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Every Female Democratic Senator Is Backing Clinton—With One Notable Exception

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton will make a stop in Washington, DC, on Monday night to show off her resounding support from the Democratic women in the US Senate. At a “Women for Hillary” event near the Capitol, 13 of the 14 female Democratic senators will voice their support for Clinton’s presidential campaign, with backers ranging from moderates such as Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota to liberals including Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.

But amid that overwhelming support, it’s the lone holdout that might be most notable: Elizabeth Warren.

The progressive icon from Massachusetts is one of the few Senate Democrats who have not yet endorsed Clinton. Of the 44 Democrats in the Senate, 38 have endorsed Clinton. (Bernie Sanders has yet to lock up public support from even one of his Senate colleagues.)

But Warren has been conspicuously reticent. A favorite of the progressive base who has been pushing her Democratic colleagues to be more openly liberal, Warren has yet to throw her support behind the Democratic front-runner. In 2013, Warren joined all other Democratic women in the Senate in signing a letter encouraging Clinton to enter the 2016 race. Warren and Clinton later met at Clinton’s DC home late last year while the former secretary of state was readying her campaign launch. During that meeting, Clinton reportedly asked for Warren’s advice but not her endorsement.

But since Clinton made her campaign official earlier this year, Warren has remained largely silent on presidential politics, with her few stray comments pointing to a reluctance to align her political brand with Clinton’s. In July, Warren implicitly called out Clinton at the annual progressive activist confab Netroots Nation, stating that she couldn’t see herself supporting a presidential candidate who wouldn’t ban the revolving-door windfall bonuses Wall Streeters receive when they take a government job in Washington. Warren specifically said her endorsement was contingent on a candidate’s support for a bill introduced by Baldwin to end these so-called golden parachutes. The following month, Clinton announced her support for the legislation, which has yet to receive a vote in the Senate.

Still, Warren hasn’t cozied up to the Clinton crowd. In August, Warren met with Vice President Joe Biden while he was still flirting with the idea of a presidential campaign. And at a book release event at a Senate office building last month, Warren used her opening remarks to attack Clinton’s campaign rhetoric. She didn’t name Clinton explicitly, but said she had been disappointed to watch the Democratic debates and see candidates dismissing the need to reinstate Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking that was repealed under President Bill Clinton. With both Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley backing a new Glass-Steagall, Warren didn’t have to use Clinton’s name to make it clear who she was referring to when she said Democrats shouldn’t be asking if Glass-Steagall alone could have stopped the recent recession. “I think that’s just the wrong question to ask,” she said with exasperation, “the wrong point to make.”

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Every Female Democratic Senator Is Backing Clinton—With One Notable Exception

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We Need to Re-Learn the Lessons of the Iraq War

by OrvalMedrano Posted on November 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeff Guo writes about the likelihood that the Paris attacks will inspire reprisals against Muslims:

“This is precisely what ISIS was aiming for — to provoke communities to commit actions against Muslims,” said Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland who studies how people become terrorists. “Then ISIS will be able to say, ‘I told you so. These are your enemies, and the enemies of Islam.’”

….The researchers see the Paris attacks increasing radicalization in two potential ways. First, the killings project power and prestige, burnishing ISIS’s image and attracting those who want to feel potent themselves.

Second, the attacks will escalate tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims. They have already led to some anti-Muslim activity, and will likely provoke more. Not only will these events make Muslims in the West feel marginalized, but they will also provide extremist propagandists with examples of Western oppression.

What really gets me about this is not just that it’s true. It’s that we’ve seen this movie before with Al-Qaeda. We know perfectly well that it’s ISIS that wants to turn this into a war of civilizations, just as Al-Qaeda wanted to do. It’s no secret. Why are so many conservative hawks so willing to play along with this?

