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Millennials are starting to realize that Clinton is not the same as Trump

by Yvonne9866 Posted on September 15, 2016

Ready. Same. Fire.

Millennials are starting to realize that Clinton is not the same as Trump

By on Sep 15, 2016Share

Hillary Clinton got one piece of good news this week: An increasing number of  young voters can tell her policies apart from Donald Trump’s.

For Clinton, that’s no small feat.

In July, Tom Steyer’s group NextGen Climate released the first battleground poll of millennial voters this election cycle. The takeaway was a startling number: roughly four out of 10 voters age 34 and younger saw no difference between the two candidates on the issues most important to them.

Now a new follow-up poll by NextGen Climate/Project New America in 11 swing states has found some improvement in Clinton’s numbers in just the month since the last poll was done. More see a difference between the two candidates:

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

Clinton also gained five points since July among likely millennial voters who say they intend to vote for her: 48 percent now back Clinton compared to 23 percent for Trump in a four-way race.

Her gains among Sanders’ most die-hard voters are worth looking at. Around the time of the Democratic National Convention in July, one in five millennials were still devoted Sanders supporters, and most of them didn’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump. Now, the Sanders holdouts have shrunk from 21 to 16 percent, and slightly fewer Sanders supporters still claim there’s no difference between the two major-party candidates.

While Clinton’s numbers have improved, Trump’s have stayed about the same, despite his repeated attempts to reboot his campaign.

“Millennials’ views of Donald Trump haven’t changed — but their awareness of the differences between Trump and Hillary Clinton on the issues has,” Jamison Foser, a strategic advisor to NextGen Climate, said in a statement. “Clinton’s lead has grown and favorability has increased as young voters learn more about the candidates’ policy positions, suggesting that as bad as things are for Trump, they can still get worse.”

The polling firm Global Strategy Group asked voters which candidate represents their views on issues like equal pay and debt-free college. Clinton pulls ahead on these issues and also has stronger favorability on climate-related questions — like moving away from fossil fuels to clean energy and protecting families’ health with clean air and water.

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

Still, 28 percent of likely voters see no difference between Clinton and Trump on protecting air and water and 30 percent don’t think there’s a difference on moving away from fossil fuels. That’s still a lot of voters who don’t see the point in choosing between the two.

Clinton at least has a few more millennial-whisperers working in her corner from now until Election Day. This weekend, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will campaign in Ohio to convince this historically unreliable voter demographic that she’s their best bet.

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Millennials are starting to realize that Clinton is not the same as Trump

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This American Company Is Finally Getting Out of the Cluster Bomb Business

by KimberHoltzmann Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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The CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon first saw combat in the early months of Operation Iraqi Freedom. On April 2, 2003, an Iraqi tank column was advancing toward a Marine unit in southwest Baghdad. The marines had no tank support, but a new weapon was on its way. A B-52 bomber dropped two CBU-105 cluster bombs aimed at the leading edge of the Iraqi armor. “The entire first third of the Iraqi tank column was decimated,” said Air Force Col. James Knox. “The Iraqis in the back of the tank column immediately stopped and surrendered to the Marines.”

It was the perfect unveiling for the CBU-105, which quickly became the United States’ go-to anti-armored vehicle munition. But in the past decade, cluster munitions have become known not for deadly accuracy but indiscriminate carnage and civilian casualties. And now, after sustained international pressure, the internationally-banned weapon will no longer be made in the United States—at least for now.

On Tuesday, Textron Manufacturing Systems announced that it is ceasing production of the controversial CBU-105, citing reduced orders, a volatile political environment, and international weapons treaties that negatively affect the “ownability” of its shares. “Historically, sensor-fuzed weapon sales have relied on foreign military and direct commercial international customers for which both executive branch and congressional approval is required,” Textron said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “The current political environment has made it difficult to obtain these approvals.”

The announcement comes three months after Textron’s CEO defended the weapon in a Providence Journal op-ed amid ongoing protests at the company’s Rhode Island headquarters. Around the same time, the Obama Administration blocked the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia in a rare display of unease over the growing civilian death toll in the Saudi Arabia-led war against Shiite rebels in Yemen.

