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Trump Just Held His First Campaign Rally for the 2020 Race

Mother Jones

On Saturday, just one month into his presidency, President Donald Trump held the first rally of his 2020 presidential campaign.

Trump was introduced by several Florida congressmen before making a dramatic entrance. To the soundtrack of the movie Air Force One, the presidential aircraft pulled into the airplane hangar where the rally was being held. Earlier this week, the White House said in a statement that they would not use the plane in the background as a prop, something Trump did often during the campaign with his own airplane.

After Melania Trump recited the “Our Father” and said a few words, Donald Trump opened his rally with an attack on the media. “I also want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news,” he said, accusing news outlets of writing false stories about him using made-up sources. “When the media lies to people, I will never, ever let them get away with it.” For the next 45 minutes he returned to his familiar themes of the wall on the US-Mexico border, keeping out unvetted immigrants, the unreliable judiciary, and America’s return to greatness.

In one particularly odd moment, Trump forced the Secret Service to let a man who had complimented his presidency during a pre-rally interview join him on stage. Trump instructed the man to climb over a fence to get to the stage and then briefly gave him the microphone to address the crowd. Trump acknowledged that the Secret Service was probably not pleased with this, but “we know our people,” he said.

Trump also lashed out at the Ninth Circuit appeals court that overturned his executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim nations, saying that thousands of immigrants have been allowed into the country with no vetting. “There was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. Nothing,” he said. In fact, the immigration process for refugees and other immigrants requires extensive vetting and documentation. Trump also said he’s ordered the Department of Justice to protect police and sheriffs “from crimes of violence,” and reiterated his plans to cut taxes, while also promising to implement a trillion dollar infrastructure program around the country.

You can watch the full speech here:

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Trump Just Held His First Campaign Rally for the 2020 Race

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The F-18 vs. the F-35: ¿Quien Es Mas Macho?

Mother Jones

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More brilliance from Donald Trump:

There is nothing that military buffs love more than nerding out about the F-18 vs. the F-35. The F-18 is cheaper! The F-35 is stealthier! The F-18 makes tighter turns! The F-35 is a one-seater! The F-18 is better in a dogfight! The F-35 has better avionics! The F-18 can be fitted with external fuel tanks for longer range! Denmark says the F-35 was a clear winner in its flight tests! Canada says it wants the F-18! This is the kind of argument that Trump fans adore.

But on a substantive level, Trump’s tweet is junior high school stuff. Boeing has been building new variants of the F-18 ever since it was introduced. They’ve already demonstrated upgraded Block III Super Hornets designed (they claim) to perform most of the missions envisioned for the F-35. In other words, they don’t need to “price-out” a “comparable” F-18. They’ve already done it, and everyone in the military is well aware of what Boeing has to offer. Besides, the F-18 will never be as stealthy as the F-35 and it will never have the same avionics, so there’s no way to ever make it truly comparable anyway.

As near as I can tell, once the F-35 is fully tested, the software constraints are tuned, and its pilots get enough flight hours behind them, the F-35 will be indisputably superior to the F-18 at nearly the same per-unit cost as the latest and greatest Super Hornet. Considering that the F-18 is forty years old, it sure ought to be. The program as a whole may have been an epic disaster, but now that it’s done the F-35 is going to be America’s primary multirole fighter for the next few decades. There’s no going back.

So what’s up? Is Trump just trying to make nice with Boeing after dissing the cost of the new Air Force Ones? Does he think this is a clever tactic to scare Lockheed Martin into offering the F-35 at a lower price? Did some admiral get his attention and gripe about the F-35 being a single-engine airframe? Is he just blowing hot air? As usual, no one knows.

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The F-18 vs. the F-35: ¿Quien Es Mas Macho?

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Bombs and Backbiting: The Syrian Cease-fire Is Off to a Great Start

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov announced an imminent cease-fire in Syria, government planes bombed a crowded marketplace killing 61 and wounding 100 more. By weekend’s end, at least 90 people had died in regime airstrikes, including 28 children. Today, President Bashar al-Assad publicly vowed to “recover every inch of Syria from the terrorists” and decried those in the opposition who “were betting on promises from foreign powers, which will result in nothing.”