More generally, it’s astonishing—or depressing, take your pick—how soon we forget what we learned just a few years ago. Should we send a massive force into Anbar to crush ISIS once and for all? Well, we’ve tried that before. Remember? We sent a massive force into Iraq and, sure enough, we toppled Saddam Hussein regular army units pretty quickly. Then, despite a huge military presence, the country fell apart. The Sunni insurgency lasted for years before it was finally beaten back. Then the Shiite government of Iraq decided that fealty to its Shia supporters was more important than uniting their country, and before long Anbar was in flames again, this time with ISIS leading the charge.

You want to take out ISIS? Me too. But if you want to do it fast in order to demonstrate how tough you are, it’s going to require 100,000 troops or more; it will cost hundreds or thousands of American lives; and the bill will run to tens of billions of dollars. Remember Fallujah? It took the better part of a year and nearly 15,000 troops to take a medium-sized city held by a few thousand poorly trained militants. Now multiply that by ten or so. And multiply the casualties by 10 or 20 or 30 too. This isn’t two armies facing off on the field of battle. It’s house-to-house fighting against local insurgents, which isn’t something we’re especially good at.

Still, we could do it. The problem is that President Obama is right: unless we leave a permanent occupying force there, it will just blow up yet again—especially if we take Ted Cruz’s advice and decide we don’t really care about civilian casualties. Having defeated Al-Qaeda 2.0, we’ll end up with Al-Qaeda 3.0. Aside from a permanent occupation, the only thing that can stop this is an Iraqi government that takes Sunni grievances seriously and is genuinely willing to govern in a non-sectarian way.

This isn’t just a guess. We went through this just a few years ago. But everyone seems to have forgotten it already. Just send in the troops and crush the bastards! That worked great against the Nazis. It doesn’t work so great in Iraq.

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We Need to Re-Learn the Lessons of the Iraq War

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Trump Blasts O’Malley: "Disgusting, Little, Weak, Pathetic Baby"

by StevieMcMillan Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back in July, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley apologized for saying “all lives matter” to a group of Black Lives Matter activists who had interrupted one of his speeches.

“That was a mistake on my part, and I meant no disrespect,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said. “I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment, and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

Great, a well-spoken, sincere apology from a white guy who, if given the benefit of the doubt, probably just didn’t know any better. Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

In an interview on Fox News that is set to air Saturday night, Donald Trump blasted O’Malley’s apology.

“And then he apologized like a little baby, like a disgusting, little, weak, pathetic baby,” Trump said. “And that’s the problem with our country.”

Though many will groan at an adult hurling insults at another adult for realizing he made a mistake and attempting to correct himself, O’Malley may be loving the Trump exposure, considering he has been known to participate in some good old-fashioned trolling of the real estate tycoon himself.

Mother Jones has reached out to the O’Malley campaign, and we will update if it responds.

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Trump Blasts O’Malley: "Disgusting, Little, Weak, Pathetic Baby"

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Maryland Official: Lead Poisoning Is the Royal Road to Riches

by TanjaMarston Posted on August 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Technically this has nothing to do with lead and crime, but since I’m Mother Jones’ senior lead correspondent it’s up to me to put up this outlandish little item from Maryland:

Gov. Larry Hogan’s top housing official said Friday that he wants to look at loosening state lead paint poisoning laws, saying they could motivate a mother to deliberately poison her child to obtain free housing.

Kenneth C. Holt, secretary of Housing, Community and Development, told an audience at the Maryland Association of Counties summer convention here that a mother could just put a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth, then take the child in for testing and a landlord would be liable for providing the child with housing until the age of 18.

Pressed afterward, Holt said he had no evidence of this happening but said a developer had told him it was possible. “This is an anecdotal story that was described to me as something that could possibly happen,” Holt said.

I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t actually work, but that hardly matters. It’s just another example of the peculiar Republican penchant for governance via anecdote. They’re all convinced that someone, somewhere, is trying to rip them off, but they can never find quite enough real examples of this. So instead we get Reaganesque fables about stuff they heard from some guy who heard it from some other guy who said, you know, it could happen.

By the way, if you’re tempted to do this, please don’t. Licking a lead fishing weight once probably won’t actually cause a detectable rise in blood lead levels, but it’s still a really bad idea.

