Tag Archives: hillary

Hillary Fudges on the Minimum Wage

by MagaretArledge Posted on April 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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

I didn’t see last night’s debate, but I noted this in the transcript this morning:

BLITZER: If a Democratic Congress put a $15 minimum wage bill on your desk, would you sign it?

CLINTON: Well, of course I would. And I have supported supported the fight for 15. I am proud to have the endorsement of most of the unions that have led the fight for 15. I was proud to stand on the stage with Governor Cuomo, with SEIU and others who have been leading this battle and I will work as hard as I can to raise the minimum wage. I always have. I supported that when I was in the Senate.

SANDERS: Well, look…

CLINTON: But what I have also said is that we’ve got to be smart about it, just the way Governor Cuomo was here in New York. If you look at it, we moved more quickly to $15 in New York City, more deliberately toward $12, $12.50 upstate then to $15. That is exactly my position. It’s a model for the nation and that’s what I will do as president.

This is a pretty obvious evasion, and I’m sorry to see it. Here’s her official position:

Hillary believes we are long overdue in raising the minimum wage. She has supported raising the federal minimum wage to $12, and believes that we should go further than the federal minimum through state and local efforts, and workers organizing and bargaining for higher wages, such as the Fight for 15 and recent efforts in Los Angeles and New York to raise their minimum wage to $15.

Blitzer’s question was clearly about raising the federal minimum wage to $15, and Hillary immediately said she’d support that. But she doesn’t. She supports a $12 federal minimum wage. Pretty obviously, though, she wanted the TV audience to take away a different impression.

I hate to see pandering like this. Hillary’s position on the minimum wage is perfectly reasonable: a federal minimum of $12. States and cities have always been able to enact higher minimums if they want, and the president has no say over that. So why not say so? Would she really lose that many votes? My guess is that none of the hardcore $15 folks are voting for her in the first place.

View the original here:

Hillary Fudges on the Minimum Wage

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Fudges on the Minimum Wage

A climate hawk’s guide to New York’s Democratic debate

by ShermanFrancisc Posted on April 14, 2016

Bernie and Hillary debate in Flint, Michigan, March 6, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young

A climate hawk’s guide to New York’s Democratic debate

By on 14 Apr 2016 5:00 amcommentsShare

Less than a week to go before the New York primary, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will hold their ninth debate on Thursday on both their home turfs — Brooklyn. Though the environment hasn’t cropped up in many of the previous debates, it’s looking as though it will be on the table during this one with CNN and NY1. Last weekend, Sanders held climate rally for activists in upstate New York and he’s taken plenty of opportunities to go after his opponent on hydraulic fracturing. And on Wednesday, the day before the debate, Clinton released a plan to fight for climate and environmental justice.

With Clinton currently polling ahead of Sanders by double-digit margins and Sanders coming in from a seven-state winning streak, you can expect a tussle. But if you haven’t been keeping up — in this election season’s circus, we wouldn’t blame you — here are the climate fireworks to watch for in the debate:

Fracking: Sanders’ camp pointedly brought fracking into the fray in a state that’s banned the practice outright, highlighting Clinton’s record of supporting the natural gas industry. When it comes to fracking, Clinton favors local control and stiffer regulations, as opposed to the straight-up national ban that Sanders has called for.

How would Sanders stop fracking? Grist spoke to the Sanders campaign in February to get the details. (Hint: He says he doesn’t need Congress.)

Environmental justice: The water crisis in Flint, Mich., has featured heavily in the Democratic primary, as Rebecca Leber writes. Clinton released a plan on Wednesday to tackle lead poisoning, which includes establishing a Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure, directing more money to the Superfund budget, and requiring federal agencies to come up with environmental justice plans. It has some overlap with Sanders’ past proposals and calls for environmental justice.

Fossil fuel donations: Clinton recently snapped at a Greenpeace activist at a rally in Purchase, N.Y., who challenged Clinton to reject fossil fuel donations in her campaign. Clinton lost her cool, replying that she was “sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me.” Ben Adler has the context on whether Clinton’s donors matter more than her policy positions.