In other words, the long-awaited Syrian cease-fire appears to be off to a great start.

The agreement, which was announced early Saturday morning in Geneva, officially began at sundown today. It comes after 10 months of failed attempts to reach a political settlement to a conflict that’s killed nearly half a million people and spawned the largest refugee crisis since World War II. While some observers argue that the cease-fire is the best opportunity to bring a pause to the violence, the plan has been greeted mostly with skepticism.

If the truce endures for a week and humanitarian aid begins to flow into besieged areas, the United States and Russia say they will put aside their differences over the legitimacy of the Assad regime and work to target two jihadist groups, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the former Al Qaeda-affiliate that recently rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS).

In theory, the cease-fire deal prohibits the Syrian Air Force from flying raids over opposition-held areas, except for those controlled by ISIS or JFS. Kerry called this “the bedrock of the agreement,” labeling the Syrian Air Force the “main driver of civilian casualties.” But as Michael Weiss of The Daily Beast writes, outside of excluding ISIS and JFS, the deal does not clearly define the ideologically mixed groups that make up the Syrian opposition forces.

As part of the agreement, more moderate rebel groups must distance themselves from JFS or risk being targeted. But Syria’s mainstream armed opposition forces, as Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, puts it, “are extensively ‘marbled’ or ‘coupled’ with JFS forces…This is not a reflection of ideological affinity as much as it is merely a military necessity.” Lister wrote on Saturday that “not a single one has suggested any willingness to withdraw from the frontlines on which JFS is present. To them, doing so means effectively ceding territory to the regime, as they have little faith in a long-term cessation of hostilities holding.”

Under the new deal, the Syrian government is only banned from striking areas agreed to by both Russia and the United States, and the Assad regime and Russia are permitted to strike JFS (the group formerly known as Nusra) without prior American consent if it’s in response to “imminent threats.” Weiss asks, “What is to stop Damascus and Moscow from suddenly finding ‘imminent threats’ everywhere against parties they insist are Nusra or Nusra-affiliated before Washington can concur?”

Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake points out that the Pentagon and the US intelligence community are deeply skeptical about sharing intelligence with the Russians on Syria. Even if the first week’s truce holds, he writes, “is it even desirable for US intelligence officers to be sharing the locations of US-backed rebels in Syria with a Russian Air Force that has been bombing them for nearly a year?”

On Sunday, rebel groups sent a letter to the United States agreeing to “cooperate positively” with the cease-fire. But they added that they have deep concerns “linked to our survival and continuation as a revolution.” Among their top concerns: The agreement neglects many besieged areas outside of Aleppo, lacks guarantees or sanctions against violations, and doesn’t ban Syrian jets from flying for up to nine days following the beginning of the cease-fire. It also called the exclusion of JFS, but not Iranian-backed Shiite militias, a double standard. One American-backed rebel faction has already called the deal a “trap.”

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, reports of alleged cease-fire violations emerged within one hour of its official start on Monday night, as the Assad regime launched artillery strikes on Al-Hara and dropped a barrel bomb on Aleppo.

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Bombs and Backbiting: The Syrian Cease-fire Is Off to a Great Start

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"This Could Be the Stupidest Thing Ever Said in the History of Presidential Campaigns"

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump and nukes. Nukes and Donald Trump. They don’t really go together, unless you are having a nightmare. Over the past few weeks a fair number of people have been understandably freaking out over the idea that if Donald Trump wins in November, he will have virtually unfettered power to fire off nuclear weapons. In June, Politico ran a frankly horrifying piece outlining exactly how presidents go about facing the nuclear question. (If the military ever detected—accurately or inaccurately—a nuclear attack against the United States, the president could have as little as 30 seconds to decide how to respond.)

Esquire has a Q&A today with John Noonan, a retired Air Force officer and former adviser to Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. Noonan doesn’t mince words about Trump being unprepared. You should read the whole thing because (1) it’s fascinating, (2) it’s terrifying, and (3) this issue really can’t be talked about enough. It’s too important.

