Tag Archives: clinton

Sanders Wins West Virginia, Keeping the Pressure on Clinton

by UNNKent506 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders won the West Virginia Democratic primary on Tuesday, once again demonstrating that his campaign retains ardent support despite Hillary Clinton’s significant lead in the delegate count.

West Virginia fits the profile of a Sanders-friendly state. It’s a small and overwhelmingly white—in fact, at 93 percent white, it’s the third-whitest state in the country, according to FiveThirtyEight. Independents were permitted to vote in the Democratic primary, and Sanders has done well in contests open to independents, whereas Clinton has won most primaries restricted to Democrats.

Recent polls showed Sanders leading by an average of six points in the state. The major networks called the race with a quarter of the votes counted.

But Sanders’ win is not enough to make up ground in the delegate count. West Virginia has only 29 delegates, which will be allocated proportionally. Before Tuesday night, Clinton led Sanders by 290 in the pledged delegate count. When super-delegates are included, that lead grows by another 484 delegates. In order for Sanders to overtake Clinton, he will need many of those super-delegates to abandon Clinton and support him instead. And he’ll need to win bigger states than West Virginia, and by bigger margins.

On the Republican side, presumptive nominee Donald Trump won handily in West Virginia. Even before his last two rivals, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, left the race last week, polls in West Virginia showed the real estate mogul with a lead of more than 30 points.

Trump also easily won the Republican primary in Nebraska on Tuesday. Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, recently endorsed Trump, while the state’s junior senator, Republican Ben Sasse, is among the most vocal anti-Trump members of Congress.

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Sanders Wins West Virginia, Keeping the Pressure on Clinton

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Clinton Campaign Won’t Let Trump Distance Himself From Radical Tax Plan

by DoraColton Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton’s campaign isn’t going to let Donald Trump quietly walk back the more extreme positions he took in order to secure the Republican nomination. On Monday, as Trump begins distancing himself from his earlier tax plan now that he’s the presumptive GOP nominee, the Clinton campaign organized a press call to rip the plan as a massive giveaway to the top 1 percent. “This is the most risky, reckless, and regressive tax proposal ever put forward by a major presidential candidate,” said Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council, speaking for the Clinton campaign.

Trump’s campaign hasn’t exactly been known for its depth of policy details. But one of the few comprehensive plans that Trump put forward was a scheme to cuts taxes drastically. Released last fall, Trump’s tax plan would slash rates across the board, but with most of the benefits accruing to the rich and uber-rich, as the top income tax rate would drop from 39.6 percent to 25 percent.

“We still think facts and numbers matter and should in this campaign,” Sperling said. He pointed to independent analyses of Trump’s plan showing that it would cost anywhere from $9 trillion to $12 trillion over the first decade. Most of the benefits of these tax cuts would go to the wealthy. According to the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, $3.5 trillion, or 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, would go to people earning more than $1 million dollars per year. The Tax Policy Center found that 40 percent of the money in Trump’s tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent, with the bottom 60 percent of the country getting 16 percent of those tax cuts.

“To put it simply,” Clinton policy adviser Jake Sullivan said, “Donald Trump has put forward a tax plan that places him squarely on the side of the superwealthy and corporations at the expense of the middle class and working families.”

Over the weekend, Trump created some confusion about whether he actually stands by his tax plan. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump painted his proposal as just an opening bid that would inevitably change during negotiations with Congress, and he even seemed to suggest that he’d like to see taxes go up on the wealthy. “For the wealthy, I think, frankly, it’s going to go up,” he said. “And you know what, it really should go up.”

The Clinton campaign isn’t ready to let him to ditch his stances. “The only thing one can do is look at the black and white of his paper and not be fooled by his shifting comments,” Sperling said. The Clinton aides also suggested that Trump’s recent flirtations with refinancing the country’s debt posed a dire threat to the global financial system. “It’s somewhat shocking,” Sperling said, “that in a time when our country is celebrating the economic foresight of Alexander Hamilton that the presumptive candidate for president, Donald Trump, is openly advocating that the United States no longer honor 100 percent of its debt or protect our full faith and credit.”

