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7 Republicans Who Said Obama Wasn’t Trying Hard Enough to Bring the Benghazi Attacker to Justice

by ChristoSlama Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post broke a big scoop on Tuesday with the news that US special forces, working with FBI agents, mounted a secret raid in Libya this past weekend that captured Ahmed Abu Khattala, who is suspected of masterminding the attack on the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The Post story noted that the operation had been months in the making. In fact, US Special Forces had a plan to apprehend Abu Khattala last October, days after US commandos in Tripoli snatched Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, who was accused of bombing US embassies in East Africa in 1998. But that attempt to apprehend Abu Khattala had to be called off at the last minute.

So for a long stretch, maybe a year or more, the Obama administration had been trying to figure out how best to grab Abu Khattala, who was identified as a possible Benghazi ringleader soon after the September 11, 2012, assault. Yet for much of that time, Republican critics of the president have repeatedly criticized Obama for not capturing the Benghazi perps. Even though it took a decade to nab Osama bin Laden, GOPers have depicted Obama as feckless on the Benghazi front, with some even saying that he was not truly interested in bringing the Benghazi killers to justice.

Here’s a sampling of those GOP attacks:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas): In November, Cruz criticized the Obama administration for failing to use a State Department program that offers rewards to people with information about terrorists in order to track down the Benghazi attacker: “The State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program exists to help the US identify and apprehend its enemies, but the Obama administration has not used it to pursue the terrorists who attacked our personnel in Benghazi,” he said.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.): In August, Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which has held numerous hearings on the Benghazi attack, harped on the administration’s “delay” in apprehending Abu Khattala: “If our government knows who perpetrated the attack that killed four Americans, it is critical that they be questioned and placed in custody of US officials without delay,” he said. “Delays in apprehending the suspected Benghazi killers will only put American lives at further and needless risk.”

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), and John McCain (R-Ariz.): In a February letter to Obama, the three GOP senators wrote, “In almost 17 months, none of the terrorists have been brought to justice. The families of the murdered Americans deserve to see the terrorists brought to justice. Moreover, terrorists around the world need to know that if they kill Americans, we will hunt them down and bring them to justice. Allowing terrorists apparently involved in the attack to sit and give interviews in cafés sends a dangerous message that there are no consequences for killing Americans.”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah): “Let’s not forget the Benghazi terrorist attackers,” Chaffetz told USA Today in October. “There’s been no visibility on whether or not we’re pursuing that.”

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.): In August, when the Justice Department filed charges against Abu Khattala, Wolf suggested the administration wouldn’t have acted without Republican pressure. “I think they’re feeling pressure to do something, to show they’re making progress,” he told the Washington Times, adding that charges against suspects have likely been delayed by “confusion” among US law enforcement authorities.

By now, it should be obvious: It can take a while—even years—to capture a suspected terrorist overseas. (Ruqai, the embassy bombings suspect, was apprehended 15 years after the attacks.) Yet that didn’t stop these Republicans and other conservatives from slamming the president and suggesting publicly—in a real underhanded dig—that Obama was not seeking the murderers of Benghazi. Now what will they say? That his heart wasn’t really in it?

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7 Republicans Who Said Obama Wasn’t Trying Hard Enough to Bring the Benghazi Attacker to Justice

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The Story Behind That Radio Station Heroically Playing Nelly’s "Hot in Herre" For Three Days Straight

by ElissaBarfield Posted on March 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, Latino Mix 105.7, a Univision-owned radio station in San Francisco, captured the hearts and lazy imagination of the internet. “There once was a film called Life is Beautiful about Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre‘ being looped on a radio station for 24 straight hours and now that movie has come to life,” gushed Gawker. (Life is Beautiful is actually a movie about the Holocaust and the enduring love of family.) In the widely covered stunt, the station started playing “Hot in Herre” sic around 3 p.m. PST on Friday and then just… kept going. The song wasn’t taken off repeat until Monday evening, shortly after 5 p.m. PST. “San Francisco radio station Latino Mix FM 105.7 has been doing its best to torture Bay Area listeners,” the San Jose Mercury News reported on Monday.

