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The Sexist Chatter at Elaine Chao’s Confirmation Hearing Will Make You Shudder

by DallasPruett Posted on January 11, 2017

Mother Jones

There were no demonstrations or outbursts from protesters at Elaine Chao’s confirmation hearing Wednesday to become President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of transportation. The former secretary of labor in the second Bush administration may have not been loved by labor unions, but her previous experience as a deputy transportation secretary for George H.W. Bush makes her uniquely qualified for the job.

The most notable moments during Chao’s appearance before the Senate Science, Commerce, and Transportation Committee did not concern her positions on safety regulation, Trump’s infrastructure plan, or the self-driving car industry, but rather her marriage to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell appeared at the hearing to introduce his wife.

“I regret that I have but one wife to give for my country’s infrastructure,” McConnell said, echoing the words of the former Senate majority leader Bob Dole in 1983, when he introduced his wife, Elizabeth Dole, for her confirmation hearing to be secretary of transportation in the Reagan administration. “She’s got really great judgment,” McConnell added, pausing for effect and appreciative laughter from his colleagues, “on a whole variety of things.”

McConnell’s quip was the first of a number of remarks focusing on Chao’s gender and marital status that male senators made during the hearing. Sen. Jim Inhoffe (R-Okla.) focused on Chao’s relationship to her father. “I keep thinking—last night, I was with you and your family, your daddy—how excited your daddy is right now thinking about the things that are going on, and that he is responsible for you and your performing and your cute little nieces,” he said at the start of his questioning. “As you well know, I’ve got 20 kids and grandkids. You’ve got some more work to do, but that’s alright.”

The comments were decidedly bipartisan. “I might just say although Sen. McConnell has left, he and I have something in common, which is we both married above ourselves,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) joked. He wasn’t the only one to say something to that effect.

“I have a great deal of respect for you, although now I have some frustration now with Mitch McConnell, being a young, single member of the Senate,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said. “He has never taken me aside to tell me how to marry out of my league.”

At the start of the confirmation hearing, chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) patted his committee on the back, noting that with its new members, it has the distinction of being the “Senate committee with the most women members ever.”

For her part, Chao played along. She joked about her relationship with McConnell, saying she planned to “lock in the majority leader’s support tonight over dinner.”

Chao is not alone. As the wife of a Republican leader, she has plenty of company.

Continued: 

The Sexist Chatter at Elaine Chao’s Confirmation Hearing Will Make You Shudder

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California’s drought causes a lot more pain than brown lawns and empty swimming pools.

by Oliva01Ush Posted on January 10, 2017

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, released a report Tuesday morning that adds up the many ways in which the incoming Trump administration could enrich the world’s largest oil company.

The report comes a day before Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s former CEO, starts his nomination hearing to be President-elect Trump’s secretary of state.

In that role, Tillerson could do a lot for his former employer. The oil giant has massive holdings in foreign oil reserves and remains one of the biggest investors in the Canadian tar sands, with rights worth around $277 billion at current prices.

As it happens, the State Department is responsible for approving the fossil fuel infrastructure that could bring Canadian tar sands oil to the U.S. market. Remember the Keystone XL pipeline? It could come back from the dead and get approved by Tillerson.

Tillerson could also undo sanctions on Russia that have blocked Exxon’s projects there, including a deal with Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, worth roughly $500 billion.

And then there are the Trump administration’s domestic plans to lift every restriction on extracting oil from public lands and offshore. The CAP report also figures that Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to investigate Exxon’s effort to mislead the public about climate change. Tally all the benefits and you get nearly $1 trillion.

So who was the biggest winner of the November election? According to the CAP report, ExxonMobil.

From: 

California’s drought causes a lot more pain than brown lawns and empty swimming pools.

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Trump Apparently Scares the Hell out of Gingrich

by Andres53Mddbjv Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an interview with NPR on Wednesday, Newt Gingrich claimed that Donald Trump was ditching the catchphrase “drain the swamp”—the popular expression he used during the campaign when he promised to eliminate big money interests and corruption in Washington. The statement follows a number of actions by the president-elect that appear to back Gingrich’s assertion, as Trump appoints to his cabinet an increasing number of billionaires and millionaires with unprecedented potential conflicts of interest.

“I’m told he now just disclaims that,” the former House Speaker and loyal Trump adviser said. “He now says it was cute but he doesn’t want to use it anymore…I’d written what I thought was a very cute tweet about the ‘alligators are complaining,’ and somebody wrote back and said they were tired of hearing this stuff.”

