Tag Archives: democratic

Even Without Voter ID Laws, Minority Voters Face More Hurdles to Casting Ballots

by HuldaC56ykc Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Over the past decade, Republican legislators have pushed a number of measures critics say are blatant attempts to suppress minority voting, including voter ID requirements, shortened early voting periods, and limits on same-day voter registration. But minority voters are often disenfranchised in another, more subtle way: Polling places without enough voting machines or poll workers.

Charts: How minority voters were blocked at the ballot box in 2012.

These polling places tend to have long lines to vote. Long lines force people to eventually give up and go home, depressing voter turnout. And that happens regularly all across the country in precincts with lots of minority voters, even without voter ID or other voting restrictions in place.

Nationally, African Americans waited about twice as long to vote in the 2012 election as white people, (23 minutes on average versus 12 minutes); Hispanics waited 19 minutes. White people who live in neighborhoods whose residents are less than 5 percent minority, had the shortest of all wait times, just 7 minutes. These averages obscure some of the unusually long lines in some areas. In South Carolina’s Richland County, which is 48 percent black and is home to 14 percent of the state’s African American registered voters, some people waited more than five hours to cast their ballots.

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Even Without Voter ID Laws, Minority Voters Face More Hurdles to Casting Ballots

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Court Rules Maine Can’t Quarantine Ebola Nurse

by RevaGavinvb Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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After a days-long battle with Maine governor Paul LePage, Kaci Hickox, a nurse who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, has officially won the right to go outside.

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Earlier this week, LePage announced he would seek legal authority to forcibly quarantine Hickox—who has not exhibited symptoms of Ebola—in her home. LePage, a Republican, dispatched state police to “monitor” her house. However, in a series of orders issued Thursday and Friday, a state judge ruled that Hickox could leave her home and could not be barred from any public places.

Hickox, who had been working with Doctors Without Borders in Sierra Leone, was quarantined in a New Jersey hospital last weekend after a forehead scanner at the Newark airport indicated she had a temperature of 101 degrees. Fever is an early symptom of Ebola. But by the time she arrived at the hospital, doctors took another temperature reading and told Hickox she no longer had a fever, according to her own account. Since then, Hickox has been tested twice for Ebola. Both times, she tested negative for the virus. Since Ebola can only be transmitted by patients who are currently experiencing symptoms (and, of course, only if they actually have the virus), experts say Hickox presents little risk to others.

On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) released Hickox, allowing her to return to her Fort Kent, Maine, home. But in Maine, Hickox became the center of a political battle, as LePage—who is in a tight reelection fight—attempted to quarantine Hickox for the remainder of the 21-day Ebola incubation period. Maine’s director of Health and Human Services said that the state government would seek a court order to keep Hickox from leaving her home.

LePage’s proposed quarantine ran contrary to even the more stringent guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday. According to those guidelines, health care workers who had treated Ebola-infected patients for prolonged periods while wearing protective gear but who do not exhibit symptoms should have their temperature monitored frequently—but they do not need to be forcibly quarantined. While local health authorities may consider barring returned health care workers from crowded public places, such as shopping malls and movie theaters, the guidelines say that movement in open areas outside their homes “may be permitted.”

Hickox had stated explicitly that she did not intend to observe the quarantine. On Thursday, she was seen biking around her neighborhood.

Members of Maine’s medical community strongly criticized the attempted quarantine. The Maine Medical Association issued a letter arguing that indiscriminate quarantines of returned health care workers “may be well intended” but that the policy “is not supported by the science or experience.”

“Unnecessarily quarantining these returning health care workers can have a devastating impact on the efforts to stop Ebola at its source and ultimately here,” the letter said.

The American Civil Liberties Union also opposed the quarantine. “There are legal standards that must be met before the state can hold Kaci Hickox or anyone else in custody,” Alison Beyea, executive director of the ACLU’s Maine office, said in a statement Wednesday. “In this case, we don’t believe the standard has been met. This is a rapidly changing situation. That makes it all the more important that the government remain transparent and even-handed, and make decisions based on medically sound science, not on fear.”

LePage’s Democratic challenger, Rep. Mike Michaud, initially appeared to endorse the governor’s actions. Queried about the issue on Wednesday, Michaud told reporters that “it’s the state’s responsibility to make sure people are protected here in the state of Maine for the public safety, and I support the 21-day quarantine.” He added that he believed that the government should rely on the guidance of health professionals to determine the duration of the quarantine.

