Tag Archives: governor

Death Penalty Opponents Lose Two Big Battles

by claudiospeckman Posted on November 9, 2016

Mother Jones

Voters in California and Nebraska on Tuesday rejected efforts to abolish the death penalty in their states. The two states—one deep red and the other deep blue—were seen as significant bellwethers for longtime opponents of capital punishment who had hoped for a different result.

In California, the ballot proposition to repeal the death penalty fell short with about 46 percent of the vote as of Wednesday morning. At the same time, voters narrowly passed a second proposition to speed up the process of executing death row inmates. In Nebraska, voters overwhelmingly chose to keep the death penalty by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent.

Heading into Tuesday, polls in California showed voters closely divided on the issue; Nebraska’s scant polling showed the pro-death penalty side leading. But overall in the country, support for capital punishment and executions have both waned. In September, a Pew poll found support for the death penalty nationwide had fallen below 50 percent for the first time in nearly 50 years. Some states have been unable to carry out executions due to a shortage of the requisite drugs, including Nebraska, which has not executed anyone since 1997. California has not executed anyone since 2006, also out of concern for its drug protocols.

The results send a signal that voters in both red and blue America are reluctant to part with the death penalty, even as the number of executions around the country has declined in recent years. In Oklahoma, a state that carried out a notoriously botched and brutal execution nearly two years ago because it used the wrong drug, voters passed a ballot initiative to protect the constitutionality of the death penalty, by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent.

Still, the ballot initiatives in California and Nebraska were a bold effort to push the issue forward, with a deep-blue state questioning the morality of a system that has taken innocent lives and a deep-red state beginning to see the death penalty as a flawed and wasteful government program. “California and Nebraska are such different states that we’re seeing the death penalty being fought on multiple fronts,” said James Clark, an anti-death penalty advocate at Amnesty International, on the eve of the election. “We’re seeing diehard progressives who believe in human rights, who believe this is a violation of human rights, are really on the forefront in states like California. And then also conservatives are on the forefront in both states, saying this is a failed government policy, this is government overreach, it costs so much money.”

The conservative argument played a big role in the death penalty debate in Nebraska. The state’s conservative legislature voted in 2015, over the governor’s veto, to repeal the death penalty. But the issue was forced to a referendum when the governor, Republican Pete Ricketts, spent $300,000 of his own money to try to reinstate it.

Opponents of the death penalty in states across the country, both red and blue, were looking to the outcomes on Tuesday to decide whether to try to repeal the death penalty in their own states. Other countries were watching, too. The United States is the only Western democracy with a death penalty; more than half of the world’s countries have abolished it, and many more countries have stopped using it. “There’s a lot of momentum building around the world to abolish the death penalty, and those countries that continue to use if often point to the United States as the justification for using it,” Clark said.

Even with Tuesday’s defeats, death penalty opponents still believe the momentum is on their side—if for no other reason than the shortage of execution drugs. Clark said the ballot initiatives were “bold risks that could cause setbacks, but I don’t think they will change the overall trend of the death penalty in the United States. I don’t think we’re in jeopardy of that.”

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Death Penalty Opponents Lose Two Big Battles

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Two Former Chris Christie Aides Found Guilty of All Charges in Bridgegate Scandal

by Alicia54Ogktze Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two former aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were found guilty of all charges in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing trial.

Bridget Kelly and Bill Baroni were charged with organizing a plan that included shutting down the highly trafficked lanes as an act of political revenge against a Democratic mayor who did not endorse Christie during his re-election bid.

The verdict on Friday comes as Christie prepares to make a public appearance this weekend in New Hampshire in support of Donald Trump. In September, federal prosecutors accused the embattled governor of knowing about the lane closings—an allegation Christie has vehemently denied.

“Let me be clear once again, I had no knowledge prior or during these lane realignments, and had no role authorizing them,” he said in a statement reacting to Friday’s verdict. “No believable evidence was presented to contradict that fact. Anything said to the contrary over the past six weeks in court is simply untrue.”

