Tag Archives: mother

Darrell Issa is Finally Going Off His Nut

by LynellLamothe Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Darrell Issa’s latest jihad is also one of his most peculiar: he’s accusing the EPA of working too closely with environmental groups. Seriously. That’s it. Here’s a report from the New York Times about the “cozy” relationship between EPA administrator Gina McCarthy and David Doniger, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council:

Republicans say the most vivid example of a cozy relationship is an email exchange … celebrating legal maneuvering that provided Mr. Obama with something both the E.P.A. and the environmental group wanted: a court-ordered deadline for release of a 2012 E.P.A. regulation curbing greenhouse gas emissions on future power plants — a precursor to Mr. Obama’s announcement in June. (The environmental group had joined with others to sue the E.P.A. to force the regulation, and the E.P.A. quickly settled.)

On Dec. 23, 2010, the day the settlement was announced, Mr. Doniger emailed Ms. McCarthy, “Thank you for today’s announcement. I know how hard you and your team are working to move us forward and keep us on the rails. This announcement is a major achievement.” He added, “We’ll be with you at every step in the year ahead.”

Ms. McCarthy responded, “Thanks David. I really appreciate your support and patience. Enjoy the holiday. The success is yours as much as mine.”

Reacting to the email exchange, Mr. Vitter said in a statement: “Who is working for whom? The key example in all of this is the settlement agreement on greenhouse gases when the N.R.D.C. sued the E.P.A., the E.P.A. settled, and the two celebrate the agreement. It doesn’t get any more blatantly obvious than that.”

Explosive! “Thanks David. I really appreciate your support and patience.” Truly a smoking gun of improper influence. They used first names and everything!

Issa must really be getting desperate. I mean, normally I understand the supposed malfeasance in his investigations. I may think his charges are foolish, but at least I get it. But this time? Even in theory, what’s supposed to be wrong here? An environmental group expressing pleasure at a court ruling? The EPA administrator sending back a polite note? Everybody knew all along that both sides wanted the same thing, so this is hardly a surprise. And certainly light years from scandalous.

Issa must be going off his nut because his investigations keep failing to excite anyone. Or maybe this is just designed to provide some fodder for fundraising emails for the upcoming election. It’s hard to figure out what else could be going on.

View original post here:  

Darrell Issa is Finally Going Off His Nut

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Darrell Issa is Finally Going Off His Nut

Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy, Part 2: Its Retirement Plan STILL Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

by JosetteSeely Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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

When Obamacare compelled Hobby Lobby to buy employee health insurance plans that covered emergency contraception, the Green family, who own the national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. So what happened when Mother Jones reported that Hobby Lobby contributed millions of dollars to employee retirement plans with stock in companies that make emergency contraception?

According to Hobby Lobby president Steve Green, nothing.

That revelation came on Friday, when MSNBC reporter Irin Carmon published parts of an interview with Green, whose Supreme Court case resulted in the partial dismantling of Obamacare’s contraception mandate.

Carmon asked Green for his response to the Mother Jones report, which noted that Hobby Lobby’s employee retirement plans had stock holdings in companies manufacturing the very drugs and devices at the center of the Supreme Court case: PlanB, Ella, and two types of intrauterine devices. Green doesn’t often speak to the press, so it was the first time he had publicly responded to this information since I first reported it in early April.

In the interview with Carmon, Green dismissed the idea that it mattered where his employee’s 401(k) plans had indirect investments, telling her it was “several steps removed.”

Of course, the Greens were also several steps removed from any emergency contraception Hobby Lobby’s female employees may or may not have obtained through the company’s insurance plan. And as I pointed out in April, divestment from certain companies does matter to many Christian business owners, who have fueled a cottage industry of mutual funds that screen for morally objectionable stocks.

But Green indicates he wasn’t troubled enough by Mother Jones‘ report to investigate for himself or make any changes to Hobby Lobby’s employee retirement plan:

Whether they do or not invest in these drugs and devices, I couldn’t confirm or deny it. I don’t know if it’s even true. Of course, the other question I would ask is, do those companies also provide a lot of life-saving products that our employees are dependent on? I don’t know that either. But we’ve not made any changes.

Carmon also confronted Green with the overwhelming scientific evidence that using emergency contraception does not cause abortions. The Greens’ contention that emergency contraception was a form of abortion was key to their argument that Obamacare violated their free exercise of religion. Read Carmon’s whole story here.

