Tag Archives: obama

Slavitt: Obamacare Should Be Profitable This Year if Republicans Don’t Blow It Up

by TyreeP48paejrf Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

Andy Slavitt ran the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Obama, which included responsibility for Obamacare. Here’s a tweetstorm he posted today:

I talked today/last night to 5 health plan CEOs. Won’t use names but: 1 Blues, 1 integrated w hospital, 2 non-profit, 1 VC backed. All 5 health plan CEOs believe they priced 2017 #ACA business & should at least breakeven. Several of the plans beat their ACA membership projections.

Of the 5 plans, w/ current uncertainty none can yet commit 2 participate in 2018. All seemed aware that new #ACA stability reg is coming. One plan said with all the work to be profitable in the #ACA (they hadn’t been), ironic to question participation now.

….They didn’t say, but I will: if there is ambiguity, they will raise prices if they participate. One CEO who has an actuarial background said he would be at single digit rate increases but for all the uncertainty. It sounds like the plans will submit #ACA rates for 2018 high to hold place in line. Big increases all from repeal & mandate uncertainty.

It is a shame. Not sure if representative, but single digit if we would wipe uncertainty off table. Still can. But needs to be fast….I think people are so weary of the unpredictability of politics. It zaps energy from their real jobs.

We don’t yet have final enrollment figures for 2017, but it appears that even with double-digit rate increases, uncertainty over Republican repeal plans, and deliberate sabotage from the new Trump administration, signups will be only 2-3 percent lower than last year. That’s a pretty stable market, and probably a profitable—or at least breakeven—one. Fairly modest changes could fix a lot of Obamacare’s existing problems, and higher funding could fix the rest of them.

Instead, we have massive uncertainty in an industry that felt like things had finally settled down after years of work. Slavitt is right: it’s a shame. We can only hope that Republicans will wake up and decide that repairing Obamacare and then taking credit for its success is a better path than blowing up the entire individual health insurance market.

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Slavitt: Obamacare Should Be Profitable This Year if Republicans Don’t Blow It Up

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Trump Unfamiliar With Both New START and 2013 Immigration Bill

by RobertaRosenbau Posted on February 9, 2017

Mother Jones

The latest tidbit of Trump idiocy making the rounds is this disclosure about his call last week with Vladimir Putin:

When Putin raised the possibility of extending the 2010 treaty, known as New START, Trump paused to ask his aides in an aside what the treaty was, these sources said. Trump then told Putin the treaty was one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration, saying that New START favored Russia. Trump also talked about his own popularity, the sources said.

There are, as usual, several things we can say about this:

Trump’s ignorance is almost boundless.
He nonetheless refuses to be briefed before calls with foreign leaders.
The willingness of his staff to leak unflattering anecdotes about him is both epic and unprecedented.

But the bit that caught my attention was this: “Trump also talked about his own popularity, the sources said.” This is far from the first time we’ve heard this. Trump is apparently nearly incapable of talking with a foreign leader without blathering about how terrific he is, how well loved he is, how epic his victory was, and how gigantic the crowds at his inauguration were.

And as long as we’re on the subject, here’s Trump idiocy #2 for the day. Sen. Joe Manchin passes along the following anecdote about immigration legislation from a White House lunch today:

According to the West Virginia Democrat, when Trump noted that there is no current immigration legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill, another senator in attendance, Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), mentioned the 2013 bill. Alexander also noted that the 2013 bill had passed with 68 votes, Manchin recalled.

“Well, that sounds like something good and you all agreed, 68? What happened to it?” Trump said, according to Manchin.

“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, Mr. President,” Manchin said he told Trump. “It went to the House and Majority Leader Eric Cantor gets defeated. They’re crying ‘Amnesty, amnesty, amnesty’ and House Speaker John Boehner could not bring it back up on the floor and get a vote — that’s exactly what happened.”

At that point, Trump said, “I want to see it,” Manchin said. “So he was very anxious to see it. He says, ‘I know what amnesty is.’ And I said, ‘Sir, I don’t think you’re going to find this is amnesty at all.’”

Sean Spicer later “clarified” that Trump opposes the 2013 bill and considers it to be amnesty. And I suppose he does, now that someone has told him what his opinion is supposed to be.

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Trump Unfamiliar With Both New START and 2013 Immigration Bill

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Trump’s Staff Sure Seems Eager to Tell the World He’s an Imbecile

by ElisabethDadson Posted on February 8, 2017

Mother Jones

Every day brings new stories out of the White House about what an idiot Donald Trump is. I kinda sorta try to stay away from them, with only sporadic success. But this one is worth it for reasons unrelated to the anecdote itself. Here are S.V. Date and Christina Wilkie:

President Donald Trump was confused about the dollar: Was it a strong one that’s good for the economy? Or a weak one?

