Tag Archives: congressman

“You’ll Be Hanging From A Tree.”

Mother Jones

Before Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) began his town hall Saturday morning, he instructed his aides to play a tape. It was, he explained, a voicemail he had received earlier in the week, shortly after he had delivered a speech on the House floor to become the first member of Congress to call for President Donald Trump to be impeached.

“Hey, Al Green, I’ve got an impeachment for ya—it’s gonna be yours,” said a man’s voice. “Actually we’re gonna give you a short trial before we hang your nigger ass.”

A murmur went up in the audience of 80 or so Houston-area constituents who had packed into a church hall in the city’s southwest corner. Green played another voicemail, which warned, “try it, and we’ll rinse out you fucking niggers, you’ll be hanging from a tree.”

When it was over, Green got to his point. “Friends, I want to assure you that no amounts of threats or intimidation will stop what I have started, I promise you—we are going to continue with this,” he said. “We are gonna move forward, we will not turn around.”

Green, a seven-term congressman and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, made his call for impeachment after Trump tweeted warning former FBI director James Comey not to leak details of their conversations with the press. Green told the audience he believes that Trump’s actions amounted to an admission of obstruction of justice, and the tweet constituted intimidation. It is imperative, he said, that the House move to indict Trump; nothing less than the rule of law is at stake.

Those who asked questions largely agreed with Green’s argument, but constituents seemed uncertain about the future. One man wondered if it was worth going through the impeachment process if the result was President Mike Pence. Another asked about impeaching Pence, too. A woman in the back wanted to know if there was any possibility of the president’s cabinet declaring him unfit. Unsurprisingly, given the president’s low approval in the district (just 18 percent of voters in the district voted for Green’s Republican opponent last fall), only one questioner voiced any real opposition to what Green had done, asking why he had said nothing about “the lawlessness of the Obama administration.”

Green himself suggested the process might plod along from here. He hadn’t introduced an official impeachment resolution yet and was planning more town halls on the subject. “I haven’t asked leadership for a response,” he told me, insisting that impeachment needed to come “from the bottom up, not the top down.” By the same token, no one in in the leadership had told him to pipe down, he said, although he allowed that there were “surely members who were thinking it.”

When a nine-year-old girl asked “why does it take so long to impeach Trump?” Green said that it “may never happen”—but it was worth giving the system time to function as it should. He has done a flurry of interviews over the last few days (there were NBC News cameras in the back of the room while he spoke) but is treading lightly when it comes to his fellow colleagues. Green told me he was not planning to lobby fellow members to get behind an impeachment measure—”people have to be guided by their conscience.” (He did hope, though, that they would listen to public opinion—at the event he asked residents to go to ImpeachTrumpNow.com to register their support.)

For now the road to impeachment is lonely, and perhaps very long. “I am a voice in the wilderness,” he said, “but history will vindicate me.”

View the original here:  

“You’ll Be Hanging From A Tree.”

Posted in alo, Bragg, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on “You’ll Be Hanging From A Tree.”

Trump Has No Idea What’s In His Health Care Bill

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’m going to go out and throw some frisbees around. In the meantime, enjoy John Dickerson’s interview with Donald Trump about his health care bill:

JOHN DICKERSON: So but in the bill, as it was analyzed, there were two problems. One, and you talked about this with Congressman Robert Aderholt, who brought you the example of the 64-year-old who under Obamacare the premiums–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But that was a long time ago, John.

JOHN DICKERSON: But has that been fixed?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Totally fixed.

JOHN DICKERSON: How?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: How? We’ve made many changes to the bill. You know, this bill is–

JOHN DICKERSON: What kind though?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –very much different than it was three weeks ago.

JOHN DICKERSON: Help us explain because there are people–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The bill–

JOHN DICKERSON: –out there wondering what kind of changes.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me explain. Let me explain it to you.

JOHN DICKERSON: Okay.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This bill is much different than it was a little while ago, okay? This bill has evolved. And we didn’t have a failure on the bill. You know, it was reported like a failure. Now, the one thing I wouldn’t have done again is put a timeline. That’s why on the second iteration, I didn’t put a timeline.

But we have now pre-existing conditions in the bill. We have — we’ve set up a pool for the pre-existing conditions so that the premiums can be allowed to fall. We’re taking across all of the borders or the lines so that insurance companies can compete–

JOHN DICKERSON: But that’s not in–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: –nationwide.

JOHN DICKERSON: –this bill. The borders are not in–

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Of course, it’s in.