Today, however, Michaud’s campaign told Mother Jones that he “supports a voluntary quarantine” and that it should be in line with CDC guidelines.

Medical experts aside, advocates of quarantines seem to have public opinion on their side. A CBS News poll released Wednesday found that 80 percent of Americans believe US citizens returning from West Africa should be “quarantined upon arrival” until authorities can be certain they do not have Ebola.

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Court Rules Maine Can’t Quarantine Ebola Nurse

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Joni Ernst Wants to Make English the Official Language

by GarryLandale Posted on October 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Joni Ernst has latched onto pretty much every idea favored by the tea party. On Thursday afternoon, while campaigning in western Iowa, Ernst endorsed another concept favored by the grassroots right: officially declaring the United States an English language country. “I think it’s great when we can all communicate together,” Ernst said when a would-be voter at a meet and greet in Guthrie Center, Iowa, asked if she’d back a bill making English the official national language. “I think that’s a good idea, is to make sure everybody has a common language and is able to communicate with each other.”

Ernst spent the day campaigning with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the main architects of the comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Democratic-run Senate, but not the GOP-run House, in 2013. Ernst has opposed Graham’s bill to put some undocumented workers on a path to citizenship, and regularly attacks President Barack Obama’s possible use of executive authority to allow immigrants to remain in the country as “amnesty.”

Making English the official language is a longtime cause of Ernst’s fellow Iowa Republican, Rep. Steve King (Guthrie Center is just outside King’s congressional district). As a state senator in 2002, King pushed a law that made Iowa an English-only state. In 2007, King and Ernst, then a county auditor, sued Iowa’s then-secretary of state, Democrat Mike Mauro, for offering voter forms in languages other than English.

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Joni Ernst Wants to Make English the Official Language

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Scott Brown’s Big-Money Sellout

by KimberlHiggs Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Name a major super-PAC or dark-money outfit and there’s a good chance it has helped Republican Scott Brown, the former senator from Massachusetts now trying to oust Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Karl Rove’s American Crossroads? Check. The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity? Check. The US Chamber of Commerce, billionaire Joe Ricketts’ Ending Spending, FreedomWorks for America, ex-Bush ambassador John Bolton’s super-PAC—check, check, check, and check.

Despite being a darling of conservative deep-pocketed groups, Brown once was a foe of big-money machers. As a state legislator in Massachusetts, he sought to curb the influence of donors by stumping for so-called clean elections, in which candidates receive public funds for their campaigns and eschew round-the-clock fundraising. But during his three years in Washington—from his surprise special-election win in January 2010 to his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Warren in November 2012—Brown transformed into an insider who embraced super-PACs, oligarch-donors such as the Koch brothers, and secret campaign spending. On the issue of money in politics, there is perhaps no Senate candidate this year who has flip-flopped as dramatically as Brown. Here’s how it happened.

In November 1998, Brown won a seat in the Massachusetts House. That same year, voters in the state approved a ballot measure to implement a clean elections system; the proposal passed by a 2-1 margin. By law, however, ballot measures can’t allocate taxpayer funds, and the fight to implement the new system moved to the legislature in Boston.

Brown allied himself with supporters of clean elections. As part of the state House’s tiny Republican caucus, Brown clashed with the old-guard Democratic leadership, including House Speaker Tom Finneran, who viewed clean elections as inimical to incumbents. Brown did quibble with reformers over some details of the proposed clean-elections system, but he voted in 2002 against a plan that would have gutted the program.

David Donnelly, who spearheaded the clean elections effort in Massachusetts, remembers Brown as a reliable supporter of clean elections: “Over those years, Scott Brown was not only a consistent vote, but a consistently outspoken supporter of the clean-elections program.” In a June 2001 letter to the editor in the Boston Globe, an activist with Common Cause, the good government group, hailed Brown’s support for clean elections as “not only courageous, but gutsy and heroic.”

When Brown ran for state Senate in 2004, he billed himself as “the person that bucks the system often.” He frequently mentioned his support for clean elections as evidence of his reformer bona fides. “As a state representative,” he said then, “I fought House Speaker Thomas Finneran’s pay raise bill and supported the voters’ will on Clean Elections.” Brown won the special election and served in the state Senate from 2004 to 2010.