Fuel extraction: Clinton and climate activists have genuine disagreements when it comes to fossil fuels, as Grist pointed out last week. For starters, Clinton supports some extraction on public land. (Sanders doesn’t.) Clinton in the past has also supported natural gas as a “bridge” between fossil fuels and clean energy.

Clinton has come out against offshore drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic, while Sanders opposes offshore drilling. Sanders supports a bill that would ban fossil fuel extraction on national land, ban offshore drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic and stop new leases for drilling in the Gulf.

Nuclear energy: One major difference between Sanders’ climate plan and views held by some environmentalists: nuclear energy. Sanders opposes nuclear across the board, while enviros tend to favor keeping it in the mix to street clear of coal and oil.

Ben Adler took a deep dive into Sanders’ stance on nuclear power last month, and found that while it may “not be the best idea from a climate perspective,” it’s also not “the shallow hippie caricature that his critics describe.”

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Continue reading here – 

A climate hawk’s guide to New York’s Democratic debate

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A climate hawk’s guide to New York’s Democratic debate

Hillary Clinton Wants to Eliminate Lead Within Five Years

by WVTJoannevapufa Posted on April 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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

In a speech on environmental justice today, Hillary Clinton made a bold proposal:

Be still my heart! Hillary’s plan has eight parts, and the first one is all about lead poisoning:

Eliminate lead as a major public health threat within five years.…For every dollar invested in preventing childhood exposure to lead, between $17 and $200 is saved in reduced educational, health, and criminal justice expenses and improved health and economic outcomes—but the few federal programs that exist are inadequate to address the scope of the problem and have seen significant budget cuts and volatility in recent years.

….Eliminating lead as a major public health threat to our children is a goal we can and must meet as a nation. Clinton will establish a Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure and charge it with writing a national plan to eliminate the risk of lead exposure from paint, pipes, and soil within five years; align state, local and philanthropic resources with federal initiatives; implement best prevention practices based on current science; and leverage new financial resources such as lead safe tax credits. Clinton will direct every federal agency to adopt the Commission’s recommendations, make sure our public water systems are following appropriate lead safety guidelines, and leverage federal, state, local, and philanthropic resources, including up to $5 billion in federal dollars, to replace lead paint, windows, and doors in homes, schools, and child care centers and remediate lead-contaminated soil.

I don’t think five years is anywhere near feasible—it’s more like a 10-20 year project—but that’s a nit. I’m especially happy to see Hillary acknowledge the importance of remediating lead in soil, which usually doesn’t get much attention. But that’s where all the lead from automobile emissions settled, and it’s worst in low-income urban neighborhoods that are dense with traffic.

Unfortunately, it’s also the most difficult to address. Replacing lead water pipes is expensive, but we know how to do it. Getting rid of lead paint in old houses is a little less expensive, especially if we concentrate on doors and window sills, but we know how to do that too. That leaves lead in soil, which is tough because there’s so damn much of it. The first step is to map the highest concentrations of lead in soil around the country, and we haven’t even done that yet. Next we have to figure out the best way to get rid of it. There are lots of different methods, and they differ a lot in cost. You can, for example, simply haul away the top few inches of soil. That’s expensive. Alternatively, there’s a lot of buzz around the idea of seeding contaminated soil with phosphates, which combine with lead to produce harmless pyromorphite. This can be done using fish bones, which contain calcium phosphates. And fish bones are cheap.

But does this really work? It looks like a promising approach, but it still needs more research. Either way, though, it’s nice to see a presidential candidate take lead seriously. We’ve been making progress on lead contamination for decades, but we’ve never truly made it a consistent priority. It’s time to do that.

Read More:  

Hillary Clinton Wants to Eliminate Lead Within Five Years

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton Wants to Eliminate Lead Within Five Years

Sanders Extends Winning Streak in Wyoming

by MagdaMingay4 Posted on April 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Bernie Sanders won the Democratic caucuses in Wyoming on Saturday, adding to his winning streak over the past several weeks. Sanders captured 56 percent of the vote, to 44 percent for Hillary Clinton.

Small and overwhelmingly white, Wyoming fits the profile of a Sanders-friendly state. Sanders has also performed better in states that hold caucuses rather than primaries.