Cluster bombs, which are dropped from aircraft or launched from the ground, contain submunitions, or “bomblets,” that spread over a wide area before exploding. They’re intended to target military convoys or installations, but can kill or injure anyone who happens to be nearby. Bomblets that fail to detonate can become de facto landmines, laying in wait for anyone unfortunate enough to come across them. The CBU-105 cluster bomb contains 10 canisters, each of which disperses 4 explosive bomblets, called “skeets,” which can spread out over an area the size of a football field before detonating.

In 2008, the United States came up with a policy to end its use and export of all cluster munitions by 2018 except for those whose failure rates are less than one percent. In lab settings, the CBU-105 meets the criteria, blowing up 99 percent of the time they’re deployed. But many observers and activists question whether that’s been the case on the battlefield after documenting numerous cases of unexploded skeets.

Morgan Stritzinger, a Textron spokesperson, defended the CBU-105 in a statement to Mother Jones. “The Sensor Fuzed Weapon is a smart, reliable air-to-ground weapon that is in full compliance with the US Defense Department policy and current law,” she wrote.

According to the 2016 Cluster Munition Monitor, civilians made up 97 percent of cluster-bomb casualties in 2015. More than a third were children. Since the beginning of 2015, Syrian government forces have dropped 13 types of cluster munitions in at least 360 attacks, resulting in 248 deaths. And the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen has used cluster munitions in at least 19 attacks, killing more than 100. Casualties from cluster munition remnants have also been documented in six other countries.

Under the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, more than 100 countries have banned the CBU-105. Yet major arms-supplying nations, including United States and Russia, have refused to sign the treaty. Former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates stated that eliminating cluster munitions from US stockpiles “would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk.” The last known time the United States used cluster bombs was in 2009, when it sent a Tomahawk missile armed with cluster bombs at an alleged Al Qaeda training camp in Yemen. The attack killed 35 women and children and as many 14 militants.

“Textron has taken the right decision to discontinue its production of sensor fuzed weapons, which are prohibited by the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions,” Mary Wareham, the arms advocacy director at Human Rights Watch told Mother Jones in an e-mail. “This decision now clears the path for the administration and Congress to work together to permanently end US production, transfer, and use of all cluster munitions. Such steps would help bring the US into alignment with the international ban treaty and enable it to join.”

How likely that is remains to be seen. This week, states parties and advocates meet in Geneva for the Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions. But as former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer turned public radio reporter John Ismay notes, the United States doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to arms treaties. “We haven’t signed the land mine treaty. We still have nuclear weapons. We still have napalm bombs in the inventory,” he says. “I have a feeling these are things we’ll hang on to.”

Plus, they’re still legal under US law. While Textron Systems is ending its cluster bomb program, the Pentagon could turn to a different manufacturer. Or Textron may be willing to license its technology to other defense contractors. On that point, the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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This American Company Is Finally Getting Out of the Cluster Bomb Business

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Meet the People Trying to Prevent Minority Voters From Bailing on Trump

by FlorPilgrim353 Posted on August 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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With less than 100 days to go until the election, the Donald Trump campaign will officially launch its outreach effort to black voters on Sunday at a church in Charlotte, North Carolina. For some of the prominent Trump backers taking part in the event, it’s the culmination of a monthslong fight to keep minority support for the Republican candidate from crumbling altogether amid a seemingly endless series of scandals that have prompted charges of racism.

The National Diversity Coalition for Trump, a group originally conceived after a contentious meeting between Trump and black ministers last year, began operations in April. The coalition, a volunteer effort that is not formally connected to the Trump campaign, is the brainchild of a handful of vocal Trump supporters. Bruce LeVell, a black businessman and Georgia delegate to the Republican National Convention, serves as the organization’s executive director. Michael Cohen, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, and Darrell Scott, a black Cleveland-area pastor, are also leaders of the group. Omarosa Manigault, a former Apprentice contestant who serves as Trump’s director of black outreach and will deliver a sermon at Sunday’s event, was vice chair of the coalition prior to joining the campaign. The group’s advisory board includes leaders of groups such as American Muslims for Trump, African-American Pastors for Trump, and Korean Americans for Trump.