In 2010, Brown ran for the US Senate seat that had been held by Ted Kennedy for 46 years. Most people remember his ubiquitous pickup truck, the one he drove everywhere and used to burnish his regular-guy image. What’s less remembered is how Brown again bragged about his support of campaign finance reform on his way to becoming a US senator.

Here’s what Brown told NPR the day after his upset win over Democrat Martha Coakley:

Maybe there’s a new breed of Republican coming to Washington. You know, I’ve always been that way. I always—I mean, you remember, I supported clean elections. I’m a self-imposed term limits person. I believe very, very strongly that we are there to serve the people.

That reformer approach vanished as soon as Brown joined the Senate Republican caucus.

In the summer of 2010, Senate Democrats heavily lobbied Brown to be the decisive 60th vote on the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would beef up disclosure of spending on elections by dark-money nonprofit groups, including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. But Brown instead joined the Republican filibuster that killed the bill. In an op-ed explaining his vote, Brown said the bill was an election year ploy that exempted labor unions, which traditionally back Democrats, from some disclosure requirements. (In fact, the bill applied the same requirements to corporations and unions, and the AFL-CIO opposed it.) But he praised the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law as “an honest attempt to reform campaign finance” and wrote that genuine reform “would include increased transparency, accountability, and would provide a level playing field to everyone.” This gave some reformers hope that Brown might support a whittled-down version of the bill.

But no. Brown later opposed two newer, slimmer versions of the DISCLOSE Act and refused to cosponsor a national clean-elections bill similar to the measure he had backed in Massachusetts. (A spokeswoman for Brown’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Brown has gone on to accept millions from the interests most opposed to campaign finance reform. In 2011, he was caught on camera practically begging David Koch, the billionaire industrialist, for campaign cash. “Your support during the 2010 election, it meant a ton,” Brown told Koch. “It made a difference, and I can certainly use it again.” In his 2012 race against Warren, he benefited from a super-PAC funded largely by energy magnate Bill Koch, the youngest Koch brother and also a billionaire, and casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands company. And though he agreed that year to the “People’s Pledge”—a pact intended to keep outside spending out of the campaign—Brown refused to make the same pledge in his current campaign against Shaheen.

As a state legislator, Brown bragged that he was someone who “bucks the system often.” Today, he is relying on the system—dominated by millionaires and billionaires, overrun with money, and cloaked in secrecy—to get back to the Senate.

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Scott Brown’s Big-Money Sellout

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Texas Just Won the Right to Disenfranchise 600,000 People. It’s Not the First Time.

by JoanSanderz Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Saturday morning, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas’ harsh voter ID law could remain in effect for the upcoming midterm elections, potentially disenfranchising some 600,000 mostly black and Latino voters. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the law may be “purposefully discriminatory” and warned that it “likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.” And Ginsburg noted that Texas’ 2011 law falls in line with the state’s long history of discriminatory voting laws. Here is a look at that history, based on expert testimony by Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history at Clemson University, and Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

1865: Voter intimidation. Beginning with emancipation, African Americans in Texas were regularly denied the right to vote, through intimidation and violence, including lynching.

1895: The first all-white primaries begin. In the mid-1890s, Texas legislators pushed a law requiring political parties to hold primaries and allowing those political parties to set racist qualifications for who could participate.

1902: The poll tax. The Legislature added a poll tax to Texas’ constitution in 1902, requiring voters to pay a fee to register to vote and to show their receipt of payment in order to cast a ballot. The poll tax was equivalent to most of a day’s wage for many black and Mexican workers—roughly $15.48 in today’s dollars.

1905: Texas formalizes its all-white primary system. The Terrell Election Law of 1905 made official the all-white primary system, encouraging both main political parties and county election officials to adopt voting requirements that explicitly banned minorities from voting in primaries. The stated purpose of the law? Preventing voter fraud.

1918: Texas enacts an anti-immigrant voting law. The legislation banned interpreters at the polls and forbade naturalized citizens from receiving assistance from election judges unless they had been citizens for 21 years.

1922: Texas tries a new type of all-white primary. In 1918, black voters in Texas successfully challenged a nonpartisan all-white primary system in Waco. The state Legislature got around this snag by enacting a law banning blacks from all Democratic primaries. Because the Democratic Party was dominant in the South at the time, the candidate it selected through its primary would inevitably win the general election. Anyone voting in the party’s primary had to prove “I am white and I am a Democrat.”