But Sanders’ margin of victory wasn’t enough for him to cut into Clinton’s lead in pledged delegates. Each candidate won seven delegates in Wyoming.

Both campaigns put in appearances in Wyoming during the past week. The Clinton campaign sent Bill Clinton to stump for his wife. On Tuesday night, 1,800 people attended a Sanders victory rally at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, after he won the Wisconsin primary that evening.

Wyoming will send 14 pledged delegates to the party’s national convention in Philadelphia this summer, as well as four unpledged superdelegates.

Read this article – 

Sanders Extends Winning Streak in Wyoming

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sanders Extends Winning Streak in Wyoming

Bernie Sanders’ Path to Victory All Hinges on This One Chart

by Fanny1336eymnx Posted on April 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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

For those of you wondering how well Bernie Sanders did last night, here’s a table that you might want to keep handy. It’s from Nate Silver, and it shows how big a margin Bernie needs in the remaining states to catch up with Hillary and get a majority of pledged delegates. In Wisconsin, for example, he needed to win by 16 points, but he won by only 13 points and picked up 47 delegates instead of the 50 he needed:

Roughly speaking, Bernie broke even yesterday. He’ll need to do this well or better in every future election. In any case, this is a good table to keep at hand for upcoming primaries. It gives you an idea of how big a victory Bernie needs in order to catch up with Hillary. Anything less is basically a setback; anything more is a victory.

NOTE: I excerpted the table to include only the states with more than 50 delegates. The full table is at the link.

Follow this link: 

Bernie Sanders’ Path to Victory All Hinges on This One Chart

Posted in GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bernie Sanders’ Path to Victory All Hinges on This One Chart

Clinton Campaign: No More Debates Until Sanders Starts Being Nicer

by YettaA15yy Posted on March 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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

The Democratic presidential candidates are back at it, having debates about scheduling more debates. Over the weekend, Sen. Bernie Sanders publicly challenged Hillary Clinton to face off on a debate stage in New York before the state’s primary on April 19. On Monday, a top Clinton staffer said not so fast.

The Sanders and Clinton campaign have tussled since the start of campaign season over the number of debates. But it seemed like those silly tiffs were finally settled back in January, when the two campaigns agreed to meet for debates once a month through May.

Now the Clinton campaign is sounding less sure about that agreement. Joel Benenson, the campaign’s chief strategist, said on CNN Monday morning that Sanders needs to watch his tone, or else the Clinton campaign will pack up its ball and head home. “The real question is, what kind of campaign is Sen. Sanders going to run going forward?,” Benenson said when asked about Sanders’ request for a New York debate.

“Let’s see the tone,” Benenson continued when pressed about why Clinton was reluctant to debate. “This is a man who said he’d never run a negative ad; he’s now running them, they’re planning to run more. Let’s see the tone of the campaign he wants to run before we get to any other questions.”

Benenson added, “Let’s see if he goes back to the kind of tone he said he was going to set early on. If he does that, then we’ll talk about debates.”

The problem with Benenson’s argument is that the 2016 Democratic primary has been one of the most remarkably friendly contests in recent memory. While Republican Party leaders mount a #NeverTrump campaign as the front-runner mocks the appearance of his opponent’s spouse, the Democratic candidates have largely focused on minor policy differences, with Sanders waving away efforts to get him to attack Clinton for using a private email server. Sanders regularly says he’ll back Clinton if she’s the nominee and encourages his supporters to do the same. And Sanders has yet to call Clinton’s success “the biggest fairy tale” or circulate old photos of Clinton to question her religious beliefs—actions the Clinton camp took during the far nastier 2008 Democratic race.

See original:

Clinton Campaign: No More Debates Until Sanders Starts Being Nicer

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Clinton Campaign: No More Debates Until Sanders Starts Being Nicer

Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs

by AliChoatevkr Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Once again, Hillary Clinton has pledged that she will discover as much as possible about government involvement in UFO research and share the information with the American people. Clinton was on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show Thursday night, and Kimmel brought up the fact that he’d asked former President Bill Clinton about his efforts on UFO disclosure during his administration. (Kimmel has also asked President Barack Obama about UFOs.)

