Tag Archives: jones

Headline of the Day: Our Mideast Allies Suck

by BelindaJoe Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s my favorite headline of the day:

Inept Allies in Mideast

Emma Ashford so perfectly channels my view of our putative allies in the Mideast that I won’t even pretend to objectivity here. I like her piece for no better reason than the fact that I agree with nearly every word of it.

This doesn’t get President Obama off the hook for mistakes he’s made, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the US has a better strategy available to it. The world is what it is. Still, more people should understand just what we’re up against in the region. The answer is: just about everything.

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Headline of the Day: Our Mideast Allies Suck

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Quote of the Day: Republicans Hate Obamacare Except for the Parts They Don’t

by ArtHorvath Posted on April 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who asked for horror stories about Obamacare and was instead deluged with stories from people who have been helped by it:

The stories are largely around pre-existing conditions and those that are getting health insurance up to age 26.

Well, sure. Everyone likes the idea of making sure that people with pre-existing conditions can get health insurance. Unfortunately, as Greg Sargent points out, Republicans can’t just say they support Obamacare’s pre-existing conditions provision but oppose the rest of it:

It’s true that Republicans tend to support provisions like the protections for preexisting conditions; after all, they are very popular. But they can’t be tidily untangled from the law. The ACA’s protections for preexisting conditions rely on the individual mandate, because without it, people would simply wait until they got sick to sign up for insurance, driving up premiums; instead, the mandate broadens the risk pool. And the mandate requires the subsidies, so that lower-income people who’d face a penalty for remaining uninsured can afford to buy coverage.

This is something that Republicans steadfastly refuse to admit, even though it’s obvious to everyone with even a passing knowledge of how this stuff works. Sargent has more at the link about how this ties into the King v. Burwell lawsuit and Republican claims that they want to replace Obamacare with something better.

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Quote of the Day: Republicans Hate Obamacare Except for the Parts They Don’t

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Mike Huckabee Should Probably Stop Criticizing Hillary Over Her Emails

by Cherie65Cw Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee thinks questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails as secretary of state “will linger” throughout the 2016 presidential race. “If the law said you had to maintain every email for public inspection, that’s what you got to do,” he recently told ABC News. Huckabee also suggested that the missing emails might shed new light on the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012.

Huckabee, who is considering a second run for president himself, is probably right that the issue of secrecy will dog Clinton’s campaign going forward. But he might not be the best man to make that case. As Mother Jones reported in 2011, Huckabee destroyed his administration’s state records before leaving office in 2007.

In February, Mother Jones wrote to the office of Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe seeking access to a variety of records concerning his predecessor’s tenure, including Huckabee’s travel records, calendars, call logs, and emails. Beebe’s chief legal counsel, Tim Gauger, replied in a letter that “former Governor Huckabee did not leave behind any hard-copies of the types of documents you seek. Moreover, at that time, all of the computers used by former Governor Huckabee and his staff had already been removed from the office and, as we understand it, the hard-drives in those computers had already been ‘cleaned’ and physically destroyed.”

He added, “In short, our office does not possess, does not have access to, and is not the custodian of any of the records you seek.”

Huckabee responded at the time by attacking Mother Jones, which he claimed “doesn’t pretend to be a real news outlet, but a highly polarized opinion-driven vehicle for all things to the far left.” He also called the story “factually challenged.” But the Arkansas Department of Information Systems confirmed that the hard drives had been destroyed while he was still in the governor’s mansion. Legal? Sure. But absolutely shady.

Even before he destroyed his hard drives rather than grant the public access to his records, Huckabee took a combative approach to public records requests. When Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley (who has also weighed in on Huckabee’s transparency record) requested documents from Huckabee in 1995, the then-lieutenant governor flipped out. In a press release issued by his campaign, he attacked Brantley as a “disgruntled and embittered wannabe editor” from a “trashy little tabloid”—and went after Brantley’s wife, a Clinton judicial appointee, for good measure. All because the editor filed a request for records every citizen was entitled to.

