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Our Future Is In Paul Ryan’s Hands

by TMQMason7050375 Posted on October 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s 23 days until this sordid campaign finally ends. Polls currently suggest that (a) Hillary Clinton will become president, (b) Democrats will regain control of the Senate, and (c) Republicans will maintain control of the House. Let’s assume that’s how things turn out. What happens next? A few things:

The Republican Party will completely disown and repudiate Donald Trump.
Mitch McConnell will be a nonentity. He doesn’t pretend to be a national leader, especially if he’s in the minority, and he’s shown pretty often that he’s willing to do deals in a fairly conventional way. He’s a caucus manager, not a visionary.
With few other choices around, Paul Ryan becomes the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.
After the election Republicans will do their usual “autopsy,” and it will say the usual thing: Demographic trends are working against them, and they have to reach out to non-white, non-male voters if they don’t want to fade slowly into irrelevance. In the last 25 years, they’ve won two presidential elections by the barest hair’s breadth and lost the other five—and this is only going to get worse in the future.
Hillary Clinton will remain the pragmatic dealmaker she is. And despite the current bucketloads of anti-Hillary red meat that Republicans are tossing around right now, most of them trust her to deal honestly when it comes to political bargains.

This means that the next four years depend entirely on Paul Ryan. So what will he do? I maintain that this is a very open, very interesting question.

I’ve gotten some pushback lately for a couple of posts where I’ve gone soft on Ryan. But here’s the thing: when it comes to Ryan’s budget policies, I have nothing but contempt for him. Here’s a typical post of mine from a few years ago, and there are plenty more just like it. But it’s foolish to insist that simply because someone disagrees with my politics they’re either stupid or irredeemably evil. Ryan is neither.

So what will Ryan do? One possibility, of course, is that he’ll take the simplest route: endless obstruction, just like 2009. Republicans may be a divided party, but one thing they all agree on is that they hate Hillary Clinton and they want to prevent her from doing anything.

But there’s another possibility. Ryan is not a racial fearmonger. He’s always been open to immigration reform. He’s consistently shown genuine disgust for Donald Trump. He’s been open to making low-key deals in the past. He’s smart enough to know precisely the depth of the demographic hole Republicans are in. And despite being conservative himself, he may well realize that the GOP simply can’t stay in thrall to the tea party caucus forever if it wants to survive. On a personal level, he saw what they did to John Boehner, and he may well be sick and tired of them himself.

It’s also possible that he wants to run for president in 2020, and if that’s the case he’ll do better if he has some real accomplishments to show over the next four years. Running on a platform of scorched-earth obstruction might get the tea partiers excited, but that’s not enough to win the presidency.

So maybe Ryan decides that now is the time to try to reform the Republican Party. Once he wins the speakership again, he makes clear to the tea partiers that they’re finished as power brokers: he’s going to pass bills even if it means depending on Democratic support to do it. He reaches out to women and minorities. He passes immigration reform. He makes sure that budgets get passed and we don’t default on the national debt. He works behind the scenes with Hillary Clinton in standard horsetrading mode: she gets some things she wants, but only in return for some things conservatives want.

This could go a long way toward making him the next president of the United States. If he plays his cards right, Clinton might suffer with her base for selling them out on some of the deals she makes. Ryan will get the tea partiers under control and have some accomplishments to run on. He’ll soften the nonwhite disgust with the party enough to pick up some minority votes. Maybe the economy helps him out by going soft in 2019. And he’s already got good looks, youth, and an agreeable speaking style going for him.

So which Paul Ryan will we get in 2017? The movement conservative who breathes fire and insists that Hillary Clinton will never get one red cent for any of her satanic priorities? Or a conservative but realistic leader who’s willing to make deals as a way of bringing the Republican Party back from the brink of destruction that Donald Trump has led them to?

If it’s the latter, this presents liberals with a real quandary: just what are they willing to give Ryan in return for passage of some of their priorities? That’s worth some thought just in case Ryan decides to take the smart route.

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Our Future Is In Paul Ryan’s Hands

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Senators Press Feds to Stop Locking Up Central American Families Who Have Fled for Their Lives

by LorenD35vd Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Roughly 30 Central American women and their children who are applying for asylum in the United States are being held outside Philadelphia in a federal immigration detention center called the Berks County Residential Center. Many have been there for more than a year, and in August, 22 mothers went on hunger strike to protest their prolonged detention. Now, a group of 17 Democratic senators, including former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and current vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, have called on Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to release the families and end the practice of family detention.

