Tag Archives: governor

Chris Christie: "Hell No," America Shouldn’t Lead on Climate Change

by LoriZVJtsn Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Most Americans say the United States should be a global leader in the fight against climate change, according to a recent poll conducted by YouGov and our Climate Desk partners at the Huffington Post.

Chris Christie is not one of those Americans.

In a remarkable interview published today by The Atlantic (another Climate Desk partner), the New Jersey governor and Republican White House hopeful criticized President Barack Obama for supposedly prioritizing climate change over the battle against ISIS. “His priorities are climate change,” said Christie. “He thinks that this is what we need American leadership on.”

Check out Climate Desk’s ultimate guide to the presidential candidates’ positions on climate change

“And you don’t,” responded The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

“Hell no!” said Christie. “I think there’s a lot more important things to worry about. I’ll guarantee you this—the 220,000, 230,000 dead Syrians aren’t worried about climate change.”

In reality, a number of experts argue that a devastating drought linked to climate change was one of the factors that contributed to instability in Syria. Of course, Christie’s statements aren’t likely to hurt him with Republic voters, who are much more skeptical of climate action—and, for that matter, climate science—than the general public. According to the poll, 52 percent of all respondents said the United States should lead the way on climate, compared with 26 percent who said it shouldn’t. But among Republicans (PDF), just 32 percent want the country to take a leadership role; 46 percent don’t.

The Huffington Post

You can read the entire Atlantic interview with Christie here.

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Chris Christie: "Hell No," America Shouldn’t Lead on Climate Change

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This Composer Wants You To Know Who Syrian Refugees Really Are

by Bradly2804 Posted on November 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Suad Bushnaq thinks of Syria, she thinks of the wonderful years she spent studying at one of the Middle East’s top conservatories, attending performances at the Damascus Opera House, and catching jazz gigs in back-alley cafes.

She thinks of musakhan, shwarma, fresh-squeezed juices; and of her dearest friends and the jokes they told each other.

She thinks of her late mother, born and raised in Syria, and of her mother’s family still living there.

But these days, watching events unfold from the safety of the United States, she is barraged by daily images of violence, airstrikes, and fleeing refugees. And the public apprehension, ever since the Paris terrorist attacks, that has allowed craven politicians (including the governor of her home state) to paint those refugees as a threat. “No one in the West has the image of the Syria that I know,” Bushnaq told me. “The beautiful Syria filled with culture and history and amazing food and people who laugh.”

Syria has changed dramatically in the decade since Bushnaq, one of only a handful of Arab women composers on the planet (Layal Watfeh and Farah Siraj being among the other notables), last set foot there. The ongoing civil war has disrupted and even claimed the lives of many of her friends and relatives. Now she’s fighting the loss of Syrian culture in the only way she knows how: by creating orchestral pieces and scores that combine the Western and Middle Eastern musical traditions.

She has released two albums and collaborated with award-winning Arab filmmakers, as well as the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra, which performed a movement of her orchestral suite Hakawaty (or Suite for Damascus) to a sold out international audience in Bremen, Germany, this past September.

The 33-year-old composer was born and raised in Amman, Jordan, by a Syrian mother and Palestinian-Bosnian father with a large LP collection. (“My house was full of music,” she says.) She started piano at age four, but hated her lessons, preferring to make up her own songs. “When I was in fifth grade, my mom told me, ‘If you stop taking piano lessons I will break the piano! I am not the type of mom who would allow us to have a piano as a piece of furniture.”

By 16, she decided that composition was more than just a whim. She dreamed of attending McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in Montreal, but her parents said no. It was too far away and too expensive. So Bushnaq moved to Damascus.

There she attended the Higher Institute of Music, where she learned from and performed with some of the region’s premier musicians—many of them women who’ve gone on to international success. But Bushnaq was the only one studying composition. She would also be the only Arab woman ever admitted to McGill’s prestigious composition program, where she landed a full scholarship in 2005. At McGill, she further honed her compositional style—a distillation of the influences of “a classically trained pianist who grew up in the Arab world, who has a bit of Balkan blood, and who likes to listen to jazz.”