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Two Former Chris Christie Aides Found Guilty of All Charges in Bridgegate Scandal

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A Billionaire Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

by VivianLahey Posted on November 1, 2016

Mother Jones

On May 20, 2015, the Nebraska state Legislature voted to repeal the state’s death penalty. When the Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, vetoed the legislation six days later, the Legislature overrode his veto. It was an extraordinary move, making Nebraska the first solidly conservative state in more than 40 years to end the death penalty.

But the victory for death penalty opponents was short-lived. Having failed in his role as governor to protect the death penalty, Ricketts worked to reinstate it in a different capacity: As a man of deep pockets. Ricketts and his billionaire father, Republican megadonor Joe Ricketts, spent $300,000 on an effort to collect enough signatures to put the death penalty question to voters, in the form of a referendum on November 8. The governor donated another $100,000 this fall to fund a campaign to sway voters to reinstate the death penalty.

“It’s pretty unusual to have a governor who would lose an initiative through the process then try to reverse that process outside of the role of the governor with his own money,” says state Sen. Colby Coash, a conservative Republican and a leader of the anti-death-penalty effort. “Pretty unprecedented.”

Ricketts’ personal funding of the pro-death-penalty campaign has raised questions about the separation of powers in the state, but also about his political motives. The death penalty is an odd issue for Ricketts to stake so much on because, at least in Nebraska, it’s largely symbolic. The state has not carried out an execution in nearly two decades—and critics believe it will not execute anyone in the foreseeable future because the state is unable to obtain the necessary drugs. (Ricketts’ administration even tried, but failed, to obtain execution drugs illegally from India.)

It’s possible that the governor simply feels passionately about the death penalty, which he has long supported. But Ricketts’ critics think he’s using the death penalty to achieve a different objective: consolidating his own power. Ricketts, they say, wanted the death penalty on the ballot in November as a wedge issue to unseat lawmakers who have defied him over the past year. If Ricketts plays his cards right, he could enter the last two years of his first term as a much more powerful governor. From there, he could run for the US Senate—for which he ran unsuccessfully in 2006—or even the White House. “Certainly he sees himself with a future,” says Paul Landow, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who specializes in state-level politics. “A national future.”

Within a few months of becoming governor in January 2015, Ricketts was clashing with the Legislature—and losing. The first showdown came over a bill to raise the gas tax to pay for repairs to roads and bridges. Ricketts vetoed the 6-cent-per-gallon hike, and the Legislature overrode his veto. Less than two weeks later, the Legislature overrode another veto, this time over the death penalty. The very next day brought a third override, over a bill to allow driver’s licenses for young immigrants who were granted temporary legal status under President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive action to help children of undocumented immigrants. A year later, the Legislature would override Ricketts’ veto of a bill permitting these same immigrants to obtain professional and commercial licenses.

Ricketts has made no secret of his anger at the legislators who voted against him on those measures. At the state Republican Party convention this spring, he read aloud the names of more than a dozen GOP senators who had crossed him and called for electing Republican senators who do not stray from the party’s platform. (The Legislature is unicameral, but its members are known as senators.) This is a faux pas in Nebraska, where the Legislature is ostensibly nonpartisan, although it’s no secret which members are Republicans and which are Democrats. Thirteen senators, including five Republicans, chastised Ricketts in an open letter for attacking “respected conservatives elected by the people to obey their own convictions and principles, not the governor’s.”

But Ricketts was doing more than lecturing the Legislature. By the time he gave that speech, he had already endorsed a challenger to one of the Republicans who had clashed with him on those vetoes. Later in the summer, he gave his support to another challenger of an incumbent Republican. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity and Trees of Liberty, two groups affiliated with the Koch brothers, used a direct-mail campaign to target incumbent Republicans who had defied Ricketts on the vetoes. (The groups are not required to disclose their donors.) After a May primary—Nebraska employs a jungle primary system in which the top two vote-earners face off in the general election—three sitting Republicans are confronting GOP challengers on November 8.

