Tag Archives: clinton

Hillary Fudges on the Minimum Wage

by MagaretArledge Posted on April 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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I didn’t see last night’s debate, but I noted this in the transcript this morning:

BLITZER: If a Democratic Congress put a $15 minimum wage bill on your desk, would you sign it?

CLINTON: Well, of course I would. And I have supported supported the fight for 15. I am proud to have the endorsement of most of the unions that have led the fight for 15. I was proud to stand on the stage with Governor Cuomo, with SEIU and others who have been leading this battle and I will work as hard as I can to raise the minimum wage. I always have. I supported that when I was in the Senate.

SANDERS: Well, look…

CLINTON: But what I have also said is that we’ve got to be smart about it, just the way Governor Cuomo was here in New York. If you look at it, we moved more quickly to $15 in New York City, more deliberately toward $12, $12.50 upstate then to $15. That is exactly my position. It’s a model for the nation and that’s what I will do as president.

This is a pretty obvious evasion, and I’m sorry to see it. Here’s her official position:

Hillary believes we are long overdue in raising the minimum wage. She has supported raising the federal minimum wage to $12, and believes that we should go further than the federal minimum through state and local efforts, and workers organizing and bargaining for higher wages, such as the Fight for 15 and recent efforts in Los Angeles and New York to raise their minimum wage to $15.

Blitzer’s question was clearly about raising the federal minimum wage to $15, and Hillary immediately said she’d support that. But she doesn’t. She supports a $12 federal minimum wage. Pretty obviously, though, she wanted the TV audience to take away a different impression.

I hate to see pandering like this. Hillary’s position on the minimum wage is perfectly reasonable: a federal minimum of $12. States and cities have always been able to enact higher minimums if they want, and the president has no say over that. So why not say so? Would she really lose that many votes? My guess is that none of the hardcore $15 folks are voting for her in the first place.

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Hillary Fudges on the Minimum Wage

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Sanders Extends Winning Streak in Wyoming

by MagdaMingay4 Posted on April 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders won the Democratic caucuses in Wyoming on Saturday, adding to his winning streak over the past several weeks. Sanders captured 56 percent of the vote, to 44 percent for Hillary Clinton.

Small and overwhelmingly white, Wyoming fits the profile of a Sanders-friendly state. Sanders has also performed better in states that hold caucuses rather than primaries.

But Sanders’ margin of victory wasn’t enough for him to cut into Clinton’s lead in pledged delegates. Each candidate won seven delegates in Wyoming.

Both campaigns put in appearances in Wyoming during the past week. The Clinton campaign sent Bill Clinton to stump for his wife. On Tuesday night, 1,800 people attended a Sanders victory rally at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, after he won the Wisconsin primary that evening.

Wyoming will send 14 pledged delegates to the party’s national convention in Philadelphia this summer, as well as four unpledged superdelegates.

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Sanders Extends Winning Streak in Wyoming

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Does It Really Matter if Bernie Called Hillary Unqualified?

by PenneyBarge4101 Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Josh Marshall weighs in on the flap over Bernie Sanders saying that Hillary Clinton is unqualified to be president:

Various things Clinton said can be reasonably interpreted as questioning whether Sanders is up to the job of the presidency. But it is an entirely different matter when an opponent, in his own voice, says flatly his challenger is “unqualified” to serve as President of the country. That’s something that cannot be unsaid. If Clinton is the nominee, it will undoubtedly be a staples of GOP stump speeches in the Fall. These are simple realities of political campaigns.

I’m curious about something: is this actually true? I hear it every four years. At some point, the primary races always get a little (or a lot) nasty, and the candidates start saying things that seem like they’d be great fodder for attack ads by the other side in the general election. But are they? Do these kinds of comments ever end up as a major theme in political ads?

I never see it. Of course, I live in California, and nobody ever bothers advertising here. Still, I never really hear about it elsewhere either. By the time the general election comes along, both sides have far more important attacks to make. And they probably assume—rightly—that most undecided voters don’t care much what some angry primary opponent said six months before.