“Many of these mothers have asylum claims based on rape, severe domestic violence, and murder threats,” the senators wrote in a letter released on Tuesday. “It is unconscionable to keep these children locked up and goes against our most fundamental values.” The children at Berks, who make up about half the population of detainees, range in age from 2 to 16 years old. Many have been held for months and, in some cases, more than a year. The senators said family detention is “wrong” and “should be ended immediately,” pointing to research showing that prolonged confinement is harmful to children’s physical and mental health.

The Berks Center is one of three family detention centers in the country. The other two, located in Texas, were opened by the Obama administration in 2014 in response to the surge in unaccompanied minors crossing the border. Around that time, the centers came under scrutiny for poor medical care, lack of access to legal council, and alleged sexual abuse. (Earlier this year, one former guard at Berks was sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting a teenage detainee.)

Last summer, the administration announced a series of reforms to reduce the length of confinement. Shortly afterward, a district court in California ordered the government to release migrant children within three to five days of their initial confinement, or within 20 days under extreme circumstances. The administration says it has taken steps to come into compliance with that court decision. Secretary Johnson has said his agency is detaining families for an average of 20 days or less, but advocates say the experience of the Berks mothers tells another story.

The 17 senators urged Johnson to review their cases and release them unless they are a serious flight risk or threat to public safety. Hillary Clinton has taken a similar position as her running mate and called for an end to family detention.

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Senators Press Feds to Stop Locking Up Central American Families Who Have Fled for Their Lives

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The Key Moments From the Vice Presidential Debate

by KarmaG62lyzhfxl Posted on October 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a debate that was expected to have none of the fireworks of last week’s presidential face-off, the two vice presidential nominees embraced their attack-dog roles Tuesday in a sparring match that was less about the men on stage than about Donald Trump.

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia used the debate in his home state to slam Trump repeatedly over his refusal to release his tax returns and his surprising comments about nuclear proliferation. Republican Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, in turn, tried to dodge most of the attacks Kaine lobbed his way and used them to accuse Kaine of running an “insult-driven” campaign. Pence was also able to get in a few swipes at Hillary Clinton.

It was a messy, chaotic affair for two vice presidential hopefuls, both thought to be more mellow than their running mates. The two candidates often talked over each other often during the debate—and over the moderator, CBS News’ Elaine Quijano, who had a hard time holding Kaine and Pence to the allotted time and subject matter for each question.

Here are the best moments from the combative debate:

Pence defends Trump on not paying taxes. Following a New York Times report suggesting that Trump might not have paid any federal income taxes for nearly two decades by claiming $913 million in losses on his tax returns in 1995, Pence defended his running mate. “Donald Trump is a businessman, not a career politician,” Pence said. “He actually built a business. He faced some pretty tough times 20 years ago. His tax returns—that showed he went through a very difficult time but he used the tax code just the way it’s supposed to be used and he did it brilliantly.”

Kaine goes after Trump’s missing tax returns. Kaine went hard after Trump for not releasing his tax returns. He recalled that Trump promised back in 2014 that he would release his returns if he ran for president, and he said that Trump broke that promise. Just as Pence shared his tax returns with Trump as part of the vetting process to be his running mate, Kaine said, Trump should share his returns with the American people as he runs for the job of president.

Pence accuses Kaine of running an “insult-driven campaign.” Throughout the debate, Pence accused Kaine and Clinton of running an “insult-driven campaign.” “I have to tell you, I was listening to the avalanche of insults coming out of Sen. Kaine,” Pence said early in the debate. What had Kaine said that had so offended Pence? The Democratic candidate has just ticked off a litany of statements that Trump had made over the course of the campaign. Pence used this to bring up Clinton’s comment that half of Trump’s supporters are in a “basket of deplorables.”

Kaine ridicules Trump’s inability to apologize. When Pence noted Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comments, Kaine said that she had apologized for how she phrased that comment. (She apologized for exaggerating and saying the “deplorables” made up “half” of Trump’s supporters.) He went on to name a long list of insults that Trump has spewed since starting his campaign but not apologized for and said, “You will look in vain to see Donald Trump ever taking responsibility for anybody and apologizing.”

Kaine goes after Trump’s penchant for praising dictators. Midway through the debate, Kaine rattled off a list of Trump’s most controversial foreign policy ideas, from his questioning of the NATO treaty to his suggestions that the United States would be better off if more countries had nuclear weapons. But the best zinger came when Kaine listed the figures who would be carved into Trump’s “personal Mount Rushmore”: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Muammar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein.

Kaine suggests Pence revisit his fifth-grade civics lessons. Kaine criticized Trump for his connections to Russian oligarchs and took on Pence for praising Putin as a “stronger leader” than President Barack Obama. For this, Kaine suggested, Pence might need to retake fifth-grade civics.