With the death penalty question on the ballot, these challengers are making it a central campaign issue as they try to oust sitting Republicans who voted to repeal it. They’re “trying to ride it to election,” says state Sen. Mike Gloor, a Republican who voted to repeal the death penalty. Vincent Powers, the head of the state Democratic Party, puts it more bluntly. “Ricketts just wants to impose his will on the Legislature, and so he’s using this emotional issue as a club,” he says. “It’s very troubling if you are like me and you think democracy is a good thing.”

The fact that the repeal effort succeeded at all was something of a miracle. For decades, state Sen. Ernie Chambers, a liberal independent who has served in the Legislature since the 1970s, has unsuccessfully introduced a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. But in 2015, with a large freshman class open to arguments against the death penalty, a few conservatives in the Legislature took up the cause as well.

By all accounts, Nebraska’s death penalty is a failure. The last execution in the state took place in 1997, but the state continues to spend $14.6 million a year on costs related to maintaining the death penalty, according to a study commissioned by the state’s anti-death penalty coalition. The legislators who voted to repeal it had come to believe that the death penalty was not just a financial loser but also bad policy that was unfairly applied, used to coerce suspects into pleading guilty, and capable of putting innocent people to death.

As the death penalty fight moved from the Legislature to the ballot initiative, a coalition of conservatives, liberals, and the Catholic Church came together to fight to retain the repeal. The coalition has spent more than $2.5 million on voter education efforts, canvassing, and TV ads—far more than its pro-death-penalty counterpart has spent.

Even with the active backing of the Nebraska Catholic Conference in the heavily Catholic state, the consensus is that a popular referendum on the death penalty in a deep-red state is a heavy lift. But there are a few wild cards that could help the anti-death penalty side in a close contest. The first is the language on the ballot itself, which could confuse some death penalty supporters, who need to vote “repeal” to reverse the existing death penalty ban. When the ballot language was finalized, the coalition opposing the death penalty quickly changed its name to Retain a Just Nebraska so that death penalty opponents would know to vote “retain” to keep the ban.

The second big question is turnout. Nebraska does not have a governor’s race or a US Senate race this year, leaving the presidential race as the main draw for voters to get to the polls. But Nebraska, though deeply conservative, is not exactly Trump territory. Ricketts endorsed Trump after his first choice, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the primary, but he has not donated to Trump’s campaign; his wife, meanwhile, registered as a Democrat and is supporting Hillary Clinton. Both of the state’s Republican US senators have spoken out against Trump: Ben Sasse is perhaps the most prominent Never Trump Republican in the country, while Deb Fischer unendorsed him after the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood video was leaked in early October. (She later re-endorsed him.) “I think there’s a legitimate chance that the Legislature will be held up,” Coash says hopefully. “It all comes down to turnout.”

Most politicians and analysts predict the repeal will be overturned because Nebraska is such a conservative state. “I would be absolutely shocked if the voters basically supported to keep the repeal of the death penalty,” says Aaron Trost, a Republican operative who ran Fischer’s campaign in 2012. In August, the pro-death-penalty group released a poll showing that 2 out of 3 Nebraskans support the death penalty. Dan Parsons, the spokesman for the anti-death-penalty group, has argued that the poll was “flawed.” Unlike the poll, the referendum states that if the death penalty repeal stands, defendants who would otherwise have received a death sentence would instead get life in prison. Previous polling has shown that when life without parole is mentioned as the alternative to the death penalty, some Americans switch from death penalty support to opposition.

“We’ve outworked them and outmaneuvered them for over a year now,” Parsons says. As of early October, according to campaign finance disclosures, the anti-death-penalty group had raised $2.7 million to the pro-death-penalty group’s $1.2 million—and most of the latter funds were spent gathering signatures to put the issue on the ballot.