Bushnaq, who now lives with her husband in North Carolina, has worked on the scores of several films. One of them is a documentary about a 12-year-old Syrian refugee, by the female Lebanese director Niam Itani. There’s also a psycho-thriller called The Curve, which will premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival in December, by Jordanian-Palestinian director Rifqi Assaf. (The strings on the soundtrack were recorded by Syrian musicians in Damascus.)

Lately, Bushnaq has been looking around for an orchestra to perform her Suite for Damascus in full, following on the success of the Syrian Expat concert. She remains in constant contact with friends and family back in Syria, where, despite all the chaos, the Higher Institute of Music continues to operate, and its musicians continue to perform.

“It’s sad what’s happening now,” Bushnaq told me. “But it makes me happy to know that the music scene is still going. It shows me that despite the war, people are still trying their best to live.”

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This Composer Wants You To Know Who Syrian Refugees Really Are

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Louisiana Just Voted to Give a Quarter of a Million People Health Care

by RethaTEAUjg Posted on November 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican Sen. David Vitter lost his bid to be the next governor of Louisiana on Saturday, and it wasn’t even close. The two-term senator lost the runoff election to Democratic state Rep. John Bel Edwards by double digits, setting the stage for the state to potentially become the first in the Deep South to accept a pivotal part of Obamacare.

Vitter was dogged by a decade-old prostitution scandal, and a bizarre spying incident at a coffee shop. Desperate to make up ground, he warned voters in one ad that President Obama would release “thugs” from prison onto Louisiana streets. Vitter also sought to turn the tide by warning voters of a terrorist threat posed by the state’s 14 Syrian refugees. He went as far as to allege (falsely, it turned out) that one of the refugees had gone missing. It didn’t work.

Edwards, an anti-abortion, pro-gun, West Point grad, became the first Democratic candidate to win a statewide election in Louisiana since 2008, and benefited from support from Republicans who were dissatisfied with Vitter’s personal troubles and who were disappointed by the state’s financial woes under outgoing Gov. Bobby Jindal. (By the time Jindal dropped out of the presidential race on Wednesday, the one-time rising star’s approval ratings had dropped to 20-percent.)

Jindal also rejected federal funding to expand Medicaid. Edwards has pledged to sign an executive order authorizing the expansion of the program on his first day in office. That’s a really big deal. Such a move would provide coverage to about 225,000 residents in one of the poorest states in the nation.

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Louisiana Just Voted to Give a Quarter of a Million People Health Care

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Indiana Managed to Keep One Syrian Refugee Family Out. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen Again.

by OlenMcgehee Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, a Syrian family of three on their way to the United States received an unexpected surprise: their long-awaited resettlement to Indiana was, with less than 24 hours to go, being shifted to Connecticut, because Indiana Gov. Mike Pence had demanded that no Syrian refugees be allowed into his state.

The case got widespread national attention as a symbol of the backlash against Syrian refugees following last week’s terror attacks in Paris. But nonprofit groups that help resettle refugees across the country say the case wasn’t a sign of things to come, but a one-off that won’t be repeated.

“We’re not going to capitulate to this,” says Carleen Miller, executive director of Exodus Refugee Immigration, the Indianapolis resettlement organization that was handling the Syrian family’s case. “We intend to resettle Syrians.” Wendy Johnson, the communications director for Episcopal Migration Ministries, the national group that works with Exodus, was equally firm. “The case in Indiana was a one-time occurrence,” she remarks.

Miller says Pence’s gambit worked because of short notice. Her office received a letter from the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration on Tuesday saying the state wouldn’t provide resettlement funds for Syrian refugees. Those dollars help pay for a variety of services, including English classes, counseling, and food assistance. By the time the letter arrived, the family was on its way to the United States, and Miller says she didn’t have time to scramble for other resources. “The decision I made to redirect the family to Connecticut was because the family was coming in less than 24 hours and all this had erupted, and nobody told me what the governor could or couldn’t do that would disrupt services or benefits to the client,” she says. Rather than giving the family an uncertain welcome, she chose to send them to another destination where resources were fully available.

If a resettlement group has more time to prepare, it can find private money to make up for state aid that is taken away, Miller explains. She adds, “That’s what we need to know, that families will be welcomed by us and that we’ll have the resources to provide what they need.”