Here’s one bit that really caught my eye:

Think of the world as a playground. Does the bully—the five-foot-tall third grader with a pituitary disorder—pick on the star athlete or the 60-pound weakling? They’re not going to punch the athlete in the nose because they’ll get socked right back, so they go for the weakling every time. In America’s case, we don’t just stand up to the nuclear-armed bullies—we also stick up for the weaker kids. Russia, to wit, could impose its will on the small Baltic democracies because Russia is big and they are small. It’s American resolve, backed by nuclear weapons, that keeps Russia in check. That’s what you call deterrence.

This is what I hear from Trump: that he wants to flip that equation and make the United States the bully. That is, We’re big and we have nukes and we can use them to kill terrorists in Raqqa and Mosul. Stop us if you dare. It’s how he’s run his businesses for decades: I can do whatever I want. In the business world, it was shady and unethical. In the national-security world, it’s downright dangerous.

I don’t think it’s empty talk either. His spokesperson said a few months ago, “what good is a nuclear triad if you can’t use it?” That could the sic stupidest thing ever said in the history of presidential campaigns, which puts it in the running for stupid thing ever said in the history of humanity. (Emphasis mine) Nuclear weapons are like an understanding between the athlete and the bully: You don’t screw with me and I won’t screw with you. It’s a way for the two biggest kids on the block to communicate with each other in no uncertain terms. That Trump allegedly believes that nukes are solutions to low-intensity problems like ISIS and Al-Qaeda is raw, unfiltered insanity.

Go read the whole thing.

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"This Could Be the Stupidest Thing Ever Said in the History of Presidential Campaigns"

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New Study Suggests Police Shoot Whites More Frequently Than Blacks

Mother Jones

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In a new paper using an interesting approach, Roland Fryer finds that police officers treat blacks and Hispanics more roughly than whites, but they don’t shoot them any more frequently:

The results obtained using these data are informative and, in some cases, startling. Using data on NYC’s Stop and Frisk program, we demonstrate that on non-lethal uses of force — putting hands on civilians (which includes slapping or grabbing) or pushing individuals into a wall or onto the ground, there are large racial differences. In the raw data, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force.

In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, we find no racial differences in officer-involved shootings on either the extensive or intensive margins. Using data from Houston, Texas — where we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified — we find, in the raw data, that blacks are 23.8 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to whites. Hispanics are 8.5 percent less likely.

Analyzing data from cities in California, Texas, and Florida, Fryer found that lethal force was used more often against whites than blacks.1This is from the New York Times:

In officer-involved shootings in these cities, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both of these results undercut the idea that the police wield lethal force with racial bias.

….A more fundamental question still remained: In the tense moments when a shooting may occur, are police officers more likely to fire if the suspect is black?

To answer this question, Mr. Fryer focused on one city, Houston. The Police Department there allowed the researchers to look at reports not only for shootings but also for arrests when lethal force might have been justified. Mr. Fryer defined this group to include suspects the police charged with serious offenses like attempting to murder an officer, or evading or resisting arrest. He also considered suspects shocked with Tasers.

And in the arena of “shoot” or “don’t shoot,” Mr. Fryer found that, in tense situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot a suspect if the suspect was black. This estimate was not very precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data. But, in a variety of models that controlled for different factors and used different definitions of tense situations, Mr. Fryer found that blacks were either less likely to be shot or there was no difference between blacks and whites.

Fryer calls this “the most surprising result of my career.” Needless to say, it’s based on limited data and a new way of looking at police shootings, so Fryer’s results should be considered tentative. And it’s worth keeping in mind that lesser uses of force are far more common in encounters with blacks than whites:

“Who the hell wants to have a police officer put their hand on them or yell and scream at them? It’s an awful experience,” he said. “I’ve had it multiple, multiple times. Every black man I know has had this experience. Every one of them. It is hard to believe that the world is your oyster if the police can rough you up without punishment. And when I talked to minority youth, almost every single one of them mentions lower level uses of force as the reason why they believe the world is corrupt.”