The anti-death penalty group received big donations from liberal philanthropic organizations. Major contributors to the pro-death penalty group include Pete and Joe Ricketts and billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer, as well as two national dark-money groups. One of those groups, Citizens for a Sound Government, spent money on Ricketts’ behalf during his 2014 primary. It’s unclear who is behind the groups’ money or why outside groups see fit to invest in the death penalty in Nebraska. One possibility is that they’re investing in something else: Ricketts’ broader conservative agenda and his career, perhaps on the national stage.

“Should the ballot initiative lose, that would be a big blow to him,” says Landow, the political scientist. “So it’s a gamble. And he took it, I think, because he calculated that it was worth it in terms of his future national standing.”

Continued –

A Billionaire Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

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Why Did Hillary Clinton Send Michelle Obama to Arizona?

by LucioK20ml Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Clinton campaign is going all-in for a state it doesn’t even need to win. On Monday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager announced that her campaign would spend $2 million on ads and direct mail in Arizona. Perhaps more important, the campaign is redirecting some of its top surrogates from traditional battleground states to Arizona, including Chelsea Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and perhaps the campaign’s most valuable asset, Michelle Obama, who spoke in Phoenix on Thursday afternoon.

Sometimes presidential candidates with a commanding lead try to expand the electoral map simply because they can; a dominant win can translate into a mandate once in office. In 2008, for example, Barack Obama’s campaign was so far ahead in polling and resources that it started investing in Indiana. Obama won the state, which became a symbol of how big his 2008 victory really was.

But Arizona could serve a strategic purpose that Indiana did not. Unlike the Hoosier State, it has a large and increasingly politically active Latino population. Tellingly, when Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook announced the investments in Arizona, he also announced an ad buy in Texas, another state with a large Latino population that was thought to be out of play for Democrats until the Donald Trump campaign began its recent implosion. If she wins Arizona, Clinton could bring Republicans to the table on immigration reform by proving to them that they have no shot at the White House—that even formerly safe red states will turn blue—if they continue to hold the Trump line on immigration.

“We have been able to move the Latino community to participate in the civic life of Arizona on the issue of immigration,” says Ben Monterroso, executive director of Mi Familia Vota, a group that has worked to register Latinos in Arizona and other states this year. He points out that in 2010, the year Arizona passed its draconian anti-immigrant law, there were 50,000 Latinos registered to vote by mail. Today, he said, there are more than 350,000. “I hope that Hillary Clinton and her campaign see this as an opportunity to send a clear message to Republicans that enough is enough to be playing around with the issue of immigration.”

The fact that Clinton has sent the popular first lady to Arizona is a sign that the campaign is in it to win it. “Sending Michelle Obama sends a signal that a lot of it will hinge on turnout, and in that state particularly Latino turnout,” says Gabriel Sanchez, a pollster with the firm Latino Decisions. Sanchez says his survey data shows that if the campaign can ramp up turnout among Latinos, it has a “legitimate” shot at winning Arizona. Obama did not disappoint; the first lady delivered a rousing speech to a sea of fans in Phoenix. Of course, there will still be hurdles to accomplishing immigration reform in Congress, thanks largely to the uphill battle Democrats face in taking back the House of Representatives. But it would be a warning shot to Republicans in Washington to help move on immigration reform—and to future Republican presidential candidates that Trump’s hardline immigration stance was a losing electoral strategy.

Monterroso believes Arizona is more like California than like Indiana. Just as Arizona’s Barry Goldwater helped launch the conservative movement with his 1964 presidential candidacy, California was once a home base for the Republican Party, sending Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the White House. In 1994, California’s Republican governor supported an anti-immigration ballot initiative known as Proposition 187. The move is largely credited with turning the state solidly blue by mobilizing Latinos against the GOP. “Look at what happened in California,” he says. “I think Arizona is in the same direction if the Republican Party doesn’t do anything different in this election.”