So he made a call ― except not to any of the business leaders Trump brought into his administration or even to an old friend from his days in real estate. Instead, he called his national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, according to two sources familiar with Flynn’s accounts of the incident.

Flynn has a long record in counterintelligence but not in macroeconomics. And he told Trump he didn’t know, that it wasn’t his area of expertise, that, perhaps, Trump should ask an economist instead.

Just for the record, the answer about the dollar is: it depends. But a weak dollar is good for boosting exports and reducing the trade deficit, so that’s probably what Trump was looking for.

These anecdotes are basically liberal porn for those of us who revel in reports of Trump’s almost unfathomable ignorance. I include myself among the revelers, but I also know that there’s no way of knowing for sure which of these stories are true and which are just malicious gossip. What’s more interesting is the topic of the rest of the story:

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s volatile behavior has created an environment ripe for leaks from his executive agencies and even within his White House. And while leaks typically involve staffers sabotaging each other to improve their own standing or trying to scuttle policy ideas they find genuinely problematic, Trump’s 2-week-old administration has a third category: leaks from White House and agency officials alarmed by the president’s conduct.

….Information about Trump’s personal interactions and the inner workings of his administration has come to HuffPost from individuals in executive agencies and in the White House itself. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

While some of the leaks are based on opposition to his policies — the travel ban on all refugees and on visitors from seven predominantly Muslim nations, for instance — many appear motivated by a belief that Trump’s words, deeds and tweets pose a genuine threat.

This is truly bizarre and unique. Every new White House has lots of growing pains and plenty of leaks. But they never feature leak after leak after leak portraying the president as a boob. That’s something new.

At this point, I’m mostly curious about who’s doing the leaking. Is it career staff from the Obama era who are still working in the White House until they get reassigned? Or is this coming from folks who were actually hired by Trump? If it’s the former, it’s still unprecedented but probably just represents lingering resentment. However, if Trump’s own people think he’s an idiot and are happy to let the whole world know it, something is very, very wrong.

But I don’t know which it is.

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Trump’s Staff Sure Seems Eager to Tell the World He’s an Imbecile

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Trump Brags About Job Growth That Happened Under Obama

by Sidney2406 Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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After repeatedly accusing the government of inflating its monthly jobs reports while on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump on Friday praised the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest numbers, which showed 227,000 new jobs in January, as “really big league.” He even appeared to take credit for the report, even though the data were collected during Barack Obama’s final days in office.

“A couple of things happened this morning,” Trump said referring to the report. “So we are very happy about that. I think that it’s really big league. We’re bringing jobs back, we’re bringing down your taxes. We are going to get rid of your regulations.”

Conservative outlets, including Fox News and Breitbart, also misleadingly implied that the reported job growth came under Trump:

While running for president, Trump took a strikingly different approach to the Labor Department’s reports. He routinely accused the Obama administration of purposely understating the true unemployment rate, which he believed to be as high as 42 percent.

“Don’t believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment,” Trump said at a rally nearly a year ago. “The number is probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.”

Some of the president’s Cabinet picks, including treasury secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin and labor secretary nominee Andrew Puzder, have also mocked the government’s official unemployment rate.

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Trump Brags About Job Growth That Happened Under Obama

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A Company Closely Linked to Tom Price’s Medical Practice Paid a Big Medicare Fraud Settlement

by StacieWisewould Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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During Tom Price’s confirmation hearing last week, Sen. Orrin Hatch quizzed him on his commitment to eradicating Medicare fraud, which the Utah Republican noted had cost the government billions of dollars. If confirmed to head the US Department of Health and Human Services, Price, a Republican congressman from Georgia, will oversee the agency’s efforts to protect government-run health care programs from scammers. “I think they’re a minority,” Price replied, “but there’s some bad actors out there…If we were to focus on those individuals that were the bad actors specifically, then I think we could do a much better job of not just identifying the fraud that exists out there, but ending that fraud.”

Those bad actors aren’t as rare as Price suggested. In fact, a company closely linked to his medical practice was ensnared in a multimillion-dollar Medicare fraud case. In 1999, Price became a partner in Resurgens PC, what is now Georgia’s largest orthopedic practice, where he also served as a board member until 2004, when he ran for Congress. Resurgens doctors performed surgeries at an outpatient facility that had been incorporated as a separate corporate entity, Resurgens Surgery Center LLC. In 2005, the surgery center agreed to repay $2.5 million to the federal government to settle allegations that it had fraudulently billed Medicare and Medicaid and violated a federal anti-kickback law.

