Tag Archives: death

The Clinton Rules, Tax Record Edition

by LanoraMeeson Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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I was sitting in the living room this afternoon and Hopper jumped into my lap. So I told Marian to turn the TV to CNN and I’d watch the news until Hopper released me. The first thing I saw was John Berman teasing a segment about Hillary Clinton releasing a health statement plus eight years of tax records. In other words, pretty routine stuff for any serious presidential candidate. But when Berman tossed to Brianna Keilar, here’s what she said:

KEILAR: When you think of a document dump like this, you normally think of, uh, in a way, sort of having something to hide. But the Clinton campaign trying to make the point that they’re putting out this information and they’re trying to be very transparent.

Talk about the Clinton rules! Hillary Clinton releases nearly a decade’s worth of tax records, and the first thing that pops into Keilar’s mind is that this is probably an effort to hide something. But hey! Let’s be fair. The Clinton campaign says it’s actually so that people can see her tax records. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Unbelievable. If any other candidate released eight years of tax records, it would be reported as the candidate releasing eight years of tax records. But when Hillary does it, there’s very likely something nefarious going on. God help us.

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The Clinton Rules, Tax Record Edition

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It’s Republicans, Not Obama, Who Want to Bust the Sequestration Deal

by IrisCTTDnruhenv Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports today that we might be headed for another government shutdown. Big surprise. But these paragraphs are very peculiar:

President Obama has signaled his intention to bust, once and for all, the severe 2011 spending caps known as sequestration. He’s vowed to reject any GOP-backed appropriation bills that increase government funding for the military without also boosting domestic programs important to Democrats such as Head Start for preschoolers.

The Republican-controlled Congress is also digging in. Since taking control in January, GOP leaders had promised to run Congress responsibly and prevent another shutdown like the one in 2013, but their spending proposals are defying the president’s veto threat by bolstering defense accounts and leaving social-welfare programs to be slashed.

It’s true that Obama has proposed doing away with the sequestration caps. But his budgets have routinely been described as DOA by Republican leaders, so his plans have never gotten so much as a hearing. What’s happening right now is entirely different. Republicans are claiming they want to keep the sequestration deal, but they don’t like the fact that back in 2011 they agreed it would cut domestic and military spending equally. Instead, Republicans now want to increase military spending and decrease domestic spending. They’re doing this by putting the additional defense money into an “emergency war-spending account,” which technically allows them to get around the sequester caps. Unsurprisingly, Obama’s not buying it.

So how does this count as Obama planning to “bust” the sequestration caps? I don’t get it. It sounds like Obama is willing to stick to the original deal if he has to, but he’s quite naturally insisting that this means sticking to the entire deal. It’s Republicans who are trying to renege. What am I missing here?

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It’s Republicans, Not Obama, Who Want to Bust the Sequestration Deal

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The New York Times Needs to do a Better Job of Explaining Its Epic Hillary Clinton Screw-Up

by SISJessika Posted on July 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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As you probably know, the New York Times screwed up epically last week by publishing a story claiming that Hillary Clinton was the target of a criminal probe over the mishandling of classified information in her private email system. In the end, virtually everything about the story turned out to be wrong. Clinton was not a target. The referral was not criminal. The emails in question had not been classified at the time Clinton saw them. When the dust settled, it appeared that the whole thing was little more than a squabble between State and CIA over whether certain emails that State is releasing to the public should or shouldn’t be classified. In other words, just your garden-variety bureaucratic dispute. Hardly worth a blurb on A17, let alone a screaming headline on the front page.

The Clinton campaign has now officially asked the Times to account for how it could have bollixed this story so badly. Here are the most interesting paragraphs:

Times’ editors have attempted to explain these errors by claiming the fault for the misreporting resided with a Justice Department official whom other news outlets cited as confirming the Times’ report after the fact. This suggestion does not add up. It is our understanding that this Justice Department official was not the original source of the Times’ tip. Moreover, notwithstanding the official’s inaccurate characterization of the referral as criminal in nature, this official does not appear to have told the Times that Mrs. Clinton was the target of that referral, as the paper falsely reported in its original story.

This raises the question of what other sources the Times may have relied on for its initial report. It clearly was not either of the referring officials — that is, the Inspectors General of either the State Department or intelligence agencies — since the Times’ sources apparently lacked firsthand knowledge of the referral documents. It also seems unlikely the source could have been anyone affiliated with those offices, as it defies logic that anyone so closely involved could have so severely garbled the description of the referral.