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Why Did Hillary Clinton Send Michelle Obama to Arizona?

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Here’s What Trump’s Sexist Views Mean for the War on Women

by AaronLampungmei Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s positions on women’s issues, previous statements about women, and long history of sexism have become central issues about his character during his campaign for the presidency. A new ad will go after the GOP candidate’s position on abortion by using his own words against him.

Planned Parenthood Votes and Priorities USA Action, the main super-PAC supporting the Hillary Clinton campaign, have created a new digital ad that will play as preroll footage on web videos, as well as on Facebook and Instagram. This is part of a larger ad campaign aimed at women in North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, key swing states in the presidential contest.

The effort comes as the Trump campaign tries to push back against accusations that the Republican presidential candidate is sexist. During a Wednesday interview with a Las Vegas NBC affiliate, Trump addressed his history of demeaning statements toward women, saying that “a lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment.”

The ad also appears days after the only vice presidential debate of the campaign cycle, where Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, said that he “cannot conscience a party that supports” abortion. Pence, who recently said he wants to “send Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history,” has signed several pieces of extreme anti-abortion legislation during his time as the governor of Indiana, including a bill that required that aborted fetuses be cremated or buried.

The ad opens with Trump’s now infamous exchange with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, in which he said, “There has to be some form of punishment” for women who get abortions, adding that he wanted to ban the procedure. The video also shows footage of Trump discussing his pro-life background and his desire to see Planned Parenthood defunded. “Donald Trump is too dangerous for women,” the video concludes.

“This is the most anti-woman ticket we’ve seen in decades. Donald Trump would ban abortion, defund Planned Parenthood, and even make it more difficult to access birth control,” Deirdre Schifeling, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, said in a statement. “We will not let Mike Pence and Donald Trump strip rights away from the women of America.”

The digital ads will run from October 10 through Election Day.

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Here’s What Trump’s Sexist Views Mean for the War on Women

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Alabama’s Chief Justice Still Opposes Same-Sex Marriages. Now He’s Standing Trial.

by MadgeNew40940934 Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore went to court Wednesday morning in Montgomery. But this time he was a defendant, charged with possible ethical violations for defying higher-court rulings with his anti-gay-marriage stance.

In January 2015, after a district court judge ruled that same-sex marriage was legal in Alabama, Moore sent a letter to Gov. Robert Bentley adamantly expressing his belief that the ruling was destructive, and urging the governor to defy the district court ruling and support judges who did not wish to comply.

“The Supreme Court of Alabama has likewise described marriage as ‘a divine institution,’ imposing upon parties ‘higher moral and religious obligations than those imposed by any mere human institution or government,'” he wrote. “The laws of this state have always recognized the Biblical admonition stated by our Lord.”

Moore went further and used his position as chief justice to instruct Alabama probate judges to refuse to issue licenses to same-sex couples via email. “No probate judge shall issue or recognize a marriage license that is inconsistent with Article 1, Section 36.03, of the Alabama Constitution or…30-1-19, Ala. Code 1975,” he wrote.

Moore’s actions led to a complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which alerted the state-run Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission, which in turn launched an investigation. The commission suspended Moore in May. He is now facing six counts of judicial ethics violations.

Moore’s attorney for the proceedings is Mat Staver from the Liberty Counsel, which has been partly funded by one of the conservative billionaire Wilks brothers. He also represented Kim Davis, the Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Liberty Counsel takes on so-called “religious liberty” cases, and the law firm offered its services in the North Carolina fight over restricting the access of transgender people to public restrooms. Staver also represents David Daleiden, who produced heavily edited videos that purport to show Planned Parenthood officials involved in the sale of fetal tissue for profit. (There has been no evidence that Planned Parenthood is guilty of any wrongdoing.)