Original source:  

Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy, Part 2: Its Retirement Plan STILL Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hobby Lobby’s Hypocrisy, Part 2: Its Retirement Plan STILL Invests in Contraception Manufacturers

Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

by TawnyaSherwood Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Catblogging has become harder recently. There’s no shortage of cuteness, obviously, but getting good pictures of the cuteness is tricky. The problem is simple: 55-year-old human reflexes combined with cheap-camera shutter lag are simply no match for 10-month-old kitten reflexes. This produces lots of pictures like the one on the right. You’ll just have to take my word for it, but that’s Hopper carrying around one of her stuffed mice. I’ve muted all the chirping sounds from my camera, which reliably caused them to turn their heads just as the autofocus finally whirred to its proper setting, but even so I have hundreds of photos like this one.

Still, they slow down once in a while, so catblogging isn’t completely lost. On the left, Hopper is behind the drapes trying to chase down an errant bug. On the right, Hilbert is majestically surveying his space.

View original post here: 

Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 10 October 2014

Was Obama Naive?

by EstebanHarpster Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Paul Krugman has finally come around to a fair assessment of Barack Obama’s term in office: not perfect, by any means, and he probably could have accomplished more with better tactics and a better understanding of his opponents. Still and all, he accomplished a lot. By any reasonable standard, he’s been a pretty successful liberal president.

Ezra Klein says this is because he abandoned one of the key goals of his presidency:

From 2009 to 2010, Obama, while seeking the post-partisan presidency he wanted, established the brutally partisan presidency he got. Virtually every achievement Krugman recounts — the health-care law, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, the financial rescue, the stimulus bill — passed in these first two years when Democrats held huge majorities in congress. And every item on the list passed over screaming Republican opposition.

….Obama spent his first two years keeping many of his policy promises by sacrificing his central political promise. That wasn’t how it felt to the administration at the time. They thought that success would build momentum; that change would beget change. Obama talked of the “muscle memory” congress would rediscover as it passed big bills; he hoped that achievements would replenish his political capital rather than drain it.

In this, the Obama administration was wrong, and perhaps naive.

This is, to me, one of the most interesting questions about the Obama presidency: was he ever serious about building a bipartisan consensus? Did he really think he could pass liberal legislation with some level of Republican cooperation? Or was this little more than routine campaign trail bushwa?

To some extent, I think it was just the usual chicken-in-every-pot hyperbole of American presidential campaigns. American elites venerate bipartisanship, and it’s become pretty routine to assure everyone that once you’re in office you’ll change the toxic culture of Washington DC. Bush Jr. promised it. Clinton promised it. Bush Sr. promised it. Carter promised it. Even Nixon promised it.

(Reagan is the exception. Perhaps that’s why he’s still so revered by conservatives despite the fact that his actual conduct in office was considerably more pragmatic than his rhetoric.)

So when candidates say this, do they really believe it? Or does it belong in the same category as promises that you’ll restore American greatness and supercharge the economy for the middle class? In Obama’s case, it sure sounded like more than pro forma campaign blather. So maybe he really did believe it. Hell, maybe all the rest of them believed it too. The big difference this time around was the opposition. Every other president has gotten at least some level of cooperation from the opposition party. Maybe not much, but some. Obama got none. This was pretty unprecedented in recent history, and it’s hard to say that he should have been able to predict this back in 2008. He probably figured that he’d get at least a little bit of a honeymoon, especially given the disastrous state of the economy, but he didn’t. From Day 1 he got nothing except an adamantine wall of obstruction.

Clearly, then, Obama was wrong about the prospects for bipartisanship. But was he naive? I’d say he’s guilty of a bit of that, but the truth is that he really did end up facing a hornet’s nest of unprecedented proportions. This might have taken any new president by surprise.

See the original article here: 

Was Obama Naive?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Was Obama Naive?

There Are No Magic Wands in Iraq

by CharliCYLL Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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

The Syrian border town of Kobani is the latest shiny toy for the press to latch onto in the war against ISIS:

As warplanes from the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates pounded Islamic State fighters near the Syrian city of Kobani for a third day, the U.S.-led military campaign began running up against the limits of what air power can accomplish. “Airstrikes alone are not going to save the town of Kobani,” Rear Adm. John Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

….Despite an intensifying air campaign in Fallouja and other cities not far from Baghdad, an effort that in recent days has included use of U.S. attack helicopters, the Iraqi army has continued to lose ground to the militants, U.S. officials acknowledged.

