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Mississippi’s Republican Senators Say the State’s Confederate Symbol Has Got to Go

by CristinTang Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update: Sen. Thad Cochran, the state’s senior senator, has joined his colleague in appealing to the state legislature to change the Mississippi flag. “it is my personal hope that the state government will consider changing its flag,” he said in a statement. The original story is below:

When Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) was asked on Sunday about removing the Confederate cross from his state’s flag, he demurred. That decision “should be up to the Mississippi legislature and the people of the state,” he argued. But 48 hours later, he has changed his mind. On Wednesday, he released a statement calling for the current incarnation of the flag to be “put in the museum” and replaced with something else:

After reflection and prayer, I now believe our state flag should be put in a museum and replaced by one that is more unifying to all Mississippians. As the descendant of several brave Americans who fought for the Confederacy, I have not viewed Mississippi’s current state flag as offensive. However, it is clearer and clearer to me that many of my fellow citizens feel differently and that our state flag increasingly portrays a false impression of our state to others.

In I Corinthians 8, the Apostle Paul said he had no personal objection to eating meat sacrificed to idols. But he went on to say that “if food is a cause of trouble to my brother, or makes my brother offend, I will give up eating meat.” The lesson from this passage leads me to conclude that the flag should be removed since it causes offense to so many of my brothers and sisters, creating dissention rather than unity.

This is an issue to be decided by the legislature and other state government officials and not dictated by Washington. If I can be part of a process to achieve consensus within our state, I would welcome the opportunity to participate.

Wicker joins the chancellor of the University of Mississippi, the nephew of former Gov. Haley Barbour, and the state’s Republican speaker of the House among other prominent Mississippians who have called for the Confederate symbol to go after the murder of nine African American parishioners at a church last week in Charleston, South Carolina.

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Mississippi’s Republican Senators Say the State’s Confederate Symbol Has Got to Go

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Here’s How Fast Politicians Are Now Fleeing From the Confederate Flag

by eric2034 Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

UPDATE 6/23/15, 3:25 p.m. ET : An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the company would pull all Confederate flag merchandise.

Within a week of the murders of nine black church congregants in Charleston, South Carolina, southern politicians and GOP presidential hopefuls have been pressured to address the continued flying of the Confederate flag. Previously justified as a symbol of Southern pride and history, the flag—and all its racist baggage—has become more difficult for prominent supporters to defend. This became increasingly clear over the weekend when a website apparently belonging to suspected shooter Dylann Roof emerged, featuring a racist screed and photos of Roof posing with white supremacist insignias and a Confederate flag license plate.

Right after the murders, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said, “It’s him, not the flag,” but by Monday afternoon, flanked by a bipartisan group at a news conference, she announced her support for the flag’s removal from state Capitol grounds. Standing next to her was Sen. Lindsey Graham, another former flag supporter. Since then it has been like Dixieland dominos, with conservative politicians, southern state leaders of all stripes, and corporations including Walmart coming forward to support the flag’s removal.

The shifting tide has been accompanied by some telling statements:

South Carolina State Rep. Norman D. Brannon

The day after the murders, Republican South Carolina State Rep. Norman “Doug” Brannon, a former Confederate flag supporter, announced plans to sponsor legislation that would have the flag removed from the state Capitol grounds. Brannon was close friends with state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, one of the victims in the church attack, which catalyzed his move to abandon the flag. “What lit a fire under this was the tragic death of my friend and his eight parishioners,” he told the New York Times last week. “It took my buddy’s death to get me to do this. I feel ashamed of myself.”