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Maryland Official: Lead Poisoning Is the Royal Road to Riches

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Black Lives Matter Organizers Labeled as "Threat Actors" by Cybersecurity Firm

by Daisy09Jmt Posted on August 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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The cover of a report by a cybersecurity firm that identified Black Lives Matter organizers as “threat actors.” ZeroFox

Documents from a “crisis management” report produced by the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox indicate that the firm monitored Black Lives Matter protesters during the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore earlier this year. The documents, which surfaced online last Wednesday, also state that the firm “protected” the online accounts of Maryland and Baltimore officials and members of the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland National Guard.

The report identifies DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, two prominent Black Lives Matter organizers who took part in the Baltimore protests, as “threat actors” for whom “immediate response is recommended.” It describes McKesson and Elzie as “high” severity, “physical,” and “#mostwanted” threats and notes both have a “massive following” on social media. It says that ZeroFox was engaged in “continuous monitoring” of their social media accounts and specifies their geographical locations at the time of the report. The report does not suggest that the pair were suspected of criminal activity but were “main coordinators of the protests.”

ZeroFox

McKesson and Elzie both tell Mother Jones they were “not surprised” that they were being watched. “It confirms that us telling the truth about police violence is seen as a threat,” McKesson says. Both activists say they do not know why they were identified as physical threats. McKesson and Elzie live in Missouri, where they helped organize the Ferguson protests. They traveled together to Baltimore for a week and a half during the Freddie Gray protests.

A link to the ZeroFox report first circulated on Twitter last Wednesday. ZeroFox did not respond to a request to confirm the authenticity of the documents. The Baltimore Police Department and the mayor’s chief of staff did not respond to request for comment. The Maryland governor’s office says that the state does not have a contract with ZeroFox.

In emails exchanged in April, ZeroFox’s CEO, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake’s chief of staff, and the president of the Maryland chapter of an FBI intelligence partnership program discussed ZeroFox’s potential surveillance “help” for Baltimore. These emails were released to the Baltimore Sun last week following a public records request. The emails also indicate that ZeroFox “briefed our classified partners” at the Fort Meade Army base in Maryland on “intelligence” it had collected during the Gray protests. Other emails from the Baltimore Police Department indicate the department had collected “intelligence regarding potentially violent agitators.”

The report on the Black Lives Matter organizers is dated the day after the Fort Meade briefing. It states that ZeroFox intended to “alert Baltimore PD on all monitoring threat actors and influencers.”

According to the leaked report, ZeroFox monitored 62 “threat actors” and 187 “threat influencers,” including a Twitter user who was “a main local protest organizer” and another who was “sending supplies from New Jersey.” The report also identifies people, organizations, and systems for “asset protection,” including Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, Baltimore Police Department Captain Eric Kowalczyk, and other members of the Baltimore police and Maryland National Guard.

ZeroFox

This report has emerged amid growing evidence of federal, state, and local government monitoring of Black Lives Matter protests. Last month, the Intercept published Department of Homeland Security emails showing that the department had closely tracked Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, DC in April. Since protests started in Ferguson, Missouri, last August, the department has also monitored non-protest events such as cultural events and prayer vigils in DC, Atlanta, Oakland, Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

The emails obtained by the Baltimore Sun also say that ZeroFox performed surveillance for the New York Police Department during protests over the death of Eric Garner. ZeroFox also has a contract to provide equipment to the State Department.

McKesson says that during last year’s protests in Ferguson, he and other prominent organizers became suspicious that they were being monitored by local police officials there as well. On numerous occasions, he says, they interacted with police officers that knew their names and Twitter accounts. “The police officers in St. Louis knew us. They knew many of us by Twitter handle. It was clear they read our Twitter feed. It was clear they watched the live streams of protests,” he says. But the ZeroFox documents mark the first time he has seen written evidence that his activity was being tracked.

Elzie, too, says she already knew she was being watched. “I never needed a paper confirmation. But I guess it made it real for other people who just didn’t think that it was possible.”

