Tag Archives: democratic

Trump’s UN Pick Contradicts Him on Major International Issues

by GalenRamsey Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came out hard against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. She used her platform during the GOP’s response to President Barack Obama’s 2016 State of the Union speech to urge fellow Republicans to resist the urge “to follow the siren call of the angriest voices” in her party’s primary. She said in February 2016 that Trump was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president,” and only tepidly supported him after first backing Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and then Sen. Ted Cruz during the primary.

The notoriously thin-skinned Trump responded by calling the Indian American governor “very weak on illegal immigration,” and by tweeting, “The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!” Nonetheless, as president-elect, Trump picked Haley to be his ambassador to the United Nations, calling her a “proven deal-maker” with “a track record of bringing people together regardless of background or party affiliation.” Haley accepted his nomination: “Our country faces enormous challenges here at home and internationally,” she said, adding that she was “honored that the president-elect has asked me to join his team.”

But during her Senate Foreign Relations committee confirmation hearings Wednesday, flanked by her husband, son, parents, and two brothers, Haley joined other Cabinet nominees in expressing differences with Trump on foreign policy issues, starting with Russia.

“Do you agree, that both at the UN in New York and on the streets of Aleppo, Moscow has acted as an active accomplice in Assad’s murder of his own people?” Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), asked.

“Yes,” Haley responded.

A few minutes later, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), said it was very clear that Russia had interfered in the US presidential election and asked Haley whether she would “stand up to Vladimir Putin and against Russia’s attempt to interfere with our electoral system?”

“We should stand up to any country that attempts to interfere with our election system,” Haley said. Udall then asked her what her message to her Russian counterpart at the UN would be regarding election meddling.

“That we are aware that it has happened, we don’t find it acceptable, and that we are going to fight back every time we see something like that happening,” Haley replied. “I don’t think Russia’s going to be the only one—I think we’re going to start to see this around the world with other countries. And I think that we need to take a firm stand that when we see that happen, we are not going to take that softly, we are going to be very hard on that.”

Trump has continually downplayed and cast doubt on the findings of the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI that Russia’s government attempted to influence the 2016 US presidential election in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and boost Trump’s chances of winning. Haley was just the latest of his nominees to publicly break from the president-elect on Russia: Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson did, and so did Defense Secretary nominee General James Mattis and the nominee for CIA director, Rep. Mike Pompeo.

Haley also came out in support of NATO, calling it “an important alliance for us to have…and I think it’s an alliance we need to strengthen.” Trump has called NATO “obsolete.”

Unlike the confirmation hearings for some of Trump’s other Cabinet picks, there were no contentious exchanges with even the Democratic senators during her three-and-a-half-hour hearing. Haley was long considered to be one of Trump’s least controversial appointees.

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Trump’s UN Pick Contradicts Him on Major International Issues

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Jeff Sessions Has a History of Blocking Black Judges

by MarleneSells Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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Alabama is nearly 30 percent black, but only three African American judges have ever sat on a federal bench there. Advocates for judicial diversity in the state say that in recent decades, that’s thanks largely to Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama whom Donald Trump has nominated to be his attorney general. During his 20 years in the Senate, they say, Sessions has used his perch on the judiciary committee to block nearly every black candidate for a judgeship in his state.

“The senator has a problem putting African Americans on the federal bench in Alabama,” says John Saxon, a Birmingham-based attorney who served on a committee in the 1990s that recommended nominees for judgeships in the state. “And the people need to know that.”

The Senate will hold confirmation hearings over Sessions’ nomination for attorney general on Tuesday and Wednesday. If it votes to confirm him, Sessions will wield significant influence over issues of particular importance to African Americans and other minorities, such as the application of the nation’s civil rights laws. Sessions has a troubled history on race relations that, along with his far-right views on immigration and other issues, has aroused strong opposition from civil rights leaders to his nomination. In 1986, the Senate failed to confirm Sessions, then a federal prosecutor, for a federal judgeship after witnesses at his confirmation hearing claimed Sessions had called a black colleague “boy,” labeled civil rights groups including the NAACP “un-American,” and joked that he used to like the Ku Klux Klan before he learned that its members smoked marijuana. Sessions has denied the first charge and said the other comments were taken out of context.

Those allegations have haunted his career, although he was elected Alabama attorney general in 1994 and to the US Senate two years later. But his track record on African American judges has received far less scrutiny.

For years, Democrats have tried to remedy the inequality in Alabama’s court system by appointing more black judges. Nearly every time, Sessions has succeeded in stopping them.

