Tag Archives: kansas

Donald Trump Holds a Micro Press Conference, Comes Off As an Idiot

Mother Jones

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We’ve had a busy day of Trump news. I know you all want to be on top of things, so here’s the latest. First, Trump was asked what he thought about Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement that sanctions were due against Russia and Vladimir Putin for their hacking during the election. Check out his reply:

I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind the security we need. But I have not spoken with the senators and I will certainly will be over a period of time.

Later, asked about Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Trump produced another bit of word salad that made it clear he had no idea what a settlement even was. This is probably why Trump hasn’t spoken to the press in such a long time. This kind of callow blather might have been entertaining when it was coming from a buffoon candidate who had no chance of winning,1 but not when it’s coming from the president-elect.

In other news, Politico reports that Trump was irritated by President Obama’s comments at Pearl Harbor yesterday. Obama said, “even when hatred burns hottest, even when the tug of tribalism is at its most primal, we must resist the urge to turn inward. We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different.” Those are fairly boilerplate remarks, but “these felt to Trump like direct criticism of the president-elect, according to two people close to Trump.” Gee, I wonder why?

Finally, Trump announced that Sprint was bringing 5,000 jobs back to America. “I just spoke with the head person,” Trump told Bloomberg. “He said because of me they’re doing 5,000 jobs in this country.” Here’s how it played in the nation’s press:

The skepticism in these headlines turns out to be warranted. Trump did indeed desperately try to take credit for this, and you will be unsurprised to learn that he was lying. First of all, Sprint announced these jobs back in April. Here’s the Kansas City Star: “Sprint Corp. is launching a nationwide service to hand-deliver new phones to customers in their homes. The Direct 2 You service, which first rolled out in a Kansas City pilot, will lead to the hiring of about 5,000 mostly full-time employees as it spreads nationwide.”

Second, the Japanese owner of Sprint, Softbank, announced in October that it was creating a huge tech investment fund.

Third, in December, Softbank’s CEO announced the fund again after a meeting with Trump, and said that one part of the whole package was the creation of 50,000 new jobs. Today, Sprint reluctantly conceded that its 5,000 jobs were part of the previously announced 50,000 jobs.

And finally, these jobs were announced yet again today.

That makes four times these jobs have been announced. Donald Trump was responsible for none of them.

1Actually, it wasn’t entertaining even back then.

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Donald Trump Holds a Micro Press Conference, Comes Off As an Idiot

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Kansas Governor Sam Brownback Wants to Wreck the US Economy Too

Mother Jones

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Oh man:

Sam Brownback, the Kansas governor whose tax cuts brought him political turmoil, recurring budget holes and sparse evidence of economic success, has a message for President-elect Donald Trump: Do what I did.

….“My critics, which are many, they only want to look at the budget,” Mr. Brownback said in an interview. “They won’t look with any depth or detail at the impact on small-business growth or private-sector job growth. That’s the target, that’s what we’re after.”

….Mr. Brownback said a number of states face budget problems and said Kansas has “never had more private-sector jobs.”

It’s technically true that Kansas has “never had more private-sector jobs.” What that really means, however, is that despite five years of population growth and economic expansion under Sam Brownback, Kansas has only barely passed its previous peak from 2008—while the rest of the country passed that mark long ago. The chart on the right shows total Kansas private-sector employment vs. US private-sector employment starting in January 2011, when Brownback took office. His tax-cutting policies didn’t work from the start, and the longer he’s stayed in office the worse they’ve done. Kansas is the poster child for the failure of betting on tax cuts for the rich to supercharge the economy.

If you want a more sophisticated analysis that takes into account all the excuses people will toss at you (drought, airplane manufacturing, etc. etc.), check out Menzie Chinn. His latest is here, and you can search Econbrowser for all the gory details you want. Spoiler alert: None of them change the picture on the right.

