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Mitch McConnell Says He Stood Up for Women in a Senate Sexual-Harassment Scandal. The Real Story Is Damning.

by DerickQAWfhh Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Facing his toughest reelection battle in years against a well-known and well-financed female opponent, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently boasted that he led the Senate in ousting a GOP colleague accused of sexual harassment in 1995. But news reports from that time show that late in the investigation, McConnell tried to stall the probe against his fellow Republican, Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) He derided efforts by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to hold public hearings on Packwood as “frolic and detour”—after the Senate ethics committee had substantiated nearly two-dozen claims of sexual harassment leveled against Packwood by female lobbyists and former staffers.

Talking about the Packwood scandal this past week, McConnell noted that he was chair of the Senate ethics committee when Packwood resigned. In a Tuesday interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, McConnell said he had taken “the toughest possible position.” The newspaper reported that McConnell had “offered himself as an example of how elected officials should handle situations when a member of their own party is accused of sexual harassment.”

But the bulk of the ethics probe against Packwood took place when the committee was chaired by a Democrat. When Republicans regained a majority in the Senate after the 1994 elections and McConnell became chair of the committee, he transformed the Packwood investigation into a partisan mess.

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Mitch McConnell Says He Stood Up for Women in a Senate Sexual-Harassment Scandal. The Real Story Is Damning.

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GOP Senate Candidate Looks For Help From Radio Host Who Wants to Jail Gays

by Aigneis Gaskill Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mississippi GOP Senate candidate Chris McDaniel appeared on a radio program on Monday hosted by a controversial social conservative activist who has called for gay people to be imprisoned and has said the “the spirit of the Antichrist is at work” in the Obama White House.

McDaniel, a state senator who is challenging incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran for the GOP nomination, has taken heat over the last week for past comments he made on his own radio show, “The Right Side,” which were reported by Mother Jones in January. The comments, recently picked up by the Wall Street Journal, featured a riff on the merits of using taxpayer funds to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. “If they pass reparations, and my taxes are going up, I ain’t paying taxes,” the tea party favorite said in 2006. His appearance Monday on “Focal Point” with host Bryan Fischer, the issues director for the American Family Association, was an opportunity to clear the record.

“They’re desperate,” McDaniel told Fischer. “And when these politicians and the establishment in Washington feels threatened, they always react with desperation. I was a conservative talk radio host, actually it was a Christian conservative talk radio show for three and a half four years I hosted that. Two hours a day. And this is the best they’ve got? Most of it is way out of context anyway. They were talking about reparations, for example—let me be real clear, I’m against reparations. I don’t know why that’s a bad thing to say. Maybe Sen. Cochran’s for reparations? He should clarify that for us. But I’m against it. And some of the other things, we were just sitting there, no harm was meant.”

In other clips from “The Right Side,” McDaniel alleged that Democrats were plotting to make polygamy legal in all 50 states, and that Hollywood was whitewashing the evils of Islam. He mocked San Francisco “elites” by alleging a correlation between IQ and “gender misidentification,” and blamed an uptick of gun violence in Canada on hip-hop. Shootings, McDaniels claimed, are “a problem of a culture that values prison more than college; a culture that values rap and destruction of community values more than it does poetry; a culture that can’t stand education.”

But Fischer’s show is an unusual choice for a politician looking to launder his reputation as a conservative shock-jock. In March, Fischer told his listeners that while he didn’t think President Obama is the antichrist, “the spirit of the Antichrist is at work” in the Oval Office. He has said that people turn to homosexuality (which he’d like criminalized) when the Devil takes over their brains. He once called for a Sea World Orca whale to be Biblically stoned after it killed its trainer. He said the secretarial job in his office is “reserved for a woman because of the unique things that God has built into women.” Even some Republicans have distanced themselves from Fischer—at the 2011 Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C., Mitt Romney condemned Fischer’s “poisonous language.”

McDaniel has received the backing of major Republican groups, including the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth, but still faces an uphill battle. An April survey from Harper Polling gave Cochran a double-digit edge over McDaniel, 52–35.

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GOP Senate Candidate Looks For Help From Radio Host Who Wants to Jail Gays

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Quote of the Day: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obamacare?

by LesterMcGrowdie Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

From a Republican congressional health aide who was “granted anonymity to speak candidly,” on the difficulties of creating a Republican plan to replace Obamacare:

The problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act. … To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA. You have to have a participating mechanism, you have to have a mechanism to fund it, you have to have a mechanism to fix parts of the market.

