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Donald Trump Denies "Masquerading" as His Own Spokesman

by LakeishLeHunte Posted on May 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is shooting down a report by the Washington Post that claims the real estate magnate and presidential hopeful used to call members of the press pretending to be his own spokesman. According to the Post, he used the pseudonyms John Miller and John Barron—two names Trump admitted under oath in 1990 to using “on occasion.”

Speaking on the Today Show on Friday, Trump dismissed the allegations as a “scam,” saying the voice captured in the phone call recording did not resemble his own.

“You’re telling me about it for the first time, and it doesn’t sound like my voice at all,” Trump said. “I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice, you can imagine that. This sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams.”

Earlier on Friday, the Post published audio from a 1991 phone call reportedly recorded by People magazine reporter Sue Carswell. In the audio, Carswell can be heard talking to a man who introduced himself as John Miller but sounds very much like Trump. The report goes on to cite other journalists who recalled a John Miller or John Barron contacting them, sometimes as far back as the 1970s, through similar guises to promote Trump with flattering stories.

To hear the recording in its entirety, head to the Washington Post.

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Donald Trump Denies "Masquerading" as His Own Spokesman

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The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket

by DanelleDHTV Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Pity Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Belgian-owned behemoth responsible for such beloved US beers as Budweiser, Bud Light, and Michelob Ultra. When InBev bought US beer giant Anheuser-Busch back in 2008, the company accounted for 49 percent of the US beer market, the Wall Street Journal reported. Since then, its US market share has dipped to 45 percent. Since 2005, sales of its big domestic brands like Bud have dropped 5.7 percent, even as craft-beer sales have rocketed up 173.6 percent. What’s a transnational, industrial-scale maker of flavor-light, marketing-heavy brews to do?

The answer, according to the Journal: use its still-formidable US market heft to squeeze out those fast-growing craft-beer makers. Understanding AB InBev’s maneuver requires a bit of background. After Prohibition, the US government sought to limit the market power of brewers by imposing a three-tiered system on the industry. One set of firms would brew beer; another set would distribute it; and a third would retail it, either in bars or carryout stores. Much of that old regime has broken down—in many states, for example, small brewers can sell directly to the public through brewpubs. But in most states, distributors—the companies that move beer from breweries and stock retail outlets’ shelves and bars’ taps and bottle offerings—can’t be owned directly by brewers. â&#128;¨

To get around that restriction, megabrewers have for decades sought more or less exclusive agreements with nominally independent distributors. Today, the US beer market is dominated by AB InBev and rival MillerCoors, which together own about 80 percent of the market. Independent craft brewers account for 11 percent of the US market—and that’s growing rapidly, even though crafts tend to retail for $8 to $10 per six-pack, versus about $6 for conventional beers. Most distributors sell either InBev or MillerCoors brands as their bread and butter, the Journal reports, plus a smattering of independent craft brews. That’s why in supermarket beer coolers these days you’ll typically find a few national craft brews like Sierra Nevada, along with maybe a few local favorites, after you walk past towering stacks of Bud and Miller six-packs.

So AB InBev has launched a “new plan to reverse declining volumes” in the United States by offering sweet incentives for company-aligned distributors to restrict sales of craft beers and push more Bud Light and whatnot. Get this, from the Journal:â&#128;¨

The world’s largest brewer last month introduced a new incentive program that could offer some independent distributors in the U.S. annual reimbursements of as much as $1.5 million if 98% of the beers they sell are AB InBev brands, according to two distributors who requested confidentiality because they were asked not to discuss the plan. Distributors whose sales volumes are 95% made up of AB InBev brands would be eligible to have the brewer cover as much as half of their contractual marketing support for those brands, which includes retail promotion and display costs. AB InBev, which introduced the plan at a meeting of distributors in St. Louis, estimates participating distributors would receive an average annual benefit of $200,000 each.â&#128;¨