But on Thursday, Trump took to Twitter to rebut the claim, all but calling Gingrich out by name for apparently going off message:

Shortly after, Gingrich posted this very sad video message confessing his “big boo boo.”

From – 

Trump Apparently Scares the Hell out of Gingrich

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Portland says no way to new fossil fuel infrastructure.

by MarionAwe7 Posted on December 15, 2016

Oregon’s largest city became the first in the nation to ban the building of major fossil fuel terminals and the expansion of existing ones after a unanimous city council vote on Wednesday.

The city council used zoning codes to enact the ban, which will go into effect in January, and will prevent the construction of any new terminals for transporting or storing coal, methanol, natural gas, and oil. Other West Coast cities made similar moves earlier this year: Vancouver, Washington, banned new oil terminals and Oakland, California, banned coal terminals.

In the wake of the Trump election, it’s clear that the federal government won’t be taking climate action, so environmentalists are increasingly looking to cities to adopt climate change–fighting policies — and those cities might want to follow Portland’s lead.

“What we’ve done in Portland is replicable now in other cities,” Portland Mayor Charlie Hales told InsideClimate News. “Everybody has a zoning code.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is also encouraging cities to take action. “Mayors and local leaders around the country are determined to keep pushing ahead on climate change,” he wrote recently, “because it is in their interest to do so.” It’s also in all of ours.

Credit: 

Portland says no way to new fossil fuel infrastructure.

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Is Trump’s EPA pick or State nominee the riper target for Democrats?

by MilagroSchwing5 Posted on December 15, 2016

Oregon’s largest city became the first in the nation to ban the building of major fossil fuel terminals and the expansion of existing ones after a unanimous city council vote on Wednesday.

The city council used zoning codes to enact the ban, which will go into effect in January, and will prevent the construction of any new terminals for transporting or storing coal, methanol, natural gas, and oil. Other West Coast cities made similar moves earlier this year: Vancouver, Washington, banned new oil terminals and Oakland, California, banned coal terminals.

In the wake of the Trump election, it’s clear that the federal government won’t be taking climate action, so environmentalists are increasingly looking to cities to adopt climate change–fighting policies — and those cities might want to follow Portland’s lead.

“What we’ve done in Portland is replicable now in other cities,” Portland Mayor Charlie Hales told InsideClimate News. “Everybody has a zoning code.”

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is also encouraging cities to take action. “Mayors and local leaders around the country are determined to keep pushing ahead on climate change,” he wrote recently, “because it is in their interest to do so.” It’s also in all of ours.

Original post: 

Is Trump’s EPA pick or State nominee the riper target for Democrats?

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It Turns Out Rex Tillerson Is Just Another Member of the Swamp

by Mark Q Manning Posted on December 10, 2016

Mother Jones

Now that ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson seems to be a likely choice for Secretary of State, I got to wondering: where did his name come from in the first place? Obviously not from Trump himself. Well, I asked, and Twitter delivered. Here is Politico:

Tillerson was brought into Trump Tower for an interview with Trump at the recommendation of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who count Exxon among their private consulting clients, according to two sources familiar with the conversations. His name was first publicly floated for the job in early December and he met privately with Trump on Tuesday. Rice sat down with the President-elect in late November, and Gates followed her three days later.

So Tillerson pays Gates and Rice for “consulting,” whatever that means, and they in turn recommend him to Trump for the State Department. Welcome to the swamp, ladies and gentlemen.

And while on we’re on the subject of the Secretary of State, National Review editor Rich Lowry says that Tillerson, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney all have problems that ought to disqualify them:

The natural pick here has always been John Bolton, who endorsed Trump early, who fits broadly within the Trump worldview that you might characterize as muscular realism, and actually has substantial foreign policy experience.

I think the answer here is pretty obvious: Bolton doesn’t like Russia, and he has no qualms about saying so loudly and persistently. Trump obviously values an appreciation of Vladimir Putin’s talents more highly than he does even loyalty to Trump. Plus there’s the mustache.

See the original article here – 

It Turns Out Rex Tillerson Is Just Another Member of the Swamp

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There’s Something Wrong With the TIMSS Advanced Math Test

by cazaresibiuieftina Posted on December 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Excellent news! The 2015 TIMSS test results are out. This is one of two international math tests for 4th and 8th graders (the other is PISA), and it provides us with yet another chance to bemoan the shoddy education of American students.