1927: Texas tries a third type of all-white primary. After the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ all-white Democratic primaries, the Legislature got crafty again, passing a new law that allowed political parties—instead of the state government—to determine who could vote in party primaries. The Texas Democratic Party promptly adopted a resolution that only whites could vote.

1932: Texas tries again. In 1932, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ white primaries once more. In response, the Democratic state convention adopted a rule keeping nonwhites out of primaries. The high court initially upheld the new system.

1944: And again. The high court eventually overturned the convention-based white primary system in 1944, but party leaders could still ensure that county officials were elected by whites. A nonparty county political organization called the Jaybird Democratic Association had for decades screened candidates for nomination without allowing nonwhites to participate. The Supreme Court only invalidated the practice in 1953.

1963: Long live the poll tax! In the middle of the civil rights era, Texans rejected a constitutional amendment that would have ended the poll tax. Efforts to repeal the tax were labeled a communist plot by mainstream Texas pols and newspapers. The tax remained in place until 1966. Research shows it dampened minority turnout until 1980.

1966: Texas implements a strict new voter registration system. After the Supreme Court invalidated Texas’ poll tax, the state Legislature enacted a restrictive registration system requiring voters to reregister annually during a four-month time period that ended nearly eight months before the general election. The high court ruled the voter registration regime unconstitutional in 1971.

1970: Texas draws discriminatory districts. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the state’s 1970 redistricting lines were intentionally discriminatory. In each redistricting cycle since then, Texas has been found by federal courts to have violated the US Constitution or the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

1971: The state attempts to keep black students from the ballot box. Once 18-year-olds got the right to vote in 1971, Texas’ Waller County became a majority black county. To stave off the wave of new African American votes, county officials fought for years to keep students at the county’s mostly black Prairie View A&M University from accessing the polls.

1981: Texas draws discriminatory districts again. After the state redistricted a decade later, the attorney general found that two of the new districts were discriminatory and violated the Voting Rights Act. (Since 1976, the Justice Department has issued 201 objections to proposed electoral changes in Texas due to the expected discriminatory effects of the measures.)

2003: And again. In a 2006 ruling, the Supreme Court found that one of Texas’ recently redrawn counties violated the VRA.

2011: And again. A year later, a three-judge federal court ruled in Texas v. United States that the state’s local and congressional redistricting maps showed evidence of deliberate discrimination.

2011: Texas enacts its infamous voter ID law. The state’s voter ID law is the harshest of its kind in the country. Poll workers will accept fewer forms of identification than in any other state with a similar law. Earlier this month, a federal trial court struck down the law, ruling that it overly burdened minority voters. The Supreme Court reversed that court’s ruling this past weekend.

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Texas Just Won the Right to Disenfranchise 600,000 People. It’s Not the First Time.

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This Republican’s Campaign Promise Is: Elect Me and I’ll Kill That Guy

by MadgeWight Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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When he first ran for statewide office in 2010, John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, told voters he supported the death penalty. But last year, as the state prepared to kill Nathan Dunlap, a convicted quadruple-murderer whom doctors had diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Hickenlooper said that new information—about the cost of execution, Dunlap’s mental illness, and members of the jury who had changed their minds about killing Dunlap—had caused him to change his opinion. Hickenlooper stayed the execution but stopped short of granting full clemency—thus leaving his successors with the option of ordering Dunlap’s execution at some future date. “Colorado’s system of capital punishment is imperfect and inherently inequitable,” Hickenlooper said at the time. “Such a level of punishment really does demand perfection.”

Now Bob Beauprez, Hickenlooper’s Republican opponent, is running a campaign centered on a simple promise: Elect me and I’ll kill that guy.

“When I’m governor, Nathan Dunlap will be executed,” Beauprez, a former congressman who represented Colorado’s 7th District from 2003 to 2007, promised during a GOP primary debate in May. “This is not a flippant issue,” Beauprez’s communications director said in an email, “but Bob does believe capital punishment should be an option for our most heinous crimes.”

Hickenlooper, a once-popular mayor of Denver, is now running about even in the polls with Beauprez. And although it’s unclear exactly how much Hickenlooper’s death penalty stance plays into his struggles, a poll last year found that 67 percent of Coloradans disapproved of his decision in the Dunlap case.

“It was handled very clumsily,” says Kyle Saunders, a political scientist at Colorado State University. “It was a very nuanced decision in his head, but it came off being very wishy-washy and weak.”

