Tag Archives: election

Donald Trump is Predictable and Controllable. On the Other Hand, He’s Also Predictable and Controllable.

by Darci5363yxecmd Posted on October 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein writes about what we’ve learned for the thousandth time this week about Donald Trump:

The problem isn’t that Trump is cruel, though he is. The problem isn’t that Trump is boorish, though he is. The problem isn’t that Trump is undisciplined, though he is.

The problem is that Trump is predictable and controllable….His behavior, though unusual, is quite predictable — a fact the Clinton campaign proved by predicting it. His actions, though beyond the control ofhis allies, can be controlled by his enemies — a fact they proved by controlling them.

….Donald Trump can be forgiven for being caught off-guard at Monday’s debate. His presidency-disqualifying sin came in the hours after the debate. The Clinton campaign released a slickly produced video featuring Machado. The Guardian and Cosmopolitan rushed pre-planned Machado profiles to publication. Hillary Clinton did everything but spraypaint “THIS IS A TRAP” on the side of Trump Tower.

And still Trump fell for it. And fell for it. And fell for it. Six days later, he’s still falling for it.

All of this is precisely true. As Klein says, what Hillary Clinton did was so obvious, and so ploddingly executed, that it’s almost wrong to call it a trap. Any half-witted high school debater could have swatted it away contemptuously. But the Clinton camp knew Trump would fall for it anyway, and he did. His lizard-brain approach to life is that predictable.

But the funny thing is that there’s a completely different way that Trump’s biggest problem is that he’s predictable and controllable. In fact, it’s what I expected Klein’s post to be about when I read that line.

For months, liberals have been afraid that Trump might be smarter than he seems. Once the primary was over, he’d be able to remake himself as a normal person for a few consecutive months, and that might be enough to convince fence-sitters that he was presidential material. And for a while, after he brought Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway on board, it looked like that might happen. Trump calmed down and allowed his team to guide him. He started picking up a few points in the polls. Democrats were getting scared.

If he had kept that up, this might have turned into a real nailbiter of an election. And that was the real fear. Trump can, in fact, be predictable and controllable in a good way, and if he had managed to keep up that facade from Labor Day to Election Day, he might have fooled a fair number of people into voting for him. Fortunately, he couldn’t keep up the act, and within a few weeks he once again became predictable and controllable in a bad way.

In the end, Trump’s inability to play a role for even a few weeks in a row might be the only thing that saves us from a Trump presidency. That’s a little too close for comfort.

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Donald Trump is Predictable and Controllable. On the Other Hand, He’s Also Predictable and Controllable.

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Hillary Clinton Is Finally Feeling the Bern

by JensStocks Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve been a mite hard on Bernie Sanders, and a couple of weeks ago I was eager to put it behind me. Sanders was scheduled to do some weekend campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Ohio, but when I went to the tape on Monday I discovered that his rallies had been poorly attended (possibly not his fault) and that his pitch for Clinton was not notably enthusiastic. So I just said nothing.

Today, however, Ed Kilgore tells me that bygones, apparently, are finally bygones:

Now Sanders is back on the trail not just on Clinton’s behalf but by her side, beginning with an appearance in New Hampshire last night. And his message is significantly more focused on her agenda, and not just as an afterthought….They sounded much more like teammates working together than former antagonists forced to combine forces against a common enemy.

Aside from targeted campaigning, a sharpening of the Sanders message for Clinton, which seemed to be developing in New Hampshire, would be helpful just about everywhere. His new rap about the consequences of a Donald Trump victory, which makes sitting out the election a great moral error, is pretty strong. He might want to add in some reminders of the kind of world Libertarians like Gary Johnson want to build, where, yeah, you can smoke weed, but you’re totally on your own in facing life’s vicissitudes.

In any event, it seems the bad feelings and genuine differences of opinion of the 2016 Democratic primaries are finally fading to the point where Bernie Sanders is an indispensable asset for Clinton. If the race stays close, it could matter a lot.

This is good news for Team Clinton, which needs all the help it can get. Only 40 days to go!

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Hillary Clinton Is Finally Feeling the Bern

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Climate change got 82 seconds in the presidential debate

by SabrinaMiles Posted on September 27, 2016

One minute and 22 seconds were spent on climate change and other environmental issues in Monday’s presidential debate — and that was pretty much all Hillary Clinton talking. (Surprise, surprise.) How does that compare to debates in past years? We ran the numbers on the past five election cycles to find out.

The high point for attention to green issues came in 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush spent just over 14 minutes talking about the environment over the course of three debates. The low point came in 2012, when climate change and other environmental issues got no time at all during the presidential debates. Some years, climate change came up during the vice presidential debates as well.