Mississippi’s Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn

Gunn was one of the first to speak out after Haley’s announcement. He took to Facebook, where he left the following message:
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We must always remember our past, but that does not mean we must let it define us. As a Christian, I believe our state’s…

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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

On Friday, Graham defended the south’s affinity for the Confederate flag, saying it is “part of who we are,” but by Monday he was standing with Haley opposing it. “After the tragic, hate-filled shooting in Charleston, it is only appropriate that we deal once and for all with the issue of the flag,” the senator and presidential hopeful said in a statement following his appearance behind Haley. “I hope that, by removing the flag, we can take another step toward healing and recognition—and a sign that South Carolina is moving forward.” While Graham wants to remove the flag from the Capitol grounds, that doesn’t mean he is totally against its use. In a tweet Monday, he indicated it should still be flown and not completely eliminated.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Taking to social media, the senator waited until Monday before releasing a statement on the Confederate battle flag:

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe

On Tuesday, Gov. McAuliffe took steps to ban the Confederate flag from state license plates. “Although the battle flag is not flown here on Capitol Square, it has been the subject of considerable controversy, and it divides many of our people. Even its display on state issued license tags is, in my view, unnecessarily divisive and hurtful to too many of our people,” McAuliffe said in a statement. Prohibiting the flag on license plates falls in line with a a recent US Supreme Court ruling that gives states the authority to restrict certain plate designs.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

Over the weekend, Walker spoke at the Road to Majority 2015 convention, where he told the room of religious conservatives that he denounced the Charleston massacre. While he was quick to call the shooting a “racist” and “evil” act, he was uncharacteristically reticent about the Confederate flag. Walker said he predicted South Carolina would have some “good healthy debate” about the topic, but that it should be contained to “South Carolina among officials at the state level.” Following Haley’s announcement and the other GOP candidates backing her decision, Walker has discovered his opposition to the Confederate flag, tweeting:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich

The potential presidential hopeful also took to Twitter to express his support for Haley:

GOP Presidential Nominee Hopeful Ben Carson

The retired neurosurgeon will not say if the flag should stay or go, noting that all these statement supporting the removal of the flag lack substance and action and ultimately will not fix or erase our nation’s race issues. “So often as a society we deal with the symptoms without dealing with the disease and we think we’ve done something,” Carson said in a telephone interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam

Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee has lifted a page from McAuliffe’s book, saying he supports the removal of the flag from specialty license tags. (In 2012, he signed a bill allowing the Confederate flag to go on motorcycles.)

Democratic Presidential Nominee Candidate Hillary Clinton

CNN has reported that Clinton will be giving a speech on Tuesday at Christ the King Church outside of Ferguson, Missouri, where she plans to support the removal of the Confederate flag but also stress that these actions alone are not a solution to our nation’s racial tensions.

There are others who will not be moved:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee

It’s unclear what Huckabee’s thoughts on the flag are, but he is clear about his views on God. Over the weekend he said he did not believe the question of the flag was one for presidential candidates. But during a Fox News appearance on Monday, he said, “I don’t think the president of the United States needs to be picking the symbols that fly on the state Capitol grounds.” He continued “I keep hearing people saying we need more conversations about race. Actually we don’t need more conversations. What we need is conversions because the reconciliations that changes people is not a racial reconciliation—it’s a spiritual reconciliation when people are reconciled to God.”

Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour

Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday, a day after the South Carolina governor’s call for action, Barbour said he is “not offended at all” by the Confederate flag. This, however, isn’t surprising. In 2011 he came under criticism when he refused to condemn a proposed state license plate that honored a Confederate general and early Klu Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not all in Barbour’s family, however, are for the flag. In a sign of a hopeful and eventual changing of the guard, Barbour’s nephew Henry took to Twitter expressing the need for change.

Of course, South Carolina Gov. Haley cannot alone call for the flag’s removal. As politicians and companies across the nation weigh in on the topic, the big question is how local leaders will respond. The Post and Courier reached out to legislators across the state to see where they stand on the flag’s removal. As of 2 p.m. EST, 51 state House representatives and 21 state senators said they believed it should be removed.