Despite abysmal poll numbers, members of the coalition contest the perception that Trump is struggling among nonwhite voters. “There are a lot of minorities who are for Trump, but the media doesn’t report that,” Dahlys Hamilton, a coalition adviser and the founder of the conservative group Hispanic Patriots, says in an email. Hamilton is currently helping the group plan its Hispanic outreach strategy.

Coalition members have become some of Trump’s most reliable media surrogates, frequently making appearances on television and radio in an effort to cast the candidate in a better light. It’s not surprising that media bookers turn to them, given the dearth of prominent Trump supporters of color.

The coalition is attempting to reverse a precipitous slide in minority support for the Republican Party. After Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, party insiders wrote an “autopsy” of the election that called for bringing more nonwhite voters into the party, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus announced a $10 million minority outreach initiative the next year to aid in the effort. This year, polls in some states show minority support for Trump far below Romney’s numbers. (An online poll conducted by Florida International University and Adsmovil and released Wednesday found Trump with one-third the support among Latinos in Florida that Romney had.) Earlier this week, Sally Bradshaw, a longtime adviser to Jeb Bush and one of the co-authors of the autopsy, said she would leave the Republican Party rather than support Trump. “Ultimately, I could not abide the hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump and his complete lack of principles and conservative philosophy,” she told CNN.

Even within a party that has struggled to attract voters of color, Trump has seemed to go out of his way to turn off one minority group after another. First, of course, there was his wall to prevent Mexican “rapists” and drug dealers from entering the country. Then came his ban on Muslim travel, his frequent retweeting of white supremacists, skirmishes between black protesters and Trump supporters at rallies, his suggestion that a federal judge was biased because of his Mexican heritage, and, most recently, a feud with the parents of a Muslim American Army captain killed in combat in Iraq.

“There is a deliberate effort by the Clinton campaign to label him as a racist,” says Paris Dennard, a member of the coalition’s advisory board and a black outreach staffer at the White House during George W. Bush’s second term. “Hillary Clinton can only win this election by voter suppression, by stopping Republicans, independents and moderates from voting for Trump.”

Members of the coalition say Trump hasn’t been given a chance to explain how his policies will help minority communities and argue that the candidate’s racially charged rhetoric on the campaign trail does not match his behavior in private meetings. They believe his business experience, his stance on criminal justice reform, his positions against free trade and outsourcing, his call for limiting immigration, and his support of school choice will appeal to conservative nonwhite voters frustrated by the Obama presidency. (Trump’s campaign website does not list a specific justice reform platform, but the candidate has said he wants a return to “law and order,” using misleading interpretations of crime data to argue that “this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement” has caused an increase in crime.)

Changing the narrative around the Trump campaign hasn’t been an easy task. At times, the coalition has been hindered by its lack of official status in the campaign. According to NBC, when the group held its launch meeting at Trump Tower in April, members spent more time going through security than interacting with Trump. Last month, BuzzFeed reported that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager until June, complicated the diversity coalition’s attempts to guide Trump’s minority outreach strategy when he “made the decision that the campaign would not launch outreach initiatives in favor of a broader message aimed at the entire country.” NBC notes that when the coalition met with Trump in April, Lewandowski was not in attendance.

In July, with Lewandowski gone, several members of the group spoke onstage at the Republican National Convention, and the Trump campaign has reportedly hired several staffers to work on minority outreach efforts. At a press conference last week, Trump told reporters that his campaign would hold a news conference discussing its Hispanic outreach effort sometime “over the next three weeks.” On Sunday, Manigault told NPR that the campaign has created a “76-page strategy” targeting black voters. Manigault did not respond to a request for comment.

But the outreach efforts have come against the backdrop of an exodus of minority staffers from the GOP leadership. The Republican National Committee’s director of Hispanic media relations left the organization in June amid reports that she was “uncomfortable” working with the Trump campaign. In March, the RNC’s director of African American outreach became the fourth black staffer to leave the committee in the past year, although people who know her said she didn’t leave because of Trump.