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Black Lives Matter Organizers Labeled as "Threat Actors" by Cybersecurity Firm

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Boy Scouts End Age-Old Ban on Gay Leadership

by AdalberOreilly Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Boy Scouts of America voted today to scrap a blanket ban on gay leaders, marking the end of a policy as old as the group itself. The change will also bar discrimination based on sexual orientation in all Boy Scouts of America official facilities and paying jobs.

Robert Gates, president of the Boy Scouts of America (and former US defense secretary), called for an end to the ban in May, saying the organization should “deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”

The end of the ban does not, however, mark complete acceptance of gay leaders: Some scout groups, particularly those with close religious affiliations, will be able to limit leadership positions to heterosexuals.

Here are some stories that demarcate turning points in the controversy:

An alternative group called the Navigators gained traction with families fed up with BSA policies against gay scouts, atheists, and families who wanted their daughters and sons to be in the same scouting troop. Navigators USA publicized itself as an organization that “welcomes all people…no matter what gender, race, lifestyle, ability, religious or lack of religious belief.”
This timeline shows just how long anti-gay discrimination has been going on in the BSA.
In 2013, the BSA ended its ban on kids in the program who identify as gay, but kept its ban on adults—meaning, in effect, that once a scout turned 18, he could be kicked out.
The Boy Scouts council threatened to kick out a Maryland pack for posting an inclusive statement on its website promising not to discriminate against gay scouts.
BSA funders such as UPS, United Way, the Merck Company Foundation, and the Intel Foundation fled for the hills as a direct result of the Boy Scouts’ anti-gay policies.

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Boy Scouts End Age-Old Ban on Gay Leadership

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Will Hillary Clinton swear off fossil-fuel money? Bernie Sanders already has

by GeraldoTCO Posted on July 7, 2015

Will Hillary Clinton swear off fossil-fuel money? Bernie Sanders already has

By on 7 Jul 2015commentsShare

The Nation magazine and 350 Action are challenging presidential candidates to “neither solicit nor accept campaign contributions” from fossil fuel companies — and that’s putting the heat on Hillary Clinton in particular.

“Back in the 1990s, politicians on both sides of the aisle swore off campaign contributions from big tobacco because the industry lied to the American people about the damage it was causing to public health,” writes 350 Action spokesperson Jamie Henn in an email. Oil, coal, and gas companies, Henn continues, “have consistently misled the public about the dangers associated with their product, and this time it’s the whole planet that’s at stake. You can’t be serious about addressing climate change and still accept checks from ExxonMobil.”

Fossil fuel companies, of course, exercise quite a bit of influence over politics through their ability to lob money into campaigns. Though coal companies’ profits have been suffering, oil companies are going strong, and both still put a lot of money into politics. The oil and gas industry poured $76 million into federal campaigns in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Of the amount that was donated to individual candidates’ campaigns, 89 percent went to Republicans and 11 percent to Democrats. The coal mining industry gave another $15 million in 2012, and most of the candidates it supported were Republicans too.

So The Nation’s editors issued a challenge to candidates in an editorial yesterday:

To break the carbon barons’ grip over America’s response to this crisis, The Nation calls upon all 2016 presidential and congressional candidates to make and honor the following pledge: In the name of protecting our country and the world from the growing dangers of climate change, I will neither solicit nor accept campaign contributions from any oil, gas, or coal company.

It’s an interesting experiment, and how candidates choose to respond to it says a lot about their priorities. “Some candidates for president are already signing up,” writes Henn, “and we expect more to do so as campaigns like divestment continue to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry.”

Democrat Bernie Sanders and the Green Party’s Jill Stein have said they’re in — they’ll take the pledge. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and former Rhode Island governor and U.S. senator Lincoln Chafee — also both running as Democrats — “said they supported strong climate action but would not sign the pledge,” write the magazine’s editors in the editorial. [UPDATE, 7/7/15: O’Malley now tells The Nation that he will take the pledge.] Nation Executive Editor Richard Kim told Grist that they’re reaching out to Jim Webb, former senator from Virginia, who jumped into the race as a Democrat last week.