Needless to say, it’s not in. It might be in a future bill, but it’s not in the current bill. On the bright side, I’m impressed that Trump even knows about the high-risk pool, even if he doesn’t quite know what it’s called.

We also learned that Trump’s response to North Korea’s missile test is that he’s not happy. What does that mean? “I would not be happy. If he does a nuclear test, I will not be happy.”

Roger that.

Source: 

Trump Has No Idea What’s In His Health Care Bill

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Has No Idea What’s In His Health Care Bill

Tom Perez Was Just Elected DNC Chair

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Tom Perez was elected chair of the Democratic National Committee in Atlanta on Saturday. Perez, who ran the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama and later served as his Secretary of Labor, edged out Keith Ellison, a Muslim congressman from Minneapolis, in the first contested race for party control in decades. After a congested first round of balloting, the other candidates dropped out of the race and the race proceded to a head-to-head second ballot. Perez received 235 votes. Ellison notched 200.

Immediately after his election, Perez asked and received unanimous consent from the assembly of Democrats to name Ellison as the party’s deputy chair.

Original link:  

Tom Perez Was Just Elected DNC Chair

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tom Perez Was Just Elected DNC Chair

The House GOP Just Revealed Its Plan To Cut Social Security

Mother Jones

Late Thursday, Congressman Sam Johnson (R-TX), the Chairman of the House Social Security subcommittee, introduced a bill to “reform” (i.e. cut) Social Security.

Josh Marshall warns, “Republicans apparently aren’t going to be satisfied with phasing out Medicare. They’re going to try to pass huge cuts to Social Security this year too. Not Bush-style partial phaseout but just big, big cuts. And you’re out of luck even if you’re a current beneficiary. “

The Washington Examiner describes it thusly:

The bill…would reduce costs by changing the benefits formula to reduce payments progressively for high earners. It would also gradually raise the full retirement age from 67 to 69 for people who are today 49 or younger. Lastly, it would change the inflation metric used to calculate benefits to one that shows lower inflation, essentially slowing the growth in benefits, and eliminate cost of living adjustments for high earners.

You can read the full bill below. Democrats are not pleased.

DV.load(“https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3235010-The-House-GOP-Just-Introduced-A-New-Bill-To-Cut.js”,
width: 630,
height: 400,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
pdf: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-3235010-The-House-GOP-Just-Introduced-A-New-Bill-To-Cut”
);

Visit link – 

The House GOP Just Revealed Its Plan To Cut Social Security

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The House GOP Just Revealed Its Plan To Cut Social Security

Here’s My 11-Word, 1-Chart Plan for Fixing Obamacare

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

There’s been a lot of talk about “fixing” Obamacare lately. Here’s my two-step plan:

  1. Increase the subsidy levels.
  2. Increase the penalty for not buying insurance.

That would pretty much do it. I could add lots of other small-bore things that need some tweaking, but why bother? These two things would do most of the job—and Republicans will never agree to them. They won’t agree to any of the small-bore stuff either. So take your pick. You can support a detailed 11-point plan for Obamacare that will never get passed, or you can support my 11-word plan that will also never get passed.

But since we’re all lightweight wonks around here, we should take a guess at how much we need to change the subsidy and penalty levels to make everything work. Basically, Obamacare’s big problem is that not enough young people are ponying up for insurance. To fix this, we need to get to a point where it’s cheaper for young people to buy insurance than it is to pay the penalty. This can be done by either increasing subsidies or increasing the penalty. Here’s my swag at what it would take:

You could increase subsidies by 100 percent and leave the penalty alone, or you could increase the penalty 250 percent and leave the subsidies alone. Or you can pick any point in between.

In reality, you could probably get by with smaller numbers, since nearly everyone will sign up if the penalty is within shouting distance of the net premium cost. You don’t have to literally make the penalty as high as the premium cost. I also assumed silver coverage in this chart, and you can assume lower numbers if you’re happy with kids buying bronze coverage.1

Anyway, that’s it. This chart is my proposed Obamacare reform. It represents something of an upper bound, and I imagine that someone who has actual working knowledge of all this stuff could do a lot better. Call your congressman today and demand that this chart be made into law.

1I’m not, especially, which is why I went with silver.

Read this article: 

Here’s My 11-Word, 1-Chart Plan for Fixing Obamacare

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s My 11-Word, 1-Chart Plan for Fixing Obamacare

This Congressman Just Made an Openly Racist Comment on Live Television

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Question: How do you define Western civilization? Mull this over while you watch this clip of Congressman Steve King during a panel hosted today by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:

Context: Hayes had just asked one of King’s co-panelists, Charles Pierce, a writer at Esquire magazine, to discuss the identity of the Republican party, as members of the GOP convene in Cleveland, Ohio today for the first day of the Republican National Convention. Pierce had described the convention halls as filled with “loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people.”