That’s a problem, all right. If you actually want to cover people, you have to pay for it. End of story. Republicans are steadfastly not willing to pay for it, so they aren’t going to cover anyone with whatever plan they dream up. No matter what kind of smoke and mirrors they throw up to disguise this, that’s the bottom line. No money, no coverage.

Really, though, all this GOP aide is saying is that Obamacare is fundamentally a pretty conservative plan. Liberals nearly all prefer a simpler, cheaper, more comprehensive riff on single-payer of some kind. But that couldn’t pass in 2009—even moderate Democrats wouldn’t have supported it—so instead we had to cobble together a bunch of conservative ideas into a kind of Rube Goldberg edifice that was at least better than nothing. It only works moderately well, but that’s because the conservative take on healthcare is fundamentally incoherent. The more conservative your health care plan, the worse it works.

So Republicans have a choice. They can:

  1. Introduce a more liberal plan that’s cheaper and works better.
  2. Introduce an even more conservative plan that’s more expensive and works even worse than Obamacare
  3. Toss out a few of the usual pet rocks and just pretend it’s a plan.

My money is on Option 3.

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Quote of the Day: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obamacare?

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This GOP House Candidate Is Running for Office So His Daughter Won’t Have to Learn About Evolution

by Jacobi Posted on April 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Minnesota Republican congressional candidate Aaron Miller’s gripe with Washington is personal. Speaking at the district convention on Saturday, Miller, an Iraq War vet who won the nomination to challenge four-term Democratic Rep. Tim Walz, explained that he was running for office in part to ensure that his daughter won’t have to learn about evolution at her local public school. Per the Mankato Free Press:

He also called for more religious freedoms. He repeated his story about his daughter returning home from school because evolution was being taught in her class. He said the teacher admitted to not believing in the scientific theory to his daughter but told her that the government forced him to teach the lesson.

“We should decide what is taught in our schools, not Washington D.C.,” Miller said.

Miller has declined to provide any more information to verify his story.

This isn’t the first time Miller has recounted this tale—it’s a staple of his stump speech. The comments were first flagged by Minnesota blogger Sally Jo Sorensen, who points out that Minnesota’s biology standards are set by Minnesota, not DC. Miller has the endorsement of the district’s 2012 GOP nominee Allen Quist, a longtime conservative activist in the state who wrote an educational curriculum supplement postulating that “people and stegosaurs were living at the same time.”

The first district, which President Obama carried by a point in 2012, is one of just a handful of red-leaning congressional districts represented by Democrats. But Walz, who has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, remains popular in the district. It probably doesn’t hurt that the local GOP keeps nominating candidates like Quist and Miller, either.

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This GOP House Candidate Is Running for Office So His Daughter Won’t Have to Learn About Evolution

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

by BettinaYLPM Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

How big is the midterm penalty for Democrats? Eric McGhee tells us in handy chart form. Given President Obama’s current approval rating, his model says Democrats would have a 75 percent chance of holding the Senate if this were a presidential election year. But in a midterm, Dems have only a 10 percent chance:

Ed Kilgore writes about this a lot, and warns Democrats not to get too mired in fruitless efforts to attack the “enthusiasm gap.” After all, the kind of people affected by enthusiasm are the kind of people who are likely to vote anyway. A loud populist message might thrill them, but it won’t do much to affect turnout among minorities and the young, who typically have more tenuous connections to politics. Instead, Democrats should focus on old-fashioned efforts to get out the vote. Or, more accurately, brand new rocket science efforts to get out the vote:

There’s plenty of evidence that turnout can be more reliably affected by direct efforts to identify favorable concentrations of voters and simply get them to the polls, with or without a great deal of “messaging” or for that matter enthusiasm (no one takes your temperature before you cast a ballot). Such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are the meat-and-potatoes of American politics, even if they invariably get little attention from horse-race pundits. Neighborhood-intensive “knock-and-drag” GOTV campaigns used to be a Democratic speciality thanks to the superior concentration of Democratic (especially minority) voters, though geographical polarization has created more and more equally ripe Republican areas.

….If that’s accurate, then the most important news for Democrats going into November is that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is planning to spend $60 million on data-driven GOTV efforts specially focused on reducing the “midterm falloff” factor. The extraordinary success of Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign in boosting African-American turnout for an off-year election will likely be a model.