Even corporations are starting to jettison the controversial symbol from inventory. “We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer,” Walmart spokesman Brian Nick said in an emailed statement to USA Today. “We have taken steps to remove all items promoting the confederate flag from our assortment—whether in our stores or on our web site.” While Sears Holdings, which runs K-Mart and Sears, does not currently sell Confederate flag merchandise in its brick-and-mortar stores, it sells this type of merchandise online through a third-party vendor, and recently announced that it plans to discontinue these sales. Ebay followed suit, saying it would ban the listings of Confederate flags or any related items with images of the flag.

But one retailer is profiting from attacks on the flag. Amazon reports its sales of Confederate flag memorabilia have increased by 2,300 percent.

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Here’s How Fast Politicians Are Now Fleeing From the Confederate Flag

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The Deeply Racist References in Dylann Roof’s Apparent Manifesto, Decoded.

by ErickRittenhous Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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The manifesto and photos apparently posted to the web by alleged Charleston gunman Dylann Roof, first unearthed on Twitter by @EMQuangel and @HenryKrinkIe Saturday morning, are full of references to white supremacist groups and terminology. Here are some of the key terms, explained:

1488

The numbers 1488 can be seen scrawled in the sand in photos from the downloadable trove. The 14 is short for “14 words” and denotes an expression used by white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, 88 is an abbreviation for the “Heil Hitler” salute.

Council of Conservative Citizens

The manifesto refers to the council as a source of research into “black on White crime.” The council is a conservative group with white supremacist leanings, considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to be part of the “neo-confederate movement.” It was founded by members of Citizens’ Councils of America, also known as White Citizens Councils, a confederation of segregationist groups active until the 1970s. In more recent years, the Council of Conservative Citizens has made the news when it was revealed that former US Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had given speeches to the group. It was also extremely active in the demonstrations to keep the Confederate battle flag flying over the state capitol of South Carolina between 1993 and 2000.

Northwest Front

The manifesto makes reference to the “Northwest Front.” According to its site, “The Northwest Front is a political organization of Aryan men and women who recognize that an independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest is the only possibility for the survival of the White race on this continent.” It was founded by Harold Covington, who joined the American Nazi Party while in the US army before moving to South Africa and then Rhodesia, which deported him in 1976, after he sent threatening letters to a Jewish congregation. He bounced around various hate groups both in the North Carolina and the UK, before founding Northwest Front.

References to South Africa and Rhodesia

A photo of Dylann Roof from the website “The Last Rhodesian.”

In several of the photos, Roof can be seen wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, just as in the photo that was widely published after the attack. Former Mother Jones editor Nick Baumann has this excellent summary of what these references mean, over at the Huffington Post:

Rhodesia was an apartheid state in East Africa that was majority black but ruled by white, mostly British-descended people from 1965 until 1979. It grew out of the former British colony of South Rhodesia, which had some degree of self-rule (under the British colonial umbrella) from 1923 until 1965, when the colony’s overwhelmingly white government, fearing having to share power with blacks, declared independence to preserve white supremacy.

“The mantle of the pioneers has fallen on our shoulders to sustain civilization in a primitive country,” Ian Smith, the country’s white leader, declared at the time.

“The Rhodesian flag is important in terms of symbolism, for Rhodesia subscribed to white supremacy,” Blessing-Miles Tendi, a lecturer in African history and politics at Oxford, explained in an email. “A minority, racist, colonial white settler state subjugated a majority black population in the then Rhodesia for approximately a century.”

The manifesto also references South Africa, “and how such a small minority held the black in apartheid for years and years.” It continues: “if anyone thinks that think will eventually just change for the better, consider how in South Africa they have affirmative action for the black population that makes up 80 percent of the population.”

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The Deeply Racist References in Dylann Roof’s Apparent Manifesto, Decoded.

