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Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

by KarolynHDG Posted on February 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have officially announced that they aren’t willing to even hold hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee—no matter who it is.1 There’s all the usual argle bargle about needing to “protect the will of the American people” blah blah blah, but none of that matters. They’re doing this because they want to do it and they have the power to do it. I doubt that Democrats would act much differently under similar circumstances.

That said, you can add me to the huge crowd of observers who are puzzled by the political tactics here. The obvious question is: Why refuse to even hold hearings? That just makes Republicans look sullen and obstructionist. Why not hold hearings normally, drag them out a little bit, and then vote down whoever Obama nominates? The result is the same, but Republicans look more like senators and less like small children throwing a temper tantrum.

I suppose the answer is that this is a good way of firing up their base, and they think that’s more important than appealing to the center. Fair enough. But that raises another question: What’s the best way to fire up the Republican base? I’m not trying to troll anyone here, but it seems like the answer is to hold hearings. That would keep the whole Supreme Court issue front and center for months on end. The base would be faced almost daily with the prospect of what a liberal justice would do; talk radio would go nuts; and there would be endless chances to find specific problems with the nominee—many of which would coincidentally require the production of reams of files and records to trawl through.

Democrats, conversely, would have less to get fired up about. Sure, they’d be unhappy, but they wouldn’t be able to carp endlessly about Republican obstruction. Their guy is getting a hearing, after all.

So it seems like holding hearings normally would be a better way to fire up the GOP base and a better way to keep the Democratic base a little quieter. It probably wouldn’t make a huge difference either way, but it’s still a win-win. What am I missing here?

1After which they undoubtedly went out for a beer and shared their bewilderment about the fact that so many Republicans have been trained to vote for a guy like Donald Trump. What could possibly have driven them in such a direction?

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Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

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The Clinton-Sanders Ad War Shows How Black Lives Matter Reshaped the Race

by SamualGrimstone Posted on February 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, competing for African American voters in South Carolina, released a new radio ad featuring film director and actor Spike Lee enthusiastically talking up the record of “my brother Bernie Sanders” in fighting racism.

“When Bernie gets in the White House, he will do the right thing!” Lee says in the spot, a nod to the movie that made him famous. “How can we be sure?” he continues. “Bernie was at the March on Washington with Dr. King. He was arrested in Chicago for protesting segregation in public schools. He fought for wealth and education and inequality throughout his whole career. No flipping, no flopping. Enough talk. Time for action.”

The high-energy Spike Lee ad is one of many in the ongoing ad war between Sanders and front-runner Hillary Clinton. Last week, Republican candidates blanketed the Palmetto State with ads that amounted to a million-dollar circular firing squad. The ad blitzes from Sanders and Clinton—primarily targeting hip-hop, gospel, and R&B radio stations—zero in on serious topics: police violence, mass incarceration, and inequality.

The ads in South Carolina, where more than half the Democratic electorate is black, were always going to be a little different than the ads in uber-white New Hampshire. But listen to an hour or two of drive-time radio, and it becomes clear how different the battle lines in South Carolina are from those in the three states that voted before it—and how the work of civil rights activists over the last few years has changed the dynamics of the 2016 race.

“I was one of the leaders in the House to take charge and say the Confederate flag has to come down now,” says Rep. Justin Bamberg, an African American Democrat in a Sanders ad, explaining why he switched from Clinton to the Vermont senator. “He has stood for civil rights his entire life. He marched on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King. Bernie Sanders will be the advocate to address the problems in the criminal justice system.”

Another Sanders spot features four African American activists from South Carolina, of varying ages, outlining why they back the self-described democratic socialist. “Bernie Sanders realizes that mass incarceration, especially among young people, is a rising epidemic,” says Hamilton Grant. Gloria Bomell Tinubu remarks, “We know that prison is big business; it’s been privatized. And Bryanta-Booker Maxwell says of Sanders, “He is the best champion for criminal justice reform.”

In another radio ad, Sanders, touting his plan to fight “institutional racism,” makes a direct pitch for himself: “Millions of lives are being wrecked, families are being torn apart, we’re spending huge sums of taxpayer money locking people up. It makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in education, in jobs, rather than jails and incarceration.”

Pro-Clinton ads hit similar points, but with three big additions: Obama, Obama, Obama. That is, as these ads depict Clinton as a pursuer of justice and equality, they hammer home her connection to the president.