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Kansas Governor Sam Brownback Wants to Wreck the US Economy Too

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"Prevent Tragedy Before It’s Too Late": Read the Statement 1,200 Scholars Just Released About Trump

Mother Jones

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Concerned by the hateful rhetoric that has accompanied President-elect Donald Trump’s transition to the White House, a group of 1,200 historians and other scholars have put out a powerful statement urging Americans to stand guard against civil rights abuses.

“Looking back to history provides copious lessons on what is at stake when we allow hysteria and untruths to trample people’s rights,” the scholars wrote. “We know the consequences, and it is possible, with vigilance and a clear eye on history, to prevent tragedy before it is too late.”

The statement was first created by three associate professors at Northwestern University, Oberlin College, and the University of Kansas who were alarmed about parallels between the current political climate and instances throughout history when Americans’ rights have been suspended, like during World War II. They originally planned to collect signatures from a small group of scholars and then publish a letter or an op-ed, says Shana Bernstein of Northwestern, one of the organizers, but interest spread quickly as they reached out to their networks.

Historians from a range of institutions signed on, including those from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and many other elite universities, as well as independent scholars. Among the signatories were six Pulitzer Prize winners, a MacArthur “Genius” award recipient, five Bancroft Prize winners, and at least 12 Guggenheim Fellows. “I continue to receive inquiries about signing the letter, from people both inside and outside academia,” Bernstein says, noting that they only included scholars of US history and related fields.

Their statement raises concerns about an increase in harassment of minorities since the election, as well as Trump’s proposal to create a registry that tracks Muslims in the United States. “While we find ourselves in a distinct moment compared to World War II and the Cold War, we are seeing the return of familiar calls against perceived enemies. Alarmingly, justifications for a Muslim registry have cited Japanese American imprisonment during World War II as a credible precedent, and the Professor Watchlist—which speciously identifies ‘un-patriotic professors’—is eerily similar to the communist registry of the McCarthy era,” they wrote, referring to a new website that accuses college professors of pushing “leftist propaganda.”

“All of us are deeply concerned about the talk of registering Muslims, breaking up immigrant families by deporting and interning undocumented parents, limiting speech on campuses and by cracking down on peaceful protest, and the damaging effects of rolling back civil rights, workers’ rights, immigrant rights, and the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans,” Annelise Orleck, a history professor at Dartmouth College who signed the statement, tells Mother Jones. “We are the people who know well the times in American history when there have been wholesale violations of civil and human rights, when our intelligence agencies have exceeded their constitutional mandate and conducted secret surveillance of American citizens who are simply exercising their rights. We are saying that it is naive to assume that ‘it can’t happen here.'”

Check out the full statement below.

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Final Collective Statement, December 13, 2016 (PDF)

Final Collective Statement, December 13, 2016 (Text)

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"Prevent Tragedy Before It’s Too Late": Read the Statement 1,200 Scholars Just Released About Trump

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Major investment groups told food companies that meat is too risky.

Myron Ebell, a director at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, would head Trump’s EPA transition team, E&E Daily reports. Ebell also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a pro-business group focused on pushing climate denial.

While Ebell generally maintains that climate change is a hoax, he’s also argued that if it does exist, it’s actually a good thing. “Life in many places would become more pleasant,” he wrote in 2006. “Instead of 20 below zero in January in Saskatoon, it might be only 10 below. And I don’t think too many people would complain if winters in Minneapolis became more like winters in Kansas City.” He has less to say about the summers in Minneapolis, which, if current emissions trends continue, will feel like summers in Mesquite, Texas, by 2100.

Ebell’s waffling is in-line with the candidate’s, who seems to have spontaneously changed his mind about climate change during the first presidential debate. When accused by Hillary Clinton of calling climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, Trump flat-out denied it, despite a notorious tweet saying just that.

Ebell joins energy lobbyist Mike McKenna, George W. Bush’s former Interior Department solicitor David Bernhardt, and oil tycoon Harold Hamm on Trump’s team.

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Major investment groups told food companies that meat is too risky.

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Let’s all give a small, slightly restrained cheer for Costa Rica.