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Dear Rick Santorum: Sorry, the Pope Actually Did Study Science. So He Might Know About Science.

by ElliottRundle Posted on June 16, 2015

Mother Jones

“I am not a scientist!” is now the standard escape hatch through which Republican climate deniers slither to avoid talking about climate science or evolution. From Sen. Marco Rubio, asked how old the Earth is: “I’m not a scientist, man.” Rick Perry whipped out the same “I’m not a scientist” line last year in DC while questioning the consensus around climate change. Jeb Bush said the same thing back in 2009.

Now at least one GOP presidential hopeful is turning the talking point into an attack on the pope, ahead of his landmark encyclical on the environment, to be released Thursday. (A draft of the document has already leaked). Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a Catholic with a history of criticizing Pope Francis, says the pope should leave science to the scientists. “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science,” he told Dom Giordano, a radio host in Philadelphia, earlier this month. “And I think that we are probably better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we’re really good at, which is theology and morality.”

One problem with Santorum’s retort? The pope, while obviously not a climate scientist (he’s the pope), actually did study science and therefore might have a better grasp of fundamental scientific processes than most people who have not studied science.

The National Catholic Reporter and the Official Vatican Network both report that Francis, then Jorge Bergoglio, earned a technician’s degree in chemistry from a technical school in Buenos Aires before joining the seminary. Sylvia Poggioli from NPR also reports Francis worked as a chemist. Listen to her report from Morning Edition, below, from Rome:

And for good measure, here’s a video my Climate Desk colleagues—Tim McDonnell and Suzanne Goldenberg (from the Guardian)—put together last week. They asked a bunch of climate change deniers at the annual Heartland Institute conference in Washington, DC, what they think of the pope’s calls for action on climate change:

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Dear Rick Santorum: Sorry, the Pope Actually Did Study Science. So He Might Know About Science.

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Jeb Bush’s Nonexistent Campaign Faces Nonexistent Hurdles

by BrendaBanning Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Technically, Jeb Bush is not yet running for president. So technically, there have not been recent staff changes in the former Florida governor’s presidential campaign.

According to an NBC Nightly News report on Wednesday, two top campaign aides, Danny Diaz and David Kochel, were given new titles and new responsibilities. Diaz became campaign manager, and Kochel became chief strategist. While on a trip to Europe, Bush was asked by NBC’s Chris Jansing why he replaced his campaign manager, and his reply was firm. “Well first of all, we don’t have a campaign,” Bush said. “So there was no switching.”

Bush’s strategy seems to be to eliminate any potential questions about internal campaign discord by insisting that the campaign itself does not exist.

But what works for a staff shake up may not be so effective with the Federal Election Commission. Some watchdog organizations contend that this non-campaign campaign could get him into legal hot water. Candidates must follow strict FEC regulations when they raise their campaign war chests, but those regulations don’t apply to candidates who are merely “testing the waters.” Bush’s ambivalence has attracted the attention of some watchdog organizations. Yesterday, the nonpartisan watchdog groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging it to “investigate apparent campaign finance violations by Jeb Bush and his associated Super PAC.” The groups allege that Bush’s super-PAC has violated federal contribution laws in the way it has raised and spent its money:

We are writing to make clear that Bush’s formal declaration of candidacy has absolutely no effect on the allegations made in our May 27 letter requesting an investigation of the Bush Super PAC scheme. In the letter, we showed that Bush already is, and has for some time been, a candidate for federal office under the statutory definition of “candidate” set forth in the federal campaign finance laws. Bush cannot evade the statutory definition of “candidate” by proclaiming he is not a candidate.

On Monday, Bush is expected to announce that his presidential campaign actually does exist.

More here – 

Jeb Bush’s Nonexistent Campaign Faces Nonexistent Hurdles

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Top Campaign Watchdog Petitions Her Own Agency to Do Its Job

by TheronTracey5 Posted on June 8, 2015

Mother Jones

The Federal Election Commission should just do its job already.

That’s not a #hottake. It’s the formal opinion of the chairwoman of the FEC itself.