“He said that he did do that and he didn’t find anything,” Kimmel said. Hillary Clinton replied, “Well, I’m going to do it again.”

This is the second time during the last few months that Clinton has said she wants to tackle this issue. In late December, Clinton told a New Hampshire reporter that she thought “we may have been visited already,” and that she would “get to the bottom” of the issue if elected president. Three weeks ago, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, an X-Files fan and longtime Clinton aide, told a Las Vegas television station that he’s pressed Clinton on the issue.

“I’ve talked to Hillary about that, this is a little bit of a cause of mine which is that people really want to know what the government knows, and there are still classified files that could be declassified,” Podesta said at the time.

And while many dismiss UFOs with eye-rolling skepticism, Clinton showed Kimmel that she’s familiar with the more scientific side of the issue, correcting his use of the term “UFO.”

“There’s a new name—it’s ‘unexplained aerial phenomenon,'” she said. “UAP, that’s the latest nomenclature.”

UAP is the term used by the scientific and evidence-based wing of the UFO research community, and is an attempt by those interested in the issue to get away from the derision and mockery that the term “UFO” typically provokes. When Podesta was interviewed in Las Vegas, he said, “I think I’ve convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can so that people have their legitimate questions answered and more attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people who are in public life who are serious about this being ridiculed.”

As Mother Jones has reported, the Clintons’ interest in UFOs and information about US government involvement goes back at least until the mid-1990s. During that time, the late Laurance Rockefeller, who was a UFO enthusiast, approached the White House and pushed for the information to be released. Documents released about Rockefeller’s meetings under a Freedom of Information Act request show that Hillary Clinton was involved in those talks. She met with Rockefeller in August 1995 at his Wyoming ranch and probably discussed the issue, according to the FOIA documents. The effort, known by some as the “Rockefeller Initiative,” has been the subject of several big stories lately, including a recent Mother Jones profile of Stephen Bassett, the nation’s only registered extraterrestrial-issue lobbyist.

Hillary Clinton with Laurance Rockefeller at his Wyoming ranch in 1995 Grant Cameron/Stephen Bassett

Last night, Clinton told Kimmel that anything that can be released should be released. “I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible,” she said. “If there’s nothing there, let’s tell people there’s nothing there.”

“What if there is something there?” asked Kimmel.

“Well, if there is something there,” she replied, “unless it’s a threat to national security, I think we ought to share it with the public.”

Watch the exchange:

Visit source: 

Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs

Posted in alternative energy, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs

Hillary Clinton Really Regrets Saying She’d Put Coal Miners Out of Work

by KimberlCaperton Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Last weekend, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton made an unexpectedly strong statement about her intentions for coal country. As I reported:

Speaking in Ohio about her plans to revitalize coal country, Clinton said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” That comment was immediately preceded by a promise to invest in the clean-energy economy in those places, and immediately followed by a pledge to “make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people.” But it’s not hard to guess which comment will end up as a sound bite in attack ads in coal states during the general election.

Unsurprisingly, the comment was quickly condemned by lawmakers from coal country. In response, Clinton sent a letter to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D), to “clarify” what she meant. In the letter, she says that her comment about lost coal jobs was intended to describe an existing downward spiral in the coal industry, rather than a promise to intentionally put coal miners out of work through her policy decisions. You can read the letter below. It’s a helpful bit of context, but I doubt it will be enough to keep Donald Trump, or whoever her general election opponent turns out to be, from using the soundbite against her.

DV.load(“https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2767046-Letter-to-Senator-Manchin.js”,
width: 630,
height: 600,
sidebar: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-2767046-Letter-to-Senator-Manchin”
);

Letter-to-Senator-Manchin (PDF)

Letter-to-Senator-Manchin (Text)

Continue at source: 

Hillary Clinton Really Regrets Saying She’d Put Coal Miners Out of Work

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton Really Regrets Saying She’d Put Coal Miners Out of Work

Clinton Backers Edit Trump Ad to Make Him the Punch Line

by RichelleSimson1 Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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

A day after Donald Trump posted an ad on his Instagram account featuring Hillary Clinton barking like a dog, a super-PAC backing Clinton for president has responded in kind.