“Hot in Herre” (click here for lyrics) was a smash-hit song for St. Louis rapper Nelly in 2002. It was described as “the perfect summer jam” by People. It’s a song so inextricably tied to the early Bush era that you can read about US Marines singing it as they moved into combat in Iraq. (This moment, from journalist Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill, was recreated in the HBO miniseries of the same name.) The song was featured in a 2012 Super Bowl ad starring Elton John as a tyrannical but violently overthrown king.

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The Story Behind That Radio Station Heroically Playing Nelly’s "Hot in Herre" For Three Days Straight

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The Financial Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its Lack of Diversity

by RolandoRoland Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s not unusual for the banking industry to challenge a new government rule. Ever since Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, the banks have sent forth their army of lobbyists any time federal regulators try to enforce a new restriction, often resorting to the courts if they don’t get their way. But their latest objection is particularly galling: they don’t want the government or public to know about the diversity—or lack thereof—within their industry.

When Congress went about reforming the banking industry in 2010, Democrats made a specific point to encourage the financial industry to diversify its workforce. It has long needed a fix. The financial trade is controlled by old, rich white dudes, a cohort that doesn’t accurately reflect the country’s shifting demographics. The problem only gets worse when you look higher up the chain of command. Overall management in the financial services industry is 81 percent white as of 2011. African-Americans only account for 2.7 percent of senior-level staff in the financial industry, while women hold just 28.4 percent of upper management jobs.

Dodd-Frank, the Democrats’ bill to reform Wall Street following the crash, included a provision that creates Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion in each branch of the federal regulatory regime, such as the Department of Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. (The provision doesn’t touch sexual orientation.) These new offices are tasked with boosting diversity within their own ranks and analyzing hiring practices of the businesses in their purview. Late last year, regulators from six of these offices wrote a rule, still in the proposal stage, to enforce the second half of that mandate. It’s a modest measure—a simple request that the banks conduct self-assessments based on a few best-practice guidelines, but it was enough to rile up the banks.

Complaint letters sent from the main lobbying arms of the financial industry to regulators show a concerted effort to avoid changing their hiring practices and to dissuade regulators from revealing the lack of diversity in the banking sector. “In an otherwise good-faith effort to utilize the joint standards and meet certain standards or metrics relating to ‘diversity,’” the Chamber of Commerce wrote in its letter, “regulated entities may inadvertently run afoul of federal workplace requirements by, for example, engaging in ‘reverse’ discrimination.” Smaller regional banks shared those concerns. The Missouri Bankers Association likened the agencies’ proposal to a “government mandated affirmative action program.”

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The Financial Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its Lack of Diversity

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NFL Commissioner Says Washington Football Team’s Name "Honors Native Americans," Native Americans Disagree

by Junko98Watba Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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During his pre-Super Bowl press conference Friday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked if he would ever call a Native American by the name of the Washington football team. Goodell hedged, instead saying the name has been “presented in a way that honors Native Americans.” (Goodell sent a letter to members of Congress last year defending the name.)

On Wednesday, ThinkProgress reporter Travis Waldron published an exhaustive account of the fight to rebrand the slur, revealing that the Washington team consulted with Republican advisers—including GOP messaging consultant Frank Luntz (of “death tax” fame), former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer (of Iraq War fame), and former Virginia governor and US senator George Allen (of “macaca” fame)—on how to handle criticism of the team’s name.

If Goodell, team owner Dan Snyder, and friends like Luntz, Fleischer, and Allen don’t understand the issue, they might want to take a look at an ad the National Congress of American Indians released Monday. Watch here:

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Ani DiFranco Wanted to Party at a Slave Plantation. Guess What Happened?

by EllaBlocker Posted on December 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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In a banner year for non-apology apologies, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco non-apologized this weekend for renting out an old Louisiana slave plantation to host a songwriting workshop. The event, now canceled, was billed as a “Righteous Retreat” and charged attendees $1,000 to sleep in a tent for four nights and learn about “developing one’s singular creativity” while DiFranco and her friends led jam sessions. The “captivating setting” was to be Nottoway Plantation and Resort in White Castle, Louisiana, a 64-room, 53,000-square-foot antebellum mansion and sugar plantation whose website has this to say about the plantation master:

“Considering his slaves to be valuable tools in the operation of his business, John Randolph provided the necessary care to keep them in good health. He understood the importance of hygiene in controlling the spread of illnesses and disease, so he provided a bathhouse where slaves could bathe daily if they wished…Ever the astute businessman, Randolph knew that in order to maintain a willing workforce, it was necessary to provide not only for his slaves’ basic needs for housing, food and medicine, but to also offer additional compensation and rewards when their work was especially productive… It is difficult to accurately assess the treatment of Randolph’s slaves; however, various records indicate that they were probably well treated for the time.”