We all know what’s coming next, don’t we? Two weeks ago, everyone — absolutely everyone — was unanimous in agreeing that (a) we needed to act now now now, and (b) we should never put boots on the ground in Iraq. But now that the obvious is happening, I think we can expect an extended round of breast beating and humanitarian keening about the well-known limitations of air campaigns; the horror of watching innocent Kobanis die; and the lamentable lack of planning and leadership from the White House.

Some of this will just be partisan opportunism, but most will be perfectly sincere protests from people with the memory span of a gnat. What they want is a magic wand: some way for Obama to inspire all our allies to want exactly what the United States wants and then to sweep ISIS aside without the loss of a single American life. Anything less is unacceptable.

But guess what? The Iraqi army is still incompetent. America’s allies still have their own agendas and don’t care about ours. Air campaigns still aren’t enough on their own to stop a concerted ground attack. This is the way things are. There are no magic wands. If you want quick results against ISIS, then speak up and tell us you want to send in 100,000 troops. If you’re not willing to do that, then you have to accept that lots of innocent people are going to die without the United States being able to offer much help. Make your choice now.

Continued – 

There Are No Magic Wands in Iraq

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There Are No Magic Wands in Iraq

McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

by MosesWatters Posted on October 8, 2014

McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

By

8 Oct 2014 12:41 PM

Share

Share

McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

×

Yesterday, the internet witnessed the launch of a new online media platform, Collectively.org, which wants to usher us into a brighter, greener, more sustainable future. Great! Me too! It is part of my job.

The primary force behind Collectively is Jonathon Porritt’s blue-sky-minded nonprofit Forum for the Future, and the content is “curated” by VICE Media’s advertorial arm, VIRTUE (red flag #1, perhaps.) But there’s one weird trick here (if you will): This particular venture is collaboratively — and very publicly — bankrolled by a whole slew of major corporations (McDonald’s! Coca-Cola! General Mills! Twitter!), many of which have played a significant role in building models of unsustainable industry.

The venture does make a valid point: Climate change mitigation is going to be essentially impossible without the cooperation of major corporations, and it’s naïve to think that they should be excluded from the process. But for the perpetual cynic (hi!), Collectively could be seen as a very glossy marketing tool for corporate greenwashing:

From time to time you’ll see stories of sustainable innovation from our partner organizations, but they are selected entirely on the merits of their newsworthiness and potential to create positive change. On Collectively, we’re as excited to talk about the work of a social entrepreneur in Kigali as we are to break the news about a global environmental initiative from Nike.

However, the primary problem with Collectively does not appear to be, at least in these nascent stages of its development, that it’s bankrolled by some of the largest corporations in the world. Rather, its content is both formulaic to the point of bizarreness and largely consumer-focused: A two-year-old video of a cardboard bicycle. A piece on sustainable condoms with a confoundingly cringe-worthy headline. A “news” article about why the climate march — which happened two weeks ago — was so successful. (One section has the heading, “Brands Took on a Bigger Role Than Ever.” Hmm.)

That said, I’m fully aware that Grist also frequently covers the minutiae of green decisions made in our day-to-day lives on an individual level. The difference, I would argue, is that the onus of climate change mitigation is not placed squarely on the consumer.

From the site’s introductory post:

In our articles, we will not only give readers a great story full of useful information, but also something they can do to begin creating the world they want to live in. No action is too small. Each one offers a different way of thinking and living from which we all can benefit.

Sustainability continues to be a term that has to be called out and acknowledged, a set of choices that are somehow differentiated from a “normal” lifestyle. But if we are to survive and our planet is to survive with us, a sustainable lifestyle must simply become our lifestyle. In our collective future that must be the new normal.

And on the topic of a systemic change starting at the individual level, I also found this unbelievably strange PR quote from an article in The Guardian announcing the site’s launch:

Keith Weed, the chief marketing officer and global head of sustainability at Unilever, which is the second largest advertiser in the world, says it is important to create a global movement of change.

“Maybe mother nature has invented a solution by creating the internet so that we can create movements at scale,” he told Guardian Sustainable Business.

Pardon? Is this real life? At what point did Mother Nature (She prefers Her name to be capitalized, Keith) create the internet? On which planet, exactly, can we find the Unilever marketing department?

There’s an argument to be made for the importance of personal lifestyle choices — if the demand for cleaner products isn’t there, then where’s the incentive to produce them? I get it. But I’m not delusional enough to think that the majority of my generation — the target audience for Collectively — is going to look at a video of urban beekeepers in Los Angeles (also, weirdly, two years old) and say, “SIGN ME UP FOR THE COMMUNITY APIARY THIS INSTANT! I WILL ONLY PRODUCE MY OWN HONEY FROM HERE ON OUT!” No. Most of us might, however, be more inclined to look for more sustainably produced honey at the grocery store — and guess which major brands will likely be right there to slap a label on a jar and sell it to us? Cynicism! I know.