Messaging matters. But in midterm elections, shoe leather matters more, even if it’s mostly digital shoe leather these days.

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How Democrats Plan to Address the Midterm Blues

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Memo to Political Reporters: Iowa Is More Than Just Farming

by botai3dkwu Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Republicans took a page from the Mother Jones playbook Tuesday and uncovered video of a politician speaking a bit too freely at a private fundraiser. The New York Times‘ Nick Confessore was quick to dub it “47%”-like. American Rising, an opposition research PAC founded by Mitt Romney’s former campaign manager, released a video of Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa), the Democrats’ likely candidate for Iowa’s open Senate seat this year, speaking before a crowd of lawyers at a fundraiser in Texas. Braley, himself a lawyer, disparages Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for being just a “farmer from Iowa.”

The nerve! How dare someone running for office in the heartland question the credentials of a farmer! Yet when it’s presented in its full context, Braley’s statement offers a valid critique: Grassley lacks a law degree and, should Republicans retake the Senate this fall, he’d be first in line to chair the Judiciary Committee. Here’s the full quote:

To put this in stark contrast, if you help me win this race you may have someone with your background, your experience, your voice, someone who’s been literally fighting tort reform for 30 years, in a visible or public way, on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Or, you might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law, serving as the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because, if Democrats lose the majority, Chuck Grassley will be the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The horror! A lawyer touting his shared credentials before a room of fellow lawyers! And he wasn’t just puffing up his audience: Grassley taking over the influential committee truly would be unprecedented. As the Daily Beast‘s Ben Jacobs points out, every single senator who has chaired the committee (dating back to 1816) has been a lawyer.

But the media couldn’t help itself, pouncing at the slightest whiff of a gaffe. “Despite Iowa’s centrist tendencies, Braley is heavily favored to win, and wasn’t considered a major pickup opportunity for Republicans,” a National Journal reporter wrote. “That may change now, thanks to this video.”

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Memo to Political Reporters: Iowa Is More Than Just Farming

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Alaska Republican: Birth Control Might Not Work for Women Who Binge Drink

by TawnyaRiddle Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Alaska state Sen. Pete Kelly, a Fairbanks Republican, announced last week that he wants to use state funds to supply bars with pregnancy tests to help combat the state’s epidemic of fetal alcohol syndrome. But Kelly told the Anchorage Daily News he would not support the same measure for birth control, noting that “birth control is for people who don’t necessarily want to act responsibly.” Kelly, who came under fire for his remarks by Democrats, took to the Senate floor Monday to elaborate on why he doesn’t think birth control is an effective way to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome:

If you have people who are binge drinking or chronic drinkers, we’re hesitant to say ‘use birth control as your protection against fetal alcohol syndrome,’ because again, as I say, binge drinking is a problem…If you think you can take birth control and then binge drink and hope not to produce a baby with fetal alcohol syndrome you may be very wrong. Sometimes these things don’t work. Sometimes people forget, sometimes they administer birth control improperly and you might produce a fetal alcohol syndrome baby. That would be irresponsible of us until we get better information on that to say that well, maybe that is a good idea.

When reached by Mother Jones, Kelly said “it’s fine for women both married and unmarried to use contraceptives,” but he reiterated that “people forget, people administer contraception incorrectly, and sometimes the methods simply fail.â&#128;&#139;” He said that if contraceptive measures are found to be effective at reducing fetal alcohol syndrome, lawmakers could pursue using state funds to offer them as well. He did not elaborate on whether he would personally support this, although he told the Anchorage Daily News last week that he would not.

Medical experts say that, in fact, relying on birth control to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome is an excellent idea. The Department of Pediatrics at NYU Langone Medical Center says that in order to prevent fetal alcohol syndrome, women should “use birth control until they are able to quit drinking” and “avoid heavy drinking when not using birth control.” The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism recommends that social workers advise women who are likely to drink if they become pregnant to use birth control.

At the Senate session, Kelly expressed dismay over how people have fixated on his birth control comments. “Because it got kind of caught up in the blogosphere, it got turned into something like a war on women or something like that. That’s not important. What is important…are these pregnancy tests kiosks,” he said. In a Facebook post earlier this week, he criticized Democrats for “turning his attempt to deal with the tragedy of FASD fetal alcohol syndrome into such disgusting politics.”