At the trial, Staver argued that Moore’s email to the probate judges wasn’t an order, but rather a “status update” on the conflict between the federal court ruling and state court rulings.

The Guardian recently speculated that Moore’s efforts are intended to improve his bid for the governorship in 2018. Moore attempted to run in 2006 but ultimately lost the bid for the Republican nomination to incumbent Bob Riley. He also tried to run in 2010 but lost the bid to current Gov. Robert Bentley.

This is not the first time Moore has dug his heels in over an issue he perceived to be in direct conflict with his faith. In 2003, he was suspended from the bench for installing a monument of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court building without informing the eight associate justices and then, when faced with an order from a federal judge, refused to remove the monument. Moore’s fellow justices ultimately had the 2.6-ton monument removed in August 2003.

A decision in the trial is expected within 10 days. If Moore is found guilty, he could face censure or suspension without pay. The most severe outcome would be removal from the bench, which would require a unanimous vote from the nine members of the Court of Judiciary.

Continued –

Alabama’s Chief Justice Still Opposes Same-Sex Marriages. Now He’s Standing Trial.

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California Will Keep Housing Its Detained Immigrants in For-Profit Centers

by FinleyCorser Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have prevented local governments from contracting with for-profit companies to detain immigrants. Seventy percent of the state’s immigrant detainees are held in for-profit facilities, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In his veto message, Brown said that he was “troubled” by recent reports revealing poor conditions in some private detention facilities. But he explained his veto by deferring to the Department of Homeland Security, which manages ICE and is currently examining its use of for-profit companies.

DHS’s choice to review its use of private detention centers came less than two weeks after the Department of Justice announced that it was ending its use of private prisons. A report from DHS’s advisory council is expected back by November 30. “These actions indicate that a more permanent solution to this issue may be at hand,” Brown wrote. “I urge the federal authorities to act swiftly.”

But last Thursday, in a statement interpreted as a bad sign for those pushing to eliminate these for-profit centers, ICE director Sarah Saldaña told the House Judiciary Committee that eliminating private detention centers would “pretty much turn our system upside down.” Around 73 percent of the immigration detainees are held in facilities currently operated by for-profit companies. If the for-profit companies were no longer housing detainees, ICE would have to build more detention centers and hire staff in order to meet its ongoing legal requirement to maintain at least 34,000 immigration detention beds.

The California bill, which passed 25-13 in the state Senate and 51-28 in the House last month, would have eventually closed three of California’s four private immigration detention centers. It also would have required all of California’s immigration detention facilities, public and private, to meet the most recent federal standards for things like medical care, and would have extended extra protections to LGBT inmates, prohibiting them from being forced into segregated housing on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Closing the three private detention centers would have affected approximately 40,000 immigrants held there every year, according to Christina Fialho, executive director at Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), a nonprofit that helped draft the California bill. With the three facilities closed, ICE would have been forced to send detainees elsewhere—either to publicly run local jails, out-of-state detention centers, other private facilities, or possibly community-based monitoring systems.

Among the facilities that the bill would have closed is Adelanto, a 1,960-bed center run by the for-profit corrections company GEO Group and the subject of a 2015 report from CIVIC. The report pointed to allegations of inhumane conditions and poor access to legal representation. At least one immigrant has died at Adelanto due to “egregious errors” by the center’s medical staff, who did not give him proper medical examinations or help him access timely off-site treatment, according to a letter signed by 29 members of Congress who sought an ICE investigation into health and safety concerns at the facility last summer.

Last November, a group of at least 400 detainees at Adelanto launched a hunger strike to protest what they saw as inhumane conditions. They asked for longer visiting hours with their families, better medical and dental care, cleaner and better-prepared food, daily access to an outdoor yard, and an ICE employee to handle their grievances rather than a GEO staff member. “We are detainees and not prisoners,” they wrote in a letter obtained by Think Progress. GEO Group typically makes $111.92 a day in revenue for each immigrant it incarcerates in Adelanto, according to ICE.