Officials at resettlement agencies haven’t yet received definitive word on what state governors can actually do to prevent refugees, but they insist that moves by Pence and other governors who have refused Syrian refugees are illegal on several counts. “If this was to be implemented, we’re going to be in default of our international covenants,” says Erol Kekic of Church World Service, a resettlement agency. “Article 31 in the UN refugee convention basically says we can’t discriminate based on nationality or membership in a particular religious group, and this is exactly what we’re doing.”

Even the supposed state refugee funds that governors control aren’t strictly theirs to manage: States receive that money from the federal government. The cash is typically doled out by a state refugee coordinator, but that’s not mandatory. “It’s actually at the discretion of the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement of the Department of Health and Human Services to decide who administers these funds,” Kekic says. “They’re not state funds.”

This Syrian family’s quick shift to Connecticut was motivated by logistics and not a fear of local backlash, according to refugee advocates, but that doesn’t mean refugees feel safe. Resettlement agencies say their local offices have fielded numerous calls from nervous refugee families and have also received reports of harassment. Carleen Miller of Exodus reports that one Syrian refugee family in Indiana expressed concern about the signal conveyed by Pence’s move. At school, the couple’s child was confronted by another student. “The classmate said, ‘Are you a supporter of ISIS?’…It’s really disturbing on a variety of levels.” Another refugee in Louisville, Kentucky, reported a death threat. “We have had one report of a Middle Eastern client…getting off the bus and somebody yelling, ‘I will kill you!'” says Kekic, from Church World Service. “So the guy went home and shaved his beard and cried, and then called the agency to say, ‘I don’t know what to think anymore. I didn’t do anything to anyone. Here I am, what do I do next?'” Local resettlement offices have also received threats, Kekic points out.

Many refugee families now live in a constant state of tension, according to resettlement officials. “They feel afraid, they’re not sure what to do, they don’t know if they belong there anymore, how should they behave,” Johnson say. But refugee assistance groups also note that local communities have mostly been welcoming.

In Connecticut, the Syrian family of three—they have so far declined to give their names to media outlets—arrived in New Haven on Wednesday and was greeted by Democratic Gov. Daniel Malloy, one of the few politicians to publicly welcome Syrian refugees in the past week. “Americans sometimes overreact to issues, but in the end they come back and find center,” he reassured the family, according to Chris George, the executive director of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, the group that inherited the case from Exodus.

Then, after Malloy left, the family prepared for their first night in their new homeland.

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Indiana Managed to Keep One Syrian Refugee Family Out. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen Again.

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Alabama May Back Off Its Policy of Treating New Moms Like Meth Cooks

by 0dyqe2k7 Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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A subcommittee of the Alabama Governor’s Health Care Improvement Task Force is examining proposals that aim to reform the nation’s harshest “chemical endangerment of a child” statute. The law states that “knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally” exposing a child to controlled substances or drug-making chemicals is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison if a child is unharmed, and 99 years if a child dies.

The enforcement of the law, originally intended to prosecute methamphetamine users who exposed children to the drug, has been unusually broad—including, as ProPublica’s Nina Martin previously reported in Mother Jones, the prosecution of pregnant women for exposing their fetuses to even small amounts of anti-anxiety medication. Nearly 500 women have been arrested on related charges since the law passed in 2006.

The law has been criticized by civil rights groups and public health experts for being harmful to those who need the most help—women who are faced with poverty and addiction—and for unfairly prosecuting women who were not drug users at all, but who might have simply taken a small dose of medication that eventually appeared appeared in the blood test of their new babies.

At the task force meeting on Wednesday, Dr. Darlene Traffanstedt, who heads the subcommittee, announced that three proposals were under consideration. One would require prosecutors to offer drug treatment to pregnant women instead of prosecution, another would protect women using drugs that have been legally prescribed to them (which has not been the case since 2006). The third option would hold the law to its “original intent” by preventing its use against women who are using pregnancy-related medication.

The subcommittee’s next meeting is in December, and a draft bill is expected by the beginning of February’s legislative session. Read more about the law and its consequences here.