Dale Bumpers Papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas

Hillary Clinton’s missing emails are a legitimate scandal if you care about government transparency. But many of her loudest critics have done little to inspire confidence they’d do anything differently.

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Mike Huckabee Should Probably Stop Criticizing Hillary Over Her Emails

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Thursday Hummingbird Blogging – 19 March 2015

by LakeshaDQZ Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

Sorry for the lack of blogging yet again. In the meantime, here’s the latest pic of our baby hummingbirds. They look perilously close to flapping their wings and leaving the nest.

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Thursday Hummingbird Blogging – 19 March 2015

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One Thing I Wish Vox Understood About Wishes

by VirgieSeagle Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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You can’t wish…

…for more wishes.

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One Thing I Wish Vox Understood About Wishes

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Health Note

by FloridaBirchell Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

I suppose the lack of content makes it obvious, but today has been a very bad day. I haven’t been able to sleep more than a few hours for the past few days, despite plenty of sleep meds. I’m completely exhausted, and not just because of the lack of sleep. That’s just making things worse. I can walk about 50 feet before I need to rest. My big accomplishment of the day was to turn on the TV around noon.

I assume this is all just part of the chemo withdrawal symptoms, but I don’t really know. Tomorrow I have an appointment with an oncology nurse, so perhaps I’ll learn more then.

If there’s a silver lining to this, I suppose it’s the possibility that this is the bottom of the post-chemo symptoms, and now I’ll start getting better. We’ll see.

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Health Note

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One of the Anti-Obamacare Plaintiffs Finally Appears in Public

by EstelleGariepy Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

During the run-up to the Supreme Court oral arguments in King v. Burwell, the latest legal assault on Obamacare, the four people named as plaintiffs in the case were mysteriously absent from public view. They never made any public statements. They never appeared at any conferences. These four Virginia residents who were supposed to be victims of Obamacare were essentially invisible in the highly politicized case. And their lawyers had good reason to keep them under wraps: It’s unclear if any of them have been injured by Obamacare and truly have standing to sue. One of the four, Brenda Levy, even told Mother Jones she didn’t want the lawsuit to end up stripping millions of Americans of their health insurance, which is what will likely happen should the plaintiffs prevail.

But finally, today, after oral arguments in the case, one of the plaintiffs, Doug Hurst, appeared outside the Supreme Court with his lead counsel, Michael Carvin, and lawyers from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that has propelled this lawsuit. CEI had promised that Hurst would speak. But he said nothing. He took no questions. Rather, his wife, Pam Trainor Hurst, read a prepared statement to the assembled reporters. Her comments were largely drowned out by protesters with bullhorns—anti-Obamacare protesters. But soon after, CEI released her statement.

She said:

Decisions made here in Washington directly affect middle-class families like ours, and we believe it’s time for those who have been hurt by Washington to take a stand—that’s why Doug joined the case. We never imagined we would end up at the Supreme Court, but that just shows how important this case is, not just for us, but for so many others around the country who are hurt by Obamacare.

There are millions of Americans who have lost their plans or their doctors. Or who, like Doug and I, are forced by the Internal Revenue Service to either buy insurance we don’t want or face a tax penalty. We want Americans to have options. We believe there is a better way to take care of the people who need help. But there is no reason to force millions of us to pay tax penalties if we don’t join a government program.

It seemed odd that Trainor Hurst was speaking, given she was not a party to the lawsuit. Where were the other plaintiffs? On this big day for the anti-Obamacare crusaders, it seemed, CEI was sticking to its strategy: Keep the plaintiffs out of sight.

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One of the Anti-Obamacare Plaintiffs Finally Appears in Public

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Report: Justice Department to Condemn Racially Biased Policing in Ferguson

by DeniseLoymlz Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

The US Department of Justice may have passed on filing federal charges against former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson after he shot and killed Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb last summer, but the department isn’t letting the city’s police force totally off the hook. According to the New York Times, the DOJ is about to release a report that accuses the Ferguson Police Department—and the city itself—of systemically mistreating the community’s African American population with discriminatory traffic stops; disproportionate ticketing, arrests, and court fines; and physical abuse at the hands of police officers.