The beer giant plans to devote big bucks to the scheme—about $150 million next year, as part of a “three-year plan to restore growth in AB InBev’s most profitable market,” the United States, the Journal reports. â&#128;¨

And beyond pushing up the percentage of AB InBev products in the mix, the incentive plans place another restriction on the distributors who choose to take advantage of the offers: They can only carry craft brewers that produce less than 15,000 barrels or sell beer only in one state.â&#128;¨ Such a provision would put a hard squeeze on excellent, relatively large craft brewers like San Diego’s Stone, Northern California’s Sierra Nevada, and Colorado’s Oskar Blues. InBev’s new program is already having an impact, the Journal reports.

At least one distributor has dropped a craft brewer as a result of the incentive program. Deschutes Brewery President Michael Lalonde said Grey Eagle Distributing of St. Louis last week decided it will drop the Oregon brewery behind Mirror Pond Pale Ale because it “had to make a choice to go with the incentive program or stay with craft.”

All of this raises the question: Under US antitrust law, can a giant company legally throw around its weight like that? The answer may well be yes. Ricardo Melo, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of sales strategy and wholesaler development, stressed to the Journal that the incentive program is voluntary—that is, distributors are free to decline the extra support and continue stocking as many craft brands as they want. But apparently, the company doesn’t think many distributors will turn down such a sweet deal. Currently, the Journal reports, just 38 percent of AB InBev-aligned distributors participate in the company’s incentive programs. The company “aims to double participation in three years behind the new rewards plan,” the article adds.

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The King of Beers Wants to Push Craft Brews out of Your Supermarket

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How Climate Change Shrank These Bees’ Tongues

by PhilWessel Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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The story was originally published by the Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you think about iconic symbols of climate change, you’ll probably picture a polar bear, emaciated, and clinging to a precariously small chunk of ice. You’re probably not thinking of a bumblebee, flitting about an alpine meadow with a shorter-than-average tongue. And yet, according to new research from Nicole Miller-Struttmann from SUNY College at Old Westbury, these shrinking tongues speak volumes about how nature’s most intimate partnerships might change in a warming world.

In the central Rockies, there are many species of bumblebee, and some have unusually long tongues for their body size. These are adaptations to the deep tubes of certain flowers like Parry’s clover and alpine skypilot, allowing the bees to lap at nectar that smaller-tongued species can’t reach. The tubes, in turn, are adaptations to the long bee tongues, providing exclusive access to nectar in exchange for exclusive pollination services. Both partners are locked in a co-evolutionary dance, held together by beautifully fitting tongues and tubes.

Recently, all has not been right with this dance. Miller-Struttmann’s colleagues, who have been studying the local bees and flowers for decades, started to notice weird changes. Long-tongued bees, which have been declining in many parts of the world, had become relatively rarer in the Rockies too. Meanwhile, foreign species from further down the mountainsides were encroaching on their terrain.

To work out what was going on, the team measured the tongues of the two most common bumblebee species, caught at three Colorado mountains in recent years. They then compared these lengths to those of specimens collected from the same mountains between 1966 and 1980.

These archived bees (has-bee-ns?) revealed that the tongues of these species have become 0.61 percent shorter every year, and are now just three-quarters of their former glory. “We were really surprised at the strength of the result,” says Miller-Struttmann. “We obviously asked the question but we weren’t expecting such a large response, especially over just 40 to 50 years.”

Why have the long-tongued bees evolved into long-ish-tongued bees? The team ruled out several possibilities. The bees weren’t becoming smaller overall, at least not to a degree that explained their shrinking tongues. Shorter-tubed plants hadn’t taken over the mountainsides; herbarium collections revealed that they are no more common now than they were in the 1960s. And immigrant bees from elsewhere in the mountains weren’t ousting the locals from their usual long-tubed flowers.