“Pete Kelly’s going all out with the War on Women, but from his defensive comments it looks like Alaska women may be winning,” Kay Brown, executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party, said in a press release on Monday.

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Alaska Republican: Birth Control Might Not Work for Women Who Binge Drink

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There’s a Reason that Right-Wing Crackpots are More Newsworthy Than Lefty Crackpots

by Amilianp2t Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Dave Weigel is tired of the liberal press getting all hot and bothered every time some fringe Republican nutball says something stupid. Fair enough. But today he provides yet another example and then makes a problematic comparison:

To date, nearly 90,000 people have “liked” or “shared” a story tagged “Candidate Who Blames Gay Rights for Tornadoes Scores Big GOP Win.” The candidate is Susanne Atanus, “who believes that God dictates weather patterns and that tornadoes, autism and dementia are God’s punishments for marriage equality.”

What’s missing from the story? Atanus’ status as a fringe candidate. She’s running in Illinois’ 9th District, which covers the liberal northern suburbs of Chicago….Susanne Atanus will never, ever serve in Congress.

….Both parties are going to be cursed with a few idiot candidates this year….In 2012 the declining Tennessee Democratic Party accidentally nominated a conspiracy-minded flooring installer for U.S. Senate. The media did not hustle down to Nashville and Memphis to cover him. No Democrat in another state was asked whether they agreed with this candidate about the NAFTA superhighway or the “Godless new world order.”

Why didn’t the media hustle down to Nashville to interview Mark Clayton? Wikipedia does as good a job as anyone explaining it:

Tennessee’s Democratic Party disavowed the candidate over his active role in the Public Advocate of the United States, which they described as a “known hate group”. They blamed his victory among a slate of little-known candidates on the fact that his name appeared first on the ballot, and said they would do nothing to help his campaign, urging Democrats to vote for “the write-in candidate of their choice” in November.

In the case of Clayton, nobody thought he represented the secret id of the Democratic Party. And the local party went out of its way to make sure Clayton was well and truly shunned as a crackpot they wanted nothing to do with.

Has anything similar happened in Illinois? Has the Republican Party denounced Atanus and urged voters to cast their ballots for someone else? No they haven’t. Actually, yes they have. See update below. Do reporters believe that Atanus does indeed represent a significant segment of the modern Republican base? Yes they do. Is this fair? Well….yes. It kind of is fair, isn’t it?

As it happens, I think that fringey right-wing candidates get less attention than Weigel believes. Sure, HuffPo plays them up, for the same reason they have a whole staff devoted to finding and posting sideboobs. It’s clickbait for the online hordes. But does the rest of the media obsess about the Susanne Atanuses of the world? Not really. Not if you’re a normal, casual news consumer, rather than an omnivore like Weigel and all the rest of us bloggy denizens. And to the extent they do cover the right-wing crackpots more than the lefty variety, the truth is that it’s pretty justified. These folks represent a real constituency, and the mainstream of the Republican Party, far from disowning them, practically falls all over itself to insist that they have nothing but admiration and respect for their willingness to stand up and fight for traditional values without compromise. That makes them worth a story.

UPDATE: Hey, it turns out that the media did write about Mark Clayton. The liberal media, that is. Here is MoJo’s own Tim Murphy writing on the day after the primary.

UPDATE 2: Weigel points out that the chairman of the Illinois GOP did indeed denounce Atanus after her gaffe. Fair point. Still, she’s hardly the first conservative to blame our problems on God’s wrath against liberal hedonism. It’s not unreasonable to think she represents a persistent strain of conservative thought and therefore deserves a bit of attention.

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There’s a Reason that Right-Wing Crackpots are More Newsworthy Than Lefty Crackpots

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Whoa there! State lawmakers try to make oil trains safer

by LeonoreBoyle Posted on March 19, 2014

Whoa there! State lawmakers try to make oil trains safer

By

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The wheels of railway safety reform may be in motion in Minnesota, but they’ve ground to a halt in Washington state.

Each day, an average of six trains bearing particularly incendiary fracked crude travel through Minnesota’s Twin Cities, rattling the nerves of residents and lawmakers. The main worries are about potential derailments and explosions, but oil spills are also a concern, as evidenced by the recent leak of 12,000 gallons from a moving train in the state’s southeast.