According to the Times‘ Matt Apuzzo, the DOJ will recommend a series of changes at the department. If the city doesn’t agree, the DOJ could sue to force reforms. The DOJ has court-backed agreements with nearly two dozen police departments around the country (including the island-wide force in Puerto Rico), and is fighting four other departments in court over proposed changes.

If the Times is right, the report will bolster and likely add to information that has been documented in the past by activists, advocates, and at least one state-level agency in Missouri. As Mother Jones reported in September 2014, fines and court fees are Ferguson’s second-larges revenue source, and warrants were issued in 2013 at a rate of three per household (25,000 in a city of 21,000 people).

Another Mother Jones report—based off findings from the Missouri Attorney General’s office—noted that in 2013 in Ferguson, 86 percent of traffic stops and 92 percent of searches of individuals involved African American. That’s in a city that’s around 60% black (and one that had, at the time of Brown’s death, just three black police officers). Despite the cops’ focus on Ferguson’s black residents, just one in five black people police searched were found to be carrying contraband. For white people, that number was one in three.

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Report: Justice Department to Condemn Racially Biased Policing in Ferguson

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The Proofiness of Bill O’Reilly

by TysonGoldfarb Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week, after Mother Jones published an article by Daniel Schulman and me reporting on Bill O’Reilly’s mischaracterizations of his wartime reporting experience, the Fox News host replied with insult, denial, threatening rhetoric, and bombast.

Insult: He called me a “liar,” a “despicable guttersnipe,” and “garbage.”

Denial: Though the story included video of O’Reilly stating he had been “in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands,” O’Reilly insisted, “I never said I was on the Falklands island, ever.”

Threatening rhetoric: In one of his many comments to other reporters (while continuing to ignore the questions we sent him before publication), O’Reilly declared that I deserve “to be in the kill zone.”

Bombast: O’Reilly proclaimed, “Everything I said about my reportorial career—EVERYTHING—is accurate.”

And that was just in the first 24 hours. Eventually, O’Reilly added another element to his arsenal: proofiness.

After nearly a day of hurling invective, O’Reilly opened his cable show Friday night with a monologue that assailed me as a smear-meister. But he also tried to win the day by producing documents that, he asserted, showed how he had been unfairly tarred. “In what I consider to be a miracle,” he declared, “I found this CBS internal memo from 33 years ago praising my coverage” of a protest in Buenos Aires that happened just as the 1982 Falklands war ended.

Our article had pointed out that O’Reilly’s later accounts of this protest—which he called a “combat situation”—contained significant contradictions with the factual record. He has claimed that soldiers fired into the crowd, that “many” people were killed, and that “I was out there pretty much by myself because the other CBS correspondents were hiding in the hotel.” (The Mother Jones article said nothing about how O’Reilly covered the protest at the time.)

Yet O’Reilly’s dramatic account is disputed by media reports of the time and by other journalists who were there—including, CNN reported Sunday, seven CBS staffers who were in Buenos Aires at the time. (Former CBS News veteran Eric Engberg posted a particularly scathing recollection of O’Reilly’s short stint in Buenos Aires as a CBS News correspondent.)

So what did the “miracle” memo say? It apparently was from the CBS news desk in New York City, and the note expressed “thanks for a fine piece.” It showed, in other words, that O’Reilly covered the protest—which no one disputed—and it addressed none of the issues in question.

But wait, O’Reilly found another document in his basement—a letter he sent to a CBS News executive: “The crews were great…The riot had been very bad, we were gassed, shot at, and I had the best vantage point in which to report the story.” Again, the document showed what no one had disputed—that the protest turned ugly, and that police used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the crowd—but it provided no information backing up O’Reilly’s claim that soldiers gunned down civilians and “many” were killed.

“We have rock solid proof that David Corn smeared me,” O’Reilly concluded. Not really.