The best remaining explanation is that the changing climate of the Rockies has shifted the balance of flowers that the bees depend upon. Jennifer Geib from Appalachian State University, who was involved in the study, says, “Our field sites are part of what ecologists describe as high-altitude desert.” That is: they’re really dry. And they’ve become drier in the last 60 year, as summers have become 2 degrees Celsius warmer.

Water evaporated more quickly from the soil. Winter snowfalls started thawing out earlier, depriving plants of precious meltwater during the growing season. Many wildflowers that were already eking out a living on the brink of drought were pushed over the edge. On Pennsylvania Mountain alone, the team calculated that “millions of flowers were lost.” As such, today’s bees face about 60 percent less food than their predecessors from the 1970s.

The long-tubed flowers weren’t especially affected, but there were fewer of them—and not enough for long-tongued specialists to subsist on. So the long-tongued bees were forced to broaden their diets, drinking nectar from flowers of every length. Since they were now competing for resources that many other species could plunder, their long tongues no longer conferred any special advantages. So evolution, ever-thrifty and economical, selected for individuals with shorter tongues.

“That’s a really neat discovery,” says Jeremy Kerr from the University of Ottawa, who also studies pollinators. “I haven’t seen other research that suggests we’re likely to see rapid evolution in bumblebee traits because of climate change.” Kerr’s own research shows that North American and European bumblebees are being crushed out of their normal ranges by warming climates, seemingly unable to expand into more suitable pastures.

Miller-Struttmann’s study suggests that bees might be able to persist within these contracting habitats by changing their foraging habits and evolving accordingly. How they fare in the long-term is anyone’s guess. Certainly, the widespread decline of long-tongued bees, and bumblebees more generally, is a poor portent.

This isn’t the only mutualism at risk in a warming world. In warmer oceans, corals eject the algae that they depend on for photosynthesis, depriving them of both the energy they need to construct their mighty reefs, and the source of their color. Starving and alone, they become weak and ghostly versions of themselves.

Meanwhile, carpenter ants, a hugely successful group with around 1,000 species, depend on bacteria inside their cells to supplement their diets with important nutrients. These microbes are also sensitive to temperature, and it’s possible that a warmer world would crush these ants—and the many other insects that depend on supplementary microbes—into ever narrower niches.

And what of the long-tubed flowers, now decoupled from their partners in pollination? “Alpine plants are very long-lived, so any effects of reduced pollination efficiency from the recent past would likely not be seen in their populations for some time,” says Geib. “But if climate-change models are accurate, these plants are likely to face a multitude of synergistic pressures in the future, including drought, and increased competition as the ranges of lowland species shift upward. The combination of these pressures, coupled with decreased pollination, could forecast a troubled future.”

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How Climate Change Shrank These Bees’ Tongues

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Why You Should Be Skeptical About the New Police Narrative on Freddie Gray’s Death

by JoeannTobias Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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On a relatively quiet night in Baltimore, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell. According to a sealed court document, a witness alleged that Freddie Gray—whose April death has triggered days of protests in the city—may have been deliberately attempting to injure himself while in police custody:

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety.

It’s easy to see how a sealed document like that, drafted by a police investigator, might have leaked to the press in spite of the court order, and in spite of the police department’s general aura of secrecy. If Gray’s injuries were self-inflicted, the police department is off the hook.

But as WBAL’s Jayne Miller noted, the new exculpatory allegation appears to be at odds with the police department’s earlier narrative, as well as the timeline of events:

And there’s another reason to be skeptical. Information that comes out of jails is notoriously unreliable, for the simple reason that anyone in jail has a real incentive to get out; cooperating with the people who determine when they get out is an obvious way to score points. This report from the Pew Charitable Trust walks through the conflicts in detail. According to the Innocence Project, 15 percent of wrongful convictions that are eventually overturned by DNA testing originally rested on information from a jailhouse informant. Two years ago in California, for instance, a federal court overturned the conviction of an alleged serial killer known as the “Skid Row Stabber” because the conviction rested on information from an inmate dismissed as a “habitual liar.”