The state’s last record-setting earthquake was in 2011, when it topped 5.6 magnitude. A new one on Saturday matched that record.

As fracking has boomed in the U.S., the number of earthquakes across the nation tripled from 2009 to 2015.

At 3.0 magnitude, you probably wouldn’t even notice a tremor. Approaching 6.0, you can definitely feel it — and the risk for injury starts getting more serious.

But frequency is more troubling than strength. For naturally occurring seismic activity, geologists link recurring smaller quakes to bigger, more destructive quakes to come. Oklahoma’s tremors, however are not normal: The majority are linked to wastewater injection from oil and gas operations.

The U.S. Geological Survey hasn’t determined yet whether that’s what caused Saturday’s jitters, but said: “We do know that many earthquakes in Oklahoma have been triggered by wastewater fluid injection.”

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Oklahoma and Kansas showed progress in strengthening regulations of wastewater injection. Oklahoma, which has been slower to adopt the new rules, experienced slightly fewer minor quakes in the first half of the year compared to the same period last year.

Oklahoma regulators were concerned enough to immediately order 37 wastewater disposal wells to shut down on Saturday.

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Let’s all give a small, slightly restrained cheer for Costa Rica.

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A Tea Party conservative just lost to a Trump supporter, because farm subsidies

subsidie another day

A Tea Party conservative just lost to a Trump supporter, because farm subsidies

By on Aug 3, 2016Share

A Tea Party leader in the House of Representatives just lost a primary bid for reelection — a sign that Republican voters may be fed up with Tea Party obstinance and are casting about for something new. Rep. Tim Huelskamp lost his Kansas primary by a huge margin to newcomer Roger Marshall.

The outgoing Huelskamp is an ideological conservative with a PhD in agricultural policy, and so he was against subsides whether they went to the poor or industry. He repeatedly voted against the Farm Bill even though his district is packed with farms. His obstinance so infuriated former House Speaker John Boehner that he kicked Huelskamp off the agriculture committee.

Marshall, on the other hand, is a Trump supporter who backs subsidies for farming and has earned endorsements from the agriculture lobby.

This fits with one theory of Trump-ism: The new wave of populist Republicans aren’t against all government payouts; just ones that go to people of a different culture or complexion. They’re fine with handouts — like ag subsidies — that go to their people.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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A Tea Party conservative just lost to a Trump supporter, because farm subsidies

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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

Mother Jones

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump churns out strong opinions like McDonald’s produces Big Macs. But save for the odd eruption—like declaring the supremacy of Trump Tower Grill’s “taco bowls” or blaming the California drought on environmentalists to the delight of the state’s agribusiness interests—he has been relatively quiet about food. At last month’s Republican National Convention, the real-estate developer/reality TV star took a step toward filling out his food and farm policy by tapping Nebraska agribusiness owner and cattleman Charles Herbster as the chairman of his Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee.

Like Trump, Herbster is an unconventional business titan with political ambitions.

He and his wife own Conklin, a Kansas City-based company with an odd mix of product lines: from pesticide additives called adjuvents to fertilizers for farms and lawns to probiotics for livestock, pets, and even people to industrial roof coatings to motor oils for “everything from semis to farm equipment to race cars.” In addition, he owns a cattle-breeding company called Herbster Angus Farms as well as farmland in Nebraska and Colorado, for which he received a total of $196,757 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. (That’s not a particularly high number—many Nebraska farm operators got much more over that time frame.)

Before he took the reins of Trump’s ag-policy team, Herbster was best known for his aborted 2013 campaign for Nebraska’s governorship, as Politico’s Ian Kullgren recently noted. Soon after exiting the race, Herbster donated $860,000 to the campaign of another Republican gubernatorial candidate, Beau McCoy, a Nebraska state senator. Herbster ultimately donated a total of $2.7 million to McCoy’s campaign, “nearly his entire war chest,” The Omaha World-Herald reported. McCoy lost the race. Last year, Herbster hired McCoy to run marketing for Conklin’s building-supply business. Another one-time Nebraska officeholder, former Gov. Dave Heineman, joined Conklin’s board of directors last year.