Pence defends the Trump Foundation. Pence declined many opportunities to defend Trump’s record against Kaine’s onslaught of attacks throughout the night, but he finally backed his running mate up when it came to Trump’s charitable foundation. The Trump Foundation, Pence claimed, “gives almost every cent to charitable causes”—a statement that has been proved false time and again through dogged reporting from the Washington Post. Trump has used his foundation to send an illegal political contribution to the attorney general of Florida, to pay off legal fees incurred by his businesses, and to purchase portraits of himself. The foundation is currently being investigated by the New York attorney general.

Pence defends Trump’s record on abortion. Pence and Kaine went toe-to-toe on the issue of abortion. Kaine said Trump and Pence want to see Roe v. Wade repealed, resulting in laws that punish women for seeking abortions. Kaine also seized on a comment Trump made early in the campaign when he said women who seek an abortion should be punished. (Trump’s campaign later walked back that comment.) Pence responded that he and Trump would not condone punishing women for abortion and defended Trump’s past comments by noting that Trump isn’t a “polished politician” like Clinton and Kaine.

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The Key Moments From the Vice Presidential Debate

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You Thought 2016 Was Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

by Elyse Corder Posted on October 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Best of Enemies co-director Robert Gordon confessed to me a while back that his biggest fear was that “people won’t go see this movie because they think it’s going to be boring.” It isn’t. The documentary—which premieres October 3 at 10 p.m. on PBS (Independent Lens)—chronicles the often fiery debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal that ABC aired during the 1968 election cycle in an effort to boost ratings. “It sounds like a dry documentary because people forget how witty these two guys are,” Gordon told me.

Gordon and co-director Morgan Neville—whose Twenty Feet From Stardom won the 2014 Oscar for best documentary—skillfully weave archival footage together with interviews with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Brooke Gladstone, Dick Cavett, and Buckley’s brother Neil. The movie climaxes during one of the duo’s final debates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where, while discussing Vietnam War protesters, Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” The latter’s response, which could even make Donald Trump blush, was perhaps the first viral sound bite in modern media history. “Now listen, you queer,” Buckley retorted, twitching with anger. “Quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Indeed, the televised verbal brawls between these two brilliant intellectuals anticipated the culture wars that would define, for decades to come, America’s political struggles—and how the media would cover them. I sat down with Gordon in San Francisco not long ago to chat about the de-evolution of our political discourse and the challenge of making a film about conversations that took place decades ago.

Mother Jones: How did this project come to pass?

Robert Gordon: In 2010, a friend of mine acquired a bootleg DVD of the debates and shared it with me, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is today’s culture wars expressed by these two guys.” As a documentarian, you are always looking for that cache of film you can use to build a movie from; there was 2.5 hours of raw debate. It seemed so relevant to the division in the country that I just thought, “Let’s get on this immediately.”

MJ: Had you worked with Morgan Neville before?

RG: This is our fifth film together. Between the fourth and fifth, he made 20 Feet From Stardom and got the Academy Award. I called him up and said, “Way to go Morgan! You’re really putting the pressure on us now.” But it’s a big help having that accolade. People who don’t know us are more willing to trust us; it’s the stamp of legitimacy.

MJ: Was it challenging to get backers on board with such an unconventional documentary subject?

RG: Yes, it took a while. Most said to us, “This is all very interesting, but why do you see it as relevant today?” And since the movie has been made, the response has been, “I can’t believe how relevant to today this footage is.”

Gore Vidal (front) and William F. Buckley get primped for their clash. Independent Lens

MJ: Most of your past work has involved music. What made you want to stray from that subject?

RG: Most everything I’ve done has been about music, but music as a way to talk about bigger social issues, bigger cultural moments or movements. I don’t see it as that big of a leap. The debates are the operatic vignettes that recur, and it’s quite musical to me. The important thing to me is that my documentaries are about changes in America, and so is this.

MJ: It was quite a year, 1968. How did you decide what historical and cultural context to include?

RG: There were cultural touchstones that have been investigated over and over and over, and we didn’t want to redo those. And there are a lot of them to work with. I mean ’68, like you said, it’s rife with material, with cultural disagreement, violence, internationally—it’s all there. But we wanted to focus on our guys and what they stood for and where those changes occurred in relation to them.

MJ: But you did incorporate some major historical events into the film, like the riots outside of the DNC in Chicago.

RG: Yeah, totally, but only because it was there. It felt like the fighting on the street was being played out by these two guys in front of the glare of the national TV camera.

MJ: Was there anything that surprised you while researching these two men?