Food for thought. Fryer is a careful and high respected researcher, and he was motivated to conduct this study by the events in Ferguson a couple of years ago. Both of his conclusions are worth taking seriously.

1The results weren’t statistically significant, so technically Fryer’s conclusion is that there’s no difference between the shooting rate of whites and blacks.

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New Study Suggests Police Shoot Whites More Frequently Than Blacks

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Why the San Francisco Police Department Is Under Heavy Fire

Mother Jones

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The San Francisco Police Department has faced intense criticism and growing scrutiny after two scandals involving racist texts by cops and a string of fatal officer-involved shootings, including that of 26-year-old Mario Woods. Against a backdrop of calls for reform and a hunger strike, the San Francisco Chronicle published a report in May looking at police shootings and use of force more broadly by the SFPD over the past 15 years. The Chronicle reviewed police data, medical examiner’s reports, and district attorney’s reports dating to 2000, revealing some stark findings:

From 2000 to 2015, there were 95 officer-involved shootings, 40 of them fatal. No charges were filed against officers in any of the shootings.
In the majority of the cases, suspects were armed with guns; eighteen cases involved suspects armed with knives, and in 11 cases the suspects were unarmed.
There were six fatal police shootings in 2015—double the year before and the highest count in 15 years. Of the eight people fatally shot by SFPD officers since last January, four were Latino, two were black, and two were white.
More than 60 percent of fatal police shootings since 2010 involved suspects with a history of mental illness.
About 160 officers, or roughly seven percent of the 2,200-strong force, were involved in the shootings. Six officers were involved in more than one.

Mother Jones sat down with San Francisco County district attorney George Gascon to talk about the Chronicle’s findings, ongoing reform efforts, and morale inside the department. Gascon, who served as chief of the SFPD before becoming a prosecutor, has called for the state attorney general’s office to investigate the SFPD for discriminatory policing practices, and has advocated for reform. “When you talk about racism in this country, we’re not exempt from that,” he said, referring to problems plaguing other police departments around the country. “And I think the beginning of a solution to that is to accept that we have the same problems and collectively—we as a nation need to begin to fix this problem.”

Morale among the rank and file is mixed, Gascon said. “There’s a sizeable number of people within the police department that believe that reform has to take place…there are other people that feel under siege,” he said, particularly since the firing of chief Greg Suhr, a move which some officers believe was political.

“What is clear to me,” he added, “is that things cannot continue to be the way that they are.”

Here are some of Gascon’s specific thoughts on reform and accountability for the SFPD:

Use of Force
There have been two fatal police shootings in San Francisco thus far in 2016. Luis Gongora was shot several times in the Mission District in April after he lunged at officers with a knife, according to the SFPD. And Jessica Williams, 29, was shot once by an officer in Bayview in May while an officer tried to remove her from a vehicle suspected to be stolen.

The SFPD should adopt a use-of-force policy that requires officers to respond to physical threats with the minimum force necessary, Gascon said. Enforcing a more restrictive policy would both reduce the number of fatal police encounters and put officers at less risk of legal action for running afoul of the “reasonable force” legal standard, he said. Under current interpretations of the law, no particular weapon or level of force is more reasonable than another in responding to threats that pose great bodily harm to officers—but department leadership can draw its own line, Gascon said. “What you do is you’re modifying behavior with this line. And you’re creating a buffer, so that if you make a very restrictive policy, even if the officer violates policy they’re still very far way from violating the law.”

Last Wednesday, the seven-member San Francisco Police Commission unanimously approved a new policy mandating that officers attempt to de-escalate conflict situations before using force against a suspect. The policy has the support of the police union and civil rights groups, but still has to go through negotiations between the union and the city before being adopted.