2016 so far: 1 minute, 22 seconds in one presidential debate.

2012: 0 minutes.

2008: 5 minutes, 18 seconds in two presidential debates. An additional 5 minutes, 48 seconds in a vice presidential debate.

2004: 5 minutes, 14 seconds in a single presidential debate.

2000: 14 minutes, 3 seconds in three presidential debates. 5 minutes, 21 seconds in a vice presidential debate.

In total, over the five election seasons we looked at, climate change and the environment got 37 minutes and 6 seconds on the prime-time stage during the presidential and vice presidential debates. That’s out of more than 1,500 minutes of debate. Not an impressive showing.

A note about how we arrived at these times:

We parsed questions asked of candidates and searched the transcripts for keywords like “climate,” “environment,” “energy,” and “warming.” We cross-referenced the transcripts with video of the debates. Only the mentions that pertained to fighting climate change, cleaning up the environment, and reducing emissions counted. President Obama’s passing reference to clean energy jobs in 2012 didn’t count, nor did discussions of energy security, because they were in the context of the economy and not fighting climate change.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this election

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Climate change got 82 seconds in the presidential debate

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This Is How We Know Congress Isn’t Really Serious About Election Fraud

by Vince4171216 Posted on September 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The debate over possible Russian meddling in US elections was a major theme in a US House hearing Tuesday on protecting the 2016 elections from cyberattacks and machine-voting attacks. Even though election preparations have been underway for months around the country and early voting in many states begins soon, committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said the hearing was to review the security of the election system.

“This discussion is timely as many concerns have been raised in recent months about the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, voting over the internet, and online voter registration,” Smith said.

Concerns about the security of the US voting system have been heightened after the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and some high-profile Democratic politicians. The DNC, along with several US government officials and security research firms, have fingered Russian intelligence as responsible for the hacks of Democratic targets. Add to that the recent revelation that state election databases in Arizona and Illinois had been hacked, although the degree of success in each attack, and the ultimate purpose, remains unclear. Even though the Russian government has denied being involved, Democrats within Congress have called on the Obama administration to publicly accuse Russia of trying to interfere with US elections.

None of the witnesses—Dr. Charles Romine of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and Dr. Dan Wallach of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University—suggested Russians were attempting to hack election infrastructure, only that they, too, had received this information specific to the DNC and the DCCC from press accounts.

“The nature of the threat is that they don’t want you to see them there,” said Wallach. “So we can’t assume that if we haven’t seen them that they’re absent. What we do know is that we’ve established motive. The attack on the DNC’s email server is motive—it shows that they did it for explicit partisan purposes.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said the Russians’ goal might not necessarily be to manipulate vote counts or tamper with voter registration databases, but to create chaos in the system and undermine confidence. “The focus of this hearing is on the voting systems, but really the question is about the election,” she said. “It’s pretty clear that the Russians have attacked, have engaged, in a cyberattack on the DNC and the DCCC.”

For Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.), Russian involvement in trying to hack or access actual election systems around the country lacked any evidence. “We have seen article after article after article about how Russia is compromising the integrity of our election system, and Mr. Chairman, the panelists are just saying that is false,” Rohrbacher said. “We want our country to be safe, but we also don’t want to just continually vilify Russia and turning them into the bad guys. If we’re going to have integrity of our system, I think we have to look at home for real threats to the integrity of our voting system.”

Lofgren disagreed. “To downplay the role that the Russians have had in this is a huge mistake, when you take a look at what they did to the DNC and the DCCC,” Lofgren said, urging members to avoid making the discussion about hacking partisan. “If you attack one of the major parties, somehow that’s okay if it could be to your advantage,” she said. “I like to think if the Russians had attacked the Republican National Committee, Democrats would be as outraged as Republicans. It’s an attack on America. It’s not an attack on a party.”

The hearing came the same day that Guccifer 2.0, the hacker or hackers who have publicly taken credit for the hack of the DNC, issued a rambling statement about information security at a London cybersecurity conference where he was supposed to appear (he didn’t), according to Motherboard. Guccifer did release roughly 600 megabytes of documents containing information about DNC fundraising efforts and other Democratic planning documents at the conference, according to Politico.*

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the documents released today by the hacker Guccifer 2.0 came from a Democratic contracting firm. We regret the error.

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This Is How We Know Congress Isn’t Really Serious About Election Fraud

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A Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Bill?

by eunicewalters13 Posted on September 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Has the moon turned blue? Has Hell frozen over? Could there actually be a bipartisan campaign finance reform bill in this of all years?