Herbster’s largesse to politicians hasn’t been limited to McCoy’s failed bid. Politico notes he “has given $336,000 to Republican candidates and ag-related PACs since 2012.”

He is a major funder of Ag America, which describes itself as a “Federal Super PAC active in local, state, and federal elections.” Herbster sits on the Ag America steering committee, and according to the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets, he donated $60,000 to it in 2015. Other recent contributors include Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and several other agribusiness giants.

In public documents, Ag America pushes a a fairly standard agribiz policy agenda: The next president must subject (unnamed) federal ag regulations to “rigorous cost-benefit analyses” and pursue free trade agreements “across the globe to open markets for America’s agricultural products.”

That last bit would seem to contradict Trump’s oft-stated antipathy to the the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending trade deals that was hotly supported by the agribusiness lobby.

And that appears to be where Herbster comes in—reassuring farm interests that a Trump presidency wouldn’t mean reduced access to foreign markets.

On a recent afternoon, I caught up with Herbster by phone on a corn field on his Nebraska farm after calling a number I found on the website of Herbster Angus Farms. I was quite surprised when the man himself answered the phone. After volunteering that “I’ve been friends with Donald J. Trump for more than 10 years,” Herbster told me that he’s been getting calls from farmers “concerned about issues of trade.” Herbster said he reassures them that Trump “is not against trade in any way”—it’s “just that we wants trade to be fair,” and that means renegotiating trade deals. Herbster acknowledged that “trade for agriculture in the Midwest has probably been pretty good for the past few years,” but that it “hasn’t been good for small manufacturers in middle America and the coasts.” Trump, he suggested, would make trade great again for everyone.

He then mentioned reducing the inheritance tax (applied only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher) as a “big issue,” and said that rolling back regulation would be “at the forefront” of a Trump’s first 100 days as president. “We regulate, regulate, regulate,” he complained. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, he added that “if it moves, the government’s response is to tax it; if it keeps moving, the response is to regulate it; and if it stops moving, the response is to try to control it and subsidize it.”

I asked him to specify what regulations he sought to dismantle. “We’re not gonna pinpoint and try to detail the minutiae of all of those, because the first thing we have to do is we have to win,” he said. “I believe we are gonna win, but I’ve always said, until you win, all of the great ideas in the world aren’t going to help you, because you have to win to implement ’em.”

Rather than sweat policy details, “my focus .. is to make sure we get rural America out to vote, that we raise as much money as possible,” he said, adding that “it’s gonna take a lot of money for this campaign, because we saw what happened with Romney versus Obama.”

Meanwhile, Herbster said, he’s working to assemble a group of people to serve with him on Trump’s ag-policy committee, which will be announced the first week of August. “Everyone’s gonna pretty well know the names on that list—we have some governors, we have some former governors … we’ve put together a really great list.”

I pressed him for more policy details, but he politely hustled me off the phone. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got concrete being laid at the farm,” he said.

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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

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Clinton Announces Tim Kaine as Her Running Mate

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton announced Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia as her running mate on Friday, making what’s widely seen as a safe pick by choosing a man with deep political experience, but one who might not have much potential to generate new excitement for her campaign. She announced the decision in a text message to supporters, informing them, “I’m thrilled to tell you this first: I’ve chosen Sen. Tim Kaine as my running mate.”

Read about Tim Kaine’s past as a civil rights attorney.

Kaine backed Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary but was an early booster of Clinton’s 2016 bid and has long been seen as a front-runner to be Clinton’s vice presidential pick. While he doesn’t have a loyal following among the Bernie Sanders crowd, as someone like Elizabeth Warren does, it’s easy to see why Kaine appealed to Clinton. He has an extensive political résumé, as a former mayor of Richmond, lieutenant governor and governor of Virginia, and head of the the Democratic National Committee, and now as a senator from an important swing state.