RG: I was surprised at the vigor with which Vidal pursued Buckley and his other enemies. Vidal seemed to thrive on animosity and on feuding, and at the same time could be very charming. You see him on Dick Cavett, and there’s a certain charm to him, you like to watch him, you like to see him talk, and I thought, “Well, surely this ‘man of ice’ was a put-on.” But then you read things like his obituary on Buckley, and, you know, he is a man of ice.

MJ: So did you feel like you had to hold back your own opinions about Vidal and Buckley?

RG: The film wasn’t about our personal views and our personal politics. That would have undermined the film’s potential. One of the interesting things I learned in the course of it was Buckley, whose politics I tend not to agree with, was strong enough to publicly change his mind on the Iraq War. He had come out very for it when it began, and over time, when he learned more about it, he changed. And that’s a brave position for someone in his situation. I think it’s very honorable and admirable.

MJ: There is that moment after the famous blowup between Buckley and Vidal when you pan through all the interviewees in the documentary sitting in shocked silence. And then Dick Cavett goes, “The network nearly shat.” Were those really these people’s reactions?

RG: That’s taking liberty in the editing room, is what it is. It was Cavett’s response that suggests that those were their real responses, because I asked Cavett about it and you see him turn and think, and he has a long silence, and then he gives that very funny answer, and we thought, “Wow, what if we extend that silence? Because that’s kind of musical in a way.” And we tested it and it was like, “Ohhh, this is funny.” And it never hurts to be funny.

The showdown Independent Lens

MJ: Yeah, the film has a lot of funny moments; Vidal and Buckley are very entertaining to watch.

RG: These guy were so smart, and they had a command of so many things: history, philosophy, economics, and, people forget, of humor as well. They were smart, witty guys.

MJ: I was struck by how intellectual their rhetoric was. It seems ironic that these debates helped inspire the trashy political debate we now see on cable.

RG: Yes, TV is pursued for the lowest common denominator. Networks, which had been civil to a fault up to that point in time, have worked themselves up to the point where all they are is a series of Roman candle explosions. The reason that the audience built for Buckley and Vidal is that, in addition to their cattiness, they were offering a lot of ideas and a lot of exchange, and they were humorous, too. It wasn’t just that explosive moment that made this what it was. But TV today seems to want to have you come back from a commercial and go right into a fight turned up to 10, and three minutes later go into a commercial—and that’s success! People have been introducing the show in theaters as “delicious,” and I think that suggests an appetite for more integrity on television; more intellectual exchange, less vacuous shouting.

MJ: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to imagine someone citing Pericles on network TV now!

RG: Yeah, I watched the Vidal-Buckley debates with a dictionary the first few times because I wanted to learn the words, and they were saying things I didn’t know, and what did it mean, and why were they choosing those words, and whom were they quoting? Wouldn’t you like to watch a half an hour of political TV and then take your notes and go look up what they were talking about? You glean what you need to glean, and then afterward you can take home more—it’s a prize that comes in the box!

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You Thought 2016 Was Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

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FBI Now Pretty Sure Russia Is Behind Anti-Clinton Hacking

by ThaddeuPoupinel Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

The Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI is increasingly convinced that the recent hacks of the DNC and other organizations are being led by Russia:

A fuller picture of the operation has come into focus in the past several weeks. U.S. officials believe that at least two hacking groups with ties to the Russian government, known as Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, are involved in the escalating data-theft efforts, according to people briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of the cyberattacks.

Following successful breaches, the stolen data are apparently transferred to three different websites for publication, these people say. The websites—WikiLeaks, DCLeaks.com and a blog run by Guccifer 2.0—have posted batches of stolen data at least 42 times from April to last week.

WikiLeaks has published U.S. secrets for years but has recently taken an overtly adversarial tone toward Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Cybersecurity experts believe that DCLeaks.com and Guccifer 2.0 often work together and have direct ties to Russian hackers.

Most of these leaks have been designed to hurt Hillary Clinton, who Vladimir Putin apparently hates. Meanwhile, Trump advisor Carter Page has left the Trump campaign over accusations that he’s a little too chummy with the folks in Russia responsible for all this hacking. Page says the whole thing is ridiculous, but apparently his erstwhile friends in Trumpland are throwing him under the bus anyway:

The Trump campaign has been distancing itself from Page. Although Page was one of Trump’s originally announced foreign policy advisers, campaign manager KellyAnne Conway told CNN on Sunday that Page is not really involved at with the campaign at this point.

“I have not spoken with him at all, in fact, meaning he’s not part of our national security or foreign policy briefings that we do now at all, certainly not since I have become campaign manager,” she said….Other Trump campaign sources told me that Page was never really part of Trump’s inner circle….Page has never met with Trump one on one and hasn’t been deeply involved in Trump foreign policy speeches or events, they said.

