Tag Archives: congress

Republicans Just Voted to Let Internet Service Providers Sell Your Browsing History

by RamonKraegen901 Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives on Tuesday repealed privacy rules that would have required internet service providers such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable to get consumers’ consent before selling or sharing their web browsing data with advertisers and other companies.

“Consumers should be in control of their own information,” Rep. Jared Polis, (D-Colo.) said in testifying against the bill. “They shouldn’t be forced to sell and give that information to who-knows-who simply for the price of admission for access to the internet.”

The vote overturned rules passed in October by the Federal Communications Commission that tightened limits on what internet service providers (ISPs) could do with their users’ data. The rules, which would have taken effect later this year, required ISPs to notify consumers about the type of information they collect, and obtain their consent, before selling it to third parties. The rules also made ISPs more accountable for preventing data breaches.

The measure was passed on a 215 to 205 vote, with most Republicans in favor of the repeal and most Democrats against. It still needs to be signed by President Donald Trump before it will become law, though that appears to be a given after the White House expressed support for the repeal on Tuesday.

The repeal measure was originally introduced in the US Senate by Jeff Flake, (R-Ariz.), where it passed last week on a party-line vote. Flake has argued that the FCC rules could “limit consumer choice, stifle innovation, and jeopardize data security by destabilizing the internet ecosystem.” Ajit Pai, Donald Trump’s FCC chairman, has argued that the rules put ISPs at a disadvantage to internet companies such as Google and Facebook, which are able to harvest and monetize personal information more freely.

But privacy advocates say that stricter rules for ISPs make sense. “Google doesn’t see everything you do on the Internet (neither does Facebook, for that matter, or any other online platform)—they only see the traffic you send to them,” according to an explainer on the rules by Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And you can always choose to use a different website if you want to avoid Google’s tracking. None of that is true about your ISP… That’s why we need the FCC’s privacy rules: ISPs are in a position of power, and they’ve shown they’re willing to abuse that power.”

The acronym “ISP” should now stand for “Information Sold For Profit” and “Invading Subscriber Privacy,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) during last week’s debate over the bill in the Senate. “President Trump may be outraged by fake violations of his own privacy, but every American should be alarmed by the very real violation of privacy that will result from the Republican roll-back of broadband privacy protections.”

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Republicans Just Voted to Let Internet Service Providers Sell Your Browsing History

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Bird Flu Is a Big Deal. Of Course Trump Wants to Defund the Best Way to Contain It.

by Rebekah83F Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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For the second time in less than three years, avian flu is moving through industrial-scale US chicken facilities. Republicans in power seem too fixated on budget-cutting to notice.

First, President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan pushed a healthcare plan that would have slashed funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency that tracks farm flu outbreaks and works with the US Department of Agriculture and local authorities to “minimize any human health risk” they cause.

That effort collapsed, but now Trump is taking a more direct whack at flu-tracking funding. A couple of Politico reporters got hold of a budget-cutting proposal the Trump team is circulating in Congress. The document lists $1 billion in suggested cuts to the US Department of Agriculture’s discretionary spending in 2017—which is is separate from the “21 percent proposed reduction for USDA that the administration included in its 2018 budget outline released earlier this month,” Politico reports.

Among the cuts being sought for 2017, the Trump team seeks to extract funds from a USDA program funded by Congress in 2015 to address the flu problem that swept through the Midwest that year, triggering the euthanasia of 50 million birds and causing egg prices to spike. Congress had allocated $1 billion for it, of which $80 million is left. Given that avian flu is on the march again, one might think it prudent to keep that cash that cash around, devoting to monitoring the 2017 outbreak. Trump’s budget people have other ideas—they want to take away $50 million of the $80 million left over. Politico quotes the document:

The response to the FY15 fiscal-year 2015 outbreak is complete, and USDA should still have enough balances to respond to the two recent HPAI high pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks in TN Tennessee this year.

Of course, this year’s avian flu, albeit a less virulent strain, has broken out of Tennessee, swept into Alabama, and has now alighted in Georgia, the nation’s number-one chicken producing state. It would be interesting to know what Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, Trump’s still-pending pick to lead the USDA, thinks of that proposed money-saving measure.

While the CDC insists that the risk that people will come down with the current avian flu strain is “low,” it does work with the Department of Agriculture and state authorities on tracking outbreaks. That’s because health officials have been warning for decades that massive livestock confinements make an ideal breeding ground for new virus strains, including potentially ones that can jump from bird to human, and then spread among humans. Meanwhile, a different strain of avian flu has swept across Japan, South Korea, and China. It has killed 140 people, but has not proven capable of spreading human-to-human.

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Bird Flu Is a Big Deal. Of Course Trump Wants to Defund the Best Way to Contain It.