The Police Commission is also considering outfitting all officers with Tasers as a way to give them less lethal options for responding to threats. The president of the police union said the shooting of Woods, who wielded a knife, could have been avoided if officers had been equipped with Tasers. Gascon called for officers to be equipped with Tasers when he was chief of police in 2010. Now he says that officers should have Tasers at their disposal, but that they shouldn’t get them until they’ve been trained in a more restrictive use of force policy that encourages minimum force across the weapons spectrum. “A Taser can be abused as well,” he noted. “I believe that Tasers are another tool that should be available to officers. But that has to be done in the context of a very strict policy.”

Accountability
Currently, the San Francisco police department leads investigations into officer-involved shootings, while the DA’s office conducts its own investigation into the shooting. Investigators from the DA’s office respond to the scene but rely heavily on the SFPD for information, which doesn’t always get passed along. “The worst case scenario is what we’re doing today,” Gascon said. “Perhaps the only thing that could be worse than that is if we didn’t go to the scene at all.” Earlier this month, a ballot measure was passed requiring the Office of Citizen Complaints to conduct an investigation into every police shooting. Previously it only conducted investigations when a complaint was filed with the office—which rarely happened.

The SFPD can’t continue to investigate itself for shootings involving its own officers, Gascon said. Ideally, the California state attorney general’s office should investigate police shootings, he said, though that agency says it lacks the resources. Gascon has proposed creating a special division within the district attorney’s office that would be exclusively responsible for investigating officer-involved shootings. The division would consist of investigators and prosecutors who were hired and trained specifically to investigate police shootings and would not be involved in the work of the DA’s office on other criminal cases. This would build trust, he said, between the police department and the community in terms of the integrity of police-shooting investigations.

In Gascon’s view, the SFPD should also regularly publish updated information about complaints against officers and use of force incidents on its website every 30 days, including the numbers of each, the race of the victims, and the race, gender, and age of the officer involved.

Skeptics of Gascon’s proposal have noted that his office has never charged a police officer involved in a shooting—there have been 43 cases since he became DA in 2011; 31 are closed and 12 remain open. Gascon told Mother Jones that current legal precedent on “reasonable force” allows officers wide latitude to decide what use of force is necessary, and the bar is high for demonstrating that an officer crossed the line. That’s a key reason why the SFPD’s policy needs to be changed, he said.

But Gascon also said that the public can have unrealistic expectations of how police should use force and how investigations into police conduct should be run. “The public sometimes is very influenced by what they see in movies…where police officers have this incredible marksmanship,” he said, noting that people often ask why officers don’t just shoot suspects in the leg.

The law governing how police can use force is different from that governing how civilians can use force, Gascon also notes. “The law recognizes that during their day to day operations doing their work, they’re going to be confronted with situations where they’re going to have to use force, whereas the average person wouldn’t have to.”

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Why the San Francisco Police Department Is Under Heavy Fire

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How caucuses disenfranchise voters

How caucuses disenfranchise voters

By on 25 Mar 2016commentsShare

If you live in a caucus state, like I do, you’ve heard party officials talk about how the caucus system is more democratic, more small-government, more conducive to building party unity than holding a big primary. Here’s Washington Democratic Party spokesman Jamal Raad, touting the system to me over the phone: “We’re not trying to be representative of the Washington State electorate. We’re trying to be representative of Washington State Democrats. And we actually make it very easy. You just have to show up and affirm that you’re a Democrat to participate. … It’s like a block party.”

But it’s a block party that not everyone can attend. And that’s a problem, especially for the environment, because the people left out tend to be those who care more about it.

The caucus system was once more common in our national elections, but Washington, where Democrats vote on Saturday, is one of only 12 states and a handful of territories that hold onto it. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have both appeared here in recent weeks, seeking votes. But many potential Democratic voters will find it tough to cast ballots for either candidate. Instead of simply walking to your local polling place and then going on with your day, caucusing is an event. And if you don’t have the time or ability to participate, you’re just plain out of luck.

