade sweet potato pie. He now teaches science at a public school. But last year he set his sights on something more daunting than the fried-food contest at the state fair—getting elected to the Texas Legislature as a Democrat. Whitley, who’s running in the Dallas-area 113th state House district, is one of a dozen candidates selected as part of a trial program for Battleground Texas, the Democratic organizing project launched last spring by a cast of Obama campaign veterans who are hoping to turn the nation’s largest red state blue.

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Is This Deep-Fried-Yam Chef the Future of Texas Politics?

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Microsoft Wants Minecraft to Make It Cool. Good Luck.

by DorthySilver Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Microsoft rattled the gaming world this week when it announced it would spend $2.5 billion to acquire Minecraft, a wildly popular indie videogame. By buying the game, Microsoft hopes to tap into players’ wallets. But what’s less clear is whether Microsoft can win over gamers, some of whom are criticizing Microsoft for trying to buy its way to cool—and stifling creativity in the process.

Minecraft’s premise is simple: Players are dropped into a world with LEGO-style blocks, and can then choose their own adventures—exploring, building new structures, or fighting monsters. The game has legions of devoted followers—including hardcore gamers, elementary school kids, and United Nations staffers who have asked citizens in developing countries to use the program to design better public spaces. Some gamers are earning a living off of Minecraft by uploading game videos to YouTube and taking a chunk of the ad revenue, and they’re not shying away from slamming the deal.

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Microsoft Wants Minecraft to Make It Cool. Good Luck.

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