On Sunday, O’Reilly, speaking by phone, was a guest on Fox News’ MediaBuzz, which is hosted by the network’s in-house media reporter, Howard Kurtz, and he brandished a new piece of proof: a New York Times article. The story, by Richard Meislin, chronicled the protest, and O’Reilly read several paragraphs that described the violence in Buenos Aires. We cited this article in our story, and it does not say anything about soldiers shooting into the crowd, or anyone being killed. Its only reference to police or military violence is this one line: “One policeman pulled a pistol, firing five shots over the heads of fleeing demonstrators.” Nothing in the story matches O’Reilly’s description of soldiers mowing down protesters. (The Times dispatch did say, “Local news agencies said three buses had been set ablaze by demonstrators and another one fired upon.” It did not attribute those shots to soldiers or police, and the sentence suggests this violence was committed by protesters.)

But here’s the tell: As O’Reilly read from the Times story, when he reached the line about a cop “firing five shots,” he omitted the rest of the sentence: “over the heads of the fleeing demonstrators.” He jumped straight to the next sentence, hoodwinking the audience, for with this selective quotation, he had conveyed the impression that at least one cop had been firing on the protesters. He had adulterated his supposed proof.

Later in the show, Kurtz gently asked O’Reilly, “You’ve have said you covered a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, you said the war zones of the Falkland conflict in Argentina. Looking back, do you wish you had worded it differently?” O’Reilly replied:

No. When you have soldiers, and military police, firing into the crowd, as the New York Times reports, and you have people injured and hurt and you’re in the middle of that, that’s the definition, all right.

Only that is not what the New York Times reported. O’Reilly was citing an article that disproved his point to prove his point.

And the reporter of that Times story, Richard Meislin, weighed in after the show to say O’Reilly had misled the audience about this article. On Facebook, Meislin wrote:

Bill O’Reilly cut out an important phrase when he read excerpts of my report from The Times on air Sunday to back up his claim that Buenos Aires was a “war zone” the night after Argentina surrendered to Britain in the Falklands war…

When he read it on Howard Kurtz’s Media Buzz show, O’Reilly left out that the shots were “over the heads of fleeing demonstrators.” As far as I know, no demonstrators were shot or killed by police in Buenos Aires that night.

What I saw on the streets that night was a demonstration—passionate, chaotic and memorable—but it would be hard to confuse it with being in a war zone.

There may be more proofiness to come. During Kurtz’s show, O’Reilly announced that on his Monday night show he expected to air the footage that he and his crew gathered during the Buenos Aires protest. If he does, there’s no doubt the video will present a protest that turned ugly. (Our article included video from the CBS News report on the protest—which did feature some of the footage that O’Reilly and his camera crew obtained—and that entire segment showed no troops or police firing on the protesters and slaughtering Argentines.) But unless the video O’Reilly presents on his program shows soldiers shooting into the crowd and massacring civilians, it will not likely bolster O’Reilly’s case.

That doesn’t mean he won’t cite it as proof he’s been wronged. That’s how proofiness works. The assertion is more important than the evidence itself.

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The Proofiness of Bill O’Reilly

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Bill O’Reilly Responds. We Annotate.

by Rosa54Nxuhep Posted on February 21, 2015

Mother Jones

On Thursday, Mother Jones published an article by Daniel Schulman and me documenting how Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has mischaracterized his wartime reporting experience. It noted that he has repeatedly stated that during his short stint as a CBS correspondent in the 1980s, he was in the “war zone” during the Falklands war between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982. He once claimed he had heroically rescued his cameraman in “a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands,” while being chased by army soldiers. Yet no American journalist reached the war zone in the Falkland Islands during this conflict. O’Reilly and his colleagues covered the war from Buenos Aires, which was 1,200 miles from the fighting.

O’Reilly responded to the story by launching a slew of personal invective. He did not respond to the details of the story. Instead, he called me a “liar,” a “left-wing assassin,” and a “despicable guttersnipe.” He said that I deserve “to be in the kill zone.” (You can read one of my responses here.) And in his show-opening “Talking Points memo” monologue on Friday evening, he continued the name-calling.

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Bill O’Reilly Responds. We Annotate.

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