Yes indeedy. Who was the person who first tipped off the Times reporters? And does that source still deserve anonymity? Clinton’s letter seems to be pretty clearly implying that it might have been Trey Gowdy or someone on his staff, who are currently running the Benghazi investigation that’s recently morphed into a Hillary Clinton witch hunt. Apparently they knew about this DOJ referral a day before the Times story ran, so maybe they’re the ones who passed along the garbled version.

The Clinton campaign can’t say that, of course, since they have no proof. Neither do I. But it sure seems to be the plain implication of their response. Pretty clearly, someone who didn’t have direct access to the referral—but knew of its existence—was the original source, and it’s a pretty good guess that this source was someone unfriendly to Clinton. In other words, someone whose word shouldn’t have been accepted without the most stringent due diligence.

But when you get oppo research, it’s a pretty good bet that others are getting it too. So you have to publish quickly if you want to be first. But that’s not all: you also have to be pretty willing to accept dirt on Hillary Clinton at face value and you have to care more about being first than being right. The authors of the story, Michael Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo, really ought to address these issues in public at a press conference. After all, the press loves press conferences, right?

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The New York Times Needs to do a Better Job of Explaining Its Epic Hillary Clinton Screw-Up

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Will the Tea Party Shoot Itself in the Foot Yet Again?

by JoyPostbtocen Posted on July 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman notes today that although Jeb Bush is substantively pretty conservative, his tone on the campaign trail has remained resolutely moderate and affable. Waldman explains how this leads to Bush winning the nomination:

If you’re Bush, your path to victory looks like this: Trump soaks up all the attention for a while, but eventually gets bored (and hasn’t bothered to mount an actual campaign that can deliver votes), and either fades or just packs it in. Meanwhile, the conservative vote is split. Once the voting starts, the failing candidates will begin to fall away one by one. But by the time most of them are gone and their supporters have coalesced around a single candidate like Scott Walker, it’s too late — Jeb has built his lead and is piling up delegates, has all the money in the world, and can vanquish that last opponent on his way to the convention in Cleveland.

In other words, a repeat of 2012, when all the hard-core conservatives split the tea party vote ten ways while Mitt Romney quietly vacuumed up the entire moderate vote. By the time Rick Santorum was the last tea partier standing, it was too late. Romney coasted to victory.

This is the great conundrum of the tea-party wing of the Republican Party. What they should do is coalesce immediately around Scott Walker. He’s the most plausible winner among the tea partiers, and if the race was basically between him and Bush from the start, there’s a pretty good chance he could win. On the other hand, if he has to fight off a dozen challengers for months on end, it’ll just be rerun of 2012. He’ll get a share of the tea party vote, but it won’t be nearly enough to fend off Bush, who will have his own share of the tea partiers plus the vast majority of the wing of the GOP that’s disgusted that their party has been taken over by loons. And there are still quite a few of those folks around.

I guess this is where a smoke-filled room would come in handy. This is a classic collective action problem, but without party bosses who can step in and take charge, there’s really no answer to it. The tea-party candidates keep thinking that they can run and win because there are so many tea partiers among the Republican primary electorate. Unfortunately, there are too many of them who think so. The end result is that they tear each other to shreds and end up with John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush. And then they whine and complain about how “the party” has betrayed the conservative cause yet again.

This isn’t inevitable, of course. It’s possible that Walker or one of the other mean-boy candidates will break out and become the de facto tea party standard bearer. It’s just not as likely as it should be. It’s a shame the tea partiers can’t get their act together, isn’t it?

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Will the Tea Party Shoot Itself in the Foot Yet Again?

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Opposition to Iran Nuclear Deal Just Keeps Getting Weirder and Weirder

by kx93z6g Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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The congressional hearings into the Iran nuclear deal continue apace. Steve Benen points us today to this lovely exchange between Sen. Lindsey Graham and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter:

Graham: Does the Supreme Leader’s religious views compel him over time to destroy Israel and attack America?

Carter: I don’t know. I don’t know the man. I only —

Graham: Well let me tell you, I do. I know the man. I know what he wants. And if you don’t know that, this is not a good deal.

Graham: Could we win a war with Iran? Who wins the war between us and Iran? Who wins? Do you have any doubt who wins?

Carter: No. The United States.

Graham: We. Win.