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Alabama May Back Off Its Policy of Treating New Moms Like Meth Cooks

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Hillary Clinton’s Strange Definition of "Middle Class"

by AlissaDCBftg Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton’s campaign has spent much of the past week trumpeting her pledge to protect the middle class from tax increases. Clinton has “proposed a bold, aggressive agenda,” campaign press secretary Brian Fallon said in a statement this week, “but when it comes to paying for it, she will make sure the wealthiest Americans finally start paying their fair share, not force the middle class to pay even more than they already do.”

The former senator and secretary of state hasn’t been shy about using that pledge to bludgeon her Democratic opponents, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Gov. Martin O’Malley, as too eager to take money away from the middle class. “If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes,” Fallon said. “Yet Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9-percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health care plan, and simple math dictates he’ll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda.” Twitter accounts affiliated with Clinton’s campaign have eschewed subtlety to attack Sanders and O’Malley on this point.

There’s a problem with Clinton’s line of attack: She is promising to exempt a lot indisputably rich people from paying more in taxes. Clinton pledged last week that, should she become president, she wouldn’t allow taxes to be raised on households earning less than $250,000 per year—by any measure a very high ceiling for the middle class.

The middle class is one of those nebulous terms with no clear-cut definition. But a glance at the distribution of income across the country makes it hard to argue that that anyone earning close to $250,000 a year could be considered part of the “middle” of the income range.

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Hillary Clinton’s Strange Definition of "Middle Class"

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Kansas Asks Its Entire Supreme Court to Step Aside in Key Case

by MorganTobin Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kansas Republicans believe they have created a law that their own high court cannot review.

In the latest twist of the topsy-turvy constitutional showdown between the GOP-controlled state legislature and the state Supreme Court, the Kansas attorney general has asked the entire Kansas Supreme Court to recuse itself from hearing a key case.

The power struggle between Kansas Republicans and the state’s highest court goes back to a years-long battle over education funding. The state Supreme Court has repeatedly ordered the legislature to spend more money on public education, a request that conflicts with Republicans’ desire to cut taxes. In 2014, the legislature passed a bill stripping the Supreme Court of the administrative authority to appoint chief judges in Kansas’ 31 judicial districts, a move Democrats saw as a power play by the legislature to intimidate the top court during the ongoing fight over school spending. Chief District Court Judge Larry Solomon challenged the constitutionality of the judicial administration law, arguing that it violates the state’s separation of powers.

But the legislature doubled down. Earlier this year, it passed a judicial budget that would cut off funding for the entire Kansas court system if the courts struck down the judicial administration bill—a situation that would seize critical state functions such as criminal prosecutions, civil disputes, real estate sales, and adoptions. That led to the bizarre moment in September when a district court ruled the administrative bill unconstitutional, putting all the funding for the state courts in sudden jeopardy. The situation threatened to devolve into a judicial catch-22, in which no court could rule on the legality of the laws because those laws had defunded them. To avoid that situation, the judge put a hold on his ruling invalidating the law until the state Supreme Court could hear the case—except that the state of Kansas is now arguing that the Supreme Court shouldn’t have its say.

Rather than let the case proceed to the Supreme Court, Attorney General Derek Schmidt argued in a brief last week that the justices should not hear the case because the law involves the court’s authority. Schmidt’s brief also notes that the chief justice of the Supreme Court criticized the law when it passed, betraying his bias against the law.

Under Kansas law, Supreme Court justices can appoint district court judges to sit in their place when they recuse themselves. But Schmidt argues that a district court judge shouldn’t be involved either, because the law involves appointing chief judges at the district court level. Instead, Schmidt proposes that judges on the Kansas Court of Appeals—just below the level of the Supreme Court and above the district courts—review the case. (Perhaps not coincidentally, in 2013, the Republican-controlled legislature changed the selection process for appeals court judges. Before then, a commission nominated potential judges for the governor to choose from; now the judges are appointed directly by the governor, currently Republican Sam Brownback. The judges most sympathetic to the Republican legislature may be those at the appeals court level.)