So…he was just some guy whose name they used so they’d look like they had some advisors. Apparently they’d rather publicly fess up to lying about their campaign announcements than take a chance that Page might become a liability. What nice folks.

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FBI Now Pretty Sure Russia Is Behind Anti-Clinton Hacking

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What the Candidates Might Say Tonight About the World’s Most Important Issue

by PilarErtel48 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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People pause near a bus adorned with large photos of candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump before the first presidential debate. Mary Altaffer/AP

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Climate change is a grave threat to our future, but it probably won’t come up at Monday’s presidential debate. Topics for the event include “Securing America,” and although you’d think issues of national security might involve climate change (the military certainly does), if history is any indication, it likely won’t get mentioned at all.

But if it does get the attention it deserves, here’s where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand:

Dirty energy: Clinton supports some natural gas extraction on public lands, is against offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic, and has pledged $30 billion to provide suffering coal communities with health care, education, and job retraining as we move away from coal as a source of energy.

Trump has promised to boost coal production, ease environmental regulations, open federal lands to oil and gas extraction, and increase permits for oil pipelines. He also is considering appointing an oil executive to head the Department of Interior and a fracking mogul to lead the Department of Energy.

Clean energy: Clinton has said she would install more than half a billion solar panels in the United States by the end of her first term, and that under her presidency, we will generate enough clean energy to power every home in America by 2027.

Trump has said wind power is a great killer of birds (it’s not) and that solar is too expensive to be a viable source of energy, despite the fact that the cost of solar has now reached record lows—and with proper government investment, it would get even cheaper. Trump also objects to Obama’s signature environmental legislation, the Clean Power Plan, as well as the Paris Climate Accord, which he says he would cancel.

Environmental justice: After a debate in Flint, Michigan, in April, Clinton said she would require federal agencies to devise plans to deal with lead poisoning and other environmental justice issues, and she pledged to clean up more than 450,000 polluted sites around the United States.

Trump, on the other hand, mocked the Democratic National Committee for including climate justice in the party’s platform, and has previously vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency—or, as he calls it, “the Department of Environmental”—although he’s recently backtracked on that particular idea.

Fossil fuel donations: While Republican presidential candidates can usually count on generous support from the fossil fuel industry, this year is the exception. Between both individual and corporation donations, Clinton has taken nearly twice as much from Big Oil as Trump, and some oil execs may even vote for her. Looks like we can add this to the list of things the great race of 2016 has upended.

Third and fourth party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson won’t be at the debate Monday night, which is too bad, because they tend to have the most interesting answers on climate change…and everything else.

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What the Candidates Might Say Tonight About the World’s Most Important Issue

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This Newspaper Just Endorsed Its First Democrat for President in Almost a Century, Because Trump

by CarinEWPBavsc Posted on September 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Friday, the Cincinnati Enquirer endorsed Hillary Clinton, the first Democrat for president the paper has endorsed in almost 100 years.

“The Enquirer has supported Republicans for president for almost a century—a tradition this editorial board doesn’t take lightly,” the editorial board wrote. “But this is not a traditional race, and these are not traditional times. Our country needs calm, thoughtful leadership to deal with the challenges we face at home and abroad. We need a leader who will bring out the best in all Americans, not the worst.”

With this unexpected endorsement, the Enquirer joins several other newspapers who, due to fears of a Trump presidency, have bucked years of tradition and chosen not to endorse the GOP nominee: Earlier this month, the Dallas Morning News endorsed Clinton, the first Democratic nominee for president they’ve endorsed in 75 years. The New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed libertarian Gary Johnson, after endorsing Republican candidates for a century.

The Enquirer’s editorial outlines Hillary Clinton’s “proven track record of governing,” including her work fighting for women’s rights, children’s health coverage, LGBT equality, and to secure care for 9/11 first responders.

Of Trump, the editorial board points out that he has no history of governance—and rather than acknowledging his novice status, he purports to know more than the experts:

Trump is a clear and present danger to our country. He has no history of governance that should engender any confidence from voters. Trump has no foreign policy experience, and the fact that he doesn’t recognize it—instead insisting that, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do”—is even more troubling. His wild threats to blow Iranian ships out of the water if they make rude gestures at U.S. ships is just the type of reckless, cowboy diplomacy Americans should fear from a Trump presidency.

The editorial board acknowledges their reservations about Clinton, including her lack of transparency, and it makes clear that any reservations they have about Clinton “pale in comparison to our fears about Trump.” The board goes on to outline a host of other concerns about Trump: his insults about women, his offensive comments about Latino and African-American communities, his support of dictatorial leaders like Vladimir Putin and Saddam Hussein, his endorsements from white supremacist groups, and much more.