I’ll get to that later tonight. First, though, I want to point out an odd thing about the TIMSS test. This year, for only the second time, they decided to add a third “advanced” math test for high school seniors who were in advanced math courses. Eight countries participated, and the United States did pretty well. We lagged behind only Lebanon.

Lebanon? You bet: their average score was 532, a whopping 50 points ahead of the two second-place countries (Russia and the US). But then I noticed something: only 3.2 percent of Lebanese students were in advanced math courses compared to 34 percent of Slovenian students. It makes sense that if you compare the top 3.2 percent of one country to the top 34 percent of another, the former is going to do a lot better.

So are differences in these scores just due to differences in how selective different countries are in accepting students into advanced math courses? Here’s the scatterplot you’ve been waiting for:

Selectivity doesn’t account for everything, but it does have a significant impact. If you restrict your classes to only the very brightest students (like Lebanon, Russia, and the US), they’ll do well. If you open them up to more than a quarter of your students (like Italy, Portugal and Slovenia), the average kids will drag down the mean score. But which country is actually doing a better job of education? It’s hard to say.

Regardless, there’s always something to complain about. Here is Jeffrey Mervis in Science:

Students taking the most challenging math and science courses in their senior year were found to have performed progressively worse as they moved from elementary to middle to high school. The U.S. cohort, for example… deteriorated over time, from 29 and 9 points ahead of the midpoint in fourth and eighth grade, respectively, to 15 points below as seniors. Italy recorded the steepest drops, a startling 126 points below the midpoint in physics and 78 points in advanced math by the end of high school.

It’s not clear to me that the “midpoint” of the TIMSS test means anything at all. In the advanced math test, every single country except Lebanon scored below it. What kind of midpoint is that? A pretty arbitrary one, I’d guess.

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There’s Something Wrong With the TIMSS Advanced Math Test

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Hillary Clinton’s Three Big Mistakes

by Fbvisitsmy Posted on November 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve written a post or two about the main reasons Hillary Clinton lost the election, and I always nod to the fact that there are other, smaller reasons too. One of these smaller reasons is that Clinton herself made mistakes, something that Harold Pollack noted a few days ago. So I asked him what he thought the campaign’s three biggest miscues were. He wrote a long post about this, which you should read since it contains a lot of discussion and nuance. In normal bloggy fashion, however, I’m going to ignore all that. Instead, here are Pollack’s answers, along with my comments:

Creating the email and speech problems, and being brittle and defensive about cleaning them up. No argument here. We both agree that these problems were wildly overblown by the press, but nonetheless they were problems that Clinton brought on herself. It’s all part of her greatest character deficit: pushing rules to the boundaries and then being defensive and secretive about it when her actions come to light. The former is a bad habit, and the latter just makes the press even more ravenous than they’d ordinarily be. It’s a toxic combination.

Final Polls on November 7

ABC/Post
NBC/WSJ
NBC/Survey Monkey
UPI/CVOTER
CBS/Times
IBD/TIPP
Fox
Monmouth
Bloomberg/Selzer

Clinton +4
Clinton +5
Clinton +7
Clinton +3
Clinton +4
Clinton +1
Clinton +4
Clinton +6
Clinton +3

Overconfidence and complacency across the political spectrum. In retrospect, this is obviously true. But even now, this hardly strikes me as a campaign problem per se. Clinton and her fellow Dems were confident because every poll showed them well ahead. I assume that all her internal polling showed the same thing. In the end, though, that polling was apparently off by about 3 points, and more than that in the famous trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That’s a big miss.

So what happened to the polls? Did Clinton’s internal polling show her way ahead? If so, how did it fail so badly? That’s what I’d like to know. I think anybody would have been overconfident if their polling showed them winning in a walk.

Signaling to older rural white voters that we didn’t want them, and indeed would leave them behind. This is hard to assess. There’s no question that Democrats have steadily lost the support of the white working class over the past two decades. This is something that goes far beyond Hillary Clinton. But did the white working class leave because they thought Republicans were likely to bring their jobs back and make their lives better? That hardly seems likely, given that during this entire period Republicans have campaigned on a steady diet of corporate deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.

But if that’s the case, we’re back to optics and race—and Trump appealed explicitly to both. He loudly and persistently pretended to care about the white working class while offering nothing much that would actually affect them. And he was pretty plainly pro-white, which obviously appealed to at least some of them. Clinton’s problem is that she isn’t cynical enough to do the former and not loathsome enough to do the latter.