“We frankly think that Mr. Trump’s economic plans have not received the scrutiny they’ve deserved,” Sullivan said, promising that the Clinton campaign plans to keep hammering the point home throughout the course of the race as a major area of difference between the candidates.

In the middle of the call, as luck would have it, Trump took to his favorite communication medium to stick by his tax plan:

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Clinton Campaign Won’t Let Trump Distance Himself From Radical Tax Plan

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Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

by DeniceQBJxtzjf Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the New York Times Magazine this week, David Samuels has a long profile of Ben Rhodes, the chief messaging guru for foreign affairs in the White House. Generally speaking, Rhodes seems like my kind of guy, but what’s most interesting about the profile isn’t really Rhodes himself, but his take on modern journalism. For example:

It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade….Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Or this on how to spin the news:

Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people….And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

….In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.

Or this:

Rhodes developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

….Barack Obama is not a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on.

The Blob “catching on” means that a lot of members of the foreign policy establishment have decided that maybe they don’t like Obama so much after all. He’s just too unwilling to send in the military when there’s a problem somewhere. At least, that seems like their big complaint to me.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read—not so much for what it says about Rhodes or Obama, but for what it says about the news business circa 2016. In a way, nothing has changed: presidents always try to shape the news, and they use whatever tools are at hand in their particular era. But in another way, everything has changed. It’s not just the tools that have changed this time, it’s the entire press corps.

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Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

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Pivoting to the Center for the General Election Is Easy!

by KandiLyons Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s a truism of American politics that candidates run to the left or right during primaries but then “pivot” toward the center for the general election. And the quality of the pivot is a topic of endless discussion. It has to be done smoothly and delicately. Voters won’t put up with a brazen flip-flop.

Or will they? Here is the Washington Post on Donald Trump’s pivot:

The New York real estate tycoon, who frequently boasted throughout the primary that he was financing his campaign, is setting up a national fundraising operation and taking a hands-off posture toward super PACs.

He is expressing openness to raising the minimum wage, a move he previously opposed, saying on CNN this week, “I mean, you have to have something that you can live on.”

And Trump is backing away from a tax plan he rolled out last fall that would give major cuts to the rich. “I am not necessarily a huge fan of that,” he told CNBC. “I am so much more into the middle class, who have just been absolutely forgotten in our country.”

Trump has been rewriting the rules for the past year, so maybe this rule is going by the wayside as well. It will be especially easy for Trump since (a) he doesn’t have an ideological fan base that cares much about his positions, and (b) the press will just shrug and say it’s Trump being Trump. Can you imagine what would happen if Hillary Clinton tried to pull a stunt like this?

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Pivoting to the Center for the General Election Is Easy!

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Top Gun Lobbyist Calls Hundreds of Child Gun Deaths "Occasional Mishaps"

by TameraGillis Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an in-depth investigation in 2013, Mother Jones found that guns kill hundreds of children per year in the United States. Many die in homicides, and many others die in accidents—mostly when children themselves pull the trigger. The kids shooting themselves or others have often been as young as two or three years old. Invariably these “tragedies” result from adults leaving unsecured firearms lying around in their homes or, in some cases, in their cars.

Since our investigation, the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety has collected additional data confirming the scope of the problem. As the New York Times reported on Thursday, during one week in April four toddlers around the country killed themselves with guns, and a mother was fatally shot by her two-year-old while driving, after the child apparently picked up a weapon that slid out from under the driver’s seat. The data remains stark: “In 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of young children and teenagers, according to Everytown’s database,” the Times reported. “A child who accidentally pulls the trigger is most likely to be 3 years old, the statistics show.”

Equally stark is the response from the gun lobby. There has been growing debate about laws aimed at reducing the problem, which, as our investigation showed, has long gone underreported. Larry Pratt, a leading figure among hardline pro-gun activists, argues that tighter gun regulations are not the answer. In comments to the Times, Pratt called the hundreds of child gun deaths that occur each year “occasional mishaps”:

“It’s clearly a tragedy, but it’s not something that’s widespread,” said Larry Pratt, a spokesman and former executive director of Gun Owners of America. “To base public policy on occasional mishaps would be a grave mistake.”