“Of late, Trump has toned down his divisive rhetoric, sticking to carefully constructed scripts and teleprompters,” the Enquirer notes. “But going two weeks without saying something misogynistic, racist or xenophobic is hardly a qualification for the most important job in the world. Why should anyone believe that a Trump presidency would look markedly different from his offensive, erratic, stance-shifting presidential campaign?”

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This Newspaper Just Endorsed Its First Democrat for President in Almost a Century, Because Trump

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Donald Trump Announces Something, Press Goes Wild

by ChanaWhelan445 Posted on September 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton announced a plan to rein in excessive price increases by pharmaceutical companies. It was a hot topic at the time thanks to outrage over the 6x price increase of the EpiPen. However, if my sleuthing is accurate, Clinton’s plan wasn’t covered at all in the print editions of the New York Times and Washington Post, and got only a short blurb in the Wall Street Journal.

Today Donald Trump announced a modest child-care and maternity leave plan that was almost comically underfunded. The New York Times produced a long front-page story. The Washington Post ran a long story in the A section and added a second analysis piece online. The Wall Street Journal provided Ivanka Trump with prime op-ed real estate to tout her father’s plan. That’s some great coverage! And all of these pieces barely mentioned that Trump offered no remotely plausible way to pay for his proposal.

I suppose you can argue that Trump’s child-care plan is more important than Clinton’s drug pricing plan. Or that an actual policy proposal from Trump is so rare that it’s big news no matter what. Or that Republicans don’t normally propose spending money on people in need.

Sure, I guess. I mean, I realize that the marvel of the dancing bear is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all. Even so, it sure seems like the press really doesn’t care about Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals—oh God, another boring white paper from Hillz—but swoons every time Donald Trump blurps out one of his laughably ill-thought-out ideas—he’s using Ivanka to appeal to suburban women, we gotta get on this! But that’s editorial judgment for you. I’m sure the pros know what they’re doing.

POSTSCRIPT: Can I gripe about something else as long as we’re on the subject? Thanks. Here’s the New York Times:

But in selling his case, Mr. Trump stretched the truth, saying that his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has no such plan of her own and “never will.”

The Washington Post doesn’t even mention this, and needless to say, neither does Ivanka Trump’s bit of puffery in the Journal. So props to the Times. But seriously: stretched the truth? As Trump knows perfectly well, Hillary Clinton has been pressing for better child-care and family leave policies for decades, and her current proposal has been on her website for months. It’s far more extensive, more generous, and better thought out than Trump’s.

This is why Trump feels like he can simply say anything he wants, no matter how ridiculous. The obvious way to describe Trump’s statement is to call it a lie. That’s what it is. Instead, it either goes unmentioned or, at best, gets tiptoed around inaccurately. In what way, after all, did Trump “stretch the truth”? That implies there’s some kernel of truth to what Trump said, but he exaggerated it. But that’s not what he did. He just lied.

Link – 

Donald Trump Announces Something, Press Goes Wild

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Here Is the Latest Campaign Faux Controversy

by MarguerSeay Posted on September 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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I can’t tell if this faux controversy is actually getting much attention, but I know my readers all want to stay up to date:

Donald Trump’s campaign sought an apology Saturday from his Democratic rival after Hillary Clinton took aim at the Republican’s supporters, suggesting that half of them are what she called “deplorables.”

….“To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?,” Mrs. Clinton told donors in New York City. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” The former secretary of state added that “some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” The Trump campaign quickly punched back, saying that Mrs. Clinton had revealed “her true contempt for everyday Americans.”

I’m sure this will be followed up on social media with lots of folks “fact checking” Clinton and showing that she’s right. Let’s take a look. Yep, here’s one:

Typical Hillary shill. The Reuters poll he links to clearly shows that less than half of Trump’s supporters are deplorable. At most it’s 49 percent, and the average is only 43 percent. As usual, Hillary Clinton is spinning and exaggerating for her own benefit. No wonder Americans don’t trust her. A tisket, a tasket, Hillary’s in a basket.

OK, fine, that was lame. But hopefully everyone just skips this whole affair. It’s one of those things that belongs in the category of stuff literally everyone knows but can’t say out loud. Trump’s outreach to the racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamaphobic community is pretty obvious and hardly needs any further evidence. Every campaign reporter in the country knows this. The question is, can they say it? Or will they just “report the controversy” and declare that it “casts a new shadow” over a “struggling campaign”? I guess we’ll see.