In 1996, Judge Alex Howard in the Southern District of Alabama retired, creating a vacancy on the same court where Sessions couldn’t get confirmed 10 years prior. At the time, Saxon served on a federal appointments committee overseen by the state Democratic Party, and the committee quickly began vetting potential replacements. The Southern District—whose largest city, Sessions’ hometown of Mobile, is majority African American—has never had a black judge, so the appointments committee unanimously decided that the position should go to an African American, several former members of the committee recall. The committee sent a list of several respected black lawyers and jurists in southern Alabama to the White House, but none of them was ever nominated for the position. According to Saxon, this is because Sessions had informed Bill Clinton’s administration that he opposed every name on the list. Though Sessions had no constitutional power to block their nominations, senators are given significant sway over nominees in their states. And as a member of the judiciary committee, Sessions could have used procedural maneuvers to hold up their nominations indefinitely.

“For four years, the entire second term of Bill Clinton’s administration, that federal district judgeship sat empty, and the only reason it sat empty is Jeff Sessions blocked it,” says Saxon. “And in my opinion, the only reason he blocked it is because we made it clear from day one it’s time to put an African American on the federal district bench in the only district in Alabama that hadn’t had one.”

Other members of the appointments committee, some of whom declined to speak on the record, agree that Sessions played a role in preventing the black judicial candidates from being nominated. The White House, they say, was not the problem: Several of them spoke to White House officials who were willing to nominate those black judges, as did other prominent Democrats in the state.

“It was definitely Jeff Sessions that was preventing the appointment of an African American,” recalls Democratic state Sen. Hank Sanders of Mobile, who remembers a White House official pointing to Sessions to explain why none of the black candidates were being put forward for confirmation.

“Senator Sessions voted to confirm Eric Holder for Attorney General as well as judges like Abdul Kallon, Charles Wilson, Janice Rogers Brown, and Miguel Estrada and has put forward a number of women from his state as well,” Sessions spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores says in an email response to questions about Sessions’ record on black judges. “As Senator, Jeff Sessions consistently voted for judges who would say what the law is and not what the law should be by substituting their own ideological preferences.”

In the late 1990s, Saxon had the opportunity to appeal personally to Sessions about the vacant Southern District seat when he encountered the senator at a University of Alabama football game. As Saxon recalls, the two men huddled together in the university president’s private box to discuss the open judicial seat, and Sessions repeatedly told Saxon that he couldn’t live with any of the candidates the committee had suggested. So Saxon invited Sessions to propose a different black candidate for the position from anywhere in the state. There were several potential candidates who could have appealed to Sessions, Saxon says. One was Ken Simon, a black lawyer and former state judge who had served in the Ronald Reagan administration and worked at the state’s largest corporate defense firm. “He’s not some flaming liberal,” Saxon says. But Sessions didn’t put forward Simon’s name, or anyone else’s.

“I can’t get in the man’s heart or his soul,” says Saxon. “But I will tell you it’s awfully curious that he blocked any of those names going forward and refused to come up with an alternative name with us saying, ‘Jeff, it’s time to desegregate the Southern District.'”

Saxon’s committee eventually decided that filling the Southern District vacancy with an African American was hopeless and put forward Donald Briskman, a respected Jewish lawyer in Mobile. Sessions blocked him, too, according to Saxon. In 2001, at Sessions’ behest, President George W. Bush nominated Callie Granade, an assistant US attorney whom Sessions had mentored when he was the chief prosecutor in the district. She was confirmed with Sessions’ support.

Sessions’ opposition to black judges in Alabama doesn’t seem to have dissipated over the years. President Barack Obama is leaving office with five district court seats in Alabama unfilled, and a vacancy reserved for an Alabama judge on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sits empty. Democrats tried to fill some of those open seats with African Americans, but years of conversations between the White House and Alabama’s two Republican senators, Sessions and Richard Shelby, broke down, with the senators refusing to give approval to any of Obama’s picks. “I think the holdup is basically the White House is ready to nominate some individuals but would like to have some assurance from our senators…that they’re going to at least give some positive thought toward the individuals the president nominates,” Nancy Worley, the head of the Alabama Democratic Party, told the Montgomery Advertiser in 2015.

The only exception to this pattern was the confirmation of Abdul Kallon, a black lawyer, to a federal district judgeship in 2009. But because Kallon replaced retiring Judge U.W. Clemon, a Jimmy Carter appointee and the first African American federal judge in Alabama, the diversity of the state’s bench didn’t change. Clemon tells Mother Jones he believes Sessions’ close ties to the corporate law firm where Kallon was a partner, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, played a role in Sessions’ decision to support his nomination. Bradley Arant has a lobbying presence in Washington, and two former Sessions aides have gone on to work at the firm. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bradley Arant and its attorneys are the seventh-biggest donor to Sessions’ political campaigns over the course of his Senate career.

Still, Sessions’ support of Kallon only went so far. When Obama nominated Kallon to the vacant 11th Circuit seat in February 2016, Sessions opposed his confirmation. One-quarter of the residents of the 11th Circuit, which represents Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, are black—the highest percentage of any federal appeals court in the country—but only one of the court’s 11 judges is African American. The seat on the court reserved for an Alabaman has never been held by a black judge.