The Trump campaign has turned down numerous invitations to speak before prominent minority organizations like the NAACP, the National Association of Black and Hispanic Journalists, and the National Urban League. In June, the National Council of La Raza, one of the largest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country, announced that it would not invite Trump to speak at its annual conference, citing his “indiscriminate vilification of an entire community.” A meeting with Hispanic community leaders in Florida has been rescheduled multiple times in the past month, and an event with Hispanic business leaders in Texas was scrapped entirely.

If recent polls are any indication, the coalition faces an uphill climb as it tries to win over minority voters. A June Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 89 percent of Hispanic voters surveyed viewed Trump negatively, suggesting that despite an ongoing debate over the accuracy of polls measuring Trump’s level of support among Latinos, it is unlikely that he will win more Latinos than the roughly 40 percent George W. Bush managed in 2004 or the 27 percent won by Romney in 2012. Among black voters, things are even worse: Last month, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll showed zero percent support for Trump among African Americans living in Ohio and Pennsylvania, key battleground states this year.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday showed Trump garnering 17 percent support among nonwhite respondents nationwide. Among black voters, Trump had just 1 percent support.

The National Diversity Coalition is unfazed by those numbers. “You can pick a poll and find what you want,” says Dennard. “There are a lot of black people that will not come out and say that they will support Donald Trump, but will pull the lever for him in November.”

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Meet the People Trying to Prevent Minority Voters From Bailing on Trump

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We Asked Trump Supporters About the Khan Controversy. Here’s What They Said.

by UlrikeFensterma Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s feud with the family of a fallen soldier may be generating near-universal condemnation from fellow Republicans in Washington—and throwing his campaign into chaos—but supporters of the GOP presidential candidate in a nearby suburb on Tuesday seemed to think Trump was justified in his attacks on the family. Some even repeated conspiracy theories that the late soldier’s father is part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mother Jones surveyed Trump backers at a rally in Ashburn, Virginia, for their views on Trump’s ongoing fight with the Khan family, following Khizr Khan’s emotional Democratic National Convention address about his late son, Humayun, who was killed in Iraq in 2004. Did Calvin, an attendee who declined to give his last name, take issue with Trump’s handling of the controversy, which included suggesting that Ghazala Khan had stood silently next to her husband during his speech because “maybe she wasn’t allowed to speak”? He acknowledged that Trump’s response was “very poorly worded,” but he said it didn’t affect his opinion of the candidate. “Hillary is 10 times worse than Donald Trump,” he said.

How about Christopher Abel, who was handing out business cards at the rally for the Vocal Citizens super-PAC? “My view starts with, everyone has a right to defend themselves,” he said of Trump.

Along with the Khan controversy, Trump supporters also weighed in on the GOP nominee’s recent remarks that Hillary Clinton is “the devil.” Check out their responses in the video above.

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We Asked Trump Supporters About the Khan Controversy. Here’s What They Said.

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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

by marques458 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump churns out strong opinions like McDonald’s produces Big Macs. But save for the odd eruption—like declaring the supremacy of Trump Tower Grill’s “taco bowls” or blaming the California drought on environmentalists to the delight of the state’s agribusiness interests—he has been relatively quiet about food. At last month’s Republican National Convention, the real-estate developer/reality TV star took a step toward filling out his food and farm policy by tapping Nebraska agribusiness owner and cattleman Charles Herbster as the chairman of his Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee.

Like Trump, Herbster is an unconventional business titan with political ambitions.

He and his wife own Conklin, a Kansas City-based company with an odd mix of product lines: from pesticide additives called adjuvents to fertilizers for farms and lawns to probiotics for livestock, pets, and even people to industrial roof coatings to motor oils for “everything from semis to farm equipment to race cars.” In addition, he owns a cattle-breeding company called Herbster Angus Farms as well as farmland in Nebraska and Colorado, for which he received a total of $196,757 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. (That’s not a particularly high number—many Nebraska farm operators got much more over that time frame.)