“We all worked hard to elect President Barack Obama eight years ago,” a woman narrator says at the beginning of a heavily played ad aired by Priorities USA, a Clinton-backing super-PAC. “Republicans have tried to tear him down every step of the way. We can’t let them hold us back. We need a president who will build on all that President Obama has done. President Obama trusted Hillary Clinton to be America’s secretary of state.” And the ad turns toward racism at its end: “She’ll fight to remove the stains of unfairness and prejudice from our criminal justice system, so that justice is just.”

Another spot from the super-PAC cites Clinton’s “bold” plan to curb police brutality. And in an ad paid for directly by the Clinton campaign, former Attorney General Eric Holder, emphasizing his and Clinton’s ties to Obama, hails her efforts to protect civil rights and voting rights and her support for tougher gun laws and police accountability:

The most direct reference to the Black Lives Matter movement comes in an ad in which Clinton herself says, “African Americans are more likely to be arrested by police and sentenced to longer prison terms for doing the same thing that whites do. Too many encounters with law enforcement end tragically for African Americans.” A narrator cites a young Hillary’s work “standing up for African American teenagers locked up with adults in South Carolina jails.” Then Clinton adds, “We have to face up to the hard truth of injustice and systemic racism.”

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Sanders and Clinton’s fight for the airwaves is this: For all their heated exchanges on the debate stage, not a single spot goes negative.

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The Clinton-Sanders Ad War Shows How Black Lives Matter Reshaped the Race

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Raw Data: Increase in Life Expectancy at Age 65

by NolanPopp7849 Posted on February 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Among advanced countries with high life expectancies already, how is the US doing at increasing the life expectancy of men and women once they reach age 65? Not so good! Raw data below.

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Raw Data: Increase in Life Expectancy at Age 65

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The Latest Cruz-Rubio Spat Is Very Strange

by GeorgettaLeonski Posted on February 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz has fired his communications director, Rick Tyler, for spreading a lie about Marco Rubio. Jeff Stein suggests this means there might be hope for us after all:

For months, the top Republican candidates have been engaged in a brutal knockout battle of negativity. Personal insults, lies about each other’s records, schoolyard taunts — nothing has been deemed out of bounds. The good news is that, so far as we can tell, this attack really has backfired….It may be comforting to know that even in this Lord of the Flies–style campaign cycle, some of the basic conventions just might retain a bit of power.

Anything is possible, but I’ll stick with the cynicism my heard-earned age allows me on this score. Still, there really are a couple of odd things about this episode:

The whole thing started when the Daily Pennsylvanian got hold of a video that shows Rubio walking by a Bible-reading Cruz staffer and allegedly remarking, “Got a good book there….Not many answers in it.” But this makes no sense. Did Tyler seriously believe that Rubio walked up to a Cruz staffer and casually denigrated the Bible? Even in the Donald Trump era, no one would believe that. It’s insane. Tyler is an experienced guy, and it’s inexplicable that he’d fall for this.
Tyler took down the video and apologized after he learned Rubio’s remarks had been transcribed incorrectly. Rubio actually said “all the answers are in there.” Normally that’s the end of things. But this time Cruz decided to fire him. What’s that all about?

It sure seems like there’s something goofy going on here. I’m just not sure what.

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The Latest Cruz-Rubio Spat Is Very Strange

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TEEN’s "Love Yes" Is a Sleek Affair

by ChristoSprouse Posted on February 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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TEEN
Love Yes
Polyvinyl

Courtesy of Carpark Records

Led by Teeny Lieberson, the New York-based combo TEEN (which also includes Lieberson’s two sisters) has undergone a dramatic sonic makeover in the course of just three albums without sacrificing its off-kilter sensibility. The quartet began as the garage-rock version of a synth band, playing electronica with abundant rough edges. Today, they’re the epitome of polish, with supersleek melodies and gleaming vocal harmonies that echo the slickest modern R&B. But the songs are restless, probing studies of troubled sexuality and corrosive isolation, pondering “a suffered heart from years without touch” in “Push” and confronting ambivalence over a longterm commitment on “Another Man’s Woman.” Love Yes functions equally well as consummate easy listening and as a subtle antidote to complacency.