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This Republican’s Campaign Promise Is: Elect Me and I’ll Kill That Guy

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Rick Scott Takes Late Lead In Southeast Division of Jackass Competition

by FrancisGottscha Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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WTF?

In one of the weirdest, and most Floridian moments in debate history, Wednesday night’s gubernatorial debate was delayed because Republican Governor Rick Scott refused to take the stage with Democratic challenger Charlie Crist and his small electric fan….Rather than waiting for the governor to emerge, the debate started with just Crist onstage. “We have been told that Governor Scott will not be participating in this debate,” said the moderator. The crowd booed as he explained the fan situation, and the camera cut to a shot of the offending cooling device.

“That’s the ultimate pleading the fifth I have ever heard in my life,” quipped Crist, annoying the moderators, who seemed intent on debating fan rules and regulations. After a few more awkward minutes, Scott emerged, and the debate proceeded, with only one more electronics dispute. When asked why he brought the fan, Christ answered, “Why not? Is there anything wrong with being comfortable? I don’t think there is.”

There are plenty of Republicans who I find more extreme, or more moronic, or more panderific than Rick Scott. But for sheer pigheaded dickishness, he’s a hard act to beat. Jeebus.

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Rick Scott Takes Late Lead In Southeast Division of Jackass Competition

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How Kansas Is Selling Sam Brownback’s Failed Trickle-Down Tax Cuts

by gjrrkjujp Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s reelection campaign is in serious trouble. The latest poll has the incumbent Republican losing to his Democratic opponent by 4 percentge points.

Read more about how Sam Brownback’s red-state experiment could turn Kansas purple.

As I explained in our November/December issue, Brownback’s woes can largely be traced back to the drastic tax cuts for the wealthy that he pushed through the state legislature. Kansas’ tax rate for top earners dropped from 6.45 to 4.9 percent, with further future cuts baked in. The cuts were even more generous for business owners, entirely wiping away their tax burden for pass-through income.

Brownback sold his tax cuts on supply-side promises of unbounded future growth, but the results have been less than stellar: While the state’s unemployment rate, like the national jobless rate, has dropped over the past few years, Kansas’ economic growth has lagged behind its neighbors’.

Despite these disappointing results, the state has settled on enticing out-of-state businesses with its low tax rate. Check out this full-page ad from the Kansas Department of Commerce, scanned from an issue of the US Small Business Administration’s magazine Small Business Resource by a reader:

Small Business Resource

That ad’s pitch—”one of the most pro-growth tax policies in the country” leads to “a perfect state”—lines up with the theories of free-market economist Arthur Laffer, the grand poobah of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics. Brownback cited Laffer’s work to justify his cuts. During the thick of the legislative debate, he flew Laffer in for a three-day sales pitch, costing the state $75,000.

When I called Laffer in August, he excitedly proclaimed that Brownback’s cuts would prove a resounding success. “I’ll make you a very large bet that Kansas will improve its relative position to the US over, let’s say, eight years, hands down. I’ll bet you with great odds,” he told me. “I feel very confident that what Sam Brownback has done is and will be extraordinarily beneficial for the state of Kansas.”

As Laffer saw it, low tax rates would entice out-of-state residents and businesses to relocate. Laffer himself had moved to Tennessee sight unseen nine years ago, fleeing from California because of the Volunteer State’s lack of income tax. “In someplace like Kansas, I don’t think the income tax makes any sense whatsoever,” Laffer said. “That’s what we’re trying to move toward in Kansas. The income tax is a killer.”

Except that magical migration hasn’t developed yet. In August, the state added just 900 jobs, with a tepid growth rate of just half a percent for the full year. Maybe I should have made that bet with Laffer.

