Tag Archives: democratic

Cory Booker Takes a Veiled Jab at Bernie Sanders on Prisons

by LeslieWaterfield Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, the only black Democrat in the Senate, took a subtle jab at Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Thursday for ignoring issues affecting African Americans in his own state of Vermont.

Campaigning for Hillary Clinton at a black church in Florence, South Carolina, on Thursday, Booker fired up the crowd with invocations of past violence against African Americas—from “gas and billy clubs” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to the martyred teenager Emmett Till—while framing Clinton as the only candidate in the race voters could trust to fix the criminal justice system. “If you don’t mind all this talk in this campaign about race, I want to get real with y’all for a minute,” Booker said. His support for Clinton, he explained to the church audience, was because “she was here when it wasn’t election time. I’m here because she was supporting criminal justice reform before it was popular to talk about it on the campaign trail.”

In case the contrast he was trying to draw wasn’t clear, Booker got more specific. “This is not just a South Carolina issue,” he said. “I don’t care what state you come from. Heck, Vermont! People told me, ‘Cory, they don’t have black people in Vermont.’ I’m sorry to tell you this, there are 50 states; we got black people in every state! That’s true!”

He continued, “And the problems of racial disparity did not begin in this campaign. They go deep in every state. Vermont has 1 percent African Americans. But their prison population is 11 percent black! You want to speak about injustice—I see campaigns and candidates running all over this country. Don’t you come to my communities, talk about how much you care, talk your passion for criminal justice, and then I don’t hear from you after an election. And I didn’t hear from you before the election!”

Clinton has focused on winning black voters in counties where she lost big to Barack Obama (including Florence County, where Obama beat her by 42 points), emphasizing Sanders’ votes against gun control measures and her friendship with a group of African American women who lost their children to gun violence or in police custody. But her aggressive push on criminal justice is in part defensive; she’s been criticized on the left for supporting, among other things, welfare reform and the 1994 crime bill. At a fundraiser in Charleston on Wednesday night, she was confronted by a young black woman about comments she’d made as First Lady in support of the crime bill, alleging that “super-predators” were threatening urban communities. Clinton said on Thursday, “I shouldn’t have used those words.”

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Cory Booker Takes a Veiled Jab at Bernie Sanders on Prisons

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At CNN Town Hall, Clinton Again Refuses to Release Goldman Sachs Transcripts

by AnneSASMfvyq Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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During Tuesday’s Democratic presidential candidate town hall at the University of South Carolina School of Law, CNN’s Chris Cuomo pressed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s on her continued refusal to release transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs.

“Will you agree to release these transcripts? They have become an issue,” Cuomo asked.

“Sure, if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans, because we know they have made a lot of speeches,” Clinton said, before pivoting to a defense of her record on Wall Street regulation.

Cuomo pressed again: “All the more reason to remove this issue. You know not everybody is not going to bring up their transcripts.”

“Why is there one standard for me and not for everybody else, Chris?” Clinton responded, to sustained applause.

A few minutes after the exchange, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign took a shot at Clinton based on her answer:

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At CNN Town Hall, Clinton Again Refuses to Release Goldman Sachs Transcripts

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Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

by KarolynHDG Posted on February 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have officially announced that they aren’t willing to even hold hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee—no matter who it is.1 There’s all the usual argle bargle about needing to “protect the will of the American people” blah blah blah, but none of that matters. They’re doing this because they want to do it and they have the power to do it. I doubt that Democrats would act much differently under similar circumstances.

That said, you can add me to the huge crowd of observers who are puzzled by the political tactics here. The obvious question is: Why refuse to even hold hearings? That just makes Republicans look sullen and obstructionist. Why not hold hearings normally, drag them out a little bit, and then vote down whoever Obama nominates? The result is the same, but Republicans look more like senators and less like small children throwing a temper tantrum.