To me, reading about how consumers should make more sustainable purchases on a site that is paid for by the exact businesses that are trying to reach those consumers raises the eyebrows at least a bit, despite insistent guarantees that the editorial and branding staff are kept entirely separate. Rather than what I can be doing differently to save the planet, I’m much more interested in what major corporations are doing to fix the emissions mess they started. I mean, I already belong to a community apiary.*

*A complete and utter lie. But hey, at least I’m being up-front with you.

Find this article interesting?
Donate now to support our work.Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

See original:  

McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

by JBWFlynnmh Posted on October 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Here’s a stunning chart for you. It comes from a paper by a team of Swedish researchers, and it shows the relationship between earnings and weight among men. As you can see, adult earnings reach a peak around a BMI of 23—smack in the middle of the normal range—and then steadily decline as you get more overweight. But here’s the kicker:

In particular, we contribute to the existing literature by showing that there is a large labor market weight-related penalty also for males, but only for those who were already overweight or obese in adolescence. We replicated this pattern using additional data sets from the United Kingdom and the United States, where the results were strikingly similar. The UK and U.S. estimates also confirm that the penalty is unique to those who were overweight or obese early in life.

The earnings penalty for overweight (and underweight!) men isn’t due to simple discrimination. Men who become overweight as adults face no special career penalty. It’s only a problem for men who become overweight as teenagers. The Economist summarizes the paper’s conclusions:

At first glance, a sceptic might be unconvinced by the results. After all, within countries the poorest people tend to be the fattest….But the authors get around this problem by mainly focusing on brothers….They also include important family characteristics like the parents’ income. All this statistical trickery allows the economists to isolate the effect of obesity on earnings.

So what does explain the “obesity penalty”? They reckon that discrimination in the labour market is not that important. Neither is health. Instead they emphasise what psychologists call “noncognitive factors”—motivation, popularity and the like. Having well-developed noncognitive factors is associated with success in the labour market. The authors argue that obese children pick up fewer noncognitive skills—they are less likely, say, to be members of sports teams or they may face discrimination from teachers.

In other words, social ostracism of both underweight and overweight teenagers produces lower cognitive skills and lower noncognitive (i.e., social) skills, and this in turn leads to lower earnings as adults. It may seem like harmless teenage clique behavior, but it has real consequences.

See more here:

Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: Overweight Teenagers Earn Less as Adults

Supreme Court To Decide if Judges in 30 States Can Solicit Campaign Cash

by KalaISJPiau Posted on October 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could overturn 30 states’ bans on judges personally seeking campaign contributions. In Lanell Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, a county-level judicial candidate was publicly reprimanded by the Florida Supreme Court in May and forced to pay $1,860 in court costs for signing a fundraising letter during the 2009 election, according to her petition. The court also rejected her argument that the decision violated her First Amendment rights, saying that the state’s ban is constitutional “because it promotes … the integrity of the judiciary and maintains the public’s confidence in an impartial judiciary.”

As Williams-Yulee notes, this issue is quite common in that there are hundreds of judicial elections each year. In 2011 and 2012 there were high court elections in 35 states that contested 75 open seats, along with an additional 243 intermediate appellate court races in 29 states. These races are becoming increasingly more expensive: During just those two years, state high court, appellate and lower court judicial candidates raised more than $110 million, according to the National Institute On Money In State Politics (state judicial candidates raised just $83 million total in the 1990s). Justice At Stake, a liberal judicial election watchdog group, points out that 20 states have surpassed records for judicial election spending since 2000. Independent spending on judicial elections is also booming, with more than $24 million being spent in the 2011-12 cycle compared to just $2.7 million a decade earlier.

Of the 39 states that hold judicial elections, 30 have some sort of ban, and 22 are blanket bans similar to Florida’s.

Retired US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor talked with Mother Jones this summer about problems with money pouring into judicial elections. O’Connor opposes judicial elections in general—she’d prefer judges be appointed after being nominated by a commission and then stand for retention elections—because she says increasing amounts of money in the races skews the information voters see about judges that “often comes from misleading and even nasty campaign ads.”

“Campaign contributions impact the extent to which citizens believe that judicial decisions are based on the law rather than other factors, such as to whom a judge might feel beholden,” O’Connor said. “In my mind, judicial campaign support—whether it involves direct contributions or independent spending—automatically creates an appearance of impropriety when supporters are involved in court cases.”