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TEEN’s "Love Yes" Is a Sleek Affair

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The FBI Says Its Fight With Apple Is Just About One Phone. Police and Prosecutors Say Otherwise

by MurrayMeredith Posted on February 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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The war between Apple and the FBI over the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, hinges mostly on one major question: Is the court order telling Apple to help the FBI unlock Farook’s iPhone an isolated case, or is it just the start of a new method for the government to guarantee access to anyone’s device?

Apple, which is fighting the order to unlock Farook’s phone, says complying with it would be just the tip of the iceberg. “The order would set a legal precedent that would expand the powers of the government, and we simply don’t know where that would lead us,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in a letter to customers on Sunday. “Should the government be allowed to order us to create other capabilities for surveillance purposes, such as recording conversations or location tracking?” Privacy groups and most tech experts agree with Cook.

But the FBI insists no such thing will happen, saying it is only seeking access to Farook’s phone and no one else’s. “The San Bernardino litigation isn’t about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message,” FBI Director James Comey wrote in a post responding to Cook on Lawfare, a prominent national security blog, on Sunday. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land.”

Yet high-profile supporters of the FBI’s case have said the precedent is what’s important. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a prominent advocate for more law enforcement access to encrypted data, wrote in USA Today last week that “the iPhone precedent in San Bernardino is important for our courts and our ability to protect innocent Americans and enforce the rule of law. While the national security implications of this situation are significant, the outcome of this dispute will also have a drastic effect on criminal cases across the country.”

Comey and other law enforcement officials have repeatedly stressed how widespread they believe their encryption problem is. Both terrorists and criminals increasingly use encryption to communicate, they say, meaning the government’s ability to detect them and stop crimes or attacks is getting dramatically worse. And that problem extends well beyond big terrorism cases like San Bernardino and into everyday police work. “I’d say this problem…is actually overwhelmingly affecting law enforcement,” Comey told Burr’s committee last week, “because it affects cops and prosecutors and sheriffs and detectives trying to make murder cases, car accident cases, kidnapping cases, drug cases. It has an impact on our national security work, but overwhelmingly this is a problem that local law enforcement sees.”

Cyrus Vance Jr., the district attorney for the borough of Manhattan in New York City, often highlights how many cases are supposedly impossible to make because suspects use encryption—and said on Sunday he’d put the Apple precedent to more widespread use, forcing companies to help unlock the phones of suspects in the future. “As the encryption debate zeroes in on the cowardly terrorist acts committed in San Bernardino, we should also remember that Apple’s switch to default device encryption affects virtually all criminal investigations, the overwhelming majority of which are handled by state and local law enforcement,” he said last week in calling for Congress to pass a law mandating backdoors. Burr and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have pledged to introduce such a bill in Congress.

State and local officials around the country back Vance. The Intercept compiled a collection of quotes from local law enforcement officials that run counter to Comey’s claim that the Apple case will provide only one-time access. As Matt Rokus, the deputy chief of the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, police put it, “The Apple case is going to have significant ramifications on us locally.”

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The FBI Says Its Fight With Apple Is Just About One Phone. Police and Prosecutors Say Otherwise

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Ted Cruz Tells Nevadans Only He Can Preserve Scalia’s Legacy

by DemetriHmi Posted on February 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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After a disappointing third-place finish in Saturday’s South Carolina Republican primary, Ted Cruz is looking to a new ally to boost his performance in the Nevada caucuses on Tuesday: the ghost of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Cruz seems to have settled on the idea that President Barack Obama won’t get a Supreme Court justice confirmed to replace Scalia. During a stump speech Monday afternoon in Las Vegas, Cruz said one of his first actions as president would be to name a “strong principled constitutionalist” as Scalia’s successor.

Cruz has begun to emphasize his legal career on the campaign trail in order to paint himself as the lone Republican candidate who can defend Scalia’s legacy. It’s a two-step dance to take down his rivals: heighten the stakes of the election to minimize Donald Trump as an unserious candidate, and push the idea that Marco Rubio isn’t conservative enough to be entrusted with picking Supreme Court nominees.

“As Ronald Reagan was to the presidency, so too was Justice Scalia to the Supreme Court,” Cruz said. “And his passing underscores the stakes of this election. It’s not one branch of government, but two that hang in the balance.”