I suppose the answer is that this is a good way of firing up their base, and they think that’s more important than appealing to the center. Fair enough. But that raises another question: What’s the best way to fire up the Republican base? I’m not trying to troll anyone here, but it seems like the answer is to hold hearings. That would keep the whole Supreme Court issue front and center for months on end. The base would be faced almost daily with the prospect of what a liberal justice would do; talk radio would go nuts; and there would be endless chances to find specific problems with the nominee—many of which would coincidentally require the production of reams of files and records to trawl through.

Democrats, conversely, would have less to get fired up about. Sure, they’d be unhappy, but they wouldn’t be able to carp endlessly about Republican obstruction. Their guy is getting a hearing, after all.

So it seems like holding hearings normally would be a better way to fire up the GOP base and a better way to keep the Democratic base a little quieter. It probably wouldn’t make a huge difference either way, but it’s still a win-win. What am I missing here?

1After which they undoubtedly went out for a beer and shared their bewilderment about the fact that so many Republicans have been trained to vote for a guy like Donald Trump. What could possibly have driven them in such a direction?

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Republicans Decide to Boycott the Supreme Court Vacancy. Does This Remind You of Anyone?

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How Hillary Clinton Won Nevada

by DemiLockett Posted on February 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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It might have been closer than most people would have guessed a month ago, but Hillary Clinton’s long-term investment in Nevada paid off. The former secretary of state edged out Sen. Bernie Sanders by about five percentage points in the Nevada caucuses. It wasn’t quite the 20-point edge that Clinton had in polls from late last year, but it was a decisive win that backs up the Clinton campaign’s contention that Sanders won’t be able to maintain the same level of support he enjoyed in Iowa and New Hampshire as the contest moves to more diverse states.

Nevada was always a big priority for Clinton, a first test to see if she could bring together the multicultural coalition that has formed the Democratic base across the country. Her campaign manager, Robby Mook, got his start on the Clinton team running her 2008 campaign in the state. The campaign had a bevy of staffers in the state, including Mook disciple Emmy Ruiz, as soon as the national campaign launched in March. They replicated the sort of grassroots community organizing that Mook learned on Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.

Sanders, meanwhile, didn’t get going until half a year later. His state campaign manager, Joan Kato, didn’t arrive until November. While the Clinton campaign spent the final weeks of the race running a get-out-the-vote effort to make sure Clinton backers actually showed up to caucus, the Sanders campaign was still trying to identify its supporters at a phone banking event Wednesday focused on reaching Latino voters.

“I think one of the reasons that we got here a little bit later, that the average person in Nevada understands, is that we were raising our money through small donor donations,” Kato told me later that day. “With a $27 average donation, it might take you a little bit more time to get off the ground.” But the Sanders campaign quickly ramped up, spending more on TV ads in the state and eventually opening more field offices (12) than the Clinton campaign (7).

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How Hillary Clinton Won Nevada

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The Price Is Right for Bernie Sanders in Nevada

by DianDossett269 Posted on February 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Price Is Right is one of the most overtly capitalist shows on TV, a prolonged infomercial that rewards contestants for their knowledge of the prices of various name-brand consumer goods. But Marco Antonio Regil, the former longtime host of the show’s Mexican counterpart Atínale Al Precio, is doing all he can to support Bernie Sanders, a socialist who rails against capitalist greed at every opportunity.

On Wednesday, Regil stopped by a small Sanders phone-banking operation to reach Spanish-speaking voters in Las Vegas. The phone bank was as much a photo-op for the media as it was a full-scale get-out-the-vote drive. Volunteers barely outnumbered reporters—hailing from the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and others—who piled into the house of Jackie Ramos, an enthusiastic Sanders supporter. While volunteers worked through their call sheets, state communications director Emilia Pablo teased them before Regil’s arrival. “I know the ladies are waiting for him,” she said of the handsome TV star, who has also hosted Spanish-language versions of Family Feud and Dancing With the Stars and the Miss Mexico pageant .