Credit:  

Supreme Court To Decide if Judges in 30 States Can Solicit Campaign Cash

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Supreme Court To Decide if Judges in 30 States Can Solicit Campaign Cash

Will This New Magazine Be California’s Answer to the “New Yorker”?

by ClintAponte Posted on October 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Back when editor Doug McGray was envisioning what he wanted his future magazine to look like, he thought about landing at the San Francisco airport. “If I fly to New York for work, when I come home and get off the plane, California looks different,” he says. “The quality of light is different.”

The first issue of California Sunday Magazine lands this Sunday, October 5; it’s a new publication that’s (gulp) in print and (gasp) not based in New York. McGray sees his brainchild as “palpably Californian,” written for a national audience but “inspired by the visual and entrepreneurial culture of the West.”

McGray has spent years working for several publications that define themselves by geography, or at least reference it in their titles: the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and This American Life. Since 2008, he’s been focused on a project so location-specific that if you’re not in the right room on the right night, there’s no way to see it: Pop-Up Magazine, an unrecorded live event whose “issues” consist of performances by authors, illustrators, filmmakers, and graphic designers. (My colleague Michael Mechanic wrote about Pop-Up in a December 2012 issue of Mother Jones).

After Pop-Up Magazine sold out San Francisco’s 2,700-seat symphony hall one night in 2012, McGray started thinking he could do more with the community the project had created. He loved the way it brought people together around stories. A magazine seemed like a logical next step.

He teamed up with Digg publisher Chas Edwards, and early this year the pair announced that they were starting Cal Sunday. Creative director Leo Jung, formerly of Wired and the New York Times Magazine, and photography director Jacqueline Bates, who was the senior photo editor of W Magazine, were early hires.

Why launch a new print publication on the opposite coast from the country’s magazine publishing hub? Being at the heart of so many American subcultures, from tech to entertainment, makes California inherently interesting, McGray says. “One of the reasons the media industry is overconcentrated on the East Coast is that it’s been overconcentrated on the East Coast,” he says. But now, he adds, “I don’t think you need to convince people on the East Coast that things happening in California are important.” California Sunday‘s reporters will range outside the Golden State, too, covering the West, Asia, and Latin America.

McGray expects that the “Sunday” part of Cal Sunday‘s title will also shape the magazine’s identity. Print issues will be delivered with Sunday editions of the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Sacramento Bee. Cal Sunday will also be available online, through apps for Android and iPhone, and by Kindle. By launching on multiple platforms at once, he hopes to avoid the “rough transition to digital” that some print publications have struggled with. Prospective readers curious about what’s in the first issue will have to get their hands on a copy—McGray isn’t telling. But he shared three adjectives he hopes it will evoke: “Smart, surprising, and beautiful.”

Taken from – 

Will This New Magazine Be California’s Answer to the “New Yorker”?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will This New Magazine Be California’s Answer to the “New Yorker”?

Yet More Crackpotism From the Tea Party Darling in Iowa

by KandiNPVzfidna Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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

TPM’s Daniel Strauss provides us with the latest intel on tea party darling Joni Ernst, currently favored to win a Senate seat in Iowa. Here are her answers to a survey from the Campaign for Liberty in 2012, when she was running for the state legislature:

Strauss naturally focuses on Question 5, in which Ernst happily agrees that Iowa should allow state troopers and local sheriffs to toss federal officials in the slammer if they try to implement Obamacare in their state. This is complete lunacy, but of course no one will take any notice. For some reason, conservative Republicans are allowed to get away with this kind of stuff. There’s a sort of tacit understanding in the press that they don’t really mean it when they say things like this. It’s just a harmless way of showing their tribal affiliation.

However, I’m also intrigued by Question 1. I assume this was prompted by police use of drones, which was starting to make the news back in 2012, but does it also include things like red light cameras and automated radar installations on highways? Does Ernst really oppose this stuff? She might! And maybe it’s a big deal in Iowa. I’m just curious.

UPDATE: And as long as we’re on the subject of Iowa, Senate seats, and the press, maybe you should check out Eric Boehlert’s fully justified bafflement over the national media’s infatuation with a crude Republican smear campaign based on transparent lies about Democratic candidate Bruce Braley and his neighbor’s chickens. Click here for more.

See original: 

Yet More Crackpotism From the Tea Party Darling in Iowa

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Yet More Crackpotism From the Tea Party Darling in Iowa