On Monday, Minnesota state Rep. Frank Hornstein introduced legislation that aims to protect the state from oil-by-rail accidents. The Star Tribune reports:

“We have a proliferation of oil trains and pipelines in this state,” Hornstein said in an interview. “This is an unprecedented challenge to the state. We need to have these resources to keep communities safe.”

Three bills were introduced Monday that would require railroads to regularly notify local officials about oil train movements, require railroads and pipeline operators to respond to spills promptly, improve grade crossings and add state track inspectors.

The legislation grew out of concern that firefighters across the state lack training and specialized equipment to fight a massive fire like the Dec. 30 oil train wreck near Casselton, N.D., in which multiple tank cars exploded and burst into flames.

Meanwhile, in Washington state, bills that would have boosted oil-train safety died last week after Republicans and Democrats couldn’t agree on them and the state legislature adjourned for the year. From the Associated Press:

Several measures to address oil shipments by rail died as lawmakers adjourned the 60-day session, including a resolution calling for tougher federal standards for tank cars and a bill aimed at ensuring that state laws on oil spill response cover oil from Canadian tar sands. …

Three terminals in the Northwest are already receiving crude oil by trains that run through Washington. Other facilities are proposed at the ports of Grays Harbor and Vancouver, and at refineries.

The federal government is also gradually moving forward with efforts to make oil trains safer. Last month, railway operators met with federal regulators and agreed to slow certain oil trains down to 40 miles per hour as they pass through 46 urban areas, starting on July 1. Railway companies also agreed to boost rail inspections and take other steps to improve safety.

But the feds need to be doing a lot more to crack down on railway companies, like requiring them to use sturdier, safer cars — starting yesterday, not next year.


Source
3 Minnesota bills seek to address oil transport safety concerns, Star Tribune
Washington lawmakers take little action on oil transport bills during legislative session that adjourned last week, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Whoa there! State lawmakers try to make oil trains safer

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Playing Political Games With Surgeon Generals Is Nothing New

by KaliWallwork Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Vivek Murthy, President Obama’s nominee as surgeon general, supports regulations on gun use. This has earned him fierce opposition from the NRA and seems likely to sink his nomination entirely. Paul Waldman comments:

In the calculations over whether Murthy could get confirmed, it’s notable that everyone assumes, almost certainly correctly, that every Republican in the Senate will, of course, vote against the nomination. George W. Bush appointed only one surgeon general, Richard Carmona. He was confirmed by a vote of 98 to 0. But those days are gone — what do you expect Republicans to do, examine a nominee’s qualifications and vote to confirm if he’d obviously do a fine job? Please. The default used to be that a president will get the nominees he chooses unless there’s something really egregious in their past or what they’re likely to do if confirmed, but when it comes to this president and this Congress, that has been turned upside down. Now the Republican position is that every nominee should be rejected, unless there’s some kind of a deal that allows them to get something in exchange.

I’ve made similar kinds of comments in the past, so I can’t really object to seeing them repeated here. Still, it’s worth remembering a little history. First: although President Obama’s initial choice for surgeon general, Regina Benjamin, ran into some Republican opposition when her nomination came to the floor, she was confirmed unanimously within a few days, just like Richard Carmona, Bush’s first surgeon general. Second: after Carmona’s term expired, Bush’s next nominee for surgeon general, James Holsinger, ran into a buzzsaw of Democratic opposition based on a paper he had written in 1991 which argued that “homosexuality isn’t natural or healthy.” When the Bush White House suggested it might install Holsinger via a recess appointment, Harry Reid kept the Senate in pro forma sessions to prevent it. Eventually Holsinger’s nomination died.

There was more going on with Holsinger, including his refusal to answer written questions, but basically his nomination was killed because of his anti-gay views. He insisted that his 1991 paper no longer represented his current views, but it didn’t matter.

So do Murthy’s problems demonstrate the strength of the NRA? Sure. But Holsinger’s problems demonstrated the strength of liberal LGBT views among Democrats. There’s nothing very new going on here.

In fact, I half wonder if opposition to Murthy is partly payback for Democrats killing Holsinger’s nomination. I’d be curious to hear about this from reporters who cover the conservative movement. Down in the bowels of email lists and Sarah Palin fan clubs, do tea partiers still hold a grudge over Holsinger’s defeat? Or has that long since been forgotten?

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Playing Political Games With Surgeon Generals Is Nothing New

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