The five open seats on Alabama’s federal district courts will now be Trump’s to fill. Liberals have criticized the Obama administration for failing to nominate more people of color in Alabama and other Southern states and for not fighting vigorously enough for the confirmation of the candidates he has nominated. But with Sessions on the judiciary committee, confirming black judges, particularly in Alabama, might have been an uphill battle.

“I have always found that it is very easy to get white lawyers to be judges, and it is very hard to get black lawyers to be judges,” says Joe Reed, a longtime Democratic activist in Alabama who served with Saxon on the appointments committee.

During Obama’s second term, Reed and Sanders, the state senator, traveled to Washington to meet with Sessions, Shelby, and Rep. Terri Sewell, the only Democrat in Alabama’s congressional delegation, with the goal of confirming multiple judges—including African American ones—in Alabama and on the 11th Circuit. Reed appealed to the senators by invoking their place in history. “You’ve got a legacy,” he recalls telling them. “I don’t know anybody who’s ever come out great, or been considered great or good, unless they came down on the side of justice, on the side of civil rights, on the side of racial harmony and progress. I don’t know anybody who’s ever been on the other side and looked good.” The senators responded, he says, by telling him they wanted fair judges.

After the meeting, Reed and Sanders hung back and spoke with Sessions alone. “The meeting was over, and Dr. Reed said, ‘Hank, let’s try to talk to Sessions,'” Sanders says, in an account confirmed by Reed. “‘Cause we considered Sessions a problem. We didn’t consider Shelby the same problem.” But this second attempt also fell apart when Sessions brought up the fact that Sanders had testified against his confirmation to a federal judgeship in 1986.

“Thirty years later, that was still something he was holding in his craw,” Sanders says. “My interpretation of the message was, ‘You’re not going to get anything out of me. You all stopped me from being a federal judge, and you’re not going to get anything out of me.'”

This story has been updated to include comment from Sessions spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores.

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Jeff Sessions Has a History of Blocking Black Judges

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Donald Trump Is "an Existential Threat to Public Schools"

by Carol84Iwbrct Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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On the day President-elect Donald Trump announced Michigan billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos as his pick for education secretary, the heads of the country’s two largest teachers unions jumped to condemn the choice. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten called DeVos “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee put forward since President Carter created a Cabinet-level Department of Education.” National Education Association (NEA) president Lily Eskelsen García noted the administration’s choice “demonstrated just how out of touch it is with what works best for students, parents, educators, and communities.”

Educators have worried that DeVos, a prominent Republican fundraiser, and her support for “school choice” and the use of vouchers would endanger public education. With the billionaire’s confirmation hearing slated for Wednesday, the nation’s two biggest teachers’ unions have gone on the offensive with grassroots campaigns to challenge DeVos’ nomination.

Neither group anticipated Donald Trump to win the election. “We did everything in our power to get Hillary Clinton elected. We didn’t have a plan B,” Weingarten says. “We always thought Donald Trump would be as dangerous as he’s showing he is.” But both unions say they were unsurprised by Trump’s selection of DeVos, whose past work in Michigan align with the president-elect’s proposals to direct federal dollars toward private and charter schools. “We have many, many years of experience with her and her undermining of the public education system in Michigan. We have frontline stories about what her agenda and the Trump agenda has meant to communities and to students,” says Mary Kusler, senior director of the NEA Center for Advocacy. “She was not somebody who was plucked out of thin air for us.”

Education historian Diane Ravitch, who founded the advocacy group Network for Public Education in 2013, described unions as “shocked and worried” by the DeVos selection in an email to Mother Jones. “The previous Republican administrations did not threaten the very existence of public education and teachers unions,” she added. “This coming four years is an existential threat to a basic Democratic institution: public schools. Trump has picked a Secretary who is hostile to public schools. This is unprecedented.”

In the weeks following the election, the unions at the national and local levels turned their attention to trying to disqualify DeVos by emphasizing her lack of experience in public education and her work in Michigan. Last month, the AFT, which has 1.6 million members, went on an education campaign, unveiling fact sheets on DeVos and other Cabinet picks like Labor Secretary-designee and fast-food executive Andrew Puzder and Health and Human Services Secretary-designee Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.). At these agencies, Weingarten says, are “people who have been appointed whose ideology seems antithetical to the mission of these agencies.”

On December 6, the AFT and NEA released a joint open letter condemning Trump’s pick, stating that her “sole ‘qualification’ for the job is the two decades she has spent attempting to dismantle the American public school system.” The letter has amassed more than 130,000 signatures from parents, teachers, and other supporters. Representatives from both unions say that members have been arranging meetings with senators. Meanwhile, local affiliates for both unions have encouraged members to flood senators with calls, emails, and letters in opposition.