As the Times piece notes, 27 states now have laws that hold adults responsible for letting unsupervised children get their hands on guns. Gun safety advocates have increasingly pushed for tougher laws requiring owners to use trigger locks, gun safes, or other measures for safe storage and use. Another potential solution that’s been gaining new interest is smart-gun technology. But gun lobbying groups including Gun Owners of America and the National Rifle Association have long opposed these policies across the board, claiming that they threaten Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

Even in states with laws on the books, the contentious politics tends to quash appetite among prosecutors for holding adults accountable when young children accidentally kill. Here, the data goes from stark to perhaps stunning: In 2013 we documented 52 cases where adults had left their guns unsecured—but we could only find four people who were held criminally liable for the children’s deaths.

The following year I covered this problem in more detail, in a story chronicling the rise of a new advocacy group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Particularly in more rural communities, a prevailing theme has been that parents—including a few who accidentally shot their own children—have already suffered enough and shouldn’t be punished:

Last Christmas Eve in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a man who’d been “messing with” a 9 mm handgun unintentionally shot and killed his two-month-old daughter as she slept in her glider. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, yet local law enforcement officials said they were undecided about pursuing criminal charges. Typically that might’ve been the end of it, but Moms Demand Action voiced outrage via social media and the local press. Within two weeks the DA announced plans to prosecute. (He said no outside group influenced his decision.)

“While we fully support the father being held accountable for this crime, we also acknowledge the horrific grief this family is experiencing,” Moms Demand Action said after the charges were announced. “We hope their tragedy can serve as an example that encourages others to be more responsible with their firearms.” The father later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment, which could have brought up to 15 years in prison. He got six years’ probation and no jail time.

Moms also drew attention to a case in February in North Carolina, where a three-year-old boy wounded his 17-month-old sister after finding a handgun that their father—who wrote a parenting advice column in a local paper—had left unsecured. (The infant recovered.) “The parents have been punished more than any criminal justice system can do to them,” a captain from the county sheriff’s department said soon after the shooting. After Moms swung into action, the father was charged with failure to secure his firearm to protect a minor; his case is pending.

“All too often DAs are loath to get involved, saying a family has suffered enough,” Watts says, “especially in states where laws are inadequate…This idea of ‘accidental’ gun deaths, when something is truly negligence, has to be remedied.”

For its part, the gun lobby prefers to keep the focus on other fears. On Thursday, the NRA made no reference to the latest data on child gun deaths. On its blog, a post—topped by an image of a toddler biking—offered “10 Tips That Could Save Your Life.” The “home” segment of the list made no mention of safely storing firearms, but instead focused on the specter of a home invasion. “To deal with this possibility,” it said, “be prepared by making a home defense plan and setting up a safe room with your family.” The room should be equipped with a phone for calling 911, it said, and a “personal protection device” such as “mace, batons, Tasers, stun guns, or firearm.”

The NRA’s Twitter feed otherwise attended to politics, denouncing an apparent conspiracy by the Social Security Administration to conduct “the largest gun grab in American history,” and firing away at “Hillary Clinton’s 6-part plan to disarm citizens — and rip apart the #2A.”

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Top Gun Lobbyist Calls Hundreds of Child Gun Deaths "Occasional Mishaps"

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Republicans Have a Tough Six Months Ahead of Them

by HarlanBaltzell4 Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Every living Republican president has decided not to endorse Donald Trump:

Bush 41, who enthusiastically endorsed every Republican nominee for the last five election cycles, will stay out of the campaign process this time. He does not have plans to endorse presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, spokesman Jim McGrath told The Texas Tribune.

….Bush 43, meanwhile, “does not plan to participate in or comment on the presidential campaign,” according to his personal aide, Freddy Ford.