That’s when King said this: “This whole ‘white people’ business, though, does get a little tired, Charlie. I mean, I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other sub-group of people contribute to civilization?”

Hayes juts in to ask King if he is talking about white people, to which King peddles back and says that he’s referring to “western civilization that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity has settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”

King’s co-panelists immediately try to respond but Hayes cuts them off, saying that they were not going to resolve the issue live on cable news. He later apologized on how he handled King’s comments on Twitter, saying that he was “taken aback” by the comments:

See a longer clip of the video of the panel and Hayes’s response here.

Read this article: 

This Congressman Just Made an Openly Racist Comment on Live Television

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Congressman Just Made an Openly Racist Comment on Live Television

This GOP Congressman’s Crusade Against Scientists Just Got Even More Insane

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Congressman Lamar Smith’s crusade against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps getting weirder.

Smith (R-Texas), who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, suspects that NOAA scientists may have “changed” climate research data to make it appear as though a possible slowdown in global warming over the last decade-and-a-half didn’t really happen. In other words, the congressman seems to believe that government scientists somehow manipulated the facts in order to support President Barack Obama’s climate agenda.

It turns out that the scientific debate over the extent to which climate change took a so-called “hiatus” is far from settled and extends far beyond NOAA’s research. Chris Mooney at the Washington Post has a detailed rundown of the latest research on this surprisingly difficult question here. Of course, the basic existence of man-made global warming is not in dispute by scientists, Smith’s opinion notwithstanding.

But in any case, Smith is determined to get to the bottom of what he sees as an insidious plot by NOAA to falsify research. His original subpoena for internal communications, issued last October, has been followed by a series of letters to Obama administration officials in NOAA and other agencies demanding information and expressing frustration that NOAA has not been sufficiently forthcoming. In December, for example, he wrote to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker complaining that NOAA showed a “pattern of failing to act in good faith.” (NOAA is part of the Commerce Department.)

Now, a new letter gives some insight as to his specific grievances: Smith claims that NOAA’s internal search for documents responsive to the subpoena has been “unnecessarily narrow,” limited only to documents containing the terms “hiatus,” “haitus,” “global temperature,” and “climate study.” A NOAA spokesperson confirmed that those were the only search terms the agency used to find the relevant documents. On Monday, Smith asked NOAA to expand that field to include the words below (“Karl” presumably refers to Thomas Karl, the NOAA scientist behind the research Smith is interested in):

In Smith’s defense, NOAA’s four terms (three, really, since one is just a misspelling of another) are incredibly narrow and, if there really was any scientific malfeasance, would quite possibly miss it. At the same time, the new list further illuminates what Smith is really after: Some evidence of a nefarious political conspiracy involving Obama, the United Nations, the Paris climate agreement, and temperature buoys.

Sure, NOAA should be transparent about its activities. But the whole thing seems more and more like a wild goose chase by Smith—I’m not holding my breath for any bombshell revelations.

Link: 

This GOP Congressman’s Crusade Against Scientists Just Got Even More Insane

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This GOP Congressman’s Crusade Against Scientists Just Got Even More Insane

Clinton’s Surrogates Are Banking on the Gun Issue to Win Over Black Voters

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

After her sound defeat in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, former Sen. Hillary Clinton is looking ahead to the primary in South Carolina, where she hopes her record and rhetoric on gun control will impress black voters and propel her to victory over Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In a conference call Wednesday, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries joined Hazel Dukes—the former NAACP president and current president of the civil rights group’s New York State Conference—and South Carolina state minority leader J. Todd Rutherford to promote Clinton and to cite the inexperience of her rival. The three criticized Sanders as a newcomer to issues important to black voters, and condemned what they called his inferior record on gun control and criminal-justice reform.

“I’ve watched Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail and seen how he only really started talking about issues concerning African Americans in the past 40 days,” Rutherford said. “Secretary Clinton has talked about these same issues, and advocated for us, for the last 40 years.”

They also slammed Sanders for only recently moving over to the Democratic party, for voting in favor of the infamous 1994 Violent Crimes Bill, and for voting for an amendment that Jeffries claimed would have allowed Charleston shooter Dylann Roof to obtain a handgun before the completion of a background check.