The ad, from Priorities USA, formed in 2011 and now supporting Clinton, repeats the motifs from the Trump video—Vladimir Putin doing martial arts, an ISIS fighter with a gun—but replaces the barking Clinton footage with a garbled response from Trump to a question about whom Trump consults for policy ideas. Instead of a clip of Trump laughing, there’s a clip of Clinton laughing. The closing text is the same: “We don’t need to be a punchline!”

View post:  

Clinton Backers Edit Trump Ad to Make Him the Punch Line

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Clinton Backers Edit Trump Ad to Make Him the Punch Line

Clinton backtracks on coal comments after coal lovers throw a fit

by Shauna4037 Posted on March 15, 2016

Clinton backtracks on coal comments after coal lovers throw a fit

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

On Sunday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the world that the coal industry would be in trouble when she’s president. On Monday, she tried to take it all back.

At a town hall event broadcast on CNN Sunday evening, Clinton was asked, “Make the case to poor whites who live in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, who vote Republican, why they should vote for you based upon economic policies versus voting for a Republican.” She tried to argue that she stands with working people, but it didn’t come out exactly right:

I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country, because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business … and we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives, to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal, and all the other fossil fuels. But I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.

It’s true that Clinton is the only candidate who has laid out a comprehensive plan to help coal country transition to a cleaner economy. Her $30 billion plan would rebuild infrastructure and invest in public health, education, and entrepreneurial initiatives in order to help coal-reliant communities transition to a cleaner economy.

But of course that’s not the part of her statement that everyone glommed onto. Conservative politicians and commentators — and Democrats running for office in coal country — immediately attacked her for allegedly wanting to put the coal industry “out of business.”

Advertisement – Article continues below

“Hillary’s vow to kill coal miners’ jobs finishes a vast Democratic betrayal,” read the headline the in New York Post. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, called Clinton’s comments “callous” and “wrong” on the Senate floor. Breitbart wrote that Clinton’s statement is “a clear sign she intends to accelerate the destruction of one of the country’s leading energy sector industries.”

Two of the three Democratic candidates for governor of West Virginia also attacked: Booth Goodwin said he “absolutely disagreed” with Clinton, and Jim Justice, who made his fortune in coal, said he would “not support anyone who does not support coal,” according to the AP.

Clinton, in a head-spinning reversal, quickly backed up on Monday. After first pointing out that Republicans were spinning her words (which is true), the campaign released a statement saying, “Coal will remain a part of the energy mix for years to come, and we have a shared responsibility to ensure that coal communities receive the benefits they have earned and can build the future they deserve.”

But here’s the thing: Clinton may be afraid of losing coal country votes, but Big Coal has been dying for decades. As Alec MacGillis wrote in The New Republic in 2014, “Employment in the coal industry has been in decline for so long in states such as Kentucky and West Virginia that the number of jobs directly at risk from any clampdown on coal is far smaller than the sweeping rhetoric about ‘coal country’ would have one assume.” In Kentucky, the heart of “coal country,” employment in the industry went from 38,000 in 1983 to less 17,000 in 2012, MacGillis reports. And AP notes that production in the top three coal states declined between 5 and 20 percent in 2015 alone. In Ohio, it fell 22 percent.

While it’s true that environmental regulations — and automation — have had an impact on the industry, coal isn’t actually dying because of environmental regulations. It’s dying because of the free market. The decline in coal directly corresponds to the rise in natural gas, a cheaper and more efficient source of energy — and one that the GOP has been pushing in earnest. As Michael Lynch, an energy consultant, told The New York Times in 2014, “It’s not Obama’s war on coal. It’s reality’s war on coal. Natural gas turns out to be better than coal in the marketplace.”

With coal companies going bust and banks decreasing their support for the industry, no one can save Big Coal now. What the government can do is create clean energy jobs and help coal communities adjust to the new reality — which is exactly what Hillary Clinton was talking about doing. At least, until the bad press started rolling in.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.Climate on the Mind

A Grist Special Series

Get Grist in your inbox

Link – 

Clinton backtracks on coal comments after coal lovers throw a fit

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Clinton backtracks on coal comments after coal lovers throw a fit