Here’s our coverage of the latest developments:

August 29, 2016: The Department of Homeland Security announces that it will be reexamining its use of private prison companies to hold immigration detainees.
August 18, 2016: The Justice Department declares that it will stop contracting with private prisons, which incarcerate 12 percent of federal inmates.
August 12, 2016: A blockbuster report from the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General finds that private prisons are less safe and less secure than their publicly run counterparts, and that the Bureau of Prisons does not adequately supervise their operation.
June 23, 2016: Mother Jones publishes reporter Shane Bauer’s account of four months working at a private prison in Louisiana.

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California Will Keep Housing Its Detained Immigrants in For-Profit Centers

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Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

by MartyMulkey Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like a jittery upstart on The Apprentice, Donald Trump is looking like an unlikely contender for the prize he’s groping for. To beat the long odds stacked against him in the presidential election, the mercurial reality TV star will have to conquer a chunk of real estate quite distinct from the vast gambling dens and condo castles he’s used to: Iowa.

While the US corn, soybean, and hog capital isn’t a big enough prize on its own to push the GOP nominee to victory, “there is no realistic path to the presidency for Trump without Iowa’s six electoral votes,” as the Washington Post recently reported. Ohio, too, has emerged as a necessary but insufficient piece of the electoral map for Trump.

So the lifelong urbanite is plunging those famous fingers of his into the muck of farm-state politics. Trump reportedly declined to mount a Harley and participate in the ride portion of Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” event at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines last week, but he did deliver a red-meat speech pandering to some of the baser urges of the Corn Belt’s agribusiness interests.

Here are some highlights:

• He thundered against government regulation of farming practices—a highly contentious topic in a state where waterways and drinking water are routinely polluted by runoff from farms. “We are going to end the EPA intrusion into your family homes and into your family farms, for no reason—what they’re doing to you is a disgrace,” he declared, adding without citing evidence the unlikely claim that “many” Iowans have lost their farms to overzealous enforcement of environmental standards.

• To the crowd’s delight, Trump vowed to revoke the Obama administration’s Waters of the US Rule, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency greater authority to regulate water pollution. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, “wants to shut down family farms just like she wants to shut down the miners and the steelworkers… through radical regulation,” he warned.

• Yet Trump pledged support for an infamous federal government boondoggle: a 2007 law that mandates that a huge portion of the US corn crop be diverted into ethanol production. “President Obama lied to you about his support for the Renewable Fuel Standard, and you can trust Hillary Clinton even less,” he said. In reality, Obama has never wavered in his support for the corn-ethanol mandate, and Clinton, too, supports it—as does one of her main ag policy advisers, USDA chief Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa.

• Trump promised to “end double taxation of family farms at death”—a reference to the estate tax. Repealing the so-called death tax is a perennial applause line for GOP politicians, and Trump’s proclamation drew an enthusiastic response. It’s hard to figure out why the issue still resonates with farm audiences—after years of rollbacks, the tax now applies only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher, and affects fewer than 1 percent of US family-owned farm operations, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

On two other issues, Trump declined to pander to the ag crowd during his Iowa speech. On immigration, the candidate has maneuvered himself into a tight corner. Anti-migrant rants fueled Trump’s blitz through the primaries, appealing to the nativist impulses of the GOP base. But Big Ag relies heavily on immigrants for labor, from the fruit and vegetable fields of California and Florida to Iowa’s industrial-scale hog slaughterhouses. Perhaps in deference to such business interests, Trump has on some recent occasions softened his stance on immigration. Underlining these tensions, several members of Trumps 64-person ag policy committee support a much softer stance on migration, the Washington Post recently reported. But in his Iowa speech, Trump for some reason reverted to old ways, fulminating against “criminal illegal immigrants” and vowing yet again to “build a great border wall.”