OK, it’s far from the kind of sweeping change that backers of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United want. And it’s a long way from public financing for congressional elections. But supporters of Rep. Paul Gosar’s Stop Foreign Donations Affecting Our Elections Act are billing it as an important sign that Democrats and Republicans can find ways to work together on an issue that has long been hyper-partisan.

Gosar, an Arizonan who belongs to the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus, has rounded up 81 co-sponsors for his bill, including 30 Democrats. They run the political gamut from political giant-killer Dave Brat, who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) by running to his right in a primary, to Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), whom the nonpartisan GovTrack ranks among the most liberal members of the US House. Two Democrats who are running for Senate in their respective states, Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, also have signed on.

The bill is also supported by all nine members of the House Administration Committee, which is charged with clearing the legislation for floor action. “I work it,”grins Gosar, a loose-limbed 57-year-old with a boyish fetlock, explaining how a lawmaker of his strong ideological bent (he made headlines for boycotting Pope Francis’ speech to Congress) managed to put together such a diverse coalition. He’s hoping for a House vote soon.

What Gosar describes as a “commonsense bill”would require federal candidates who accept political donations by credit card to verify the donor’s identity by obtaining the credit card verification code (the three- or four-digit number that most commercial vendors already insist on having with a purchase), as well as the card’s billing address.

Because that information currently is not required, “it leaves the door wide open”to violations of campaign law, including illegal contributions from foreign donors, according to John Pudner, a former Republican political consultant whose last gig was managing the Brat campaign that unseated Cantor. He has since started a conservative campaign finance reform group called Take Back Our Republic.

At a forum this summer sponsored by Federal Election Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, Pudner described a scenario that would enable donors to violate both the federal limits on campaign donations and the prohibition on foreign donors by using the same credit card over and over to make contributions under the $200 limit above which the FEC requires names and addresses of the donors.

“If I was an unscrupulous political consultant and didn’t care about foreign law, I’d set up a room full of people, retype over and over the credit card number, $200 a pop,”Pudner said. “That avenue is there and so easy.”Does Pudner actually believe it’s happening? “The longer you have a loophole like this, the more likely it is to be abused,”he said.

Part of the appeal of Gosar’s bill for some Republicans is that it can be cast as a poke at President Barack Obama, whose 2008 and 2012 campaigns pulled in millions in small donations, some from unverified credit cards. Pudner, who says he has spoken with Obama campaign veterans about the measure, doesn’t think the president’s team was trying to violate the law, calling the loophole an “unintended consequence”of Obama’s aggressive fundraising strategy.

This year, Pudner said, both Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns are verifying the identities of credit card donors but Bernie Sanders — whose spokesman scoffed at Gosar’s bill as “a solution in search of a problem”— did not. A 2012 report by the conservative Government Accountability Institute found nearly half the members of Congress are not verifying credit card donations.

Longtime campaign finance advocates have pointed out that there are many other ways for illegal foreign contributions to find their ways into the political system, either through the “dark money”groups that, because of their 501(c)4 status, don’t report donors, or legally, through the US subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies.

But Pudner — who says his group gets financial backing from both conservative activists and foundations, such as the Stuart Family Fund, as well as more traditional campaign finance reform funders such as the Rockefeller Brothers and the Democracy Fund — argues that the Gosar measure represents an important first step to recognizing that, as he said at the FEC forum, “there’s real grounds for agreement”between conservatives and liberals on some campaign finance reform measures.

Though Gosar hardly sounds ready to jump aboard the get-big-money-out-of-politics bandwagon (“a well-educated electorate is very important,”he said), the congressman doesn’t disagree.

“Who knows? I mean start on the things you agree on and go from there,”he said. “To be honest, you take baby steps. You crawl before you walk and you walk before you run.”

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A Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Bill?

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Washington Post Admits the Hillary Clinton Email Mountain Is a Molehill After All

by NevaFulkerson78 Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post writes today that the Hillary Clinton email story is “out of control”:

Judging by the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not.

….Ironically, even as the email issue consumed so much precious airtime, several pieces of news reported Wednesday should have taken some steam out of the story. First is a memo FBI Director James B. Comey sent to his staff….Second is the emergence of an email exchange between Ms. Clinton and former secretary of state Colin Powell….Last is a finding that 30 Benghazi-related emails that were recovered during the FBI email investigation and recently attracted big headlines had nothing significant in them….The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

I’m not quite sure how to take this. On the one hand, hasn’t the Washington Post hyped the email story as much as anybody? On the other hand, even if they have, they still deserve credit for seeing the light.