I’d prefer that both Bernie and Hillary dial it back a notch. But is Donald Trump really going to attack Hillary by showing footage of Bernie saying she’s not qualified to be president, nyah nyah nyah? I doubt it. Even low-information voters know that this is the kind of thing that happens in the heat of campaigns, and it doesn’t really mean anything.

Does anyone know the answer to this? In 2012, for example, did the Obama campaign run attack ads featuring Newt Gingrich saying that Romney kept money in the Cayman Islands? Did the McCain campaign in 2008 use footage of Hillary attacking Obama? Just how common—or not—is this?

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Does It Really Matter if Bernie Called Hillary Unqualified?

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As Wisconsin Goes to the Polls, Sanders and Cruz Have Energy on Their Side

by AlisonNXGA Posted on April 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday, a political circus arrived in Milwaukee. Over the course of several hours, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and the actual Shrine Circus all held events separated by just a few blocks in the city’s downtown. A street vendor hawked glow sticks to circus-going kids next to Trump fans selling Make America Great Again knockoff hats.

The Trump and Sanders rallies shared a parking lot and start time, but all the energy was on Sanders’ side of the street. It was indicative of the mood of the Wisconsin electorate. Ahead of Tuesday’s primaries, the senator from Vermont has aroused a level of excitement—as well as poll numbers—that Hillary Clinton and her husband can’t match. On the Republican side, Trump has found a less receptive audience for his typical bombast, failing to pack venues or to maintain his lead in a state that now looks likely to hand him a stinging defeat.

Sanders sounded a jubilant note at a ballroom in the Wisconsin Center, where just two nights prior he’d spoken before a crowd of Democratic bigwigs more favorably inclined toward Hillary Clinton. “This is like a Greek chorus,” Sanders joked at one point after the crowd booed his mention of Scott Walker, the state’s unpopular Republican governor. “I say a name, and you respond.”

Sanders, who’s used Walker as a punching bag at campaign stops in Wisconsin throughout the past week, sounded confident that he’d add Wisconsin to his list of recent wins. “Let me talk about the momentum that you are feeling and I am feeling in this campaign,” he said. “We have won six out of the last seven caucuses and primaries. Not only have we won them, we’ve won every one by landslide victories. And tomorrow, if there is a good turnout here in Wisconsin, if there is a record-breaking turnout here in Wisconsin, we are going to win here as well.” After his speech, the Sanders campaign blasted out a press release bragging that 38,000 fans had flocked to his events in the Badger State over the past week.

Down the block a few hours earlier, Bill Clinton spoke to a much smaller mid-afternoon crowd at the Turner Ballroom. The contrast in style with Sanders couldn’t have been clearer. Where the Sanders campaign warmed up the audience with the largely forgotten, late-aughts synth band 3OH!3, Clinton was preceded by Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Throughout his speech, Clinton kept returning to a refrain intended to boost his wife’s credentials and rebuke Sanders. He would mention one of Hillary Clinton’s career accomplishments and punctuate it by saying, “That’s leadership, not establishment politics.”

Still, the scene belied that assertion, with the state’s establishment lined up in Clinton’s corner. If the voting bears out recent polls, it looks like the allegiances of the state’s political leaders haven’t done much to sway Democratic voters who live there.

The same dynamic is producing the opposite result on the Republican side. Ted Cruz, the state’s likely Republican winner, spent the day campaigning triumphantly around the state with Walker, who endorsed Cruz last week. The pair hit up the Mars Cheese Castle in Kenosha for some lighthearted fun, with Cruz ducking away from a fan who tried to plop a cheesehead atop his noggin and joking, “When they promise a cheese castle, you sort of expect to be able to eat the castle.”

Things weren’t as cheery for Trump. The candidate who’s filled stadiums in other states barely managed 50 percent occupancy at a 4,000-seat theater next to the circus. Wisconsinites didn’t even bother to show up and protest outside, with Trump becoming an afterthought in the state ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

Unlike on most primary days, when candidates visit their local offices to motivate volunteers and then schedule an evening rally to get prime-time TV coverage, almost everyone is fleeing the state ahead of the vote. Hillary Clinton was already campaigning Monday in New York, which goes to the polls on April 19. Trump has a blank schedule. Sanders is slated to speak with fans in Wyoming, which holds its Democratic caucus this weekend.