Could she still have done more? Of course. Politicians routinely use symbols to demonstrate respect for groups even if their platforms don’t offer an awful lot of help at a concrete level. Clinton didn’t do that, and it turned out to be a mistake. I can’t bring myself to blame her too much for this, since it’s all hindsight, but it was still a mistake—and an especially big one since she clearly failed to understand what was happening in three states that were so critical to her that they were called the “blue firewall.”

Taken from: 

Hillary Clinton’s Three Big Mistakes

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Meet the Dark-Money Millionaire Donald Trump Just Tapped to Be Education Secretary

by CyrilTully109 Posted on November 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly chosen Betsy DeVos to be his first secretary of education—and, according to Bloomberg‘s Jennifer Jacobs, the Michigan Republican has accepted the job.

Former Mother Jones reporter Andy Kroll profiled the DeVos family and its “plan to defund the left” in these pages back in 2014:

The Devoses sit alongside the Kochs, the Bradleys, and the Coorses as founding families of the modern conservative movement. Since 1970, DeVos family members have invested at least $200 million in a host of right-wing causes—think tanks, media outlets, political committees, evangelical outfits, and a string of advocacy groups. They have helped fund nearly every prominent Republican running for national office and underwritten a laundry list of conservative campaigns on issues ranging from charter schools and vouchers to anti-gay-marriage and anti-tax ballot measures. “There’s not a Republican president or presidential candidate in the last 50 years who hasn’t known the DeVoses,” says Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.

Betsy is a member of the conservative clan through her marriage to Dick DeVos.

Betsy, who is 56, is the political junkie in the relationship. She got her start in politics as a “scatter-blitzer” for Gerald Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign, which bused eager young volunteers to various cities so they could blanket them with campaign flyers. In the ’80s and ’90s, Betsy climbed the party ranks to become a Republican National Committeewoman, chair numerous US House and Senate campaigns in Michigan, lead statewide party fundraising, and serve two terms as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. In 2003, she returned at the request of the Bush White House to dig the party out of $1.2 million in debt. A major proponent of education reform, Betsy serves on the boards of the American Federation for Children, a leading advocate of school vouchers, and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which supports online schools.

Read the whole profile.

Link: 

Meet the Dark-Money Millionaire Donald Trump Just Tapped to Be Education Secretary

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It’s Time to Pay More Attention to Jared Kushner

by MalorieL60 Posted on November 15, 2016

Mother Jones

Chris Christie was fired as the head of Donald Trump’s transition team last week. This week, two members of Trump’s transition team for national security have also been fired. What’s going on? The Washington Post says this:

A former U.S. official with ties to the Trump team described the ousters of Rogers and others as a “bloodletting of anybody that associated in any way on the transition with Christie,” and said that the departures were engineered by two Trump loyalists who have taken control of who will get national security posts in the administration: retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Rogers had no prior significant ties to Christie but had been recruited to join the Trump team as an adviser by the former New Jersey governor. At least three other Christie associates were also pushed aside, former officials said, apparently in retaliation for Christie’s role as a U.S. prosecutor in sending Kushner’s father to prison.

Smoldering vengeance is about what we’d expect from Trump and his extended family, so I’m provisionally ready to believe this is what’s going on. Remember this?

Aboard his gold-plated jumbo jet, the Republican nominee does not like to rest or be alone with his thoughts, insisting that aides stay up and keep talking to him. He prefers the soothing, whispery voice of his son-in-law.

Kushner is Trump’s very own Grima Wormtongue! And he really, really, doesn’t like Christie. This is from July:

Sources close to Jared Kushner, who is Ivanka Trump’s husband, say that Kushner has been telling them that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will be Vice-President over his dead body. Kushner, who is playing an increasingly active role in the campaign, has a bitter history with Christie. Christie, when he was the US attorney of New Jersey, prosecuted his father, Charles Kushner, in a case that grabbed national headlines. The elder Kushner, pled guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering in 2005. He received a 2 year prison sentence.

Wait. Kushner’s father engaged in witness tampering? Oh yes:

The federal witnesses he had attempted to retaliate against were his sister and brother-in-law, who were cooperating with that same investigation. Kushner paid a prostitute $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a motel room at the Red Bull Inn in Bridgewater to have sex with him. A hidden camera recorded the activity, and Kushner sent the lurid tape to his sister, making sure the tape arrived on the day of a family party.

Maybe we should be less worried about Steve Bannon and more worried about Jared Kushner. No, scratch that. We should be worried about both. But Bannon is already getting plenty of attention. I have a feeling maybe Kushner should too.

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It’s Time to Pay More Attention to Jared Kushner

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