On the other side, not one of the 14 Republican candidates The Nation contacted has responded to the challenge. All but one of the Republicans deny that human-made climate change is a real threat that should be taken seriously by our next president. The one outlier, Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), has said he’s in favor of addressing “climate change [and] CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way,” but he’s a long-shot candidate. And, well, it honestly doesn’t seem too likely that Republicans, whose party has embraced the “money is speech”-type decisions from the Supreme Court that paved the way for the current explosion in campaign spending, would say no on principle to money from a big industry — especially when the donor industry in question so clearly favors Republicans over their Democratic opponents.

That puts the pressure from The Nation and 350 Action’s challenge on Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, who has yet to respond to the challenge, has acknowledged that climate change is a potent threat. Were she to win, she’d be following another Democratic president who, at least on the demand side of things, has pushed to green America’s energy economy, and who has worked internationally to encourage other large polluting countries to do the same. Climate change is an issue she’ll have to engage with continually through the election cycle, and oil and coal companies’ objectives are, presumably, at odds with those of a candidate who has called for “decisive” action to “head off the most catastrophic consequences” of climate change.

So will Clinton heed this latest effort to push her to the left? Her campaign has started to see Sanders as a real threat, and it’s attempting to emulate his campaign by courting small donors. Choosing to turn down money from companies with a vested interest in stopping climate action is one easy way Clinton could show her commitment to the liberal base.

The Nation and 350 Action plan to keep up the pressure, on Clinton and the other candidates who haven’t pledged yet. “After all, candidates can change their minds,” the Nation editors write, “especially when enough public pressure is brought to bear.”

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Will Hillary Clinton swear off fossil-fuel money? Bernie Sanders already has

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Obama Just Came Out Hard Against the Washington Football Team’s Racist Name

by Leon51tt8 Posted on July 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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In an irony that will surely be lost on team owner Dan Snyder, the Washington Redskins are being kicked off their land.

From the Washington Post:

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser this spring that the National Park Service, which owns the land beneath Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, was unlikely to accommodate construction of a new stadium for the Redskins unless the team changes its name.

Jewell oversees both national park land and America’s trust and treaty relationships with Native American tribes.

Her decision not to extend the District’s lease of the RFK land badly hinders Bowser’s bid to return the Redskins to D.C.—and boosts efforts to lure the team across the Potomac to Northern Virginia.

Jewell, who has been an outspoken critic of the team’s controversial name, added that adjusting the federal lease on the property, which doesn’t expire for another 22 years, is “not likely to be a priority for the administration.” The team’s owner Dan Snyder, who has vowed to never change the team’s name, has long been interested in building a new stadium in the DC area.

There’s actually a great precedent for this. As we explained in 2013,

The showdown began in 1961, when John F. Kennedy’s interior secretary, Stewart Udall, who’d committed to ending segregation anywhere in his sphere of influence, declared his intent to break pro football’s last color bar…The call for integration was met with opposition, most notably from the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, a laundromat magnate turned NFL bigwig who had held firm for years. Udall had one advantage over Marshall: The team’s new home field, DC Stadium (later renamed RFK Memorial), was federal property. With Kennedy’s approval, Udall gave Marshall a choice: He could let black players on his team, or take his all-white squad to someone else’s gridiron.”

Don’t worry, Washington fans: There’s always Virginia (or stay in Maryland).

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Obama Just Came Out Hard Against the Washington Football Team’s Racist Name

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Could This Bill Prevent Another "Gamergate"?

by BobbyeHeinz Posted on June 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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The United States government has a pretty poor track record when it comes to tackling violent online threats: Between 2010 and 2013, federal prosecutors pursued only 10 of some 2.5 million estimated cases of cyber-stalking, according to Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.). With new legislation introduced on Wednesday, Clark aims to step up the fight against trolls and protect victims of internet threats, particularly women. The Prioritizing Online Threats Enforcement Act would beef up the Department of Justice’s capacity to enforce laws against online harassment and fund more investigations of cyber-crimes.