Kaine isn’t a rhetorical bomb-thrower. He still carries the reserved Midwestern persona that he gained growing up in the Kansas City suburbs. A former civil rights attorney who won a major redlining verdict against Nationwide Insurance before he launched his political career, Kaine, much like Clinton, offers a quieter version of progressivism than Sanders or Warren, with an emphasis on finding compromise and achieving incremental progress. During his first few years in the Senate, Kaine has focused on foreign policy, seeking to impose limits on the president’s powers to conduct war.

Kaine’s challenge will be to convince Sanders fans that he’s on their side, and he didn’t do himself any favors in the lead-up to his vice presidential rollout. Earlier this week, he signed onto a pair of letters, bipartisan but largely authored by Republicans, that asked federal regulators to ease regulations on community banks.

Read more about Kaine’s full career here.

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Clinton Announces Tim Kaine as Her Running Mate

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At Least 3 Police Officers Shot and Killed in Baton Rouge

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Update, July 17, 5:42 p.m. ET: The deceased suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, and he attacked the police on his birthday, CBS News reports.

Update, July 17, 4:49 p.m. ET: Baton Rouge law enforcement officials announced at a press conference Sunday afternoon that there is no longer an “active shooter” situation, and that the deceased suspect was likely the only shooter, according to NBC News. Police initially suspected that there were at least two other shooters at large.

Update, July 17, 3:49 p.m. ET: Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards condemned the shootings. “This is an unspeakable and unjustifiable attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing,” he said.

Update, July 17, 12:39 p.m. ET: The city’s mayor and the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s office have confirmed that three police officers are dead and three others were wounded in the attack. The sheriff’s office reports that at least one suspect is dead, but two others may still be at large.

At least three police officers were shot and killed and at least four other officers were injured during a gun attack in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday morning, according to CNN. The incident occurred just 10 days after an ambush of Dallas police killed five officers and injured nine people.

While no official link has been established, Sunday’s attack comes amid ongoing protests in the city and around the country after the death of Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot and killed by police outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge. Thousands attended Sterling’s funeral on Friday.

Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told MSNBC soon after the attack that the police officers had been responding to reports of gunfire when they were ambushed by at least one gunman. A Louisiana State Police spokesman told the network that the gunman was shot during the incident. The gunman’s condition remains unclear.

We will update this post as new details become available.

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At Least 3 Police Officers Shot and Killed in Baton Rouge

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The Paradox of Immigration: Opposition Is Strongest Precisely Where There Are the Fewest Immigrants

Mother Jones

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James Fallows is in western Kansas around Dodge City, where many of the cities are majority Latino and full of immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and more recently Somalia and Sudan. Here’s what he says:

I can’t let this day end without noting the black-versus-white, night-versus-day contrast between the way immigration, especially from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, is discussed in this part of the country where it is actually happening, versus its role in this moment’s national political discussion.

….Every single person we have spoken with — Anglo and Latino and other, old and young, native-born and immigrant, and so on down the list — every one of them has said: We need each other! There is work in this community that we all need to do. We can choose to embrace the world, or we can fade and die. And we choose to embrace it.

I don’t have actual data on this, but my sense from both the US and Britain is that the most fervent opposition to immigration—legal or otherwise—comes precisely from the regions where it’s had the least impact. Here in the US, for example, immigration from Latin America has been heaviest in the southern sun belt states of California, Texas, Arizona, and a few others. And yet Donald Trump’s “build a wall” narrative played well in places like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, all of which have relatively small Latino populations. Similarly, Brexit did best in the small towns and rural areas of England, the places that have the fewest immigrants and that depend the most on EU trade.

That’s not to say that opposition to immigration is absent in places like London or San Diego. It’s not. But these places mostly seem to have adapted to it and figured out that it’s not really all that bad. It’s everywhere else, where immigration is mostly a fear, that anti-immigrant sentiment has the strongest purchase. And that’s why peddling fear is so effective.

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The Paradox of Immigration: Opposition Is Strongest Precisely Where There Are the Fewest Immigrants

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