The email story is one of the hardest kinds of stories for the press to handle appropriately. At the beginning of a story like this, it’s impossible to know if there’s something to it. Then the facts drip out slowly over the course of months as everyone chases leads. At some point it becomes clear that there’s no there there, but reasonable people can disagree on when that point is. Personally, I’d date it from sometime between October of last year, when Trey Gowdy’s committee was unable to find anything even marginally corrupt during an 11-hour inquisition of Clinton, and July of this year, when FBI director James Comey made it clear that she had done nothing remotely serious enough to warrant prosecution.

But that’s it. Since at least July we’ve basically known the contours of the entire affair. Clinton was foolish to use a single email account hosted on a personal server—which she’s acknowledged—but that’s it. Beyond that, it was an unclassified system and everyone treated it like one. The retroactively classified emails are more a spat between State and the intelligence community than anything else. Nor is there any evidence that Clinton was trying to evade FOIA by hosting her email on a private server. That would have been (a) deliberate and calculating deception on a Nixonian scale; (b) phenomenally stupid since nearly all of her emails were sent to state.gov addresses and were therefore accessible anyway; and (c) unusually half-assed since she retained the emails for years after she left office and turned them over as soon as State asked for them. Only an idiot would try to evade FOIA like this, and even her bitterest enemies don’t think Hillary Clinton is an idiot.

Emailgate has been investigated and reported to death. Unless some genuine bombshell drops, further leaks should be treated as obvious partisan attacks, not news, and further production of emails should be noted briefly on page A17. Let’s not turn this into another Whitewater.

And with that out of the way, can we now move on to the Clinton Foundation? It’s been investigated to death as well, and the only thing we’ve learned is that Doug Band needs to shut his pie hole a little more often. Aside from that, literally every shred of evidence points to (a) appropriate behavior from Hillary Clinton and her staff; (b) Bill Clinton leveraging his fame to raise money for charity; and (c) billions of dollars spent on worthy causes. Beyond that, you might find Bill’s personal moneymaking enterprises a little off-putting, but that’s all. So how about if we give the Foundation a rest too?

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Washington Post Admits the Hillary Clinton Email Mountain Is a Molehill After All

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Trump Visit to Black Church Will Feature Protests But No Speech

by RubySlavin Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is hoping that his upcoming appearance at a predominantly black church in Detroit will help him make inroads with black voters. But before Trump mingles with worshipers at Great Faith Ministries on Saturday, he will be welcomed by a protest organized by a black pastor critical of the presidential candidate.

On Monday, the Detroit Free Press reported that Rev. W.J. Rideout III, the leader of All God’s People Church and a community activist, is planning a “March on Donald Trump” protest for Saturday. Rideout told the paper that while he does not oppose Trump’s speaking in Detroit, “I don’t want him to think that he can come in here and get our votes.”

In a recent interview with CNN, Rideout said that Trump’s recent attempts to reach black voters are too little too late after more than a year of comments critical of Muslims, immigrants, and other minorities.

“How can I give him credit for the things that he has said about black African Americans, Latinos, gays, lesbians?” he said. “The things that he has said is not peaceful talk. He’s trying to build walls and we’re trying to build bridges.”

Rideout did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s upcoming appearance at Great Faith Ministries was initially billed as the candidate’s first speech before a black audience, an attempt to counter recent criticism that Trump’s black outreach consisted wholly of talking about black communities in front of white audiences. Earlier this week, Trump’s campaign manager said that the candidate is planning to visit several black churches prior to Election Day.

But on Wednesday, the Free Press reported that Trump actually won’t address the congregation during his time in the church on Saturday. Instead, he will attend a sermon and then sit down for a one-on-one interview with the congregation’s leader, Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, that will be broadcast on the Impact Network, a Christian television cable network owned by the minister. The network, which Jackson claims reaches some 50 million homes, usually broadcasts sermons and other religious programming, but will air the interview with Trump as a network special. The interview will not be open to the media and will not be filmed before an audience.

Jackson says that while Trump will not address the congregation during the service, the candidate’s appearance could lead to informal interactions. “He’ll be here Saturday,” Jackson told the paper. “He’s going to sit in service and have the experience in the black church, and then he and I will be in this office and do an interview for the Impact Network that will be aired later on. Just like any visitor, there will be fellowship at the service, and he can talk to people one-on-one.” Jackson has said that he has also invited Hillary Clinton to appear at the church and sit down for an interview.

Trump’s interview will be filmed on Saturday but won’t air for at least a week.

