Tag Archives: freedom

Quote of the Day: "Suck It Up, Cupcake"

Mother Jones

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Oh FFS:

Really? Sarah Palin is still front-page news? Seriously? On the other hand, I have to admit that she’s hard to resist:

Palin said Obama’s visit suggested that the president believes that “the greatest generation was perpetuating the evil of World War II.”…The tea party heroine said Trump would be a president “who knows how to win.”

“You mess with our freedom,” she said, “we’ll put a boot in your ass. It’s the American way.” At that, the crowd chanted, “USA! USA! USA!”

Palin was the warm-up act at Trump’s large rally, speaking on stage before the candidate arrived in San Diego. She took issue with Obama’s statement overseas this week that other world leaders have been “rattled” by the rise of Trump. “Rattled, are they now?” Palin said….She pointed out that the yellow Gadsden flag flown at tea party rallies depicts a rattlesnake “coiled, prepared, ready to strike.”

“So, yeah, rattlin’ – it’s a good thing,” she said.

….Turning to look at the television cameras and journalists on the press riser, Palin lambasted the “sheep in the media.” “Their head is still a-spinnin’,” she said. “Do you know how thoroughly distrusted you are, mainstream media? … He is now we the people’s nominee, so suck it up, cupcake!

Oh well. At least it’s Saturday. Maybe no one will notice that I caved in and wrote about this.

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Quote of the Day: "Suck It Up, Cupcake"

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Clinton Derangement Syndrome Is Alive and Well

Mother Jones

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Memories:

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that top aides to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton should be questioned under oath about her use of a private email server as secretary of state, raising new political and legal complications for Clinton as she tries to maintain momentum for her campaign.

….The judge said that months of piecemeal revelations to date about Clinton and the State Department’s handling of the email controversy created “at least a ‘reasonable suspicion’ ” that public access to official government records under the federal Freedom of Information Act was undermined. “There has been a constant drip, drip, drip of declarations. When does it stop?” said Sullivan, a 1994 Bill Clinton appointee who has overseen several politically sensitive FOIA cases. “This case is about the public’s right to know,” he said.

This is all courtesy of Judicial Watch, the Scaife-funded outfit that brought us so much endless Clinton paranoia in the 90s. To this day, most people—including an awful lot of reporters who ought to know better—still don’t realize just how deliberate and manufactured the effort to destroy Bill Clinton was back then. Despite thousands of hours and millions of dollars of investigation, virtually none of the “scandals” turned out to be real. They were just an extended effort to throw mud at the wall and see if something stuck. Ironically, the only one that did stick had nothing to do with any of the mud. It was just an old-fashioned sex scandal.

And now we’re back where we started. Hillary obviously blew it when she set up her own email server, but once again, thousands of hours of investigation have turned up nothing. It was dumb, but there’s no scandal, no national security threat, and no cabal of silence. Hillary Clinton has been required to make her entire email record public, something that’s never happened before to a secretary of state, and still there’s nothing. She’s undergone hours of House questioning, and still nothing. But the mud keeps coming. Maybe Huma Abedin will finally provide the smoking gun! Maybe if we demand to see her personal emails! Maybe if we recover bits and pieces from the server! There just has to be something there.

There isn’t. Hillary didn’t order the assassination of Vince Foster and she didn’t set up a personal email account so she could conceal her orders to stand down the rescue effort in Benghazi. But thanks to the obsessive Clinton hatred of Judicial Watch and the assistance of credulous judges like Emmet Sullivan, the “drip drip drip” will keep on coming. We never learn.

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Clinton Derangement Syndrome Is Alive and Well

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Mitch McConnell Just Made It Virtually Impossible to Police Dark Money in 2016

Mother Jones

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Conservative Solutions Project has run more than 4,882 ads in support of Marco Rubio this election—and not a dime of its funding has been made public. As a politically active nonprofit, the outfit is theoretically regulated by the Internal Revenue Service, but thanks to clever legislative maneuvering by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and congressional Republicans, there’s no danger that the IRS will apply any special scrutiny to the people or corporations generously financing this key component of Rubio’s run for president. (His actual campaign unveiled its first ad just a few weeks ago).

Buried deep in the massive end-of-the-year spending bill released late Tuesday night were provisions that not only prohibit the IRS from cracking down on groups like Conservative Solutions Project, but that block the Securities and Exchange Commission from prying into the political spending of public companies.