When Regil arrived, he huddled for photos with the fangirl volunteers, and then offered a brief speech detailing why Sanders was his candidate of choice. He described his childhood in Tijuana, when he revered the middle class in the United States that he saw lacking in Latin America. “The class divides in Latin America were one of the saddest thing I grew up experiencing,” he said. But that’s slipping away, he said, hence the need for Sanders. “I know what happens when income inequality and the classes start dividing, and the gap becomes so big: Poor people start struggling, they cannot survive, and they start getting violent. They start mugging other people.”

But he was quick to caution that the socialism that Sanders offers isn’t the same as the Latin America version put forward by politicians like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro. “He calls it Democratic socialism,” he said. “I don’t like using that word, I prefer using conscious capitalism.”

“And I want Elizabeth Warren to be vice president,” he shouted to the reporters who followed him out.

On Saturday, Nevadans will pick their candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the state’s caucuses. In the surprisingly tight race, the Latino vote will be critical. Latinos make up 27.8 percent of the state’s population, despite the Hillary Clinton campaign’s attempts to downplay expectations for the state by describing it as dominated by white voters, who have tended to support Sanders.

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The Price Is Right for Bernie Sanders in Nevada

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GOP Abortion Investigation May Endanger Researchers, Democrats Warn

by KaceySdpmoki Posted on February 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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The House Energy and Commerce Committee panel that formed last October to investigate Planned Parenthood’s policies regarding how fetal tissue is handled has issued requests for documents to more than 30 agencies across the nation. The “Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives” was formed by Speaker John Boehner as a final act before he stepped down over a possible government shutdown due to the battle over funding for Planned Parenthood.

Committee Chair Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced last week that the committee had issued subpoenas to three of those groups because they “failed to fully cooperate with document requests.” The subpoenas went to Stem­Express, a California firm that provides human tissue for medical researchers, the University of New Mexico, whose Health Sciences Center conducts medical research using fetal tissue, and Southwestern Women’s Options, which has abortion clinics in Albuquerque and Dallas that perform late-term abortions.

A letter from the panel’s Democratic members expressed outrage at the demands, and called Rep. Blackburn’s subpoenas “unilateral and unjustifiable.” They urged the panel to “abandon your plan to issue subpoenas or immediately schedule a special meeting of the Select Panel in order to vote on your proposed use of compulsory process to force healthcare providers and others to disclose the names of doctors, medical students, and clinic personnel.” The Democratic members described the actions as “an abusive and unjustifiable use of the chair’s unilateral subpoena authority.”

Recalling the attack on a Planned Parenthood affiliate in Colorado—in which a gunman murdered three and injured, later saying in court that he is a “warrior for the babies”—Democrats expressed concern that the subpoenas could put the subjects of the investigation at risk.

This is not the first time that StemExpress has found itself in the middle of controversy. As Mother Jones previously reported, the Placerville, Calif. tissue provider cut ties with Planned Parenthood after the Center for Medical Progress’ discredited sting videos, which purported to show evidence of the illegal sale of fetal tissue, prompted a congressional inquiry into Planned Parenthood and made StemExpress’ CEO, Cate Dyer, a target of anti-abortion trolls on Fox Nation. Dyer’s home address was posted alongside threats against her life.

The subpoena demands documentation of all entities from which fetal tissue was procured and documentation of recipients of tissue samples. It also requests the “name and title of all StemExpress current or former personnel whose responsibilities included procuring, researching, storing, packaging for donation, sale, transport, or disposal of fetal tissue, and the identity of any supervisory personnel under whom such individuals worked.” A statement from StemExpress said the company has been cooperative in all the government investigations thus far. “Throughout this process, StemExpress has continued to protect its clients’ confidentiality, and to abide by its legal obligations,” the statement reads. “The Select Investigative Panel now seeks confidential client information and the identity of individual scientists and researchers through the issuance of a subpoena.”

Southwestern Women’s Options is a clinic that provides abortions through the third trimester at its New Mexico location. It serves women from the Southwest, and as abortions become more difficult to access in the state of Texas, the clinic serves an even greater population. The subpoena sent to Southwestern Women’s Options also calls for documentation of “all entities to which any fetal tissue was transported, sold, donated, or moved from Southwestern.” The committee also wanted to know the names of those involved in the procurement or disposal of fetal tissue and their supervisors, as well as documentation of any partnership that Southwestern Women’s Options had with the University of Mexico.