Though activity settled down leading up to the holidays, the NEA—the nation’s largest union with 3 million members—expects to ramp up calls from members to speak on behalf of students in the next week to senators on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which will oversee DeVos’ hearing. When asked if current efforts to organize around the confirmation hearing was enough to oppose DeVos, Kusler said the union’s members were doing what they could. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to remember: Our members are teaching kids during the day,” she added, likening the current grassroots efforts to that of 2015, when both unions engaged in separate campaigns during the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now known as the Every Student Succeeds Act. “We’ve never been in this situation around the confirmation for a secretary of education that has looked like this,” Kusler says. “So engaging our members using the tactics we use anyway for a legislative fight around a confirmation of a secretary is unprecedented.”

Katharine Strunk, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California who studies teachers’ unions, noted that unions would be able to activate their base of support, but that they may have less sway in lobbying efforts, given Republicans’ firm control of the Senate. “If you don’t have the majority,” the AFT’s Weingarten says, “it’s a pretty uphill battle.” Voters who sided with Trump may have wanted to shake up the system, Weingarten adds, but she doesn’t believe that they “voted to end public education as we know it.”

Carol Burris, executive director of Ravitch’s Network for Public Education, says she anticipates a difficult four years for teachers’ unions. The organization engaged in its own campaign, urging its supporters to send letters to senators over the holidays and to call and visit their offices. This week, the network called on members to make phone calls to senators in each state, particularly those on the committee overseeing DeVos’ hearing. “Betsy DeVos and the people who believe what she believes have no patience for unions in any form and certainly not teachers’ unions,” she says. “They see teachers’ unions not as partners in providing a good education for kids, but as adversaries.”

Future challenges from the unions will largely depend on the policies the Trump administration chooses to pursue. In a speech at the National Press Club on Monday, Weingarten warned that DeVos’ nomination threatened the bipartisan agreement around the federal government’s role in shaping education and could undermine the public education system DeVos would be charged with overseeing.

“Betsy DeVos lacks the qualifications and experience to serve as secretary of education,” Weingarten told the audience. “Her drive to privatize education is demonstrably destructive to public schools and to the educational success of all of our children.”

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Donald Trump Is "an Existential Threat to Public Schools"

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Surprise! WikiLeaks’ Assange Backs Trump on Russia Hacking Report

by KaliSeton93839 Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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During a live press conference broadcast from the Ecuadorian embassy in London via Twitter’s livestream app Persicope, WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on Monday blasted the recent US intelligence report on Russian hacking during the 2016 election.

“It is, frankly, quite embarrassing to the reputation of the US intelligence services to be putting out something that claims to be a report like that,” Assange said. “This is a press release. It is clearly designed for political effect and US intelligence have been politicized by the Obama administration in the production of this report and a number of other statements.”

Assange called the report a “political attack cannon against Donald Trump” and a way “to defend the reason why the Democratic Party lost.” And he claimed that its true purpose was to bolster certain officials within the Democratic Party and “delegitimize the election of Donald Trump.”

Assange’s press conference comes three days after the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report outlining its assessment of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign via hacks of US political targets, including the Democratic National Committee and the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The materials were stolen from those organizations by Russian intelligence, according to the report, and then passed to WikiLeaks, but it does not specify whether this occurred through an intermediary. An online persona known as “Guccifer 2.0” claimed credit for the DNC hack and for passing the information along to WikiLeaks and also for providing the material to media outlets and reporters.

“Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” the declassified report stated, adding that the material published by WikiLeaks did “not contain any evident forgeries.” The report stated that Russian intelligence fed the materials to WikiLeaks but didn’t say how, or whether it was through a third-party. The Washington Post reported Thursday night that US intelligence had identified the “actors” involved in getting the materials to WikiLeaks.

Assange has consistently denied that the materials came from the Russian government and addressed the issue again on Monday.

“We haven’t said we know or don’t know our sources,” he said. “We have made one statement, which is that our sources in the US election-related matter are not a state party.” Assange noted the “incredible care” with which WikiLeaks speaks about its sources, but this case “does not sufficiently threaten our sources to make this very bland disclosure.” With a “state” source, however, “we would have a lot less concern in attempting to protect them.”

Assange’s explanation seems to leave the door open that an intermediary passed the material from Russian intelligence to WikiLeaks.

Assange also discussed the penchant for outgoing administrations to destroy information on the way out the door and said WikiLeaks’ recent offer of $30,000 for information that leads to “the arrest or exposure of Obama admin sic officials destroying info sic,” is an effort to preserve information that belongs to the public. He implored government employees with access to data to grab it (not mentioning that doing so is a serious crime).

“Our request to system administrators in the Obama administration, and this goes for other administrations around the world, is take the data,” he said. “Just take it now, keep it under your bed, or with your mother, and then you can give that to WikiLeaks or other journalists at your leisure. Get a hold of that history and protect it because that is something that belongs to humanity and does not belong to a political party.”