Before he took the reins of Trump’s ag-policy team, Herbster was best known for his aborted 2013 campaign for Nebraska’s governorship, as Politico’s Ian Kullgren recently noted. Soon after exiting the race, Herbster donated $860,000 to the campaign of another Republican gubernatorial candidate, Beau McCoy, a Nebraska state senator. Herbster ultimately donated a total of $2.7 million to McCoy’s campaign, “nearly his entire war chest,” The Omaha World-Herald reported. McCoy lost the race. Last year, Herbster hired McCoy to run marketing for Conklin’s building-supply business. Another one-time Nebraska officeholder, former Gov. Dave Heineman, joined Conklin’s board of directors last year.

Herbster’s largesse to politicians hasn’t been limited to McCoy’s failed bid. Politico notes he “has given $336,000 to Republican candidates and ag-related PACs since 2012.”

He is a major funder of Ag America, which describes itself as a “Federal Super PAC active in local, state, and federal elections.” Herbster sits on the Ag America steering committee, and according to the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets, he donated $60,000 to it in 2015. Other recent contributors include Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and several other agribusiness giants.

In public documents, Ag America pushes a a fairly standard agribiz policy agenda: The next president must subject (unnamed) federal ag regulations to “rigorous cost-benefit analyses” and pursue free trade agreements “across the globe to open markets for America’s agricultural products.”

That last bit would seem to contradict Trump’s oft-stated antipathy to the the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending trade deals that was hotly supported by the agribusiness lobby.

And that appears to be where Herbster comes in—reassuring farm interests that a Trump presidency wouldn’t mean reduced access to foreign markets.

On a recent afternoon, I caught up with Herbster by phone on a corn field on his Nebraska farm after calling a number I found on the website of Herbster Angus Farms. I was quite surprised when the man himself answered the phone. After volunteering that “I’ve been friends with Donald J. Trump for more than 10 years,” Herbster told me that he’s been getting calls from farmers “concerned about issues of trade.” Herbster said he reassures them that Trump “is not against trade in any way”—it’s “just that we wants trade to be fair,” and that means renegotiating trade deals. Herbster acknowledged that “trade for agriculture in the Midwest has probably been pretty good for the past few years,” but that it “hasn’t been good for small manufacturers in middle America and the coasts.” Trump, he suggested, would make trade great again for everyone.

He then mentioned reducing the inheritance tax (applied only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher) as a “big issue,” and said that rolling back regulation would be “at the forefront” of a Trump’s first 100 days as president. “We regulate, regulate, regulate,” he complained. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, he added that “if it moves, the government’s response is to tax it; if it keeps moving, the response is to regulate it; and if it stops moving, the response is to try to control it and subsidize it.”

I asked him to specify what regulations he sought to dismantle. “We’re not gonna pinpoint and try to detail the minutiae of all of those, because the first thing we have to do is we have to win,” he said. “I believe we are gonna win, but I’ve always said, until you win, all of the great ideas in the world aren’t going to help you, because you have to win to implement ’em.”

Rather than sweat policy details, “my focus .. is to make sure we get rural America out to vote, that we raise as much money as possible,” he said, adding that “it’s gonna take a lot of money for this campaign, because we saw what happened with Romney versus Obama.”

Meanwhile, Herbster said, he’s working to assemble a group of people to serve with him on Trump’s ag-policy committee, which will be announced the first week of August. “Everyone’s gonna pretty well know the names on that list—we have some governors, we have some former governors … we’ve put together a really great list.”

I pressed him for more policy details, but he politely hustled me off the phone. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got concrete being laid at the farm,” he said.

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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

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Many young voters don’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump on climate

by mamieisabelle68 Posted on July 31, 2016

The poll shebang

Many young voters don’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump on climate

By on Jul 31, 2016 9:30 amShare

PHILADELPHIA — One presidential candidate says that scientists who work on climate change are “practically calling it a hoax” and wants to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. The other calls climate change “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time.” And about four out of 10 millennials in battleground states think there is no difference between their views on the issue.

Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate group released polling at the Democratic National Convention this past week focused on millennials in 11 battleground states, conducted by Global Strategy Group in June and early July.

According to the poll, 21 percent of millennials are Bernie Sanders supporters who are so disillusioned with Clinton that they wouldn’t plan to vote for her in a general election if there are third-party candidates as well. Young voters are one of the more unpredictable factors in the 2016 election, because they’re more likely than other age groups to support Sanders and less likely to vote in general. Democrats run the risk of losing Sanders holdouts to a third-party candidate. Nearly seven out of 10 Sanders supporters believe there’s no daylight between Trump and Clinton on the issues they care about.