I agree that Republicans partly brought Trump on themselves. But only partly. They were hoping for an ideological extremist, and before this year it wasn’t obvious either to them or to liberal critics that they might instead get a demagogic populist extremist. All of us assumed that eventually Republicans would nominate a hardcore conservative, and we were all taken by surprise when Trump stepped in instead.

So the truth is that I feel sorry for them. A lot of conservatives have an agonizing choice to make now: either support Trump or, effectively, support Hillary Clinton, a candidate they loathe. If I had a similar choice—say, between supporting a liberal Trump or supporting Ted Cruz—what would I do? I’d like to think I’d bite the bullet and support Cruz. But honestly? I don’t know. Serious Republicans have a helluva rough six months ahead of them.

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Republicans Have a Tough Six Months Ahead of Them

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Clinton is in coal country, and it’s getting messy

by ZFMHeike036 Posted on May 3, 2016

Clinton is in coal country, and it’s getting messy

By on May 3, 2016Share

Hillary Clinton had one hell of a day during part one of her two-day swing through Appalachia.

Holding back tears, an out-of-work coal miner confronted Clinton at a roundtable event in West Virginia on Monday. His concern was with remarks Clinton made on the campaign trail earlier this year about putting coal miners out of business.

“I just want to know how you can say that you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come here and tell us how you gonna be our friend,” former miner Bo Copley told the presidential hopeful, CBS reports.

Clinton apologized, and told Copley that her comments about miners at the CNN town hall in March were taken out of context — which they were. While Clinton did literally say, “We’re going to put a lot coal miners and a lot of coal companies out of business,” she was touting her plan to transition away from fossil fuels and toward a renewable energy economy. The $30 billion plan Clinton outlined would rebuild infrastructure and invest in education, public health, and initiatives to help rebuild communities ravaged by the coal industry.

“I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason or the excuse to be so upset with me, because that is not what I intended at all,” Clinton told Copley. “I’m here because I want you to know whether people vote for me or not, whether they yell at me or not, is not going to affect what I’m gonna try to do to help.” Copley, for his part, seemed unconvinced, and told CBS afterward that he was not swayed by Clinton’s apology.

Outside, protesters — whom Copley said he represented — chanted, “Go home, Hillary!” and “Benghazi! Benghazi!,” sounding, for a moment, an awful lot like Congress.

Guess who else showed up to one of Clinton’s events? None other than coal baron Don Blankenship, who was just sentenced a year in prison for creating an unsafe workplace that led to 29 coal workers’ deaths.

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Clinton is in coal country, and it’s getting messy

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The Long, Hard Slog of Health Care Reform (Abridged Version)

by MarceliRister Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, in the course of linking to a Ryan Cooper post about Bernie Sanders, I mentioned that I thought Cooper was “very, very wrong about the history of health care reform too, but I’ll leave that for another time.” Well, why not now? Here is Cooper:

Democrats as a party were not “working their fingers to the bone” trying to get universal health care through this entire time i.e., since 1993. For two whole presidential elections the party’s nominees ran on measly little half-measures they barely mentioned….ObamaCare — a basically mediocre program that is still a big improvement on the status quo — reflects its political origins. It’s what milquetoast liberals had settled on as a reasonable compromise, so when George Bush handed them a great big majority on a silver platter, that’s what we got. It was Bush’s failed presidency, not 30 years of preemptively selling out to the medical industry, that got the job done.

That’s pretty brutal. But let’s go back a little further. Here’s a very brief history of health care reform over the past half century:

1962: JFK launches effort to provide health care for the elderly. It is relentlessly attacked as socialized medicine and Kennedy is unable to get it passed before he dies.

1965: Following a landslide victory, and with massive majorities in both the House and Senate, LBJ passes Medicare and Medicaid.

1971: Richard Nixon proposes a limited health care reform act. Three years later he proposes a more comprehensive plan similar in scope to Obamacare. Sen. Ted Kennedy holds out for single-payer and ends up getting nothing. “That was the best deal we were going to get,” Kennedy admitted later, calling his refusal to compromise his biggest regret in public life. “Nothing since has come close.”