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Who Was Devin Nunes’ Secret White House Source?

by MandyToddmqo Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, has called for Devin Nunes to recuse himself from further involvement in the Russia probe. This comes after Nunes’ bizarre unveiling of supposed evidence that the Obama White House really did surveil Trump aides during the transition. Nunes still hasn’t shown his evidence to anyone, and it appears increasingly likely that it doesn’t really show anything at all. Nor will he tell us who he met with on the White House grounds to procure his evidence. Here is Michael Isikoff:

The Schiff statement came as panel staffers speculated on the possible identity of Nunes’ White House source, focusing on Michael Ellis, a lawyer who worked for Nunes on the intelligence panel and who was recently hired to work on national security matters at the White House counsel’s office. A White House official and spokesman for Nunes declined to comment on whether Ellis was involved in providing information to Nunes, as did a spokesman for Schiff. White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted that White House officials were not aware of Nunes’ secret trip to meet his source and referred all questions to Nunes’ office.

Democrats have been furious that Nunes has yet to describe precisely the classified intelligence he has seen. Nor has he shared any documents with others on the House intelligence panel. Nunes, for his part, defended his previously undisclosed trip to the White House grounds, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he had to view the classified documents in an executive branch location because the intelligence community had not yet provided them to Congress.

Michael Ellis is a former editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review and a longtime “promising young conservative.” Sadly, he’s not related to the Ellis side of the Bush family, which would have been great.

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Who Was Devin Nunes’ Secret White House Source?

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What If I Told You That Republicans Spent Only 36 Days on Trumpcare?

by AdelaidN61 Posted on March 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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If you want to know why Trumpcare failed so disastrously, here’s a big part of the answer:

The process toward passing Obamacare began on March 5, 2009, when President Obama convened a “health summit” with various players in the health care industry. It finished 383 days later, on March 23, 2010, when he signed it into law.

Trumpcare began life on February 16, 2017, when Paul Ryan released an outline of what a Republican bill would look like. It was abandoned 36 days later, on March 24, 2017.

And this doesn’t even count the fact that Democrats had been seriously debating and designing health care policy for decades before Obamacare was born. Republicans had never gone much beyond the debating point point stage. But policy matters: detailed, messy, real-life policy that makes compromises in order to produce something that works and has the support of all the stakeholders. The problem is that Trump isn’t used to that kind of thing. Ezra Klein points out today that, in fact, Trump isn’t a very good dealmaker. That’s true, and it’s something I’ve written about frequently. But he also says this:

In Trump’s past jobs, he could simply move on from failed deals and find new partners, and new markets, and new sectors. But that’s not how the presidency works, and it’s not clear he realizes that.

“Take it or leave it” works only if you really are willing to leave it. Trump often is, because he can always turn around and do a different deal with someone else. But there’s only one Congress. If Trump gets bored after a whole month of negotiations and gives up, there’s no other Congress he can turn to. That’s why Trumpcare is dead.

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What If I Told You That Republicans Spent Only 36 Days on Trumpcare?

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Watch Trump Call Obamacare Repeal "So Easy"

by BernieHaag17 Posted on March 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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After a week of emergency meetings and last-minute attempts to unify their party, Republican leaders pulled their Obamacare repeal bill from the House floor Friday when it became clear they didn’t have enough support to pass.

The decision comes as a major defeat for President Donald Trump, who during the campaign bragged that Obamacare repeal would be “so easy.”

“Together we’re going to deliver real change that once again puts Americans first,” Trump said at an October rally in Florida. “That begins with immediately repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare…You’re going to have such great health care, at a tiny fraction of the cost—and it’s going to be so easy.”

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Trump also argued on the campaign trail that electing a Republican-controlled Congress would allow him to quickly dismantle the health care law and pass other pieces of legislation. “With a Republican House and Senate, we will immediately repeal and replace the disaster known as Obamacare,” Trump said at another event. “A Republican House and Senate can swiftly enact the other items in my contract immediately, including massive tax reduction.”

“We will repeal and replace Obamacare, and we will do it very, very quickly,” Trump said during the final week of the campaign. “It is a catastrophe.”

Trump’s confidence in his ability to win the health care fight continued through the first few weeks of his presidency. On February 9, he bragged that when it came to repealing Obamacare, “Nobody can do that like me.”

By the end of February, Trump had changed his tune somewhat. “Now, I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” the president said. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

One person who certainly did know was House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who successfully shepherded Obamacare through the House in 2010. On Thursday, she mocked Trump for trying to rush the repeal bill through the chamber, calling it a “Rookie’s error.”

“Clearly you are not ready,” Pelosi said.