Assange blasted President Obama for his administration’s treatment of whistleblowers but said that things weren’t likely to improve under a President Trump.

“While there are some anti-DC elements in the Trump cabinet and a lot in his base, very quickly, based on the history of all previous administrations, the Donald Trump administration will form its own establishment and enter into a power-sharing relationship with the existing powers in DC,” Assange said. “No system of authority likes those who undermine its authority.”

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Surprise! WikiLeaks’ Assange Backs Trump on Russia Hacking Report

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CIA Says Russians Celebrated Trump’s Victory

by BerryC7650437138 Posted on January 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post passes along the juiciest bit of the CIA’s classified report on Russian hacking:

Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.

The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country’s cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.

Then NBC News got into the act:

The official agreed to talk to NBC News after the Post published leaked details of the review because the official felt that the details the paper chose focused too much on the Russian celebration and not enough on the thrust of the report.

Two top intelligence officials with direct knowledge told NBC News that the report on Russian hacking also details Russian cyberattacks not just against the Democratic National Committee, but the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department and American corporations.

….The report, on which Obama was also orally briefed, explains what intelligence agencies believe are Moscow’s motives, including, in part, a desire to disrupt the American democratic process. But the intelligence analysts who prepared the report also concluded that the hacks were payback for the Obama administration’s questioning of Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy as president.

Tomorrow Donald Trump will get his own briefing on the CIA report. That oughta be good. And in other Trump-related news, we got yet another outraged tweet about cars today:

It’s true that Toyota is moving production of the Corolla to Mexico. But here’s the thing: they’re moving it from Canada. This is not exactly breaking news, either: the Canadian media reported all this nearly two years ago.

Right now, about half of the Corollas sold in the US are made in Mississippi and the other half in Canada. When the new plant is finished, about half will be made in Mississippi and the other half in Mexico. Nothing changes. We’re still importing the same number of Corollas. And the Canadian plant will be reconfigured to build more profitable SUVs and mid-sized cars.

Unless it infuriates you that we’re importing some Corollas from Mexico instead of Canada, this is a nothingburger. On the other hand, if you just want to demagogue Mexico, I guess it’s tailor made.

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CIA Says Russians Celebrated Trump’s Victory

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Obamacare Is One of the Best Social Welfare Programs Ever Passed

by JamisonJose503 Posted on January 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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Jeff Stein reports on Democratic plans to fight any attempt to repeal Obamacare:

“We are united in our opposition to these Republican attempts to Make America Sick Again,” Schumer said, cracking a slight smile at the inversion of Donald Trump’s campaign slogan. The line suggests that Schumer wants to reframe the fight over Obamacare into one about the broader GOP health care agenda, which includes proposals to change Medicaid andMedicare.

Since the health care law passed in 2009, Schumer and other Democrats in Congress have learned that defending it can be a political loser. Republicans stayed unified in their opposition, and public opinion stayed on their side. But in their final push to save it, Democrats are moving the battle to new turf, fighting over Americans’ shared frustration with the inadequacies of the country’s health care system, not the law itself.

This is sadly true. Democrats have never been willing to defend Obamacare, and they still aren’t. It’s crazy. Obamacare isn’t perfect. Nothing this side of the pearly gates is. But if politicians limited themselves to defending programs with no problems, we’d never hear from them again.1

But considering where we started—with a Rube Goldberg medical system dominated by well-heeled special interests and all but indifferent to the near-poor—Obamacare is almost miraculously close to perfect. I know that Republicans have convinced everyone otherwise, but take a look at the results of this Kaiser tracking poll from November. Virtually every single aspect of Obamacare is not just popular, but very popular:

Even Republicans like practically everything about Obamacare, including the taxes to pay for it. People like the subsidies; they like the exchanges; they like the out-of-pocket caps; they like the Medicaid expansion; they like the pre-existing conditions ban; and they like taxing the rich to fund it all. The only unpopular part of the whole law is the individual mandate.

What’s more, Obamacare has been a huge success. It’s provided health coverage to 20 million people. It’s massively reduced the cost of health coverage for low-income families. It’s slashed the number of uninsured by half among blacks and whites and by a quarter among Hispanics. It’s allowed people with expensive chronic illnesses to get treatment. It will help keep overall health costs down in the future. It’s had no negative impact on the employer health care system. And it’s done all this without raising the deficit. In fact, it’s cut the deficit.

And yet, Democrats are still afraid to defend it loudly and proudly. This just boggles me. Sure, Obamacare has some problems. Certain regions don’t have enough competition. Deductibles are high if you buy a bronze plan. And a small part of the population has been hit with large premium increases.

But this is something like 10 percent of Obamacare. The other 90 percent is purely positive. Why are so many liberals unwilling to say so? Why aren’t they willing to defend Obamacare with the same fervor they defend other imperfect programs, like Medicare or the ADA or the Clean Air Act or Social Security? Obamacare is at least as good as any of them. But no one will ever believe it if Republicans are attacking it relentlessly while Democrats mutter resentfully that there’s no public option and politicians hide in their offices in the hope that nobody will blame them if their premiums have gone up.