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

That is alarming news for Clinton. But the numbers could change. NextGen’s findings suggest that if Democrats emphasize climate change and clean energy, they could make progress in winning over this demographic.

Young voters polled, including pro-Sanders voters, rank clean air and water and switching to renewable energy as high priorities. Three-quarters are more likely to support a candidate who wants to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels. On the flip side, Trump’s position on the EPA could hurt him. Millennials like the EPA, the polling found — about as much as they like Beyoncé.

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

But this may not help Clinton much because young voters don’t recognize how different she is from Trump. Forty-four percent say there’s no distinction between the two candidates on transitioning away from fossil fuels, and 43 percent say there’s no distinction on protecting air and water.

Maybe that’s in part because Sanders hammered Clinton over her positions on fracking and fossil fuel extraction during the primaries.“ On the ground, students just don’t know the difference between the candidates,” Heather Hargreaves, NextGen’s vice president, said at a briefing on the poll.

“It’s not just ignorance,” added Andrew Baumann of Global Strategy Group. “They assume she’s more conservative than she is.” He continued, “I think part of the goal is to educate” voters and reintroduce Clinton.

But if her convention speech was any indication, Clinton isn’t interested in focusing much more on this issue, beyond the usual applause lines. She mentioned in passing how clean energy will lead to job creation, but she didn’t dwell on it. She left the task of drawing a contrast between her climate policies and Trump’s to speakers like California Gov. Jerry Brown and League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski.

Even if Clinton isn’t going to be heavily focused on climate, Steyer and his group plan to press the issue on her behalf. NextGen is putting $25 million into efforts to turn out young voters who are concerned about climate change, including at more than 200 college campuses. The group’s hope is that young voters will understand that the stakes are so high for climate change that they will vote for Clinton even if they don’t love her.

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Many young voters don’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump on climate

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Trump Backs his Supporters’ "Lock Her Up" Chant

by AlexandraNail37 Posted on July 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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After a bipartisan assault on Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, from people ranging from leading Democrats such as Hillary Clinton to lifelong Republicans to ordinary citizens, Trump fired back during his first general election rally in Colorado on Friday afternoon.

The liveliest moment occurred when Trump supporters in Colorado Springs launched into a round of the “Lock Her Up!” chant aimed at Hillary Clinton. The chant was a nightly fixture at last week’s Republican convention, but Trump rejected it at the time. “I said, ‘Don’t do that,'” he told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday. “I really—I didn’t like it.” Today he told his supporters, “I’m starting to agree with you.”

His remarks in Colorado weren’t Trump’s first rebuttal to Thursday night’s roast at the DNC. Though Clinton taunted Trump for his short fuse on social media—”A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” she said during her acceptance speech—the GOP nominee didn’t hesitate to unleash a series of Twitter attacks on Friday against Clinton and other speakers. Trump claimed that Gen. John Allen, the former Marine Corps commandant who savaged him during a fiery endorsement speech for Clinton on Thursday, “failed badly in his fight against ISIS.” He also took aim at former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who endorsed Clinton on Wednesday and mocked Trump as a con artist.

This afternoon, Trump stuck to his familiar attacks and went on several long tangents. He started the rally by complaining the fire marshall permitted too few people into the venue. “Probably a Democrat,” he said.

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Trump Backs his Supporters’ "Lock Her Up" Chant

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Hate crappy trade deals? This free concert is for you.

by LeighW51ubkply Posted on July 28, 2016

deal with it

Hate crappy trade deals? This free concert is for you.

By on Jul 28, 2016Share

A group of musicians are on tour protesting against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a murky global trade deal that could strike a blow to human rights, labor, and the environment.

Rock Against the TPP will bring Talib Kweli, Tom Morello, cofounder of Rage Against the Machine, Anti-Flag, and many more to a venue near you. Even better, the tickets are free. The tour kicked off in Denver, and is headed to San Diego this Saturday. More stops are planned in Seattle and Portland in August.