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Trump Visit to Black Church Will Feature Protests But No Speech

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Obama designates world’s largest protected area — it’s underwater

by DorisNewhouse Posted on August 26, 2016

Obama designates world’s largest protected area — it’s underwater

By on Aug 26, 2016Share

President Obama, who marked the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service by designating a whole new land monument in Maine, is giving oceans some love, too.

On Friday, he expanded the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, also known as Papahānaumokuākea, to 582,578 square miles. At nearly three-and-a-half times the size of California, the monument is now the world’s largest protected area.

Papahānaumokuākea encompasses 10 islands and atolls of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, which supports over 7,000 species — a quarter of which are unique to Hawaii.

Native Hawaiians urged for the monument’s expansion back in January and consider the place a “the boundary between Ao, the world of light and the living, and Pō, the world of the gods and spirits from which all life is born and to which ancestors return after death,” according to the White House.

Protecting this area means it will be closed for the extraction of oil, gas, minerals, and other energy development. You can learn more about it from this video by Pew:

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Obama designates world’s largest protected area — it’s underwater

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Donald Trump Has Killed Off Support for a Border Wall

by Monty5006709 Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve been bemused for a while by the support for Donald Trump among hard-core anti-immigrant pundits. Mainly this is because I wonder why they think he’s serious about his wall. Pretty much everything he says and does is a con job of one kind or another, and there’s no real reason to think he’d stick to his guns about the wall if he became president. Instead, since he doesn’t actually care one way or the other about this, he’d probably cut a deal with Paul Ryan for some kind of comprehensive immigration reform—and it would have a far better chance of actually passing than it would if Hillary Clinton proposed it. For the anti-immigrant dead-enders, Trump is likely to be the worst possible choice.

More recently, though, I’ve also begun to think that Trump will be bad for the anti-immigrant crowd even if he loses. For starters, it’s never good to have your signature policy associated with a loser. More to the point, though, we all know that public support for specific policies depends a lot on who they come from. When President Obama supports something, Republicans suddenly hate it. When Trump supports something, people who dislike Trump suddenly hate it. Since Trump is dropping in the polls like a rock, this suggests that support for getting tough on immigrants might be dropping too.

Michael Tesler reports that this is exactly what’s happened:

A number of studies have found that Trump performed best in the primaries among the most anti-immigrant Republicans. But now, in the middle of the general election campaign, Trump is easily the most unpopular major party nominee in modern times. And his historic unpopularity may have also eroded support for the border wall.

The Pew Research Center gauged support for the border fence before and after June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy. The percentage supporting the border fence was the exact same in 2007, 2011, and 2015: 46 percent. However, that dropped to 36 percent in March 2016.

In CBS/New York Times polls, public support for “building a wall along the US-Mexico border to try to stop illegal immigration” also dropped….The results from the RAND Corp’s Presidential Election Panel Survey (PEPS) are even more telling….The PEPS data reveal who was particularly likely to shift to opposing the border wall: people who did not like Trump in 2015.

….It appears, then, that Trump’s strong support for the border wall has made this policy considerably less popular with the American public.

Supporting Trump was always a high-risk strategy for supporters of a border wall. They put all their money on snake eyes, and it turns out the dice were not their friends.

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Donald Trump Has Killed Off Support for a Border Wall

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Donald Trump Is Doing Pretty Well Considering That He Isn’t Advertising At All

by FlorencSherer Posted on August 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about the fact that Donald Trump has so far spent $0 on TV advertising. Here is Jeet Heer:

Hillary Clinton has entered the field with $13 million in Olympics ad spending, but her competitor is nowhere to be seen. Astonishingly, Donald Trump’s campaign is spending zero dollars on Olympics advertising. And it’s not just in Olympics ads that Clinton is winning by default. To date, the Trump campaign has been unwilling to spend one thin penny on television advertising.

….In recent weeks, he’s upped his fundraising game, bringing in more than $91 million. So Trump has the money, he’s just not choosing to spend it. This is further evidence that Trump’s not running a real campaign, but something closer to a scampaign.

Maybe. But does it occur to anyone that this might be a danger sign for Hillary? She’s about 6-7 points ahead of Trump at the moment, which sounds great until you think about the fact that she’s spent $90 million on ads to Trump’s zero. Perhaps the Trump campaign is gambling that ads this far ahead of Election Day don’t have much effect, so he might as well wait until September and then unleash a gigantic blitz. They might even be right. In any case, once he does start advertising, surely that will cut Hillary’s lead.

How much will it cut her lead? That’s a good question, isn’t it?

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Donald Trump Is Doing Pretty Well Considering That He Isn’t Advertising At All

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