Or maybe the witness in Baltimore is right—that happens too!—and what we thought we knew about the Freddie Gray case was wrong. But the department isn’t doing much to quiet the skeptics. It announced Wednesday that it will not make public the full results of its investigation into Gray’s death, “because if there is a decision to charge in any event by the state’s attorney’s office, the integrity of that investigation has to be protected.”

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Why You Should Be Skeptical About the New Police Narrative on Freddie Gray’s Death

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My Travels on the Clinton Conspiracy Trail

by AlphonsDarr Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Illustration by John S. Dykes

I met Larry Nichols, the self-described smut king of Arkansas, at a breakfast joint in Conway, not far from the spot where he claims Bill Clinton loyalists once fired on him and a reporter for London’s Sunday Telegraph. “You have to understand,” he said, looking up from his coffee, “you’re in Redneck City.” Nichols had declared war on the Clintons in 1988, when Bill was governor, after being canned from his job at a state agency for placing dozens of long-distance phone calls on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras. As he hunched over the table in four layers of winter clothing, Nichols indulged in the caginess that had once seduced a small army of conservative journalists seeking dirt on the Clintons—the lurching, twangy, conspiratorial tones of someone with a secret he wasn’t sure how to spill. For a moment, I felt as if I’d taken the wrong exit off I-40 and ended up in 1995.

But Nichols, who did as much as anyone in Arkansas to an image of the 42nd president as a womanizing, cocaine-snorting, dirty-dealing, drug-running mafioso, was ready to move on. “There is nothing you’re gonna find here,” he told me. “Pack your shit and go home. Good God, man—that was 20 years ago.”

With Hillary Clinton the odds-on favorite in next year’s Democratic presidential primary, all that was past is suddenly new again. The reinvestigation of the Clintons was already well underway by January, when Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus boasted to Bloomberg that he had dispatched a team of operatives to Little Rock to investigate the former first lady and secretary of state. “We’re not going to be shy about what we are doing,” he said. “We’re going to be active. We’re going to get whatever we have to in order to share with the American people the truth about Hillary and Bill Clinton.” Last year, America Rising, an opposition research firm/political action group that works with Republican candidates, placed a full-time researcher in Little Rock, where she pored over newly declassified documents at the Clinton Presidential Library.

But 20 years after the so-called Arkansas Project, the multimillion-dollar campaign financed by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife that turned Whitewater and Troopergate into household names, opposition researchers face a conundrum: Considering that the first expedition for dirt on the Clintons culminated in impeachment proceedings, are there any stones left unturned in Little Rock?

Few pieces of political turf have been excavated as thoroughly as Arkansas was in the 1990s, when conservatives scoured the Ozarks for evidence of everything from plastic surgery (to fix Bill’s supposedly cocaine-ravaged nose) to murder (a list of suspicious deaths, promoted by Nichols, became known as “Arkancides”) and, of course, womanizing. In the state capital, the return of the oppo researchers has been met with a sigh. “Bill and Hillary left here in December of 1992 and never came back,” said Max Brantley, a longtime political columnist at the Arkansas Times. “Kenneth Starr ran everything through that grand jury. There may be something, but I can’t imagine what.” Rex Nelson, a former aide to Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee, told me there was nothing left to unearth about the Clintons, “unless there’s ancient relics buried in the dirt under the Rose Law Firm,” where Hillary was once a partner.

In their quest for fresh muck, the diggers have fixated on a new chamber of secrets: archives. With a 40-year record to pore over, oppo researchers and journalists have been gifted an almost unprecedented trove of papers from former Clinton associates, and tens of millions of pages from the couple’s years in Arkansas and Washington, DC, some of which have only recently been made public. “Every chief of staff, every top official for any Clinton office dating back 40 years has donated their papers to a university,” said Tim Miller, a cofounder of America Rising. “We’ve gone to other libraries where staffers from the Clinton White House, or Clinton governor’s office, have donated papers, or authors have written profiles on the Clintons.” (Shortly after I spoke with him, Miller took a job with Jeb Bush’s campaign. Throw in material related to Bush, a former governor and kin to two presidents, and next November’s race might feature the longest collective paper trail in history.)