In a sign of how bad things have gotten at the government watchdog tasked with keeping federal elections clean, chairwoman Ann Ravel and fellow Democratic commissioner Ellen Weintraub filed a petition with their own agency this morning pleading for campaign finance rules to be enforced this election cycle. The move is not likely to have earth-shattering consequences, but it’s a sign of desperation—when even the officials who are supposed to be enforcing the law throw up their hands and file a complaint about themselves, to themselves, because there’s no one else to complain to, things are officially off-the-rails.

“People will say: ‘You’re the chair of the commission. You should work from within.’ I tried,” Ravel told CNN Monday. “We needed to take more creative avenues to try and get public disclosure.”

Petitions are almost always filed by outsiders hoping to change policy. The FEC chief now counts herself as one of those outsiders.

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Top Campaign Watchdog Petitions Her Own Agency to Do Its Job

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A Republican Senator Just Sent Out a Tweet So Stupid Our Children Will Learn About It in Stories

by LandonOlmstead Posted on June 8, 2015

Mother Jones

Sen. John Thune (R-World Of Pure Imagination) sent out this tweet today in reference to the King v. Burwell lawsuit that’s about to be decided by the Supreme Court.

Not unlike the challenge to Obamacare it is referencing, the tweet is deeply stupid.

The health care subsidies those 6 million people could lose are a part of the Affordable Care Act. Conservative enemies of Obamacare are the only reason those subsidies are at risk.

Words! Meaning! John Thune likes putting the former in combinations that are completely devoid of the latter.

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A Republican Senator Just Sent Out a Tweet So Stupid Our Children Will Learn About It in Stories

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Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

by GeoffreyMullaly Posted on June 5, 2015

Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

By on 5 Jun 2015 2:20 pmcommentsShare

The former chair of Shell is bummed about how the fight against climate change is going. But he’s got a different take on the issue than you might expect, given his CV.

“I find it distressing that 18 years after major oil companies such as Shell and BP acknowledged the threat of climate change and the need for precautionary action, and indeed began to put into place many of the steps needed, the world has made very modest progress in addressing this challenge,” said Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, who hasn’t been involved with the company since 2005. He’s since gone on to chair the mining company Anglo American PLC, and to serve on the board of directors for the consulting firm Accenture, as well as to work with the U.N. Originally trained as a geologist, Moody-Stuart was with Shell for 39 years.

In a speech at an event organized by Carbon Trust, a company that helps organizations reduce their emissions, Moody-Stuart said he also understood where the divestment movement was coming from. According to the British publication Responding to Climate Change:

In contrast to many senior fossil fuel executives he argued the growing divestment campaign was not “without some rationale”, recalling how oil and gas companies ditched coal assets in the 1990s.

“Given the inevitable continued demand for some forms of fossil fuels for some decades to come, divestment of all such holdings is probably not an economically sensible choice for most investors,” he said.

“Selective divestment or portfolio switching certainly is. As in all such choices, timing is critical.”

Oil execs past and present have had a lot to say about climate change lately. Though many oil companies have spent a lot of money to keep governments from enacting a price on carbon, certain players within the oil industry are beginning to strike a different chord. Or, a few different chords: Earlier this week, the CEOs of six major European oil companies, including Shell and BP, sent a letter to the U.N. calling for a price on carbon. But at the same time, Shell is trudging forward with its plans to drill in the Arctic. And many analysts suggested the letter might be more an attempt to nudge coal out of the global energy market — paving the way for more reliance on natural gas, a fuel that oil companies are heavily invested in — than a genuine effort to tackle climate change.

ExxonMobil has called for a carbon tax in past years, but it did not join this week’s letter to the U.N., nor did fellow American oil giants Chevron and ConocoPhillips. Exxon and Chevron have recently been resisting calls from shareholders to avoid tapping more expensive sources of oil in the Arctic, Canadian tar sands, and other unconventional locations. Asked why Exxon was not investing in renewables, CEO Rex Tillerson replied, “We choose not to lose money on purpose.” Ha ha.