The University of New Mexico’s Health Science Center has used tissue from abortions conducted at Southwestern Women’s Options over the past decade for research aimed to improve outcomes for premature babies. In December, the Health Science Center halted their medical training program at the Albuquerque clinic, which teaches UMN School of Medicine fellows and residents specializing in reproductive health and family planning how to perform abortions, among other obstetric and gynecological procedures.

Also this week, a lawyer for New Mexico Alliance for Life filed a suit against the university that alleges the UNM Health Sciences Center violated the state Inspection of Public Records Act by failing to release documents from a 2015 study “that used extracted eyeballs from babies aborted up to 24 weeks gestation,” according to a statement from the anti-abortion group. The committee subpoena to the University of New Mexico is along similar lines, requesting identities of employees who have worked with tissue, a list of tissue suppliers, and documentation of any UNM physician who assisted Southwestern Women’s Options as an abortion provider.

Meanwhile, the committee is waiting for the results of the subpoenas.

“While it was our hope that these organizations would voluntarily work with us in this effort, some have refused to cooperate by withholding information that is critical to providing us with answers to questions the American people are asking,” Blackburn said in a committee statement. “Consequently, if forced to do so, we will issue subpoenas to any organization that refuses to fully cooperate with our investigation.”

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GOP Abortion Investigation May Endanger Researchers, Democrats Warn

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This Chicago Election Hinges on a "Black Lives" Case—and It’s Not The Only One

by JonnaSimson Posted on February 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Could a bungled police shooting case be the undoing of Chicago’s top prosecutor? Her former subordinate is betting on it.

Wikipedia

Black Votes Matter: Five places where police shooting scandals have altered the political landscape.

Kim Foxx, who once worked as an assistant state’s attorney under Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, has emerged as her ex-boss’ top Democratic challenger in the March 15 primary. If Foxx prevails, it would be the first time since the Black Lives Matter movement began that voters rejected a prosecutor under fire for her handling of a case against the police—although the outcry over officer-involved shootings has changed the political landscape in a number of US communities. (See box at right.)

Alvarez, who is seeking her third term as chief prosecutor, waited more than 400 days to file charges in the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer. The incident—which the New York Times editorial board, among others, deemed an execution—only made national news this past November, when the city released video footage of Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting McDonald from behind, and then unloading his service weapon into the prostrate youngster. Alvarez’s office reportedly had footage in hand within weeks of the shooting, but held off charging Van Dyke, her critics point out, until after Mayor Rahm Emanuel was safely reelected. Alvarez has responded by saying she was waiting for the Department of Justice to conclude its own investigation of the shooting—and that she “won’t apologize” for conducting a thorough investigation.

As Alvarez struggles to get past the scandal, Foxx has been racking up key support. The Cook County Democratic Party endorsed her last month, after reconsidering its decision to stay neutral in the race. Several dozen county officials, city aldermen, and state and US representatives have publicly backed her as well—so, incidentally, has Alvarez’s former campaign co-chair.

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This Chicago Election Hinges on a "Black Lives" Case—and It’s Not The Only One

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Sorry, Hillary Clinton, Nevada Is Actually a Diverse State

by TheoHowes665163 Posted on February 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stinging from its lopsided defeat in New Hampshire and bracing for a tougher-than-expected primary fight against Bernie Sanders, the Hillary Clinton campaign has sought to lower expectations for the next contest, this Saturday’s Nevada caucuses. To do so, the campaign has been subtly pushing a curious line: Don’t read too much into the results of the Nevada caucuses because the state is disproportionately white, just like New Hampshire and Iowa.

As I explained last week, Nevada should be a firewall state for Clinton, and that’s how the Clinton campaign long painted it. But last Tuesday, campaign spokesman Brian Fallon tried to dash those impressions during an appearance on MSNBC. As recounted by BuzzFeed‘s Ruby Cramer, Fallon tried to suggest that Sanders had an edge in the caucuses thanks to the makeup of the state.