Lawyers fighting the judicial administration bill believe the recusal request is frivolous. As they wrote in a brief this week, “centuries of precedent make clear that it is the province and duty of this Court to decide cases that involve the scope of the Court’s authority, jurisdiction, and duties vis-à-vis the other branches of government.” In a response filed Thursday, the state held firm that the highest court should not hear the case.

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Kansas Asks Its Entire Supreme Court to Step Aside in Key Case

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Mike Huckabee Wants Syrian Refugees to Be Placed in Homes of "Limousine Liberals"

by EdwardJvu5943469 Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was quick to blame President Obama’s handling of ISIS and the current migrant crisis swelling Europe. On Saturday, he topped his usual blend of hateful xenophobia by suggesting Syrian refugees be placed in the neighborhoods of “limousine liberals” such as Hillary Clinton.

“How come they never end up in the neighborhood where the limousine liberal lives?” Huckabee said in a radio interview. “Behind gated communities and with armed security around. Mrs. Clinton, you have suggested we take in 65,00 refugees. How many can we bring to your neighborhood in Chappaqua?”

The former Arkansas governor continued by connecting two seemingly disparate events and belittling the protests that erupted at the University of Missouri last week over allegations of racism on campus.

“Heck, we may take them to the University of Missouri,” Huckabee continued. “A lot of the students are so stressed out from feeling unsafe because somebody said a word they didn’t like that they are not using their dorm rooms anymore. Maybe we can put them there.”

Since the deadly attacks on Friday, Republican politicians have been vowing to slam the door on the Obama administration’s plan to accept refugees fleeing from violence in Syria and the Middle East. Concerns over the screening process have been heightened after a Syrian passport was located near the body of one of the Paris attackers.

Speaking at the G20 summit in Turkey on Monday, President Obama hit back at Republicans’ growing refusal to take in refugees, calling their rejections a “betrayal of our values.”

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Mike Huckabee Wants Syrian Refugees to Be Placed in Homes of "Limousine Liberals"

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Can Republican Governors Block Syrian Refugees From Settling in Their States?

by RacheleODowd Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of last Friday’s attacks in Paris, Republican governors across the country have made their positions clear—they want nothing to do with the Syrians fleeing ISIS. On Sunday, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley announced that his state won’t accept any Syrian refugees. On Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence followed suit. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order to halt the flow of Syrian refugees to his state (it has accepted 14).

Even Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who had previously called welcoming refugees “part of being a good Michigander,” announced he was suspending his work with the federal government on bringing Syrians to his state. “Michigan is a welcoming state and we are proud of our rich history of immigration,” he said in a statement. “But our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.”

What Snyder and his Republicans haven’t explained is how they could legally do this. Refugee resettlement is a federal responsibility in which states have historically had only an advisory role. The Department of Homeland Security screens applicants. The State Department places them in new communities by working with a network of nonprofits on the ground. And the the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement works with refugees to make the transition in their new communities. (Here’s a chart if you’re confused.)

State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner told reports Monday that the government would listen to the concerns of local officials, but it would not take a position on the legality of the governors’ decrees or even say whether a governor could erect checkpoints to vet potential refugees entering their states. “Whether they can legally do that, I don’t have an answer for you,” he said. “I don’t. I think our lawyers are looking at that.”

But other experts are more emphatic. “They don’t have the legal authority to stop resettlement in their states—much less to stop the presence of a legally authorized individual based on nationality,” says Jen Smyers, associate director for immigration and refugee policy at the Church World Service, an international nonprofit that does refugee resettlement. If a family of Syrian refugees decides they want to move in with their relatives in Michigan (a hub for Muslim and Christian immigrants from the Middle East) there’s nothing Rick Snyder can do to stop them. “There are really clear discrimination protections against saying someone can’t be in your state depending on where you’re from,” Smyers notes.

Nor do the states have much have much power of the purse as far as refugee resettlement is concerned. The work of resettlement is handled by a network of public-private partnerships, and the public money comes from the federal level. In some cases, the federal dollars are diverted through state governments, but they’re merely a pass-through. “If they were to hold up that fund, there would certainly be legal ramifications,” Smyers says. Simply put, if these Republicans really want to block refugees from entering their states, they are asking for a fight.

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Can Republican Governors Block Syrian Refugees From Settling in Their States?

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

by CharlesHumes Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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