If Democrats aren’t willing to defend Obamacare, it’s hardly a surprise that Republicans feel free to go after it without consequence. Maybe they should start.

1Yes, I know, that might not be a bad thing.

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Obamacare Is One of the Best Social Welfare Programs Ever Passed

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2016 Was a Really Bad Year. These Folks Made It Better.

by ZakHugheydrmlert Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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2016 was certainly a bad year. The planet continued to get hotter (spelling doom for future habitants of Earth), natural disasters wreaked havoc all over the world, white nationalists and neo-Nazis stopped hiding on the fringes of society, and Prince, David Bowie, and Carrie Fisher left us way too soon. But before we consider 2016 as being totally bleak, let’s pause and remember a few folks who made a bad year better. From smart kids to activists and politicians, here are some of the bright spots.

Sarah McBride: Sarah McBride made history this year when she became the first transgender woman to speak at a major-party convention. “Will we be a nation where there is only one way to love, only one way to look, and only one way to live?” McBride, the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, asked fellow Democrats gathered to nominate Hillary Clinton. “Or will we be a nation where everyone has the freedom to live openly and equally?” Growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, McBride didn’t think she could live authentically as herself while achieving her professional goals in politics. Since coming out in 2012, she’s been proving her younger self wrong, breaking down barriers and fighting for transgender rights. As an intern, McBride became one of the first transgender people to work in the White House, and she played an instrumental role in getting transgender rights legislation passed in Delaware. She also made waves this year when a bathroom selfie she took in North Carolina went viral after state lawmakers approved legislation barring transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice.

Mari Copeny: Mari Copeny is better known as Little Miss Flint. In 2014, her hometown’s water was poisoned with lead when the city of Flint, Michigan, changed to an improperly treated water supply. It took months to warn Flint residents, and as a result thousands of children in the city tested positive for high levels of lead in their blood. Mari sent a letter to the White House asking President Barack Obama to visit, and Obama responded and visited Flint a few weeks later. Mari’s mother operates a Twitter account for the young girl where she continues to tweet about the ongoing water crisis.

Lindy West: In a year when some of the worst corners of the internet gained new power, Lindy West’s accounts of confronting trolls provided badly needed evidence that you can stand up to cyberbullying and win. In her debut novel, Shrill, West describes what fat shaming really means, a perspective that This American Life host Ira Glass and others have noted changed their perspective on the issue. West’s book, which is a New York Times bestseller, is a delightful yet heart-wrenching collection of essays, spanning subjects from sexism in comedy to finding love. A columnist for the Guardian, she has also argued that objectifying men at the Olympics was not a real issue, and she’s called on everyone to dispense with verbal contortions and just call white nationalists Nazis. (West spoke to Mother Jones earlier this year about internet trolls, fat shaming, and rape culture.)

Tammy Duckworth: The 2016 election wasn’t kind to Democrats, but there were a few winners. Tammy Duckworth will move from the House of Representatives to the Senate, after her defeat of Republican Mark Kirk in the closely watched race for Illinois senator. She is a double amputee and a disabled Iraq War veteran, and she’ll be only the second Asian American to serve in the Senate. During the campaign, Kirk took flack for making a racist comment about his opponent’s family during a debate. Duckworth, who has an American father and a Thai mother, noted that her family has served in the military since the Revolutionary War. Kirk responded by saying, “I had forgotten your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.” The Kirk campaign issued a statement attempting to defend his comments, but the embattled senator was met with a barrage of criticism before he tweeted out an apology. Duckworth has also supported accepting more Syrian refugees in the United States.

Michelle Obama: Real talk: Michelle Obama makes every year brighter. But this year especially, she was a force to be reckoned with on the campaign trail. Though she was a fierce critic of Donald Trump from the outset of the election, even the hot-headed president-elect knew better to go after the hugely popular first lady. In an impassioned speech after the release of an audio recording of Trump in which he talked about grabbing women “by the pussy,” Obama lambasted the Republican nominee for “actually bragging about sexually assaulting women.” Not only was she a champion on the campaign trail, but who can forget when Renaissance (her Secret Service code name) appeared on Carpool Karaoke?

The Reverend William Barber II: William Barber II, a charismatic orator and the founder of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, is probably best known for his work in voting rights and economic justice in the state. In 2013, Barber led a group of activists and clergy into the state Capitol building in Raleigh and blocked the doors to the Senate chambers to express his frustration with the Republican-majority Legislature for implementing voting restrictions, blocking Medicaid expansion, and cutting unemployment benefits. He was eventually arrested. This year, at the Democratic National Convention, Barber spoke out against injustice—from voter suppression to police brutality—and his movement has been credited with helping defeat Gov. Pat McCrory in North Carolina. The reverend shows no signs of stopping his work in voting rights and economic justice in 2017.