Cruz laid out a conservative’s dystopian vision of the Supreme Court, where the law of the land would flip to a liberal interpretation should Scalia’s seat go to a Democratic appointee. “We are one liberal justice away from the Supreme Court mandating unlimited abortion on demand all across this country with no restrictions whatsoever,” Cruz said. “We are one liberal justice away from the Supreme Court reading the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights.” Cruz warned that a 5-4 liberal majority would also mean the dismantling of statues based on the Ten Commandments, “or the Supreme Court concluding that the United Nations and the World Court can bind our justice system…and subjecting us to international law and taking away sovereignty.”

Amid this doom and gloom, Cruz made sure to remind the crowd of Nevadans that he is a former lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court, so he knows how the institution operates. At the same time, he repeatedly hammered the point that he wouldn’t waffle, vowing that he was the only Republican candidate the voters should trust to appoint truly conservative judges.

“I think Justice Scalia’s passing,” Cruz said, taking a veiled jab at Trump’s gutter politics, “has elevated the assessment of the men and women of Nevada.”

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Ted Cruz Tells Nevadans Only He Can Preserve Scalia’s Legacy

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Congress Actually Did Something Pretty Great on Climate Change

by JaninaBeauchamp Posted on February 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December, Republicans in Congress struck a deal with Democrats to extend a package of tax breaks for wind and solar energy projects. Prior to the deal, things looked bleak. The tax credit for wind had already expired the year before, and the one for solar was set to expire by 2016. So the extension, which came after Democrats agreed to support lifting the long-standing ban on US oil exports, was a big and unexpected win for clean energy—one that will help buoy the industry for the next six years.

It could also prove to be one of the most significant actions taken by this Congress to reduce America’s carbon footprint, according to a new analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Thanks to all the new wind and solar that will likely get built because of the legislation, electricity-sector greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by as much as 1.4 billion metric tons by 2030 compared with what they would have been without the extension, the study found. That’s roughly the savings you’d get if you removed every passenger car from US roads for two years.

In other words, the tax breaks—2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced by a wind turbine and about 30 percent off the total cost of solar systems—add up to “one of the biggest investments in clean energy in our nation’s history,” Dan Utech, deputy assistant to President Barack Obama on climate, told reporters today.

How much wind and solar actually gets built (and thus the actual carbon savings) will also depend on what happens to the cost of natural gas, which has been low for the last few years thanks to the fracking boom but could rise again. Low gas prices make renewables less competitive, especially without the tax credit. But having the tax credit in place will enable solar and wind to compete in the market even if gas prices do stay low. The extension will also make wind and solar less vulnerable to state-level attacks on clean energy, as well as attacks on Obama’s broader climate agenda.

So, for once: Good job, Congress.

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Congress Actually Did Something Pretty Great on Climate Change

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44 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Even Worse Than You Can Imagine

by SibylOHeawfbu Posted on February 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Albert Woodfox, a cause célèbre in prison reform circles, was freed Friday, on his 69th birthday, from Louisiana custody after a negotiated settlement to end the oldest criminal prosecution in America. He spent nearly 44 years in solitary confinement, mainly at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly called “Angola.”

As far as I know, he holds the record for having been subjected to this punishment for longer than any other prisoner in American penal history. His nearest rival was Herman Wallace, who along with Woodfox was placed in solitary following the 1972 death of Angola guard Brent Miller. Wallace, wracked with cancer, was ordered freed two years ago by a federal court. Outside the prison gates, Carine Williams, one of his lawyers, asked: “Herman, do you know where you are?” The emaciated man looked at her and said, “Yes—I’m free.” He died two days later.

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44 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Even Worse Than You Can Imagine

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Always Bring a Nuke to a Knife Fight

by EltonMays249698 Posted on February 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Yesterday Donald Trump finally went ballistic over Ted Cruz’s attacks against him. After listing half a dozen alleged lies, he made this threat:

One of the ways I can fight back is to bring a lawsuit against him relative to the fact that he was born in Canada and therefore cannot be President. If he doesn’t take down his false ads and retract his lies, I will do so immediately.

The great thing about this is that Trump doesn’t even bother pretending that he wants to sue Cruz because he truly believes Cruz isn’t a natural-born citizen. He just flat-out admits that he plans to do it purely as revenge for Cruz being mean to him. The Golden Rule here is simple: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”

This appears to be a considerable source of Trump’s appeal. His supporters don’t care much about actual political positions; they care about having a mean SOB in office. They probably like Trump more because he’s going after Cruz out of anger rather than as a matter of principle.

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Always Bring a Nuke to a Knife Fight

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