Last year, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet that wears its animus toward the Clintons as a badge of honor, hired an oppo researcher to help dig through special collections at the University of Arkansas in Fayette­ville. It came away with a series of journal excerpts from longtime Hillary confidante Diane Blair in which the first lady was quoted as calling Monica Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon.” The story made national news. “When those stories hit, we got busy for a week or so,” said Geoffrey Stark, the reading room supervisor at the university library’s special collections. The quiet basement room, with its oil paintings of homegrown artists and politicians looking on in judgment, filled up with reporters hungry for whatever scraps were left behind.

The Republican intelligence gathering has also spawned Democratic counterintelligence operations. Leaving nothing to chance, Correct the Record, a pro-Hillary group fronted by David Brock, the former right-wing journalist turned Clinton loyalist, dispatched a staffer to Fayetteville to scan the archives. Twenty-one years after he had blown open Troopergate, the bombshell that purported to detail how Bubba’s security detail facilitated his sexual liaisons, Brock was returning to Arkansas to put the genie back in the bottle. Correct the Record spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod confirmed that the group has been visiting the archives, but said, “We aren’t getting into the specifics of tactics or strategies.”

Yet even the field marshals of the new invasion recognize that the Clintons have moved on to bigger things. Miller expects the Arkansas cache to be used more as supporting evidence rather than the main indictment. The Whitewater scandal of 2016 won’t be set in Arkansas; given Republicans’ fixation on the family’s international nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, it might not even be in the United States. “For me, the big difference between 2016 and 2008, from a research standpoint, is that their network of influence has grown exponentially,” Miller explained. “When you’re talking about crony capitalism and special deals in the ’90s, a lot of times the beneficiaries are, like, Arkansas lawyers. Now their influences are the global elites.” And what’s not in the Clintons’ archives may turn out to be just as damaging, as Hillary found out in March, when it was revealed that she had skirted public recordkeeping requirements by conducting all of her State Department business with a private email address.

The Arkansas the Clintons left behind isn’t just old news—it hardly exists anymore. One morning in February, using the Whitewater report as my Lonely Planet guide, I spent a few hours walking through a Little Rock neighborhood known as SoMa, searching for remnants of the real estate deals that compelled special investigator Kenneth Starr to set up shop in town. In testimony, the area was described as “a slum district,” but it has since flowered into a yuppie paradise. I got a blank stare when I mentioned Whitewater at the farm-to-table cafe across the street from the former headquarters of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, the bank wrapped up in the Clintons’ scheme to turn a patch of land on the White River in the Ozarks into a summer resort. The young employee behind the counter seemed to think I was asking about whitewater rafting.

Now, in a salute to history, a subpoena-serving firm occupies the office that the state government once leased from the Clintons’ Whitewater banker pal. Next door at the Esse Purse Museum, I’d missed a special exhibit called “Handbags for Hillary,” a joint installation with the Clinton Library of pocketbooks given to the first lady (including one made out of socks, in honor of the family cat). The closest I came to scandal was at the Green Corner Store, purveyors of artisanal ice cream that, I was told, is whipped up in the very building “where Bill met Jessica Flowers.” (Bill’s alleged paramour was in fact named Gennifer.) The soda jerk who poured my small-batch lavenderade hinted that Hillary faces a more immediate challenge from another woman: She’s torn between Clinton and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

If the conspiracy-slinging Clinton antagonists are a bit quieter this time around, that’s also because—cue the ominous voice-over and shaky-cam footage—many of the loudest ones are now dead. John Brown, a sheriff’s deputy who alleged that the Clintons had murdered several Arkansans over a cocaine-trafficking operation, died in prison. Jim Johnson, the segregationist former Arkansas Supreme Court justice who lent a semblance of gravitas to the 1994 conspiracy flick The Clinton Chronicles, committed suicide five years ago. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, who sold 60,000 copies of the film, died in 2007. Parker Dozhier, the trapper and bait shop owner whom Scaife paid to find dirt on the Clintons, is, like his benefactor, dead.