Only Cruz is sticking around Tuesday evening, and for good reason. While a Sanders win would help him build momentum, the Democrats’ proportional allocation of delegates means he won’t gain that much on Clinton and will remain a long shot to win at this summer’s party convention. Cruz, meanwhile, is banking on a contested convention—a scenario he discussed with reporters on Monday morning—which could enable him to secure the nomination on the second ballot or later. At this point, he needs to celebrate every minor victory he can eke out, hoping that it will be enough to deny Trump a first-ballot win.

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As Wisconsin Goes to the Polls, Sanders and Cruz Have Energy on Their Side

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Over Dinner, Clinton and Sanders Bash Wisconsin’s Scott Walker

by LethaStover Posted on April 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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With just a few days left before the Wisconsin primary, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are trying their best to convince Democrats in the state that they’re the real anti-Scott Walker.

On Saturday night, Wisconsin’s Democratic elite gathered at a convention center in downtown Milwaukee to listen to a string of Democratic politicians—including both Sanders and Clinton—offer speeches at the party’s annual Founders Day Gala. The crowd was swank, well-connected: Tickets for the gala started at $150 and ran up to $5,000 for a “prime table,” and based on cheers and stickers, the party insiders heavily favored Clinton. But attendees were united in shouting support for any denunciation of their governor, first when Sanders spoke and then again when Clinton took the stage later in the evening (the presidential candidates swept quickly through the convention hall just for their slotted speaking times, so unfortunately there was no public crossing of paths).

“It is terrible to see the damage Gov. Walker and his allies in the legislature have done in just five years,” Clinton said.

“Think about all of the things Gov. Walker does, and I will do exactly the opposite,” Sanders promised for how he’d govern in the White House.

Polls released over the past week have generally shown Sanders holding a narrow lead over Clinton in Wisconsin, including the well-respected Marquette Law School poll that had Sanders ahead by 4 percent earlier this week. Meanwhile, Walker’s approval numbers in the state have sunk since he won reelection in 2014 and then turned his attention to his failed presidential run. Voters in the state now give him a net negative 10 percent favorability. Running by bashing Walker is a reliable way to inspire passion among Wisconsin Democrats.

Clinton tied a host of her regular campaign issues into a referendum against Walker. “We believe that a governor that attacks teachers, nurses, and firefighters, it doesn’t make him a leader, it makes him a bully,” she said. She warned that Ted Cruz and the other Republican presidential candidates would export Walker-style policies nationally, and that the result would be cataclysmic for the country.

In a not-so-subtle jab at Sanders, who has been hesitant to throw his weight behind down-ballot Democrats, Clinton promised to do everything in her power to get Walker out of office and get Democrats back in control of the Wisconsin legislature. “In 2018, we will defeat Scott Walker,” Clinton guaranteed.

She trained her harshest criticism on Rebecca Bradley, a state Supreme Court justice appointed by Walker and who is up for election on Tuesday. During the campaign, liberals in Wisconsin have highlighted Bradley’s past writings, which included a 2006 column in which the judge likens use of birth control to murder. “I had to read this three times, she has actually said birth control is morally abhorrent and doctors who provided it, namely birth control, and women who use it, namely birth control, are party to murder,” Clinton said, her voice full of astonishment.

“There is no place,” she said, “on any Supreme Court, or any court in this country, no place at all for Rebecca Bradley’s decades-long track record of dangerous rhetoric against women, survivors of sexual assault, and the LGBT community.”

Half an hour before Clinton took the mic at the center of the room, Sanders had ripped into Walker for pushing laws to restrict voting access. “I have contempt, absolute contempt, for those Republican governors who do not have the guts to support free, open, and fair elections,” Sanders said. Thanks to Walker, Wisconsin has new strict photo ID law that has made it difficult for some groups—that just happen to skew Democratic—from being able to cast a vote. “I say to Gov. Walker, and all of the other Republican governors who are trying to make it harder to vote for poor people and old people and people of color and young people—trying to make it harder for them to participate in the political process,” Sanders said, “I say to them, if you don’t have to guts to participate in a free and fair election, get out of politics and get another job.”