The website also notes that Randolph’s “willing workforce” was comprised of 155 slaves quartered in 42 slave houses in 1860, making Nottoway “one of the largest plantations in the South, at a time when most owners possessed fewer than 20 slaves.”

On Saturday, a group of black feminists on Twitter took notice, and the hashtag #AniDiFrancoRetreatIdeas was born:

The event’s Facebook page filled up with outraged comments, some noting that the building’s current owner is a right-wing Australian billionaire who gave hundreds of thousands to help elect a prime minister who considers abortion “the easy way out,” homelessness a choice, and doesn’t want his daughters vaccinated against cervical cancer.

Yesterday, DiFranco posted an announcement to her label’s blog canceling the event, and apologizing largely by way of excusing herself from blame, chiding those who’d gotten upset, and lamenting lost opportunities for “healing the wounds of history:”

“when i agreed to do a retreat…i did not know the exact location it was to be held. when i found out it was to be held at a resort on a former plantation, I thought to myself, “whoa”, but i did not imagine or understand that the setting of a plantation would trigger such collective outrage or result in so much high velocity bitterness…i know that pain is stored in places where great social ills have occurred. i believe that people must go to those places with awareness and with compassionate energy and meditate on what has happened and absorb some of the reverberating pain with their attention and their awareness. i believe that compassionate energy is transformative and necessary for healing the wounds of history…if nottoway is simply not an acceptable place for me to go and try to do my work in the eyes of many, then let me just concede before more divisive words are spilled.”

I spent many a dorm room night with Ani on full blast on the stereo (at Bryn Mawr, the DiFranco discography was practically a major) and she’s nowhere near the likes of Richard Cohen and Paula Deen when it comes to obliviousness over history’s injustices. But is it really such a huge step from “whoa” to “no” when a brochure for Nottoway Plantation and Resort lands on your desk?

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Ani DiFranco Wanted to Party at a Slave Plantation. Guess What Happened?

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Elizabeth Warren: Big Banks Should Reveal Their Donations to Influential Think Tanks

by q1jurse Posted on December 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on the biggest US banks to disclose their donations to think tanks, which influence laws that affect them.

Under current law, banks and other corporations are not required to publicly report their contributions to think tanks. That means that lawmakers who use think tank data and analysis to shape laws and regulations designed to police banks do not know how much bank money influences that research. “A lot of the power of big banks over DC comes from donations to think tanks, who then put out ‘studies’ favorable to certain ways of doing business,” says one Democratic aide. In a letter to the CEOs of the nation’s six largest financial institutions—JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley—Warren called on the companies to start voluntarily reporting their donations to these policy shops.

“To prevent future economic crises,” Warren says in the letter, “policymakers need access to objective, high-quality research, data, and analysis about our consumer and financial markets…Private think tanks are extremely well-suited to provide this research and analysis, but for it to be valuable, such research and analysis must be truly independent.”

Corporations are required to tell the public when they lobby members of Congress or government agencies, Warren says, so “the same transparency should exist for any indirect efforts banks make to influence policymaking through financial contributions to think tanks.”

Warren’s demand for think-tank money transparency is yet another approach to curbing too-big-to-fail—the problem of the biggest Wall Street banks being so large and loosely regulated that their failure would endanger the entire financial system. One of the reasons too-big-to-fail is still a problem, five years after the financial crisis, is that banks are good at weakening the laws and regulations meant to rein them in.

One way to do that is through think tanks. The Roosevelt Institute, for example, recently published a report on the successes and failures of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act. If the Institute had received loads of Wall Street cash, it might have been motivated to minimize the failures of the law, and thus further regulation.

Warren’s letter comes a few days after the president and vice-president of the centrist think tank Third Way wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed warning Democrats against following Warren over a “populist cliff.” The Nation reported this week that Third Way employs a Washington consulting firm that represents financial institutions including MasterCard and Deutsche Bank.

The letter also comes on the heels of a recent defeat for corporate contribution transparency advocates. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a Wall Street regulator, considered forcing corporations to disclose the money they spend on campaigns and elections. But just this week, the agency announced it had dropped that issue from its 2014 priority list.