Others have gotten out of the game. David Brock broke bad. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Sunday Telegraph scribe who reported in a gossip- and conspiracy-laden book that Bill liked to dance around in a black dress after doing cocaine with his brother, went back to Europe. “I think Hillary was a good secretary of state,” he said in an email, although he stands by his earlier work. (He doesn’t recall being shot at with Nichols.) When I reached Larry Patterson, the retired state policeman whose grudge against Bill over a forgotten transfer compelled him to talk to Brock for the Troopergate story, he was curt. “Sir, the Clintons have taught me a lesson,” he said. And then he hung up.

Of the original band of Clinton hunters, only Nichols kept up the ruse, doing interviews with fringe right-wing radio hosts, even boasting in 2013 that he had been Bill’s personal hit man, which he now says he didn’t mean and wouldn’t have said if he hadn’t been on painkillers.

But something strange has come over him. After six years of watching Barack Hussein Obama cower in the face of Islamists, Nichols believes the family he spent two decades tarring as cold-blooded crooks might just be the only people who can save the country. “I’m not saying I like Hillary, you hear me?” he said, defensively. “I am not saying I like Hillary Rodham Clinton. I’m not saying anything I’ve said I take back. But God help me, I’m going to have to stand up and tell conservative patriots we have no choice but to give Hillary her shot.”

“I know she won’t flinch,” he continued. “That’s a mean sonofabitch woman that can be laying over four people and say”—he paraphrased her now-infamous response to hostile congressional questioning on the deaths of four Americans in Libya—”‘What the hell difference did it make?'” He was against Clinton because of Whitewater. Now he’s voting for her because of Benghazi.

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My Travels on the Clinton Conspiracy Trail

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16 Charts That Show the Shocking Cost of Gun Violence in America

by DanielleGUA Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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By Julia Lurie and Jaeah Lee | Wed Apr. 15, 2015 06:00 AM ET

chapters

what does gun violence cost?
by the numbers
the survivors

The data below is the result of a joint investigation by Mother Jones and Ted Miller, an economist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. Based on Miller’s work identifying and quantifying the societal impacts of gun violence, the annual price tag comes to at least $229 billion a year (based on 2012 data). That includes $8.6 billion in direct spending—from emergency care and other medical expenses to court and prison costs—as well as $221 billion in less tangible “indirect” costs, which include impacts on productivity and quality of life for victims and their communities. (See the rest of our special investigation here.)

See more of our special investigation:

What does gun violence really cost?

8 survivors tell their stories

Watch: The cost of gun violence, in 90 seconds

More about our methodology and data

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16 Charts That Show the Shocking Cost of Gun Violence in America

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Even Life Insurance Actuaries Are Coming Around on Pot

by MaynardMcnutt Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A copy of Contingencies—the official magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries—came in the mail on Monday. I don’t know why—I’m not an actuary; I’m not even in a celebrity death pool. But there’s some interesting stuff in there. AAA president Mary D. Miller, in a column titled “It Takes an Actuary,” boasts that “our world will be more vital than ever” in the era of drones and Big Data, as people find more and more innovative ways to die; the puzzle columnist is retiring.

But I was mostly struck by the cover story:

Contingencies! Tim Murphy

Weed!

With the legalization movement racking up victory after victory, the writer, Hank George, seeks to correct a misunderstanding among his actuarial colleagues—that marijuana “conferred the same relative mortality risk as cigarette smoking.” To the contrary, he writes, “recreational marijuana users enjoy better physical fitness and get more exercise than nonusers” and “have even been shown to have higher IQs.” He concludes: “The tide is turning—life underwriters would be wise to be at the front end of this curve, and not stubbornly digging in their heels to the detriment of their products.”