#NoDAPL activists: The water protectors of Standing Rock, as they call themselves, braved security guards using pepper spray, attack dogs, water cannons in freezing temperatures, and rubber bullets in order to stop the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline and its threat to the water supply and cultural sites of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The tribe opposed to the project and pointed out that pipeline developers had initially planned to follow a different route but rejected it due to concerns about contaminating the water supply to another community. It looked like nothing was going to stop the project, but in November the US Army Corps of Engineers halted construction of the pipeline, calling for research into environmental risks. The win is cause for celebration, but the final battle may lie ahead: President-elect Trump has invested between $500,000 and $1 million in the company with the contract to build the pipeline.

Marley Dias: Marley Dias is a 12-year-old girl who is already tired of reading books about white boys and their dogs. She impressed the world in January when Philly Voice reported that the New Jersey girl was starting a project called #1000BlackGirlBooks to collect books where black girls are the protagonists and not just background characters. The book drive was part of the GrassROOTS Community Foundation, an organization co-founded by Janice Johnson Dias, Marley’s mother, that she uses for a social action project every year. Marley hit her target of 1,000 books by February.

Chris Murphy: One lawmaker who confronted Republicans in Congress this year was Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn). After the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub last June, Murphy refused to let Republicans avoid voting on two gun control measures, one that banned suspected terrorists from buying guns and another that required background checks for sales at gun shows and over the internet. Murphy lead a 15-hour filibuster on an unrelated spending bill until the issue was brought to the floor. He has become one of the leading voices in the Democratic Party on gun control since the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were killed by an assailant with two guns. Prior to the election, Murphy explained to Mother Jones why Trump is more radical than the National Rifle Association.

Kamala Harris: The race to replace retiring California Sen. Barbara Boxer came down to two Democrats who were also women of color: Rep. Loretta Sanchez and state Attorney General Kamala Harris. After beating her opponent by 25 points, Harris, who was born to a Jamaican American father and an Indian American mother, became only the second black woman elected to the US Senate. (Carol Moseley-Braun represented Illinois from 1993 to 1999.) After the election, Harris spoke out for undocumented immigrants by vowing to fight Trump’s immigration policies at every turn. “You are not alone, you matter, and we’ve got your back,” she said to immigrants and activists at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles after her victory.

Khizr and Ghazala Khan: The Khans’ son, Humayun Khan, was killed during the Iraq War in 2004. At the Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan sharply and movingly criticized Trump for his proposal to ban Muslim immigration. “Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution?” Khan asked while pulling out a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution. “I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law.'” Khan went on to note the sacrifice his family and other families like his have made:”Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing—and no one.” Trump responded by criticizing Ghazala Khan for remaining silent while standing next to her husband, saying that she wasn’t allowed to speak because of the couple’s faith. He also claimed he made sacrifices by building “great structures.” His treatment of the Khans earned him widespread criticism from both sides of the aisle. Thanks to Khizr Khan, the American Civil Liberties Union ran out of pocket Constitutions less than a week after his speech.

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2016 Was a Really Bad Year. These Folks Made It Better.

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The Electoral College Just Made it Official: Donald Trump Will Be President

by FrederickaHawes Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update, 5:39 p.m. EST: Donald Trump officially secured a majority of the Electoral College votes needed to become the next president of the United States.

As the Electoral College’s 538 members gather across the country on Monday to formally cast their ballots for the next president and vice president of the United States, protesters have flocked to state capitals to urge electors to deny Donald Trump the presidency. The normally staid process has drawn an unusual amount of attention this year, as activists have mounted various efforts to challenge the Electoral College results amid alarm over Trump’s Cabinet picks and conflicts of interest, as well as revelations about Russia’s alleged role in hacking US political targets to aid Trump.

“Shame! You don’t deserve to be an American!” one protester shouted in Wisconsin, as all 10 of the state’s electors voted to officially make Trump president. “You have sold us out!”

Numerous arrests have been made, including in Pennsylvania where 12 immigration activists were cited for disorderly conduct for protesting Trump’s victory in the state.

In Minnesota, a state that Hillary Clinton won, one elector was replaced after refusing to vote for her. A Maine Democratic elector decided to cast his protest vote for Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton. In Washington, three electors voted for Colin Powell instead of Clinton; a fourth elector wrote in “Faith Spotted Eagle.”

The unprecedented effort to upend the Electoral College vote is unlikely to amount to much. As Mother Jones reported last week, it’s highly unlikely that enough electors will change their votes and abandon the party’s nominee. While President Barack Obama called the Electoral College process a “vestige” on Friday, he said voters searching for a “silver bullet” fix to American politics are probably in for a disappointment. The large absence of “faithless” electors revolting against Trump further fuels this notion.