1979: Jimmy Carter proposes a national health care plan. The Senate takes it up, but Carter is unable to broker a compromise with Kennedy, who wants something more ambitious.

1993: Bill Clinton tries to pass health care reform. He does not have a gigantic majority in Congress, and fails miserably. Two years later Newt Gingrich takes over the House.

1997: Clinton and Ted Kennedy pass a more modest children’s health care bill, SCHIP, with bipartisan support.

2009: Barack Obama gets a razor-thin Democratic majority for a few months and eventually passes Obamacare, which expands Medicaid for the poor and offers exchange-based private insurance for the near-poor.

This is what politics looks like. Every single Democratic president in my lifetime has tried to pass health care reform. Some of them partially succeeded and some failed entirely, but all of them tried. The two main things standing in the way of getting more have been (a) Republicans and (b) liberals who refused to compromise on single-payer.

Contra Cooper, George Bush did not hand Obama a “great big majority.” Democrats in 2009 had a big majority in the House and a zero-vote majority in the Senate. That’s the thinnest possible majority you can have, and this is the reason Obamacare is so limited. To pass, it had to satisfy the 40th most conservative senator, so that’s what it did.

There’s been a long and ultimately sterile argument over whether Obama could have gotten more. I think the evidence suggests he got as much as he could, but the truth is that we’ll never know for sure. And it doesn’t change the bigger picture anyway: thousands of Democrats—politicians, activists, think tankers, and more—have literally spent decades working their fingers to the bone creating plan after plan; selling these plans to the public; and trying dozens of different ways to somehow push health care reform through Congress. For most of that time it’s been a hard, grinding, thankless task, and we still don’t have what we ultimately want. But in the end, all of these hacks and wonks have made a difference and helped tens of millions of people. They deserve our respect, not a bit of casually tossed off disparagement just because they didn’t propose single-payer health care as their #1 priority every single year of their lives.

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The Long, Hard Slog of Health Care Reform (Abridged Version)

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Campaign Reporters Fess Up: They Really Can’t Stand Hillary Clinton

by FannyMileham Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last month Politico polled 80 campaign reporters about this year’s race. It turns out they hate Nevada and Ohio but love South Carolina—mainly because it has good food, apparently. They think Maggie Haberman is the best reporter covering the race, and Fox News has done the best job of hosting a debate. Donald Trump has gotten the softest coverage, probably because they all agree that “traffic, viewership, and clicks” drives their coverage.

And who’s gotten the harshest coverage? Do you even have to ask? It turns out that even reporters themselves agree that it’s not even a close call:

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Campaign Reporters Fess Up: They Really Can’t Stand Hillary Clinton

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Democrats Have a Class Gap. Republicans Have a Generation Gap.

by KianBittner Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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What are the big fault lines within the Democratic and Republican parties? According to a recent Pew report, Democrats have a class gap: Democratic elites are far more liberal than less educated members of the party. But there’s not much of a generation gap: old and young voters are pretty similar ideologically.

Among Republicans, it’s just the opposite. They have a huge generation gap, with older voters skewing much more conservative than younger voters. But there’s no class gap: their elites are in pretty close sync with the party base. The raw data is here, and the chart below shows the magnitude of the difference:

This is interesting, since the most talked-about aspect of the Democratic primary was the astonishingly strong preference of young voters for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. But why did they prefer Bernie? The obvious answer is that they’re more liberal than older Democrats and therefore preferred his more radical vision—but the Pew data says that’s not the case.

So what is the answer? The age gap could still explain a bit of it, since young Democrats are a little more liberal than older Democrats. And the class gap could also explain a bit of it, since Bernie voters tend to be both young and well educated. But even put together, this doesn’t seem like enough.

Obviously there was something about Bernie that generated huge enthusiasm among younger voters. But if it wasn’t ideology, what was it?

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Democrats Have a Class Gap. Republicans Have a Generation Gap.

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