“We know that Hillary Clinton has consistently stood up against the gun lobby, and spoken out against the epidemic of gun violence in the African American community and beyond. The record of Bernie Sanders is very different,” Jeffries said. “He’s twice voted to shield gun manufacturers, who I often refer to as ‘merchants of death;’ he voted to overturn a ban on guns on Amtrak trains; he voted to make it harder to crack down on gun dealers who break the law; he even voted for an amendment that would have allowed, or which allowed, of course, the Charleston shooter to get a gun before his background check is completed.” If you compare Clinton and Sanders on the issue of gun violence and how it affects the black community, Jeffries added, “it’s not even a close call.”

Jeffries, Rutherford, and Dukes answered reporters’ questions about Clinton’s own, arguably dubious, track record on issues that affect black communities—including her “superpredator” comments—with praise of her political experience and her platform for economic justice. But the overarching theme of the call was that Clinton, unlike Sanders—who represents a predominantly white state—has always been a visible presence in the black community.

“It’s good to have new friends, but I would rather have true friends,” Jeffries said.

See more here: 

Clinton’s Surrogates Are Banking on the Gun Issue to Win Over Black Voters

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Clinton’s Surrogates Are Banking on the Gun Issue to Win Over Black Voters

John Kasich on How to Reduce Mass Shootings: More Death Penalty

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ohio Governor John Kasich told reporters in New Hampshire on Friday that he considers the death penalty and long prison sentences a better approach than gun control when it comes to reducing the number of mass shootings.

Kasich, who voted for a federal assault weapons ban as a Republican congressman two decades ago, demurred when asked what steps Washington should take in the wake of the Thursday massacre at Umpquah Community College in Oregon that left 10 people dead. “I don’t believe that gun control would stop this,” he told a scrum of journalists after a town hall in Goffstown, during which the subject did not come up.

Kasich continued:

I think they have very tough gun laws in that state. The fact is that more and more people believe that they should be able to defend themselves. And if take guns away from people who are law-abiding the people who are going to cause these horrible things are still gonna have them. I don’t agree with that. That is not—you know I favor, in Ohio, the death penalty. I favor long prison sentences.That’s the way I would go.

When a reporter asked him what specifically he would do to curb mass shootings as president, Kasich said it wouldn’t be his responsibility. “I don’t think any president can stop mass shootings,” he said. “And again I think that all of these places that are soft targets need to be hardened. My own state, as I’ve said, it’s frustrating to see some school districts not taking it seriously. These are terrible tragedies and we need to find out more about who this person is. If this person’s had mental illness they should never have had a weapon. That’s the rules.”

In an earlier interview with NBC News, Kasich offered a clearer idea of what he means by hardening “soft targets.” He said he wants all schools, including universities, to implement warning systems that would allow them to go into “lockdown” mode if there is a campus threat.

Kasich’s emphasis on the death penalty is curious given that more than half of the perpetrators of mass shootings over the last three decades took their own lives. The number goes up if you count “suicide by cop”—that is, those instances when a shooter was killed by law enforcement.

Moreover, Ohio’s death penalty process is notoriously flawed. Last spring, a federal judge placed a seven-month moratorium on all executions in the state after a lethal injection left a convicted killer writhing on his deathbed for 25 minutes. On Thursday, an Ohio court struck down an inmate’s death sentence, citing flaws in the state case.

Read article here: 

John Kasich on How to Reduce Mass Shootings: More Death Penalty

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on John Kasich on How to Reduce Mass Shootings: More Death Penalty

Ted Cruz Super-PAC Has Just One Donor

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A super-PAC backing Ted Cruz called Keep the Promise II just filed its campaign disclosure, and it stands rather in contrast with the filing this morning from Jeb Bush’s super-PAC. Right to Rise, the Bush-backing super-PAC, revealed a list of donors that included anonymous shell corporations, 28 former ambassadors, and hundreds of wealthy and moneyed elite from around the country, requiring this reporter to do plenty of math to determine how much came from big donors and how much came from very big donors. Keep the Promise II’s disclosure is much simpler.

One guy gave $10 million.

That’s it.

Although the super-PAC raised more money than the actual campaigns of 14 of the 20 declared major candidates, there were no other donors.

The guy’s name is Toby Neugebauer. He is the billionaire founder of a private-equity firm, and his father is Congressman Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas).

To be fair, it’s one of at least three super-PACs backing Cruz. The others have not yet filed their reports, but will likely list donors other than Neugebauer.

Visit source:  

Ted Cruz Super-PAC Has Just One Donor

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ted Cruz Super-PAC Has Just One Donor