“There’s an important Hispanic element to the Democratic caucus in Nevada,” Fallon said. “But it’s still a state that is 80 percent white voters. You have a caucus-style format, and he’ll have the momentum coming out of New Hampshire presumably, so there’s a lot of reasons he should do well.”

Campaign manager Robby Mook, who ran Clinton’s 2008 campaign in the state, made a similar argument the next day when talking with congressional Democrats:

Is Nevada as lacking in diversity as Iowa and New Hampshire? Not even close. It’s actually one of the more diverse states in the country. The population is 9 percent African American, just a few points below the national average of 13 percent. It’s also 9 percent Asian American or Pacific Islander, above the national 5.6 percent average. And Nevada boasts a far larger Latino population than the country writ large: 27.8 percent, versus 17.4 percent nationally.

Where does the Clinton campaign come up with the idea that Nevada is so overwhelming white? It all comes down to the difficult terminology of race and ethnicity. Technically, the state is 76 percent white, but that’s because most people who identify as Latino or Hispanic are included in that category. Separate them out, and the state is just 51.5 percent non-Hispanic white.

Compare that to Iowa and New Hampshire, which are, respectively, 87 percent and 91 percent non-Hispanic white.

It’s possible that Nevada’s minority populations won’t show up to caucus in large numbers. But that doesn’t seem too likely, at least based on the 2008 caucuses, when 35 percent of caucus voters were racial or ethnic minorities, according to exit polls. The state’s minority population has only grown since 2008, so there’s little reason to expect the caucus-going population to look that much whiter than in 2008.

With Sanders having captured the momentum after his big New Hampshire win, Clinton really may have a more difficult time in Nevada than she anticipated. But she can’t blame it on demographics.

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Sorry, Hillary Clinton, Nevada Is Actually a Diverse State

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A Majority of States Now Have Right-to-Work Laws

by TyroneL29aehb Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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West Virginia, once a bastion of organized labor, will soon join the ranks of the right-to-work states that have undercut union participation. The Republican-dominated state legislature on Friday overrode Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s veto of a right-to-work bill, becoming the 26th state in the nation to pass such legislation.

Right-to-work laws bar unions from negotiating contracts that require all workers represented by a union to pay dues—in effect guaranteeing workers the union’s protections and representation regardless of whether they contribute. The laws are broadly understood to weaken unions.

The bill faced fierce opposition from unions, who organized protests at the state capitol and launched TV and radio ad campaigns to fight the legislation. But it also had money behind it, courtesy of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the Koch brothers that has lobbied for right-to-work laws across the nation. One of the West Virginia bill’s key proponents, Republican gubernatorial candidate and state Senate president Bill Cole, touted his efforts to pass the right-to-work bill at a Palm Springs retreat organized by the Kochs earlier this year.

According to the US Census Bureau, West Virginia had a higher poverty rate than all but 10 states between 2011 and 2013. Many communities have been hit hard by the loss of thousands of mining jobs in recent years. Republican lawmakers claimed that loosening labor laws was necessary to attract businesses to the state. Democrats have argued that it will ultimately hurt workers, and that the bill was aimed primarily at diminishing unions’ political clout.

The right-to-work law will go into effect on July 1.

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A Majority of States Now Have Right-to-Work Laws

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Bernie Sanders Wins Democratic New Hampshire Primary

by VernMeza4862675 Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was declared the winner of the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary as soon as polls closed at 8 p.m. EST on Tuesday night. Results are still trickling in at the moment—some polling locations are still open to accommodate people in line at the cutoff time—but it looks like Sanders will likely defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by double digits.

The two have now split the first two states, with Clinton coming out narrowly ahead in Iowa a week ago.

The Clinton campaign was quick to concede, immediately circulating a memo to reporters from campaign manager Robby Mook touting Clinton’s strength in the states voting in March.

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Bernie Sanders Wins Democratic New Hampshire Primary

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