As my colleague Tim Murphy has reported, Clark first started looking for ways to curb internet harassment after learning that her district was home to Brianna Wu, a video game developer targeted with a flood of rape and death threats from “Gamergate” trolls. Since September, Wu has reportedly received 105 death threats after tweeting her opposition to Gamergate, an online movement that led to the harassment of women involved with video gaming. “All I am asking is for law enforcement to go and get a case together and prosecute,” Wu told Wicked Local. “Because law enforcement has basically treated online threats as if they don’t matter, they have unintentionally created this climate.”

“It’s not okay to tell women to change their behavior, withhold their opinions, and stay off the internet altogether, just to avoid severe threats,” Clark told members of Congress on Wednesday. “By not taking these cases seriously, we send a clear message that when women express opinions online, they are asking for it.”

Women are significantly more likely to face internet bullying than men. In one study by researchers from the University of Maryland, fake online accounts with feminine usernames faced 27 times more sexually explicit or threatening messages in a chat room than accounts with masculine usernames did. Over the past several months, women across the country, from actress Ashley Judd to feminist commentator Anita Sarkeesian, have raised the alarm about this type of abuse.

The federal government has the authority to prosecute individuals who send violent threats over the internet thanks to the Violence Against Women Act. But just one day before Clark’s appeal to Congress, the Supreme Court on Monday may have made it more difficult for prosecutors to go after trolls. In a 7-2 decision, the justices reversed the earlier conviction of a man in Pennsylvania who had used intensely violent language against his estranged wife, including saying he wanted to see her “head on a stick,” despite the fact that she testified that his postings made her feel “extremely afraid for her life.”

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Could This Bill Prevent Another "Gamergate"?

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Bee Die-Offs Are Worst Where Pesticide Use Is Heaviest

by BreannaRoemer Posted on May 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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The nation’s honeybee crisis has deepened, with colony die-offs rising sharply over last year’s levels, the latest survey from the US Department of Agriculture-funded Bee Informed Partnership shows. A decade or so ago, a mysterious winter-season phenomenon known as colony-collapse disorder emerged, in which bee populations would abandon their hives en masse. These heavy winter-season losses have tapered off somewhat, but now researchers are finding substantial summer-season losses, too. Here are the latest numbers.

Chart: Bee Informed Partnership/University of Maryland/Loretta Kuo

Note that total losses are more than double what beekeepers report as the “acceptable rate”—that is, the normal level of hive attrition. Losses above the acceptable level put beekeepers in a precarious economic position and suggest that something is awry with bee health. “We traditionally thought of winter losses as a more important indicator of health, because surviving the cold winter months is a crucial test for any bee colony,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, University of Maryland entomologist and director for the Bee Informed Partnership said in a press release. But now his team is also seeing massive summer die-offs. “Years ago, this was unheard of,” he added.

And here’s a map a map depicting where losses are heaviest:

Chart: Bee Informed Partnership/University of Maryland/Loretta Kuo

The survey report doesn’t delve into why the nation’s bees are under such severe strain, noting only, as USDA entomologist and survey co-coordinator Jeffrey Pettis put it, “the need to find better answers to the host of stresses that lead to both winter and summer colony losses.”

A growing weight of science implicated pesticides—particularly a ubiquitous class of insecticides called neonicitinoids, as well as certain fungicides—as likely factors.

Here are US Geological Survey maps of where two major neonics, imidacloprid and clothianidin, are grown. Note, too, the rapid rise in their use over the past decade.

Chart: USGS

Chart: USGS

A 2013 paper co-authored by the USDA’s Pettis and the University of Maryland’s vanEngelsdorp found that lows levels of two particular fungicides, chlorothalonil and pyraclostrobin, “had a pronounced effect” on bees’ ability to withstand a common pathogen. Here are the USGS’s maps for them.

Chart: USGS

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Bee Die-Offs Are Worst Where Pesticide Use Is Heaviest

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