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Over Dinner, Clinton and Sanders Bash Wisconsin’s Scott Walker

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Donald Trump’s Lies About Being a Business Success

by ByronMcCoy Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Fresh off of her delightful Twitter takedown listing all the ways she believes Donald Trump is a “loser,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared on the Late Show on Wednesday to shred the Republican front-runner’s self-touted reputation as a successful businessman.

“The truth is that he inherited a fortune from his father, he kept it going by cheating and defrauding people, and then he takes his creditors through Chapter 11,” Warren told host Stephen Colbert.

“We have an economy that is in real trouble,” she added. “But when the economy is in this kind of trouble, calling on Donald Trump for help is like if your house is on fire, calling an arsonist to come help out.”

In contrast, the Massachusetts senator said the Democratic presidential candidates are discussing real issues that actually matter to Americans.

“The Democrats are doing exactly what we should be doing,” she said. “We’re out talking about the issues that affect hardworking families: student loans, Social Security, more cops on Wall Street, trade.”

She concluded by encouraging Democrats to vote for whoever picks up the party’s nomination, whether it be Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Donald Trump’s Lies About Being a Business Success

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Yet More Obama Tyranny Turns Out to Be Pretty Non-Tyrannical

by JarredMessina Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stanley Kurtz is yet again in a lather about a HUD program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, the centerpiece of President Obama’s plan to fight housing discrimination:

Federal Tyranny Gags GOP in Hillary’s Backyard

The Obama administration’s AFFH policy has morphed from “mere” massive regulatory overreach into a bald attempt to quash the freedom of speech of its political opponents. The new federal effort to muzzle Westchester County Executive Robert Astorino’s attacks on the Obama administration’s housing policy is very arguably designed to silence public opposition to AFFH, and to remove a potential political time-bomb from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Hillary Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua, in Westchester County, New York is ground zero in the national controversy over AFFH….And now it just so happens that the “Federal Monitor” appointed to oversee the settlement of a court case compelling Westchester to “affirmatively further fair housing” has asked a court to muzzle Astorino.

But here’s a funny thing: Westchester’s problems were caused by a private lawsuit filed in 2006, which it lost in February 2009. It hardly seems likely that Obama had much to do with that. And it seems doubly unlikely that AFFH, which was announced a mere nine months ago, could possibly be “ground zero” for a fight that’s been ongoing for over a decade.

Still, I suppose those are nits. Regardless of when it all started, it’s certainly outrageous for the feds to try to gag an opponent of their policies. This is the kind of thing that—

What’s that? Maybe I should take a look at the federal monitor’s actual court filing? How tiresome. But we’re professionals around here. Let’s see now…ah, here it is on page 55: “Recommended Remedies.” This is what the monitor wants:

a Court declaration reemphasizing the essential terms of the Settlement and issuing findings making clear that none of the terms have been changed and the County’s statements analyzed in Section II of this report are false;
distribution by the County, voluntarily or by order, of the declaration and findings described above to the leadership of all of the eligible communities;
posting the declaration and findings described above prominently on the County website and the removal of press releases inconsistent with the declaration and findings;
unsealing the videotapes of the depositions of, at the least, the County Executive, the Commissioner of Planning, and the Director of Communications, inasmuch as each made or reviewed unsupported public statements that were inconsistent with both the terms of the Settlement and their own sworn testimony; and
hiring, within 30 days of the issuance of this report, a public communications consultant that will craft a message and implement a strategy sufficiently robust to provide information broadly to the public that describes the benefits of integration, as required by Paragraph 33(c)….

Basically, Westchester is under court order to do certain things. They haven’t done them. In fact, county leaders have been loudly and habitually lying about both the consent decree and HUD’s affordable housing requirements for years. So now the monitor wants (a) the actual terms of the settlement to be widely distributed, (b) depositions to be unsealed so everyone can see what county leaders have been saying under oath, and (c) a third-party consultant to craft the court-ordered PR plan, since the county plainly has no intention of obeying the consent decree on its own.