For now, at least, life insurers are still holding the line on pot smoke as a vice on par with cigarettes. But it’s a testament to how far the legalization movement has grown beyond its hippie roots that even the actuaries are starting to fall in line.

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Even Life Insurance Actuaries Are Coming Around on Pot

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The Last Picture Show

by DMPKellevsd Posted on August 23, 2014

Mother Jones

At their peak in 1958, America’s 5,000 or so drive-in movie theaters offered a car-crazed society a way to enjoy the latest Hollywood fare in the comfort and intimacy of the front seat. But with the move to air-conditioned digital cineplexes, drive-ins have been left in the dust. About 350 remain, like this one in Connecticut captured by Greg Miller, who’s documented auto-bound theatergoers from Maine to California. “I photograph in the time before the movies begin,” he says. “By the time the projector’s silver light illuminates the night sky, my job is done.”

Waiting for Furry Vengance, 2010

Waiting for Toy Story, 2010

Waiting for Crazy, Stupid, Love, 2011

Waiting for Iron Man, 2010

Waiting for Iron Man, 2010

Waiting for Eclipse, 2010

Waiting for Captain American, 2011

Waiting for Iron Man, 2010

Waiting for Iron Man, 2010

Waiting for Robin Hood, 2010

Link – 

The Last Picture Show

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Congress Might Actually Pass a Bill to Address VA Problems

by WillieKwan Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Since I’ve been griping for a long time about Congress being unable to pass so much as a Mother’s Day resolution these days, it’s only fair to highlight the possibility of actual progress on something:

House and Senate negotiators have reached a tentative agreement to deal with the long-term needs of the struggling Department of Veterans Affairs and plan to unveil their proposal Monday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), who lead the Senate and House Veterans’ Affairs committees, continued negotiating over the weekend. Aides said they “made significant progress” on legislation to overhaul the VA and provide funding to hire more doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals. Sanders and Miller are scheduled to discuss their plan Monday afternoon.

We don’t have all the details yet, and the bill hasn’t actually passed or anything. There’s still plenty of time for tea partiers to throw their usual tantrum. And there’s also plenty of time for the House GOP leadership to respond to the tantrum by crawling back into its cave and killing the whole thing. It’ll be President Obama’s fault, of course, probably for attending a fundraiser, or maybe for sneezing at the wrong time.

But maybe not! Maybe they really will pass this thing. It would provide vets with more flexibility to see doctors outside the VA system, which is a bit of a Band-Aid—but probably a necessary one—and it provides additional funding for regions that have seen a big influx of veterans. On the flip side, I don’t get the sense that the bill will really do much to fix the culture of the VA, which becomes a political cause célèbre every few years as we discover that all the same things we yelled about the time before are still true. But I guess that’s inevitable in a political culture with the attention span of a newt.

All things considered, it would be a good sign if this bill passed. The VA, after all, isn’t an inherently partisan issue. Just the opposite, since both parties support vets about equally and both should, in theory, be more interested in helping vets than in prolonging chaos for political reasons.

In other words, if there’s anything that’s amenable to a basically technocratic solution and bipartisan support, this is it. In a way, it’s a test of whether our political system is completely broken or just mostly broken. “Mostly” would be something of a relief.

Link:  

Congress Might Actually Pass a Bill to Address VA Problems

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These 204 Republicans Don’t Want to Punish Companies That Steal Workers’ Wages

by NonaSwaniixzu Posted on June 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, House Republicans voted to protect companies that steal workers’ wages.