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Watch Trump Call Obamacare Repeal "So Easy"

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Obamacare Repeal Is Dead

by RudolphDkw Posted on March 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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Well, that’s it. Obamacare repeal has failed. The House will not vote on the Republican health care bill.

So what’s next? The first thing, of course, is for Trump to insist that he bears no blame for this. Possible candidates for being thrown under the bus include Paul Ryan, the Freedom Caucus, Democrats, Obama, and illegal immigration.

But what’s next after that? This is the depressing part. From a partisan perspective, I imagine the best bet is to sabotage Obamacare as much as possible and wait for it to fail. Then Trump can say that he was right all along (isn’t he always?) and now we really have to do something.

But there’s also the perspective of what’s best for the country. If Obamacare repeal can’t pass, the best bet is to work on making Obamacare better. This could be done fairly easily, since it’s mostly tweaks that are needed. There are even deals to be made here. Democrats would probably be willing to give Republicans some things they want (tort reform, expanded HSAs, etc.) in return for modest changes that would make Obamacare more stable (higher penalties, tweaks to the subsidies, funding the risk corridors, etc.).

But that’s a fantasy. There’s little chance of anyone in Congress these days working across the aisle to do what’s best for the country.

UPDATE: And the winner is…Democrats!

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Obamacare Repeal Is Dead

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Sean Spicer Keeps Trying to Mislead the Press About Donald Trump’s Bogus Wiretap Claims

by RichardQuinlan Posted on March 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, mere hours after Chairman Devin Nunes apologized to fellow members of the House intelligence committee for his wild stunt the day before, White House flack Sean Spicer defended Nunes, mischaracterized what he’d revealed, and tried to perpetuate his boss’ bizarre claim that President Barack Obama had ordered “tapps” on his Trump Tower phones during the election season.

In case you missed it, Nunes, a California Republican who was on Trump’s transition team, called a press conference Wednesday to announce that he’d seen intelligence reports indicating that communications of Trump associates—maybe even Trump himself—may have been intercepted in the course of lawful intelligence-gathering on foreign targets after the election. Nunes was so “alarmed” by this that he briefed House Speaker Paul Ryan, reporters (twice), and Trump himself before he shared the information with the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, which is investigating possible Trump-Russia collusion.

That Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, was incensed. In a statement Wednesday, Schiff said he’d expressed his “grave concerns” to Nunes, and told him that “a credible investigation cannot be conducted this way.” Did Nunes intend to lead the Trump-Russia probe, Schiff said, “or he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House. Because he cannot do both.”

“The reality is that Nunes made a decision,” Spicer said at Thursday’s White House press briefing. “He briefed the press first…I don’t hear too much crying about that.”

Spicer said there was absolutely nothing wrong with Nunes going to Trump because the information had “nothing to do with Russia.” He then proceeded to mischaracterize that information, saying: “It was helpful for the president to know that the investigation as he had asked for was starting to bear fruit.” Spicer was referring to Trump’s March 5 request for Congress to investigate the president’s baseless wiretapping tweets. “What Chairman Nunes said is that there was evidence of surveillance that occurred during the election, and I think that’s important to note.”

As his boss might say: Wrong! Nunes never indicated that any Trump associates were under surveillance prior to the election. What Nunes said was that they might have been caught on tape incidentally during the transition—after the election. Nunes’ revelations in fact undermine the claim that Obama ordered Trump’s phones tapped. Ordering the illegal wiretap of an American citizen would be a serious crime. And Trump and Spicer, of all people, should know that falsely accusing someone of a serious crime is defamatory at best—if done with malicious intent, it’s also libelous.

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Sean Spicer Keeps Trying to Mislead the Press About Donald Trump’s Bogus Wiretap Claims

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What’s Missing From This Photo of Politicians Deciding the Future of Women’s Health?

by CPMCamille Posted on March 23, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump met with the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus at the White House Thursday to try to hammer out a deal on Obamacare repeal. A major question in the final negotiations? Whether or not maternity care and mammograms should be considered “essential” treatments covered by all health insurance policies under the Republican proposal. (“I wouldn’t want to lose my mammograms,” quipped Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who supports scrapping the requirement. He apologized.)

The White House happily snapped a photo of the gathering that will go a long way toward deciding the future of women’s health in America, and EMIILY’s List, the group that works to elect pro-choice Democratic women to Congress, also blasted out a photo of the event to reporters. Notice anything?

Here’s another angle:

Update: Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray has weighed in:

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What’s Missing From This Photo of Politicians Deciding the Future of Women’s Health?