But nobody is being muzzled. As near as I can tell, Astorino can continue saying anything he wants. However, the county, in its official capacity as an arm of the government, is required to carry out the consent decree. In the face of repeated intransigence, the federal monitor is asking the court to force it to do just that.

I like reading The Corner. It’s a good place to get a lot of different conservative opinions on the headlines of the day. But there are a few bylines I routinely skip because the authors are basically unhinged. Kurtz is one of them. Among other things, he was part of the crowd that went bananas about Bill Ayers during the 2008 campaign, and he’s been flogging Obama’s “war on the suburbs” for years. Today’s post is just the latest installment.

Anyway: No muzzling. No gagging. No tyranny. Just a county that refuses to obey a court order and a federal monitor who wants a judge to push harder on them. It’s hard to think of anything more routine.

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Yet More Obama Tyranny Turns Out to Be Pretty Non-Tyrannical

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Clinton Campaign Expects to Have Nomination Locked Up Next Month

by ZaneService46 Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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A month from now, the Clinton campaign thinks it will have all but won the Democratic presidential nomination.

On a conference call with reporters Monday, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Joel Benenson, said the former secretary of state will have expanded her delegate lead enough by the end of April to be the clear winner of the primary contest over Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Benenson predicted that the upcoming Wisconsin primary, on April 5, would be close. But after that, Clinton is expecting victories in the delegate-rich states of New York on April 19 and Pennsylvania on April 26.

“The truth is, after April 26, there just simply is not enough real estate left for Sen. Sanders to close the commanding lead that we’ve built,” Benenson said. “We expect to come out of that day with a pledged and total delegate lead that will make clear who the nominee will be, and that it’s going to be Hillary Clinton.”

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Clinton Campaign Expects to Have Nomination Locked Up Next Month

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What Andrew Breitbart Taught Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager About Dodging Scandals

by Jeff Howard Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2011, several years before Corey Lewandowski became the controversial campaign manager of Donald Trump’s presidential bid, he moderated a panel featuring Andrew Breitbart, the late conservative provocateur and media bigwig, and he posed an earnest question: Why do politicos, faced with their own wrongdoing, so often shamelessly deny the allegations and get away with it?

That exchange now seems particularly relevant, with the Trump campaign and Lewandowski juggling controversies and crises and often responding by challenging reality. Recently, Lewandowski came under fire for manhandling Michelle Fields, a reporter working for the eponymous news organization that Breitbart founded. Lewandowski’s aggressive behavior again became a campaign issue a week later when footage circulated that appeared to show him at a Trump rally roughly grabbing a protestor by the shirt collar. In both episodes, the Trump campaign’s response was to deny that Lewandowski had committed the acts in question and to counterattack—a move that is in sync with Breitbart’s answer to Lewandowski’s question five years ago.

That question came during an Americans for Prosperity-sponsored panel in New Hampshire on September 17, 2011, held about six months prior to Breitbart’s sudden death at the age of 43. Lewandowski, who was the East Coast regional director for the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, asked Breitbart, “Why do you think politicians involved in scandals insist on repeating the same old pattern of denying any wrongdoing—promising to clear their names—when the entire time they know what they’ve been accused of, and why don’t they just stop, and stop the further embarrassment?”

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What Andrew Breitbart Taught Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager About Dodging Scandals

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Let’s Spend a Day on the Campaign Trail With Our Presidential Candidates

by HarleyShapcott Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just for the record, here’s what Hillary Clinton was doing today in the wake of the Brussels bombings: talking about combating terrorism at a roundtable in Los Angeles.

And here’s what our Republican presidential hopefuls were doing: in between panicked demands for surveilling Muslim neighborhoods that even the NYPD rolled its collective eyes at, Donald Trump was lobbing juvenile insults at Ted Cruz’s wife and Cruz was calling Trump a “sniveling coward.”

Remind me again: which party is it that takes national security seriously?

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Let’s Spend a Day on the Campaign Trail With Our Presidential Candidates

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