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How Kansas Is Selling Sam Brownback’s Failed Trickle-Down Tax Cuts

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Why Is There No Code Name for the ISIS Bombing Campaign?

by DamienCorser Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

I learned something new today: code names for military operations only became a public thing after World War II, and it was only around 1980 that the names of major operations got turned into serious PR exercises. Paul Waldman runs down all the recent hits:

Operation Urgent Fury (invasion of Grenada, 1983)
Operation Just Cause (invasion of Panama, 1989)
Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm (Kuwait/Iraq, 1989)

Operation Restore Hope (Somalia, 1993)
Operation Uphold Democracy (Haiti, 1994)
Operation Deliberate Force (NATO bombing of Bosnia, 1995)
Operation Desert Fox (bombing of Iraq, 1998)
Operation Noble Anvil (the American component of NATO bombing in Kosovo, which was itself called Operation Allied Force, 1999)
Operation Infinite Justice (first name for Afghanistan war, 2001)
Operation Enduring Freedom (second name for Afghanistan war, 2001)
Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq, 2003)
Operation Odyssey Dawn (bombing of Libya, 2011)

Aside from the fact that we have twelve of these things in just the past 30 years, Waldman points out that Republican names (in bold) are considerably more martial than Democratic names:

Even though it’s the military that chooses these names, you might notice that the ones during Republican administrations have a particularly testosterone-fueled feel to them, while most of the Democratic ones are a little more tentative. Something like Operation Uphold Democracy just doesn’t have the same oomph as, say, Operation Urgent Fury. If the Obama administration had really wanted to get people excited about fighting ISIS, they should have called it Operation Turgid Thrusting or Operation Boundless Glory.

Oddly, though, it turns out that the ISIS campaign doesn’t even have any name at all. I guess that’s a good sign.

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Why Is There No Code Name for the ISIS Bombing Campaign?

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Happy 90th Birthday, Jimmy Carter

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

President Jimmy Carter celebrates his 90th birthday today, October 1. On the occasion of the 39th President’s birthday, let’s take a look back at his Presidency (and Governorship) with a handful of photos.

Jimmy Carter, touring a display of American-made cars in Detroit is presented with a birthday cake from the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local #900, 1980. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Graduation of Jimmy Carter from U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, Rosalynn Carter and Lillian Carter Pinning on Ensign Bars, 1946. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Then Georgia State Sen. Jimmy Carter hugs his wife, Rosalynn, at his Atlanta campaign headquarters in 1966 after making a strong showing in the Democratic primary election for governor of Georgia. AP

Jimmy Carter gets applause and victory signs at his Atlanta campaign headquarters as his mother Lillian Carter looks on, 1970. Carter faced former Governor Carl Sanders in a runoff for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. John Storey/AP

Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, right, and Delaware Governor Sherman Tribbitt say hello to Atlanta Braves Hank Aaron, left, following a rain canceled game with the Los Angeles Dodgers on September 27, 1973 in Atlanta. The cancellation slowed Aaron’s opportunity to tie or break Babe Ruth’s home run record. AP

Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, left, visits with John Denver aboard Carter’s plane en-route to Los Angeles, 1976. AP

Jimmy Carter and Sen. Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention, New York City. Library of Congress

President-elect Jimmy Carter with Rosalynn and Amy Carter on Inauguration Day. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter dancing at the Inaugural Ball. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter and Tim Kraft, the President’s Appointments Secretary, shortly after Carter’s inauguration. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter and his mother Miss Lillian Carter, 1977. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

President Carter on television during his first fireside chat at the White House. Library of Congress

Amy Carter and Jimmy Carter participate in a speed reading course at the White House, 1977. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

President Jimmy Carter greets Mohammed Ali at a White House dinner celebrating the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty. Library of Congress

Jimmy Carter at bat during a softball game in Plains, GA, 1977. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, 1977. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter with grandson Jason Carter at the White House Easter Egg Roll. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Jimmy Carter with Andy Warhol during a reception for inaugural portfolio artists. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat surrounded by the media at the White House. Marion S. Trikosko/White House/Library of Congress

President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat have refreshments in the garden of the White House. Marion S. Trikosko/White House/Library of Congress

Anwar Sadat, Jimmy Carter and Menahem Begin examine a canon during a trip to the Gettysburg National Military Park. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Reporters take notes while watching President Jimmy Carter on television making an announcement about the aborted attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. Marion S. Trikosko/White House/Library of Congress

Contact sheet of negatives showing meeting with President Jimmy Carter and Ralph Nader. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library/National Archives

Photograph of four Presidents (Ford, Reagan, Carter, Nixon) in the Blue Room prior to leaving for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s Funeral, 1981. National Archives

For those keeping track, Gerald Ford was the longest living president. He lived to be 93 years, 163 days old. Ronald Reagan was just 45 days shy of Ford. George H.W. Bush is the oldest living president. He was born on June 12, 1924, just a few months before Carter.

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Happy 90th Birthday, Jimmy Carter

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