The other issue is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade deal championed by President Barack Obama and prized by Big Ag because it pries open Asian markets for US-grown seeds, grain, and meat. Trump has been denouncing the TPP on nativist grounds since he launched his campaign. Perhaps because Iowa stands second only to California in agricultural exports, Trump held his tongue on the TPP during his speech, declining to mention trade at all.

Perhaps to smooth over those immigration and trade rough spots with the Big Ag community, the Trump campaign deployed the chairman of its Rural Advisory Committee, Charles Herbster, to address the Ohio Cattlemen’s Association’s annual roundup in Jackson, Ohio, last Saturday. Herbster, a Nebraska rancher and multilevel-marketing magnate, did not return calls asking for details of his presentation. According to Elizabeth Harsh, executive director of the OCA, Herbster “answered many questions from OCA members,” ranging from “trade and TPP to health care and immigration.” She added, “OCA’s members were very interested and engaged in the discussion,” but she declined to say more.

In a brief interview a month ago, Herbster acknowledged that he’d been getting calls from farmers concerned about Trump’s crusade against the TPP, and insisted that a President Trump would renegotiate trade deals in a way that keeps ag exports booming.

Link to article –

Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

Posted in alo, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged Casio, environment, environmental, food, governor, herbster, king, obama, Ona, republican, venta, washington | Comments Off

Your Day in Trump: Friday, 26 August 2016, 74 Days Until the Election

by DorieAshton4962 Posted on August 27, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Well, OK, I guess I’d better do a quick Trump update. No, he still hasn’t made up his mind about his immigration policy, but he did respond to the shooting of Dwyane Wade’s cousin:

Dwyane Wade’s cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

August 27, 2016

Keep it classy, Donald. Next up, remember that letter from Donald Trump’s doctor claiming that Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”? Yesterday NBC News finally got an interview with Dr. Harold Bornstein, who justified this opinion by explaining that “all the rest of them are either sick or dead.” Roger that. This picture of Bornstein nearly brought down Twitter’s servers yesterday:

Yep, that’s billionaire Donald Trump’s doctor. You can—and should!—watch the entire interview with Dr. Bornstein over at NBC News. Fun fact: he wrote the letter in five minutes while Trump’s limo was waiting downstairs.

What else? Well, it turns out to no one’s surprise that Breitbart chief and now Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon may be even more bigoted than we thought. The Daily News picked up this little nugget from his divorce proceedings:

Mary Louise Piccard said in a 2007 court declaration that Bannon didn’t want their twin daughters attending the Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles because many Jewish students were enrolled at the elite institution.

“The biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend,” Piccard said in her statement signed on June 27, 2007. “He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews,” Piccard wrote.

Bannon’s spox told the Daily News that “at the time” he never said anything like that. They did not specify at which time he did say it.

Am I done yet? Oh my no. Next up is Trump supporter Paul LePage, the unhinged governor of Maine. LePage apparently thought that a Democratic legislator had called him a racist (he hadn’t) and left him a noxious phone message. Then he met with reporters to explain himself:

There were a few other items. There always are. But that’s enough. For those of you who didn’t pay any attention to the news yesterday, this has been your day in Trump.

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Your Day in Trump: Friday, 26 August 2016, 74 Days Until the Election

Posted in bigo, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged bannon, bornstein, daily, daily-news, democratic, donald-trump, governor, lai, piccard, there | Comments Off

See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

by TheoParnell Posted on August 26, 2016

See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess | Grist

planet out

See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

By Kate Yoderon Aug 26, 2016Share Ed Hawkins

Scientists are getting better at producing visualizations that make climate change, a pretty heady topic, simple enough to take in at a glance. This image charts global temperature changes each year since 1850, using the period from 1961 to 1990 as a baseline. The color scale ranges from dark blue (-2.5 degrees C) to dark red (+2.5 degrees C).

It was created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins, the same person who brought us the popular hypnotic GIF of global temperatures spiraling out of control.

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