According to the Department of Labor, many big firms that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal contracts—including Hewlett Packard, AT&T, and Lockheed Martin—have a history of wage theft. Wage theft refers to employer practices such as not paying overtime, paying employees with debit cards that charge usage fees, or requiring workers to arrive to work early to get ready without paying them for that extra time. On Thursday, House liberals introduced an amendment to a defense spending bill that would forbid the government from handing out contracts to companies that jack their employees’ pay. The amendment barely passed, with 25 Republicans voting with Democrats in favor of the measure. But most GOPers—204 of them—voted against the change. (The full list is below.)

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), a group of about 70 liberal Dems in the House, has introduced the same anti-wage-theft amendment to other spending bills in recent weeks, in the hope that it will make it into the final version of one of those spending bills and be signed by President Barack Obama.

In May, House Republicans voted down the anti-wage-theft amendment when it was attached to a spending bill that funds several government agencies. (Ten GOPers voted in favor.) That led to some bad press for GOPers—perhaps one reason why, when the CPC added the same provision to a defense spending bill Thursday, it passed, with 15 more Republicans crossing over to vote with Democrats.

Obama has cracked down on federal contractors in other ways this year. In February, the president signed an executive order mandating a minimum wage of $10.10 for federal contractor employees. In April, he signed another directive which forbids contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their pay with each other.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.)

Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.)

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas)

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.)

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.)

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.)

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas)

Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.)

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas)

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.)

Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio)

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.)

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas)

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.)

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.)

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.)

Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.)

Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.)

Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.)

Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.)

Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.)

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.)

Rep. Tom Latham (R-Iowa)

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas)

Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.)

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.)

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas)

Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas)

Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.)

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas)

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.)

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio)

Rep. Gary Miller (R-Calif.)

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho)

Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.)

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.)

Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.)

Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas)

Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.)

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.)

Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.)

Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.)

Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.)

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.)

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah)

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)

Rep. John Carter (R-Texas)

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.)

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.)

Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.)

Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.)

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.)

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas)

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.)

Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.)

Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.)

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)

Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.)

Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio)

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas)

Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.)

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas)

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.)

Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.)

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.)

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)

Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Texas)

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas)

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.)

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.)

Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas)

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.)

Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.)

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.)

Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.)

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)

Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.)

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.)

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)

Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.)

Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.)

Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio)

Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.)

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.)

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.)

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.)

Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.)

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah)

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.)

Rep. John C. Fleming (R-La.)

Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.)

Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.)

Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.)

Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.)

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.)

Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.)

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.)

Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas)

Rep. Erik Paulsen (R-Minn.)

Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.)

Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.)

Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.)

Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.)

Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.)

Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.)

Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.)

Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.)

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.)

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.)

Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.)

Rep. Dan Benishek (R-Mich.)

Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.)

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.)

Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-Ind.)

Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ariz.)

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.)

Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.)

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.)

Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.)

Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.)

Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas)

Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.)

Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.)

Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas)

Rep. Cory Gardner (Colo.)

Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio)

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.)

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.)

Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ariz.)

Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.)

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.)

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.)

Rep. Joe Heck (R-Nev.)

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.)

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.)

Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.)

Rep. Robert Hurt (R-Va.)

Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio)

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.)

Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho)

Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.)

Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.)

Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.)

Rep. Pat Meehan (R-Pa.)

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.)

Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.)

Rep. Rich Nugent (R-Fla.)

Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-Miss.)

Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.)

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.)

Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.)

Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.)

Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.)

Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.)

Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.)

Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.)

Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.)

Rep. Steve Southerland (R-Fla.)

Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio)

Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colo.)

Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.)

Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.)

Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.)

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.)

Rep. Todd Young (R-Ind.)

Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.)

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas)

Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.)

Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.)

Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.)

Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.)

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.)

Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.)

Rep. Paul Cook (R-Calif.)

Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)

Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.)

Rep. Steve Daines (R-Mon.)

Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.)

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.)

Rep. George Holding (R-N.C.)

Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.)

Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio)

Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.)

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.)

Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.)

Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.)

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.)

Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-N.C.)

Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.)

Rep. Keith Rothfus (R-Pa.)

Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah)

Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.)

Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.)

Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.)

Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas)

Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio)

Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas)

Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.)

Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.)

Rep. Vance McAllister (R-La.)

Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.)

Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.)

Source: 

These 204 Republicans Don’t Want to Punish Companies That Steal Workers’ Wages

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