So there you have it: (a) the Ayatollah unquestionably wants to destroy Israel and attack America, and (b) there is no doubt America would win this war. This sounds like mighty poor strategic thinking on the Ayatollah’s part to me, since presumably he knows as much as Lindsey Graham about the relative military strength of Iran and the United States. But I guess his pesky religious views compel him to commit national suicide anyway.

Now, you might be skeptical that Graham knows the Ayatollah as well as he thinks he does, or knows his religious views in any depth either. But even if we give him the benefit of the doubt on that score, his apparent view of things still doesn’t make sense. If the Ayatollah is as committed to war as Graham thinks, why would he bother with this deal in the first place? According to conservatives (I’m not sure what the CIA thinks these days), Iran is currently less than a year from being able to build a nuclear bomb. So why not just build a few and start the war? It can’t be because the sanctions matter. If war is inevitable thanks to the Ayatollah’s religious views, but America is going to win the war by reducing Iran to a glassy plain, who cares about a few more years of sanctions? Most Iranians are going to be dead a few hours after the war starts anyway.

So….it’s all still mysterious. Conservatives don’t like the deal Obama negotiated. Fine. But we can’t go back to the status quo. If we pull out of the deal, economic sanctions will decay pretty quickly and Iran will have lots of additional money and be a year away from building a bomb. The only other alternative is war. Graham is more open about this than most conservatives, but even he realizes he has to be cagey about it. He can’t quite come out and just say that we should go to war with Iran before they build a bomb. So instead he tosses in an oddly pointless question about who would win a war between Iran and America. Why? Some kind of dog whistle, I guess. Those with ears to hear understand what it means: Graham wants to see cruise missiles flying. The rest of us are left scratching our chins.

It all just gets weirder and weirder. The deal on the table, imperfect as it might be, doesn’t restrict American freedom of action at all. Plus it has a pretty stringent inspection regime and would prevent Iran from building a bomb for at least ten years—probably longer. That’s better than what we have now, so why not go ahead and sign the deal and then use the next ten years to figure out what to do next? What’s the downside?

I can’t really think of one except that it makes a shooting war less likely over the next decade. I call that a feature. I guess Graham and his crowd call it a bug.

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Opposition to Iran Nuclear Deal Just Keeps Getting Weirder and Weirder

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Health Care Spending Growth Will Rise a Bit Over the Next Decade, But Only a Bit

by silvermega-1959 Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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By coincidence, a new article in Health Affairs confirms an offhand guess I made a few days ago. I wrote, “I happen to think the slowdown in medical costs is real, and will continue for some time (though not at the extremely low rates of the past few years).” The Health Affairs researchers write: “Recent historically low growth rates in the use of medical goods and services, as well as medical prices, are expected to gradually increase. However, in part because of the impact of continued cost-sharing increases that are anticipated among health plans, the acceleration of these growth rates is expected to be modest.”

As the Wall Street Journal notes, this is is similar to what Medicare actuaries have been saying for a while:

The actuaries again Tuesday pointed to the stronger economy and aging population as the main factors in shaping Medicare’s future spending.

Prescription-drug spending, long a target of warnings from the insurance industry, drew particular attention from the actuaries, who pointed to a big rise in spending growth there as costly new specialty drugs such as Sovaldi, for hepatitis C, came on the market in 2014. Spending growth on pharmaceutical products jumped by 12.6% in 2014, up from 2.5% in 2013….In all, health care will comprise about a fifth of the U.S. economy by 2024, and the growth rate will exceed the expected average growth in gross domestic product by 1.1 percentage points.

So: good news or bad news? The bad news is that health care spending keeps increasing steadily. It’s currently about 17 percent of GDP and will increase to about 20 percent of GDP over the next decade. The good news is that this is slow growth: only about 1.1 percent higher than overall economic growth. Any other time in the past 30 years we would have killed for a growth rate that low.

There’s probably no way to avoid health care costs growing at least a little faster than the rest of the economy. We keep making advances, and our revealed preferences are pretty clear on at least one point: we value health care highly and are willing to pay more for it even at the expense of other items. That probably won’t be true forever, but it’s true for now.

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Health Care Spending Growth Will Rise a Bit Over the Next Decade, But Only a Bit

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Waller County Officials: Sandra Bland Autopsy Consistent With Suicide

by silownie_zewnetrzne_krone Posted on July 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, the Waller County District Attorney revealed preliminary autopsy results in the death of Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old black woman who was found dead in her jail cell days after being arrested for a traffic stop, saying that examiners discovered no apparent injuries consistent with a violent homicide or struggle.