In last year’s budget deal, McConnell pushed through higher limits for campaign contributions to party organizations, allowing wealthy donors to chip in hundreds of thousands of dollars. During this year’s budget negotiations, McConnell initially tried to further loosen restrictions on how party committees spend money. But he faced strong opposition from an unusual coalition of congressional Democrats and members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus. The pushback appears to have caused McConnell, a longtime foe of campaign finance rules, to abandon the plan. But he did manage to slip provisions into the legislation that weakened enforcement and transparency when it comes to politically active nonprofits.

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Mitch McConnell Just Made It Virtually Impossible to Police Dark Money in 2016

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Did Ted Cruz Leak Classified Information? Then So Did a Former NSA Chief.

Mother Jones

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A testy exchange between Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz at Tuesday’s Republican debate turned on Wednesday into a question of whether Cruz accidentally leaked classified information in public. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Wednesday that his office was looking into whether Cruz had revealed any secrets as he defended his yes vote on a National Security Agency reform bill earlier this year.

Neither Burr nor his office specified what information Cruz may have revealed, but it’s widely believed to be Cruz’s claim that the USA Freedom Act, an NSA reform bill passed in May, would actually expand the reach of intelligence. Whether or not the information is classified, however, it was already known to the public, thanks to government officials including Michael Hayden, the retired Air Force general who ran both the CIA and the NSA during his career.

Rubio attacked Cruz for voting for USA Freedom, which ended the NSA’s mass collection of phone records and replaced it with a system that requires the NSA to get a federal judge’s approval to get data from phone companies. Cruz responded that the new system would actually make more records open to the NSA. “The old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists,” he said. “The new program covers nearly 100 percent.”

That lines up with what Hayden said during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation on March 30, 2014, when Hayden appeared on the show with former CIA deputy director Michael Morell and others to discuss national security issues. Morell was a member of a panel convened in 2013 by President Barack Obama to review intelligence collection, and that group recommended the end of bulk metadata collection in favor of the new system. Hayden agreed with the move for the same reasons Cruz gave. “Over time, the percentage of overall billing records the NSA was retrieving got smaller and smaller,” he told host Bob Schieffer. “Michael Morell’s panel pointed out that they’re only getting about a third, if that, just because of changes in technology. The NSA gets to query the data…in an exhaustive way, not that one-third they’ve formerly gotten.”

The Washington Post cited unnamed US government officials in an article in February 2014 who made the same claim of a 30 percent collection rate as Cruz, noting that “the government is taking steps to restore the collection—which does not include the content of conversations—closer to previous levels.”

The information may still be classified: Making a secret public doesn’t change its classified status as far as the government is concerned. But if Cruz supposedly put national security at risk over his comments last night, he was far from the first to do so.

Update, 12/16/15, 4:55 pm: Sens. Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday afternoon that “the Committee is not investigating anything said during last night’s Republican Presidential debate.”

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Did Ted Cruz Leak Classified Information? Then So Did a Former NSA Chief.

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Coal Baron Don Blankenship Convicted of Conspiring to Commit Mine Safety Violations

Mother Jones

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Don Blankenship, the former CEO of coal giant Massey Energy, was found guilty of conspiring to commit mine safety violations on Thursday in federal court in Charleston, West Virginia. However, Blankenship was found not guilty of making false statements to federal regulators in the aftermath of the 2010 explosion at a Massey-owned mine in West Virginia. Blankenship faces up to one year in prison on the conspiracy charge, a misdemeanor, and his attorney Bill Taylor told reporters he will appeal.

The irony of the Blankenship trial was that while the Upper Big Branch disaster—the deadliest in an American mine in 40 years—seemed to hover in the background of the prosecutors’ arguments, it was his paperwork after the accident, not his mine’s safety record before it, that posed the biggest threat to his freedom. As I reported in October:

What threatens to put the 65-year-old away for decades are two allegedly false statements Massey submitted in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission: “We do not condone any violation of MSHA regulations,” and “we strive to be in compliance with all regulations at all times,” Blankenship informed investors, even as his company was allegedly outflanking the regulatory system. It’s the mining equivalent of busting Al Capone for tax evasion.

“I have all the respect in hell that at least somebody was able to say, ‘Wait a minute, that isn’t right,'” says Bruce Stanley, who represented Caperton in his suit against Massey. “But he’s up for what, a possible 30-year sentence? Well, there’s only one count that puts that kind of mileage on it. That’s the one that says he lied to Wall Street. When it comes to human lives, he gets maybe a year.”

Read MoJo‘s in-depth profile of Blankenship’s rise and fall here.

This article has been updated.