On Sunday, Trump rebuked his opponents and the movement to reject his path to the White House.

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The Electoral College Just Made it Official: Donald Trump Will Be President

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After Losing Millions in Revenue, North Carolina Is Set to Repeal Its Horrible Bathroom Law

by ora6exacta1l8 Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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The North Carolina law that famously blocks transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice appears to be on its deathbed. On Monday, Governor-elect Roy Cooper announced that House Bill 2, seen as the most sweeping anti-LGBT law in the country, would be repealed in a special session of the Legislature Tuesday.

The announcement came after the city council in Charlotte voted Monday morning to rescind a local nondiscrimination ordinance, passed in February, that had inspired state lawmakers to speed HB2 through the legislative process in a single day in March. In addition to blocking trans people from bathrooms, HB2 preempted local governments like Charlotte’s from passing measures that protect gay and trans people from discrimination.

Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who passionately supported HB2 and narrowly lost his reelection bid, confirmed he would call a special session of the Legislature on Tuesday to repeal HB2. Governor-elect Cooper said the state Senate majority leader and House speaker had assured him they would kill the law because Charlotte had agreed to get rid of its local ordinance. “I hope they will keep their word to me and with the help of Democrats in the legislature, HB2 will be repealed in full,” Cooper said in a statement.

“Full repeal will help to bring jobs, sports and entertainment events back and will provide the opportunity for strong LGBT protections in our state,” he added. North Carolina lost millions of dollars of revenue after the law passed, as companies protested by canceling plans to bring jobs to the state, Bruce Springsteen and other musicians pulled out of concerts there, and the NBA and the NCAA moved sports events to other locations

Charlotte’s city council had previously refused to rescind its nondiscrimination ordinance. On Monday Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts defended the decision to do so. The vote “should in no way be viewed as a compromise of our principles or commitment to nondiscrimination,” she said.

Outgoing Gov. McCrory, whose popularity fell after HB2 was passed, criticized Charlotte leaders for not getting rid of the local ordinance sooner—and argued they waited for political reasons. “This sudden reversal, with little notice after the gubernatorial election, sadly proves this entire issue originated by the political left was all about politics and winning the governor’s race at the expense of Charlotte and our entire state,” McCrory’s office said in a statement.

LGBT rights organizations praised the plan to repeal HB2, which Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin described as “shameful and archaic” legislation. But they added they were disappointed to see Charlotte’s local ordinance go. “The problem has never been Charlotte,” said Equality North Carolina Executive Director Chris Sgro, noting that hundreds of cities across the country have similar ordinances to protect gay and transgender people from discrimination. Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said in a statement that the repeal of HB2 could open a door for other cities in the state to pass nondiscrimination protections in the future: “Completely repealing HB2 is only the first step lawmakers must take to repair the harm they have done to their own constituents. Even after it is repealed, there will be a long way to go.”

If the Republican-majority Legislature follows through and repeals HB2, it would be a surprising act of cooperation with the incoming Democratic governor. Just last week, Republican lawmakers in the state introduced a series of bills that would curtail his powers in office.

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After Losing Millions in Revenue, North Carolina Is Set to Repeal Its Horrible Bathroom Law

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Trump’s Pick for Budget Director Isn’t Sure the Government Should Fund Scientific Research

by CoyYlgpzorgdmw Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mick Mulvaney, the ultra-conservative South Carolina congressman whom Donald Trump has tapped to be his budget director, has questioned whether the federal government should spend any money on scientific research.

If confirmed by the Senate to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney, a deficit hawk who recently spoke before a chapter of the right-wing-fringe John Birch Society, would be in charge of crafting Trump’s budget and overseeing the functioning of federal agencies. One thing he seems to believe the budget and the agencies should not be funding is research into diseases like the Zika virus.

Two weeks before Congress finally passed more than $1 billion to fight the spread of Zika and its effects, Mulvaney questioned whether the government should fund any scientific research. “Do we need government-funded research at all,” he wrote in a Facebook post on September 9 unearthed by the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge. Mulvaney appears to have deleted his Facebook page since then.

In the post, he justified his position on government-funded research by questioning the scientific consensus that Zika causes the birth defect microcephaly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded in April that the Zika virus causes microcephaly and other defects. But Mulvaney wrote:

And before you inundate me with pictures of children with birth defects, consider this:

Brazil’s microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery — if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases? According to a new report from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), the number of missing cases in Colombia and elsewhere raises serious questions about the assumed connection between Zika and microcephaly.

According to the New York Times, the relatively low rate of microcephaly in Colombia has indeed puzzled some researchers, who point to the fact that many women likely delayed pregnancy or had abortions when testing revealed the birth defect. But that doesn’t change the scientific consensus linking Zika to microcephaly.

Here’s the full post from Mulvaney:

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Trump’s Pick for Budget Director Isn’t Sure the Government Should Fund Scientific Research

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