Despite stiff opposition, Obama has pushed to fast-track TPP through Congress; some protestors heckled Obama against the trade agreement during his primetime speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has been wishy-washy about the whole thing.

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Hate crappy trade deals? This free concert is for you.

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This FBI Tactic May Have Silenced GOP Convention Protesters in Cleveland

by KatrinScales Posted on July 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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There has already been more sustained protest activity in Philadelphia on the first day of the Democratic convention than there was during the entire Republican convention in Cleveland last week. Hundreds marched through blistering heat in downtown Philly on Sunday afternoon, and hundreds more marched Monday morning in favor of immigration reform and in support of Bernie Sanders. In Cleveland, despite predictions of greater unrest, no more than a couple of hundred protesters marched at any given time, and only 24 were arrested.

Perhaps the relative quiet in Cleveland was because of the overwhelming police presence there, or because estimates that “thousands” would protest at the Republican National Convention were wildly inflated—or both. But an additional factor could be that before and during the convention, the FBI intervened to make sure that any potential rabble-rousers remained quiet.

In late June, Mother Jones reported that FBI agents had stopped by the homes of several local Black Lives Matter and Occupy Cleveland activists to ask about their plans for the RNC. An FBI spokesperson told a Cleveland newspaper that the agents were conducting “community outreach as part of their security planning.” Activists in other cities who have been prominent in speaking out against police killings of African Americans told the Washington Post that they had been visited as well.

The FBI apparently continued to call upon activists throughout the week of the RNC. Last Wednesday, the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyers Guild released a statement claiming that eight special agents from the FBI, with officers from a metro Cleveland police department, “raided a home without consent or presenting a warrant.” The NLG said the raid appeared to be “part of a series of raids conducted” that morning.

When asked if the FBI activity had possibly quashed protests at the RNC, Jacqueline Green, co-coordinator of the NLG Ohio chapter and a Cleveland area civil rights and criminal defense attorney, replied, “I certainly think it had an effect.” She noted that some reports to the NLG included law enforcement telling people not to go downtown to protest. An FBI spokesperson told Mother Jones that the agency never told participants not to go downtown.

Video has surfaced on YouTube of one of the raids that apparently took place on July 20, showing what appear to be FBI agents, Elyria Police, and Homeland Security investigators entering a home and forcing the occupants outside in their underwear:

“We can get a search warrant for this place if you want to,” one of the law enforcement officers said (at 4:41 in the video). One of the men in the video was Rod Webber, a peace activist who had tried to calm tensions during the more heated debates in downtown Cleveland outside the RNC by offering everybody flowers.

Here’s another view from that same interaction captured on the front porch of the house:

Special Agent Vicki Anderson, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Cleveland field office, told Mother Jones that the FBI and other agencies were following leads from the previous day that indicated that people in that house were throwing bottles of water and “possible bottles of urine” at law enforcement officials during mild protests in downtown Cleveland. She also said they had shoved and pushed law enforcement agents.

Law enforcement entered the house as part of a “protective sweep,” she said, to make sure everybody in the house was accounted for and that any weapons in the home were secured. At least one of the men in the home said on the video that he had a gun and a concealed-carry permit; Anderson says someone else also had a weapon but “no search was conducted and no arrests were made.”

She added that she didn’t know the number of visits the FBI made to potential protesters before and during the convention and that no group had been targeted, but “numerous individuals from various groups were visited” to “encourage a safe and secure RNC event.” She explained, “We were speaking to numerous groups with the same purpose in mind, maintaining an environment where all can assemble peacefully and exercise their right to free speech.”

Juss, a local activist who preferred not to share her full name, told Mother Jones that she thinks the FBI came to her house because of her past activism around prison reform and the Occupy Cleveland movement. She says she didn’t talk to the agent, who left a business card in her door, but expected the visit and said it seemed like an effort to intimidate activists.

“They visited people who aren’t doing anything” and didn’t pose a threat, she said. “They really don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just wildly stabbing into the dark.”