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Elizabeth Warren: Big Banks Should Reveal Their Donations to Influential Think Tanks

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Dems Say Boehner Blocking Farm Bill, Wants More Food Stamp Cuts

by Onopriyll7 Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over the past month, the House and Senate have been working to come up with a compromise farm bill—the five-year piece of legislation that funds agriculture and nutrition programs. The main sticking point is the level of cuts to the food stamp program. House Republicans want to cut $40 billion from the program, while the Senate wants to trim $4 billion. Last week, the talks fell apart, and the two sides are fighting over why.

A Democratic aide tells Mother Jones that House Speaker John Boehner shot down several informal compromise farm bill proposals because the food stamps cuts were not deep enough. Boehner’s spokesman denies this.

The Democratic aide says the joint House-Senate panel that is trying to work out a deal presented Boehner with a few proposals that contained food stamps levels close to what the Senate wants. Even though Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.)—the chairman of the House agriculture committee and a top member of the compromise panel—was willing to give a lot of ground to the Senate on food stamps, he says, Boehner rejected the proposals. “Boehner is playing spoiler,” he adds. “That’s why negotiations fell apart.”

Another source familiar with the negotiations echoes the Dem aide’s claim, saying that the House leadership has Lucas on a tight leash. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who is on the compromise committee, told Congressional Quarterly the same thing last week. “I’m hearing that the speaker still keeps inserting his people into the process,” and that House members on the farm bill compromise panel “have to go and check with the speaker’s people who say they want this and this and this. I hear that’s one of our major problems.”

But a spokesman for Boehner says the assertion that Boehner shot down the food stamps proposals “is absurd.” He adds that “the Speaker has full confidence” in Lucas and the rest of the House GOP team that is working out a compromise farm bill. On Friday, Lucas said negotiations stalled because of differences over the crop subsidy provisions in the legislation.

If Boehner did reject the compromise committee’s food-stamp proposals, he adhered to something called the Hastert rule—an informal measure used to limit the power of the minority—which says that a “majority of the majority” party must support a bill before it is brought up for a vote. It was first used by former House speaker Dennis Hastert in the mid-90s.

Boehner may not use the Hastert rule on the farm bill, but time is running out to reach an agreement. The two sides were supposed to have a final compromise bill on the House floor by December 13. A Senate agriculture committee aide says that negotiations are technically still ongoing, but the deadline may be pushed into next year. The farm bill is already more than a year behind schedule.

If fruitless negotiations end up delaying a farm bill for another year, Democrats may be the unlikley winners. Some Dems have been considering voting against any compromise farm bill in order to kill the bill. If that happens, food stamps would continue to be funded at current levels.

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Dems Say Boehner Blocking Farm Bill, Wants More Food Stamp Cuts

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Regulators for Keeping Banks “Too Big to Fail”

by KirkM79lwwbk Posted on November 12, 2013

Mother Jones

Five years after the financial crash, most congressional Democrats seem content to live with the status quo. They tackled financial reform in 2010 when they passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and they’d prefer to leave the nitty-gritty details of keeping banks in check to federal agencies rather than pass new legislation.

But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) won’t be so easily assuaged. On Tuesday, she delivered a speech to a room full of academics, consumer advocates, and senate aides, that criticized federal regulators for failing to meet the deadlines to write rules regulating banks, as outlined in Dodd-Frank. “Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act?” she said. “I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That’s what oversight means. And that’s certainly a principle that would have served our country well prior to the crisis.”

She noted that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency she conceived of and helped guide to formation, has met its deadlines for writing rules. But the other federal agencies have been an utter failure at keeping to the schedule laid out by Dodd-Frank. A recent report by Davis Polk found that 60 percent of deadlines had been missed. Thirty percent of Dodd-Frank-mandated rules haven’t even been proposed yet, let alone finalized.

Warren spoke at an event assessing the state of financial reform hosted by Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) and the Roosevelt Institute. The two organizations released a 125-page report Tuesday outlining where Dodd-Frank has succeeded and failed, with a heavy emphasis on where the act failed to tame the biggest banks’ risky activities and how they still expose the entire economy to risk should they collapse.