UPDATE: Well, it’s now on the front page of the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. So I guess it’s getting some traction. Is this just because it’s a slow weekend news day? Or will it last? Come back Monday for your answer!

Original source:

Here Is the Latest Campaign Faux Controversy

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Will Hillary Clinton’s Education Policy Break From Obama’s in a Huge Way?

by LatonyaRaymond Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Before Hillary Clinton gave her speech at the Democratic National Convention in July, organizers fired up the crowd with a video extolling President Barack Obama’s key policies: health care reform that extended coverage to an estimated 20 million more people; the $62 billion bailout of General Motors and Chrysler that saved about 1.5 million jobs; the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But one major issue was conspicuously missing from the highlight reel of Obama’s achievements: education.

This glaring omission is just one of many signs that Clinton is distancing herself from Obama’s education policies. On her campaign website, Clinton’s K-12 page avoids any discussion of testing, accountability, or expansion of charters—the main focuses of Obama’s administration. Perhaps most telling, Clinton’s choices of advisers signal her attempt to move Obama’s test-driven K-12 agenda toward the center.

Clinton’s K-12 working policy group, according to a Democrat close to the campaign, comprises a mix of teachers’ union leaders, proponents of test-driven reforms, and advocates for increased investments in underfunded schools.

The previously unreleased list includes:

Chris Edley Jr. the president of the Opportunity Institute, a California-based think tank that works mostly on early-childhood and college access initiatives
Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s biggest teachers’ union
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-biggest teachers’ union
Carmel Martin, the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and onetime adviser to former Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Catherine Brown, the former vice president of policy at Teach for America and current vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress
Richard Riley, the secretary of education under Bill Clinton who’s known for his views that don’t neatly fit into the pro-reform or pro-teachers’ union wings of the Democratic Party. Riley supported testing and accountability but also pushed with equal fervor for smaller classes and more funding for schools.

The inclusion of teachers’ union leaders—who were not advising Obama’s campaigns and are among some of the most powerful opponents of his education policies—marks an especially sharp break from his administration. By contrast, many of Obama’s advisers—and later staffers at the Department of Education—viewed teachers’ unions as obstacles to school improvement and had close ties to the Gates Foundation, which championed many federal policies that encouraged both numbers-driven teacher evaluations and charter schools.

But while Clinton’s K-12 advisers may suggest a more teacher-friendly approach to policy, they don’t exactly indicate that, if elected, she would push for the end of test scores in policy decisions. The Center for American Progress, a progressive DC-based think tank closely aligned with Clinton, has been generally supportive of Obama’s test-based education policies; meanwhile, as education secretary, Riley helped lay the foundation for the modern standards and accountability movement.

Still, Clinton’s teacher-friendly speeches and lack of emphasis on test-based accountability are making many of the reform groups that had influence in the Obama administration nervous. “There’s a lot of anxiety about the transition from this president to the next administration,” said Shavar Jeffries, the president of a think tank affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform, a powerful pro-testing group, during a recent education forum.

“Obama had positioned himself as a reformer who was unapologetically for charter schooling, teacher evaluations, the notion of common standards,” said Rick Hess, a veteran education policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “With Clinton, you see an agenda that leans much more toward teacher unions than the Democrats for Education Reform.”

We’re Losing Tens of Thousands of Black Teachers. Here’s Why That’s Bad for Everyone.

Most of Clinton’s shift has to do with two of Obama’s relatively small but widely unpopular federal programs: Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants. These initiatives offered about $9 billion in grants that were tied to prescriptive policies like evaluating teachers based in part on student test scores and to dramatic school “turnarounds,” which included closings and mass firings of teachers. Even though these grants contributed just a tiny fraction to state education budgets (for example, Race to the Top accounted for 0.63 percent in New York in 2011), they had an outsize impact on schools: The numbers of standardized tests and curricula that mimicked multiple-choice questions exploded, especially in schools serving low-income black and Latino students. And as districts fired staff or closed schools with low scores, thousands of educators, especially black teachers, lost their jobs or left teaching all together.

In the last three years, opposition to these policies has gained a lot of steam. Last year, for example, 1 in 5 students in New York opted out of standardized tests, forcing policymakers to remove test scores from teacher evaluations. In August, Black Lives Matter organizers called for a moratorium on both public school closures based on test scores and the expansion of charters to replace them. Many of these opponents argue that test-based reforms haven’t been working: While racial achievement gaps have narrowed slightly since 2001, they remain stubbornly large and shrank far more dramatically before No Child Left Behind (NCLB), when policies focused on equalizing funding and school integration, rather than on test scores.