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Scholars like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Thomas Patterson suggest that the caucus system  disproportionately disenfranchises minorities, low-income earners, and young people, who are much less likely to show up than older, whiter, wealthier voters. And those who don’t show up — young voters, voters of color — tend to be more progressive on issues like climate change, the environment, and infrastructure spending. For example, voters under 30 tend to be slightly more concerned about climate change, at 54 percent vs. 51 percent for all age groups per a 2015 New York Times/CBS poll. And both black and Latino voters are more likely than white ones to say climate change is manmade, according to Pew.

Here’s how the caucus works in Washington: It starts at 10 a.m. on Saturday, generally taking place at community centers, libraries, town halls, school gyms, or — in my precinct — a dance studio. Once all the participants are gathered together, precinct captains will be selected, votes will be cast, tallied, and the results announced. Like the Iowa Democratic caucus, caucus-goers can attempt to sway undecided voters if there is no clear majority, and then a second tally is taken. The second tally is what determines how many delegates each candidate receives at the national convention in July.

This is not a quick process. It’s projected to take two hours, minimum. So to have your say, you must make time for at least two hours on a Saturday, right around the time you’d normally be taking the kids to soccer, setting out for brunch with your gals, or sleeping through your hangover. And we wonder why voter participation is low. Even people who want to take part in the caucus often can’t — me, for instance. I’ll be 3,000 miles away, stepping off a plane right around the time the first tally is taken.

Clinton herself called this a problem when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008: “You have a limited period of time on one day to have your voices heard. That is troubling to me. You know in a situation of a caucus, people who work during that time — they’re disenfranchised. People who can’t be in the state or who are in the military, like the son of the woman who was here who is serving in the Air Force, they cannot be present.”

In Washington, you can participate if you’re in the Air Force, or any other branch of the military. The party provides exceptions for people who are unable to attend due to military service, work, religious obligation, disability, or illness. Those who qualify can submit a surrogate affidavit form to the state party rather than attend the caucus on Saturday — although they’ve got to do it a week in advance.

Theoretically, this should take care of some concerns about disenfranchisement. But of course, that presumes that you’ve actually heard of the surrogate affidavit form, which most people haven’t. And regardless, this workaround doesn’t cover voters who don’t have the excuse of military, work, religion, disability, or illness. It leaves out caretakers, for instance, who may be unable to bring along the elderly person or young children in their care. And it leaves out people like me, who don’t have a valid excuse at all. Simply not going to be in town this Saturday? Sorry, no voting for you.

When I asked Raad, the Democratic spokesman, about these concerns, he said the party is aware of them. That’s  why party officials added “work” to the list of acceptable reasons to use a surrogate affidavit form for the first time this year. He also said they are reaching out to Asian-American and Spanish-language newspapers to spread the word about the caucus, although he wasn’t aware of any efforts being made to specifically reach other communities.

In 2008, according to Harvard’s Patterson, the national average voter turnout in caucus states was just 6.8 percent, four times less than participation in primary states. In Washington state, it was even lower: Only 0.9 percent of eligible voters actually caucused. And the tiny percentage that shows up tends to have different views than the general public. “Even after accounting for many other factors, caucus attenders were more ideologically extreme than primary voters,” wrote Brigham Young University political scientists Christopher Karpowitz and Jeremy C. Pope in a 2014 Washington Post editorial. “In terms of their willingness to take consistently conservative or liberal positions on the issues, caucus attendees look a lot more like members of Congress than they do average Republicans or Democrats.” The Washington Democratic Party is hopeful that with a heavily contested race, this year’s caucus turnout will be record-setting. But that will still mean just a tiny percentage of the state’s voters helped choose the nominee for president.

This “block party,” it seems, isn’t about the people: It’s about the Party.

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How caucuses disenfranchise voters

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How the US Blew Millions of Dollars Airlifting Cashmere Goats to Afghanistan

Mother Jones

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The Pentagon airlifted Italian goats to Afghanistan as part of a failed $6 million project aimed at boosting the country’s cashmere industry.

That’s one of the latest findings from John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, who testified at a Senate hearing yesterday on the Department of Defense’s efforts to boost the Afghan economy at a cost of more than $600 million. SIGAR, Sopko said, “has not been able to find credible evidence showing that TFBSO’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations activities in Afghanistan produced the intended economic growth or stabilization outcomes that justified its creation.”