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Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Has Little in Common With Most Americans

by AlbertiGoin Posted on March 22, 2017

Mother Jones

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One of the main jobs of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee this week has been to deflect attacks on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch by Democrats, who are trying to paint him as a tool of corporations and a foe of the little guy. To that end, Republicans have tried both to humanize the federal judge and to highlight the parts of his background that might make him more relatable to the average American. They’ve got him talking about the Denver rodeo and mutton bustin’ and quoting David Foster Wallace.

But those humanizing efforts are falling a bit flat. That’s largely because when it comes to demonstrating all that he has in common with the regular folks who might come before the court, Gorsuch is his own worst enemy. A graduate of Georgetown Prep, Columbia University, Harvard Law School, and Oxford, Gorsuch is the son of Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency chief and spent most of his formative years inside the Beltway, including a stint as a clerk on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. His nomination to the 10th Circuit Court was championed by the secretive billionaire Phillip Anschutz, his former client, and Gorsuch co-owns a Colorado mountain cabin with two of Anschutz’s top deputies.

On Tuesday night, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) asked Gorsuch about how he “liked to get his hands dirty.” If Flake was hoping to reveal a nominee who subscribes to Family Handyman and loves power tools, he was disappointed. The judge responded by reminding the committee how much he loves to ski. (Gorsuch was on the slopes when he learned about the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose seat he’s been nominated to fill.) “I always say the family that skis together stays together,” Gorsuch had said earlier in the hearing. Gorsuch told Flake that his daughters were “ferocious double-black-diamond skiers,” and at that very moment, one of them was doing some backcountry skiing near Telluride.

The exchange was unlikely to help most Americans relate to the judge. Today, skiing is largely a sport of the wealthy. A one-day lift ticket at Winter Park, the Colorado resort where Gorsuch said he liked to go, costs $144. A single day of skiing for a family of four could cost nearly $600, not including all the gear and lunch at the lodge. And teaching kids to ski so they can become “ferocious double-black-diamond skiers” is an enormous investment. A single day in the Winter Park ski school will set you back $189 for one child, not including equipment rentals. For most of the country, even with discounts for locals, those costs put skiing largely out of reach.

Earlier in the hearing, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) had asked Gorsuch about his experience in politics. “Are you a lawmaker?” Lee asked. “Have you ever held a position as a state legislator? Have you ever held a position as a member of Congress?” Gorsuch responded with a chuckle, “I’ve served on my kid’s school board.”

The following day, Flake asked Gorsuch about his civic involvement outside of the court, mentioning his school board service. “Boy, that I found taxing, and loved every minute of it,” Gorsuch said. Flake nodded appreciatively, telling Gorsuch, “That typifies the West. People get along. They have to. On a school board there’s no passing the buck there. You’ve gotta make decisions. Local government is like that.”

What Flake seemed to have missed, though, is that Gorsuch never served on a public school board. He was on the board of the Boulder Country Day School, a small private school with tuition that runs from $15,000 to $20,000 a year. That’s a big difference from serving on a public, elected school board just about anywhere in the country.

In fact, Gorsuch is among the most privileged individuals to be nominated to the Supreme Court in recent memory. Justice Clarence Thomas grew up poor in Pinpoint, Georgia, speaking Gullah. His idea of a good time is camping in a Walmart parking lot in his RV en route to a NASCAR race. Sonia Sotomayor hails from a Puerto Rican family and grew up with a single mom in a South Bronx tenement. Samuel Alito is a Jersey boy, the son of Italian immigrant teachers, who graduated from a public high school. At first glance, Gorsuch’s background somewhat resembles that of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., who likewise comes from a tony private-school background—except that Roberts worked summers in a steel mill to pay his way through Harvard.

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Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Has Little in Common With Most Americans

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Remember that money Congress approved to rebuild Flint’s water system? Some of it is finally on the way.

by KrystleBaldwin Posted on March 20, 2017

According to the cover article in today’s issue of the journal Nature, the iconic reef off the coast of Australia suffered unprecedented coral die-off after last year’s record-breaking bleaching event. Now, as the Southern Hemisphere hits late summer temperatures, central and southern sections of the reef — areas which avoided the worst of last year’s bleaching — are in trouble.

“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” coral researcher Terry Hughes told the New York Times. Hughes led the team that conducted aerial surveys to document the bleaching last year, as well as subsequent surveys to assess just how much of that bleaching turned into dying.

Bleached corals don’t always turn into dead corals — some are able to recover when temperatures drop. Er, if temperatures drop. If water temperatures stay high and corals stay bleached, they will eventually starve to death. Without coral building reefs, whole ecosystems may disappear, along with the food, tourism, and jobs they support.

Hughes and his coauthors found that even corals in pristine, protected water were likely to be suffering from heat stress, meaning the only thing left to do to protect corals is, you know, address climate change.

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Remember that money Congress approved to rebuild Flint’s water system? Some of it is finally on the way.

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