Perhaps because of how divisive school reform has become among Democrats, Clinton’s education campaign so far has poured most of its energy into its early-childhood initiative—an education issue that has more allies in Congress than any other and has been one of Clinton’s signature issues for decades. There is also a growing pile of evidence that investments in early childhood for poor kids may have bigger returns than a focus on raising test scores. Obama already pushed for expansion of pre-K education, and Clinton wants to make preschool universal for four-year-olds and double the number of children enrolled in Early Head Start, which includes home visits by a social worker or nurse during pregnancy and parent coaching in the child’s first three years. Paul Tough, the author of Helping Children Succeed, found that the United States spends only 6 percent of all public early-childhood dollars on interventions targeting the child’s first two years, even though that’s when kids’ brains are most malleable for positive development. (The rest goes to kids ages three to six.)

When it comes to reform ideas after preschool, Clinton’s campaign page contains relatively few policy details. It does call for investing in K-12 teachers and schools through a “national campaign to elevate and modernize the teaching profession,” rebuilding crumbling public school buildings, and increasing funding for teaching computer science. The boldest and most detailed section discusses the need to disrupt the “school-to-prison pipeline”; Clinton promises to send $2 billion to states to reduce suspensions and expulsions that disproportionately affect black students and “implement social and emotional support interventions.”

Clinton has made clear in speeches that she supports testing, but she has said she wants to have “better and fewer tests”—a position that mirrors comments from both Obama and Duncan over the past two years. Meanwhile, on accountability—which measures to use to evaluate schools and teachers, and what to do when they are not meeting the mark—Clinton’s campaign pages and speeches haven’t offered much detail. But that’s in large part because the new Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind last year, moves these decisions largely to states, and the specifics of its implementation are still being hashed out in Congress.

Many nations with higher-performing students, like Finland, Singapore, and Australia, already use fewer and broader tests for accountability. In these countries, standardized tests are used in combination with real student work, graded by trained teachers, to measure the performance of schools, as NPR’s lead education blogger, Anya Kamenetz, documents in her book The Test. Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond—who was considered for the secretary of education job after Obama was first elected, and could again be a top contender if Clinton is elected—has been calling for a similar accountability system in the United States. A 2014 testing-reform plan co-authored by Darling-Hammond recommends fewer multiple-choice tests and increased capacity at the local and state level to develop yearly “performance assessments”—student work that reflects what professionals actually do in the real world, like essays, group work, individual presentations, and science projects.

But that’s just one piece of the larger puzzle, according to José Luis Vilson, a veteran math teacher in New York City and the author of This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education. Vilson hopes to see increased investments in professional development and coaching of teachers, far beyond the three to five hours a week that’s typical in American public schools. Teachers in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea spend 15 to 25 hours each week working to improve their craft.

Today, the push to create fewer and better tests and improve teacher training faces the biggest obstacles in the schools that need them the most: those with large numbers of low-income students. In the past 10 years, the per-student funding gap between rich and poor schools has grown by 44 percent. The Title I program, a federal initiative created to equalize these disparities, is broken: A 2016 investigation by USA Today found that 20 percent of Title I money ends up funding affluent school districts. Meanwhile, a majority of US public school students come from low-income families, and about 10 percent of them live in deep poverty—in families that earn less than $11,000 a year.

Clinton has expressed support for more federal funding for poor students and those with special needs in her speeches. In a radio interview this year, Clinton said, “The federal government has an opportunity—and I would argue an obligation—to help equalize spending” on schools.

Jonathan Stith, who as national coordinator of the Alliance for Educational Justice worked closely on the development of the Black Lives Matter policy agenda, said he is encouraged to hear a call for higher investments in struggling schools. But he’s disappointed that Clinton’s K-12 agenda lacks detail and doesn’t include any discussion of systemic racism in education. “The agenda’s vague language can be seized by states to continue to do these same school ‘turnaround’ and push-out policies that have contributed in part to the rise of the Movement for Black Lives,” Stith said.

Ultimately, Stith and others agreed that Clinton’s biggest choices are still in front of her. Whether issues of race, better tests, and access to high-quality education will be addressed with meaningful policy will depend a great deal on the types of advisers and staffers she’d select as president, said Samuel Abrams, professor of education at the Columbia Teachers College and author of Education and the Commercial Mindset. Abrams, who taught in public schools for 18 years, argued that most advisers, staffers, and policymakers in the Education Department must have a proven record of success with the hardest-to-reach kids. “I failed so many times as a teacher,” he said. “Until you understand the complexities of why and how that failure happens, you won’t make good policy in education.”

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Will Hillary Clinton’s Education Policy Break From Obama’s in a Huge Way?

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