Assistant District Attorney Warren Diepraam told reporters that he was presenting physical rather than criminal findings, but said there was no evidence found in the autopsy of injuries to Bland’s hands or internal organs to suggest a violent struggle had taken place in the jail. Previously, a medical examiner called her death a suicide by hanging. Bland’s family disputes the finding.

There was no evidence the first autopsy performed on Bland was defective as was previously alleged by an attorney representing Bland’s family, Diepraam added.

According to the new autopsy findings, Bland’s injuries were consistent with having “a force against her back.”

A portion of the press conference focused on the presence of marijuana found in Bland’s system—confirmed by preliminary autopsy results. Many took to social media to question the relevance of the finding.

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Waller County Officials: Sandra Bland Autopsy Consistent With Suicide

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Another Fatal Police Shooting Caught on Video—and More Questions About a Dispatcher’s Role

by LouellaP07 Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, a federal court ordered the release of video showing a June 2013 police shooting in Gardena, California (a city in southern Los Angeles County) in which an unarmed man, Ricardo Diaz-Zeferino, was killed and another unarmed man wounded. Previously, an internal review by the Gardena Police Department had concluded that the shooting was justified, and prosecutors in Gardena decided not to pursue criminal charges against the officers involved. In May, the City of Gardena agreed to pay $4.7 million to settle a federal lawsuit filed by the family of Diaz-Zeferino. But the newly released police dash cam footage, first posted by the Los Angeles Times, has raised questions about the events leading up to the fatal encounter—including the potential mishandling of a 911 call, an issue that has come up with other officer-involved killings.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

According to the Los Angeles Times, there may have been a miscommunication by the police dispatcher:

The shooting occurred about 2:30 a.m. on June 2, 2013, after a bicycle was stolen from outside a CVS Pharmacy on Western Avenue. A police dispatcher mistakenly told officers that the crime was a robbery, which usually involves a theft using weapons or force, and officers headed to the area in search of two suspects.

Gardena police Sgt. Christopher Cuff saw two men riding bicycles east on Redondo Beach Boulevard. The men were friends of the bike theft victim and were searching for the missing bicycle. Mistaking them for the thieves, Cuff ordered the men to stop and put their hands up, according to a district attorney’s memo written by a prosecutor who reviewed the police videos.

The Gardena killing is the latest in a string of high-profile police shootings captured on video, which have brought scrutiny on police tactics and procedures. With the Tamir Rice shooting in Cleveland, evidence emerged that the dispatcher who relayed the 911 call did not include potentially key details about the suspect, as Mother Jones previously reported. And according to a recent Washington Post data investigation of police shootings of mentally ill suspects, “officers are routinely dispatched with information that is incomplete or wrong.”

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Another Fatal Police Shooting Caught on Video—and More Questions About a Dispatcher’s Role

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Dying to Be Green: The Green Burial Movement

by BrigetteKippax8 Posted on July 6, 2015

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Dying to Be Green: The Green Burial Movement

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Jeb Bush Says Obama Has Left “Violence Unopposed.” Ask Al Qaeda.

by HunterLuiassfs Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

There were many absurd moments during Jeb Bush’s official I’m-running-for-president announcement on Monday. But the most Bizarro World instance might have come when Bush, the brother of the president who committed one of the greatest strategic blunders in US history, and the candidate who has enlisted the architects of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as his own foreign policy advisers, embraced the right’s Obama-is-feckless meme. Bush slammed President Barack Obama and his foreign policy team for failing “to be the peacemakers.” He added, “With their phone-it-in foreign policy, the Obama-Clinton-Kerry team is leaving a legacy of crises uncontained, violence unopposed.”

This has become a conservative mantra: Obama has done nothing to counter the foes of the United States. Forgotten are the raid that nabbed Osama bin Laden, the drone strikes that have decimated Al Qaeda, the special forces assaults on the Taliban, and the bombing raids mounted against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Obama’s moves in the fight against these extremists are certainly open to debate. But his conservative critics keep insisting the guy essentially does nothing. Note Bush’s brazen accusation that Obama refuses to oppose violence.

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Jeb Bush Says Obama Has Left “Violence Unopposed.” Ask Al Qaeda.

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