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Coal Baron Don Blankenship Convicted of Conspiring to Commit Mine Safety Violations

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France Goes to War on Civil Liberties

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, many in France have said they finally understand what things were like for Americans just after September 11, 2001. The attacks have emboldened France’s conservatives, and pushed liberal and moderate factions rightward. On Friday, the French parliament voted to extend a nationwide state of emergency for another three months, granting authorities broad powers to limit civil liberties in the name of combating terrorism. The French public overwhelmingly supports the move.

The rise of a police state in France may come as a surprise to Americans old enough to remember when France stood out as Europe’s greatest critic of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror—a spat that peaked in 2003 when, in response to French opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the House of Representatives cafeteria rebranded its French fries “Freedom Fries.”

Nowadays, of course, just about everyone looks with disfavor on that war, which is credited with giving ISIS a foothold. Though France bombed targets in Syria on November 15, it has so far stopped short of sending in ground troops against ISIS. And, while it’s too early to tell, there’s no evidence its intelligence services are abducting or torturing terror suspects.

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France Goes to War on Civil Liberties

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Prefer Your Meat Drug-Free? You’re the "Fringe 1 Percent"

Mother Jones

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Elanco, the animal-health division of the pharma giant Eli Lilly, makes one of the world’s most controversial growth-promoting chemicals for meat production: ractopamine, marketed as Optaflexx for cattle, Paylean for pigs, and Topmax for turkeys.

A member of the class of medicines known as beta-agonists, which are also given to asthmatic people to help relax their airway muscles, ractopamine makes animals rapidly put on lean weight—but it also mimics stress hormones and makes their hearts beat faster. Studies suggest that it makes livestock more vulnerable to heat. Ractopamine is banned in the European Union, China, and more than 100 other countries, and it faces mounting criticism here in the United States.

To clean up his company’s image, Elanco’s president, Jeff Simmons, has launched a “counteroffensive,” reports Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Andrew Martin. In addition to his responsibilities operating a $2.3 billion-dollar global animal-drug business, Simmons runs an initiative called ENOUGH Movement, which calls itself a “global community working together to ensure everyone has access to nutritious, affordable food—today and in the coming decades.” Combating global hunger is one of ENOUGH’S major themes. Simmons uses a “grainy photo of himself carrying a small African child on his back” as his Twitter avatar, Martin reports.

Elanco served as the primary underwriter of The Atlantic magazine’s 2015 Food Summit, held last week in Washington, D.C. Simmons delivered a sponsored presentation at the event. In it, he complained that a group he labeled the “fringe 1 percent,” agitating for increased regulation on meat producers, is driving the national debate around food. Simmons also regaled the crowd with ENOUGH’s core messages: The world needs to produce 60 percent more meat, eggs, and dairy by 2050; doing so will require “innovative farming techniques that increase efficiency;” and organic methods—which forbid growth-boosting chemicals for animals—aren’t going to cut it. Instead, ENOUGH insists, “we must leverage the innovations and technological advances that will allow us to produce more food without using more resources.”

One can see why an exec operating in the meat industry might be feeling defensive. Industrial-scale meat production has been linked to the rise of antibiotic resistance in human medicine (which claims at least 700,000 lives per year globally); ecological ruin; increased risk of cancer; and the hollowing out of communities where it alights. Insult to injury, US consumers have been cutting back on meat consumption overall, and turning increasingly to drug-free, pasture-raised product.

And Simmons has rushed into the fray. In short, Martin shows, Simmons is taking a page from the agrichemical/GMO industry playbook: present your industry as crucial to “feeding the world” as global population grows to 9 billion by 2050, and paint your critics as out-of-touch elitists who are indifferent to hunger and poverty.

“Simmons doesn’t directly pitch Elanco products during his speeches on hunger, saying he has a higher purpose: alleviating world hunger and changing a conversation that’s been hijacked by a vocal fringe of activists,” Businessweek’s Martin writes. “If the arguments sound familiar, it’s because Monsanto and other proponents of genetically modified foods made similar claims.”

One key part of the strategy to avoid discussion of existing products, and point instead to future innovation. Generally speaking, Monsanto execs prefer to talk about still-in-development crops rather than current offerings, which are riddled by weeds and insects that have evolved to resist them. Likewise, Simmons doesn’t say much on the stump about the company’s best-known product, ractopamine.

A 2014 study from Texas Tech and Kansas State researchers found that it nearly doubled the mortality rate of cows fed on it in the weeks before slaughter. As for pigs, the drug has “triggered more adverse reports in pigs than any other animal drug on the market,” a 2012 investigation by journalist Helena Bottemiller found. “Pigs suffered from hyperactivity, trembling, broken limbs, inability to walk, and death, according to FDA reports released under a Freedom of Information Act request.”