The Pentagon’s cashmere project entailed importing nine rare, blond male goats from Italy, building a farm, and setting up a laboratory to certify the their wool. It’s possible that the program created as many as 350 jobs. But according to Sopko, the Pentagon failed to track its spending, and the project’s status is unknown. It remains unclear whether or not the goats were eaten.

Sopko has detailed other examples of waste and unchecked spending in Afghanistan, including $150 million for private security and rented villas for the Pentagon’s business task force; a $47 million “Silicon Valley-type start-up incubator” that “did nothing,” according to the contractor implementing the project; and a $7.5 million project to increase the sales of hand-knotted Afghan carpets. The Pentagon’s business task force “claims to have created nearly 10,000 carpet weaving jobs through this program,” Sopko’s prepared testimony notes, “however our initial analysis has left us questioning the veracity of this figure.”

Sopko’s reports have been leaving lawmakers dumbfounded. At yesterday’s hearing, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) lambasted a $43 million natural gas station that could have been built for $500,000, calling it “dumb on its face.” She noted that the average Afghan earns less annually than it costs to convert a car to run on natural gas.

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How the US Blew Millions of Dollars Airlifting Cashmere Goats to Afghanistan

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Chris Christie Really Wants You to Know He Doesn’t Like Black Lives Matter

Mother Jones

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At Tuesdays kids-table presidential debate in Milwaukee, Gov. Chris Christie (N.J.) tried to remind Republicans why they ever liked him in the first place—by getting really angry at everyone. Here are some of the targets of Christie’s attacks:

China: A former US attorney, Christie appeared to take the Chinese government’s hack of a massive database of federal employees personally. “If the Chinese commit cyber warfare against us, they are gonna see cyber warfare like they’ve never seen before,” he promised. Christie explained that his administration would then leak embarrassing details from its counter-hack of the Chinese government. “They’ll have some real fun in Beijing when we start showing them how they’re spending money in China.” In case there was any remaining ambiguity about his position on China, he unloaded on the Obama administration for not challenging China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. As president, he promised that his first move on China (even before he launched a cyber war, evidently) would be to fly Air Force One over China’s artificial islands. “That’ll show them I mean business,” he said.

Black Lives Matter: Christie has won praise for his campaign-trail compassion on substance abuse. That empathy doesn’t apply to victims of police violence. He ripped into Democratic politicians for, he alleged, turning their backs on police officers. “They’re not standing behind our police officers across the country, they’re allowing lawlessness to rein across this country,” Christie said. He promised things would be different if he’s elected: “When president Christie’s in the Oval Office, I’ll have your back.” Christie returned the subject unprompted later, even connecting support for Black Lives Matter to overseas engagements with ISIS. “When the president doesn’t support law enforcement officers in uniform, he loses the moral authority to command anyone in uniform,” he said.

Hillary Clinton. More than anything else, Christie wanted to talk about the Democratic front-runner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “She is the real adversary tonight, and we better stay focused as Republicans on her,” Christie said right off the bat. And he lived up to his word, responding to every question as if he were her likely opponent rather than an also-ran. He came prepared with a series of one-liners. (“The bottom line is this: Hillary Clinton’s coming for your wallet everybody”) and promised to “prosecute” her on the debate stage next fall. Clinton’s quip at the first Democratic debate that the enemies she’s proudest of in her career were Republicans also struck a nerve. Christie called it “the most disgraceful thing I’ve seen in this entire campaign.”

The only people Christie didn’t beef with were his fellow also-ran candidates on stage. The New Jersey governor explicitly refused to respond to a challenge from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. And in that respect, he won by default, as the only candidate who seemed to remember that the point of the smaller stage was to get off it.

Originally posted here:  

Chris Christie Really Wants You to Know He Doesn’t Like Black Lives Matter

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The New "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" Trailer Was Just Released—and It’s Pretty Great.

Mother Jones

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Original article:

The New "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" Trailer Was Just Released—and It’s Pretty Great.

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