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This FBI Tactic May Have Silenced GOP Convention Protesters in Cleveland

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Bernie Feels the Bern of His Anti-Clinton Delegates

by CyrilKNFxe Posted on July 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday afternoon in a cavernous ballroom at the Philadelphia Convention Center, Bernie Sanders delivered a rousing speech to the nearly 1,900 delegates backing his late presidential bid. He hit all the thematic high points of his campaign: end big-money politics, restore the middle class, stop trade agreements, continue the revolution. And his supporters cheered wildly for their man. But when Sanders told them that they must now band together to defeat the “bigotry” of Donald Trump by electing Hillary Clinton, he was drowned out by a chorus of boos and anti-Clinton chants. Just hours before the official opening of the convention, Bernie Nation was not willing to follow Sanders’ lead on this key point.

Sanders spoke after speeches by some of his biggest backers, including rapper Killer Mike, former NAACP President Ben Jealous, and actress Rosario Dawson. When Dawson mentioned Clinton, the room broke into loud boos. Dawson told the crowd that Clinton “is not a leader, she is a follower.”

When he spoke, the senator from Vermont made the case that his presidential campaign had been a historic success and that it would continue to be a vehicle for political revolution. Volunteers handed out registration forms for Sanders supporters to hold organizing meetups in late August, to kick off a new step in this progressive crusade. Sanders received big cheers when he praised his supporters’ contributions to what he called “by far the most progressive platform ever written” and an ovation when he noted the departure of Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, which he suggested might open up an opportunity for a more Bernie-friendly leadership in the party.

But when he tried to rally the delegates on behalf of Clinton, his audience became restless. “Immediately, right now, we have got to defeat Donald Trump, and we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine,” Sanders said. His delegates shouted their protests and booed, forcing Sanders to pause before continuing in his remarks. Sanders called Trump a “bully and a demagogue” who “has made bigotry the core of his campaign.” Still, the boos continued. “She does too!” delegates shouted. Others yelled, “Only you! Only you!”

Sanders declared that Trump poses a danger to the country’s future, but he could not win over the crowd. “She has ruined communities!” one woman shouted. “She has ruined countries!” Sanders pointed out that Trump “does not respect the Constitution of the United States.” Delegates kept on chanting: “Not with her!” and “We want Bernie!”

Sanders did not confront the booing delegates directly. He did not use this opportunity to address their anger and disappointment. He looked a bit surprised by the intensity of the Clinton opposition. He moved ahead with his prepared speech. After he was done—and the crowd had chanted, “Thank you, Bernie!”—Mother Jones asked Sanders three times what he thought about his delegates fiercely booing Clinton. He did not respond and quickly left the ballroom.

Afterward, Sanders delegates and supporters discussed the widespread booing of Clinton and whether they could follow Sanders’ guidance. Several said they could not bring themselves to vote for her. “She’s no better than Trump,” said one delegate, who wouldn’t provide her name.

Angela Valdes, a 37-year-old small-business owner from Portland, Oregon, who is a Sanders representative on the convention’s credentials committee, said she was nowhere close to supporting Clinton. “It is all about honesty and integrity,” Valdes said. “She has to come clean first.” Come clean on what issues? “Oh,” she remarked, “there are too many to list.” But Valdes left open the possibility that Sanders might be able to persuade her to vote for Clinton by November.

Other delegates acknowledged that Sanders was right that Clinton must win at the end of the day but said that protests against her this week in Philadelphia were worthwhile. Such actions, Elizabeth Davis, a North Carolina delegate, said, would “keep it fresh” for Clinton that she needs Sanders’ supporters to win.

So how much will Sanders do to persuade his delegates to follow his advice? In this appearance, he didn’t go beyond his prepared remarks. And Aisha Dew, a whip for the North Carolina Sanders delegation, said she has not heard anything from the Sanders campaign regarding the actions delegates should take. Earlier in the day, at a Florida delegation breakfast, Sanders offered no instructions on how delegates might conduct themselves on the floor of the convention this week.

After Sanders departed the convention center, his campaign manager Jeff Weaver remained as delegates milled about and wondered what would be next for them at the convention. What about the booing of Clinton? he was asked. “Oh,” he said, with a tone of nonchalance, “people will come around.”

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Bernie Feels the Bern of His Anti-Clinton Delegates

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