Rather than ponder such troubles, Simmons urges us to imagine a future where meat is abundant and the scourge of malnutrition has been defeated, all driven by “innovation” and “science.” Whether or not that vision comes to pass, this much seems clear: We’re on the verge of a loud campaign by the meat industry, particularly its pharma sector, to portray its critics as a privileged fringe, untroubled by global hunger.

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Prefer Your Meat Drug-Free? You’re the "Fringe 1 Percent"

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A Billionaire Sued Us. We Won. But We Still Have Big Legal Bills to Pay.

Mother Jones

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By now, you’ve probably read about Mother Jones‘ landmark legal win against Frank VanderSloot, a billionaire political donor. If you haven’t, you can read the full backstory here (it’s riveting). Or, if you’re feeling lazy, here’s the TL;DR version:

After the Citizens United decision allowed wealthy political donors to drastically increase their spending, we wrote a piece about one such donor: Frank VanderSloot. He and his company were among the biggest donors to Romney’s super-PAC. It was a straightforward bit of investigative reporting: letting readers know who was funding the campaign.

VanderSloot saw it differently. His lawyers sent us letters complaining about the piece. We didn’t retract our story, and in 2013 he sued us for defamation. Earlier this month, shortly before the case was set to go to trial, an Idaho judge dismissed the lawsuit, finding that our reporting was accurate and that the article was protected under the First Amendment.

It was a huge victory. We were up against a powerful billionaire and we won. But it came at a great cost: at least $2.5 million for us and our insurer, and $650,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for Mother Jones, to be precise. Everyone’s been asking whether we can recoup our attorney’s fees from VanderSloot, but unfortunately the answer is no.

The win means a lot to me, personally, too. As someone who writes about rich and powerful people, it’s good to know that the First Amendment is alive and well. And it makes me beyond proud to write for Mother Jones: Not too many other shops would have had the guts to fight back, but we knew you’d expect us to, and that you’d have our back if we took a stand.

If you haven’t already, can you pitch in to help us pay our legal bills? If you can, your donation will be doubled by First Look Media’s Press Freedom Litigation Fund—they’re matching up to $74,999 in donations (the same amount VanderSloot sued us for). You can give by credit card or PayPal.

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A Billionaire Sued Us. We Won. But We Still Have Big Legal Bills to Pay.

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Can Paul Ryan Save the GOP From Itself—and Save Himself From the GOP?

Mother Jones

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House Republicans are currently grappling with a fundamental philosophical question: What happens when an ungovernable group must elect a new leader?

A month after Speaker John Boehner announced his plan to resign, the Republican majority in the House has been unable to find a replacement for him. Boehner’s deputy, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), was the favorite to succeed Boehner, but he was forced to step aside amid opposition from the caucus’ most conservative members. McCarthy’s exit left the party in chaos and led to calls for Paul Ryan to become the next speaker. On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Republican told his caucus he would consider taking the job, signaling that an end to the party’s leadership crisis might finally be near. Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, has credibility in both moderate and conservative circles.

But there’s a catch. Ryan will take the job only if every caucus in his party—including the right-wing 40-member Freedom Caucus that helped force Boehner out of office—unites behind him. In short, the Republican Party has to promise to be governable. And the hardliners have to promise to stop being such hardliners. It’s a tall order—and Ryan wants an answer by Friday.

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Can Paul Ryan Save the GOP From Itself—and Save Himself From the GOP?

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Bernie Sanders Gave a Helluva Defense of Hillary’s Email Scandals at the Debate. There Are 32 Problems With It.

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered one of the most enthusiastic applause lines of the first Democratic presidential debate when he came to Hillary Clinton’s defense over her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. After CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Clinton about her upcoming testimony in front of Congress related to her emails, she offered the same answer she has repeatedly given in response.

“I’ve taken responsibility for it,” she said. “I did say it was a mistake.” She then employed her recent campaign strategy of linking the criticism of her email setup to the heavily politicized House Select Committee on Benghazi, which she described as “basically an arm of the Republican National Committee.”

But before everybody moved on, Sanders weighed in. “I think the secretary is right,” he said. “And that is, I think the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” Clinton smiled and thanked him, and the crowd roared its approval.

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Bernie Sanders Gave a Helluva Defense of Hillary’s Email Scandals at the Debate. There Are 32 Problems With It.

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