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Elizabeth Warren Slams Regulators for Keeping Banks “Too Big to Fail”

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BUILD Act could make it easier to green toxic brownfields

by AlvinaiTyler Posted on March 7, 2013

BUILD Act could make it easier to green toxic brownfields

By Susie Cagle

Nearly all of America’s cities contain brownfields — contaminated, abandoned sites that can be as big as old rail yards or as small as former dry cleaners. The EPA estimates that there are more than 450,000 brownfield sites nationwide.

MA Dept. of Environmental Protection

A brownfield in Worcester, Mass.

Greening all those brownfields is no easy task, and the EPA’s Brownfields Program still has a long way to go. But a new bill introduced in Congress could help.

The BUILD Act – BUILD stands for Brownfields Utilization, Investment, and Local Development — would make brownfields cleanup grants available to a wider variety of groups and local governments, and would generally smooth the way for communities to redevelop these properties. The bill specifically calls for extra assistance for disadvantaged and rural communities.

The legislation is sponsored by a motley bipartisan crew of senators: Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), and Tom Udall (D-N.M.). That’s right: Republicans are working with Democrats to support the EPA’s efforts to clean up cities. Even in these mad, sequestery times, there appears to be a bit of sanity on Capitol Hill.

The bill has support from the National Brownfields Coalition, and Smart Growth America calls it “great news for America’s neighborhoods.”

“The BUILD Act is a win for everyone — Congress, local governments, business owners and taxpayers,” said Geoff Anderson, president and CEO of Smart Growth America. “Brownfields restoration drives economic growth while giving local governments the flexibility to pursue the projects they need the most. Transforming a community’s financial sinkhole into a new business or residential building is a no-brainer.”

“Smart development and revitalization of our urban areas require the transformation of sites that are contaminated by pollution and hazardous chemicals,” said another urbanist blogger Sen. Udall.

“Brownfields represent tremendous economic development opportunities. The BUILD Act could help communities make it happen,” writes Craig Chester at the Atlantic Cities.

Make it happen! That’s something we don’t generally count on Congress to do. No harm in crossing fingers on this one, though.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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BUILD Act could make it easier to green toxic brownfields

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Lawmakers call for end to animal-deafening, oil-finding offshore surveys

by Myrna Posted on February 1, 2013

Lawmakers call for end to animal-deafening, oil-finding offshore surveys

By Philip Bump

When oil companies are trying to figure out where to drill offshore, they drag an array of seismic air guns behind a boat as it sails around the ocean. Submerged air guns fire bursts of air downward to create sound waves that travel to the ocean floor and rebound back up to sensors. Here’s what that looks like from the surface:

Underneath, however, it’s much less entertaining. Arrays contain dozens of guns, each of which produces a burst with tens of thousands of times as much energy as a jet engine, according to Oceana Deputy Vice President Jacqueline Savitz, as reported by FuelFix. Good for getting sonar readings on the ocean floor. Bad for any animals that are swimming in the vicinity.

This is one reason that New Jersey lawmakers wrote a letter to President Obama, asking him to stop seismic surveys on the East Coast. The other reason: Who wants an oil well offshore? From FuelFix:

Noting that the geophysical research is the first step in a long path to offshore oil drilling, [Rep. Frank] Pallone said the administration’s Interior Department should “put a stop to [seismic testing] before we experience a Deepwater Horizon-like disaster in the Atlantic.” …

Although the [Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s]  five-year plan for selling offshore oil and gas leases through 2017 does not include any planned auctions of Atlantic waters, seismic research today could pave the way for future drilling in the region. Data indicating potential big untapped resources could add pressure for future administrations to lease Atlantic tracts and help plan any auctions in the area.

magnera

An offshore rig near Norway.

The Interior Department has done an assessment of wildlife in the area where oil companies would like to shoot off their seismic air guns.

According to the ocean energy bureau, 38 marine mammal species are in the area that could be surveyed, including endangered baleen whales and manatees. The bureau’s draft environmental study concluded that seismic surveys could affect as many as 11,748 bottle nose dolphins, 4,631 short-finned pilot whales and 6,147 short-beaked common dolphins.

On one side: 20,000 dolphins and whales not deafened by bursts of air; innumerable sea animals not coated with oil in a worst-case-scenario spill. On the other: more oil — and profits — for oil companies.

In modern American politics, that’s somehow a toss-up.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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