So, yeah, oil companies are sort of all over the map on the whole climate-change-is-happening-but-we-can-make-it-less-horrendous-if-we-do-something-now issue. But the discord does seem to indicate that perhaps the ground is shifting. Even so, Moody-Stuart suggested that the momentum was not enough. He predicted the U.N. climate talks will yield some sort of deal later this year, but that it might be too loose to be useful. “This is progress and will doubtless be hailed as an agreement, although one can certainly question whether an agglomeration of diverse commitments can really be hailed as a global agreement,” he said.

Regardless, Moody-Stuart, 74, said, things aren’t changing that quickly. “I am going to be dead well before the end of the oil and gas industry.”

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Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

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Here Is Caitlyn Jenner’s Stunning Vanity Fair Cover

by MichellQka Posted on June 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Caitlyn Jenner, the woman formerly known as Bruce Jenner of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” fame, made her public debut on the cover of Vanity Fair on Monday. The beautiful portrait was shot by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz:

During a sit-down interview with Diane Sawyer back in April, the former Olympian opened up about her transition into becoming a woman. “My whole life has been getting me ready for this,” Jenner said.

“Caitlyn doesn’t have any secrets. As soon as the Vanity Fair cover comes out, I’m free,” she said in an exclusive new video for the magazine.

The cover hits newsstands on June 9.

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Here Is Caitlyn Jenner’s Stunning Vanity Fair Cover

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George Pataki Leads 2016 GOP Crowd…

by AlyceYorke Posted on May 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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The good news: The GOP 2016 field has a contender who believes human-induced climate change is real and extensive action must be taken to reduce emissions. The bad news: It’s George Pataki.

The former New York governor announced his entry into the race on Thursday—and, predictably, the political earth did not move. Few members of the politerati view Pataki as a top-tier candidate. His name recognition is low. And after he left New York state’s top job in 2006, Pataki, who had unexpectedly defeated then-Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1994, has been largely absent from politics. But he did—of course—join a law firm. And he formed a consulting group to provide guidance to firms in the energy, infrastructure, clean-tech, and environmental fields. Clean tech? Yes, he was a fan of green-friendly enterprise. But—for a Republican contender—it’s even worse: Pataki became an advocate for climate change action.

In 2007, he was named co-chair of the Independent Task Force on Climate Change organized by the Council on Foreign Relations. The other co-chair was Tom Vilsack, the former Democratic governor of Iowa who is now President Barack Obama’s agriculture secretary. Other members of this very blue-ribbon commission included Lawrence Summers, Theodore Roosevelt IV, and Timothy Wirth. And after a year of study and deliberations, the panel put out a 142-page report that would horrify the Republican Party of today, for it noted that human-caused climate change posed a crisis and that comprehensive action was required immediately. It proposed a cap-and-trade system to dramatically reduce US emissions.

Here’s the first page:

In a chapter entitled “Leadership,” the report noted that redressing climate change would “demand much of U.S. leaders” and “require strong cooperation between the executive branch and Congress.” It called for bipartisan action. The report concluded, “Addressing climate change will be no easy task. But with careful and creative strategy, tempered by modesty in its knowledge of how to address to sic the challenge but driven by an equally clear recognition of its gravity, the United States can ultimately help lead the world to a safer place.”

That’s certainly not the Republican line these days. Earlier this year, the GOP-controlled Senate voted that climate change is not caused by human activity. And it’s become a GOP article of faith that climate change is a phony issue and cap-and-trade (or any other response) is a left-wing plot to impose more taxes on Americans for the sake of imposing more taxes on Americans.

So it will be interesting to see how Pataki handles—or dodges—this issue as he campaigns for Republican votes. Here’s one clue: His bio on his campaign website doesn’t mention his climate change work. And he neglected to mention climate change during his announcement speech. Perhaps he needs to re-read his own report.

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George Pataki Leads 2016 GOP Crowd…

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