Price was not implicated in the case—the wrongdoing allegedly occurred between 1993 and 1997, before he joined the practice—and he didn’t hold a direct financial stake in Resurgens Surgery Center. But the payout by Resurgens Surgery Center highlights one of the conflicts he may face if his nomination is approved. As HHS secretary, he will be charged with helping enforce the very laws the Justice Department accused Resurgens Surgery Center of violating. A spokeswoman for Price did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.

There are other reasons to question how aggressively Price will go after Medicare scammers. He was a longtime member of a conservative medical organization, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, that has strongly opposed fraud investigations by HHS, claiming that “misguided enforcement actions” target honest physicians.

“It’s worth wondering how tough Price is going to be on these issues,” says Marc Smolonsky, a former associate deputy secretary at HHS during the Obama administration and an expert on health care fraud. “I’m not saying he’s not going to be tough, but it’s certainly something to ask.” He notes that Congress earmarks almost $1.5 billion a year for HHS to probe fraud. “Most of that is under his purview.”

The case against Resurgens Surgery Center began in 2001, when a whistleblower named Robert Allen filed a federal False Claims Act lawsuit against the company in a Georgia federal court. Between 1995 and 1997, Allen had been a consultant and then an administrator for a group of anesthesiologists who worked closely with Resurgens Surgery Center. Allen alleged that the anesthesiologists had colluded with Resurgens Surgery Center to illegally collect “facility fees” from Medicare and Medicaid for services they performed in a Resurgens facility. The government health care programs allows certain health care providers, such as hospitals or outpatient surgery centers, to bill extra fees to help cover the overhead of running the facility on top of those charged for medical care.

But to claim such facility fees legally, federal regulations require a health care facility to have a certificate of need and a government-issued billing number. Resurgens Surgery Center had the right paperwork, but the suit alleged it covered only orthopedic services, not pain management or anesthesia. The anesthesiologists named in the whistleblower suit allegedly had neither a billing number nor a certificate of need. In fact, federal rules specifically bar anesthesiologists from collecting facility fees from Medicare. So, Allen’s suit alleged, the anesthesiologists and Resurgens Surgery Center set up a lucrative but illegal arrangement. The anesthesiologists would provide pain treatments to their patients at the Resurgens facility and use its billing number to charge the federal government for use of the premises. In return, the anesthesiologists allegedly kicked back a portion of the facility fees to Resurgens Surgery Center.

Allen claimed this arrangement began in 1993 and continued after he left the anesthesiologists’ practice in 1997. And he alleged that he told the doctors their setup was illegal but they declined to put an end to it.

The Department of Justice can intervene in private whistleblower suits if it believes serious misconduct has occurred. In 2002, it did so in Allen’s case. In 2004, the anesthesiologists settled for $1.3 million. The following year, shortly after Price was elected to Congress, Resurgens Surgery Center also settled, agreeing to repay $2.5 million in fees it had billed the government. Neither Resurgens Surgery Center nor the anesthesiologists admitted to wrongdoing in the settlement.

Doug Lundy, co-president of Resurgens PC, did not respond to requests for comment. But after the 2005 settlement was announced, Charles C. Murphy, an attorney for Resurgens Surgery Center, told a local Georgia newspaper that the company made a “business decision” to settle the case. “The Resurgens doctors believed they had done nothing improper,” he said. “Nonetheless, the case was becoming a significant distraction, and Resurgens Surgery Center believes the more prudent course was to put the matter behind it.”

Since Price entered Congress, his former Resurgens colleagues and other company employees have been major backers of his campaigns, donating nearly $225,000 since 2004. In July 2015, Lundy hosted a fundraiser for Price. After Price was nominated to HHS, Resurgens issued a statement congratulating Price. (The statement was subsequently removed from the company’s website.) A full vote by the Senate on his nomination is expected next week.

The Obama administration made a big push to crack down on Medicare billing fraud, which is believed to sap nearly $100 billion a year from Medicare and Medicaid. It aggressively rooted out crooked doctors and hospitals that were bilking the system, and it included tougher anti-fraud rules in the Affordable Care Act. In June, HHS and the Department of Justice spearheaded the largest Medicare fraud takedown in history. The investigation resulted in charges against more than 300 people and involved nearly $1 billion in fraudulent billing. Sixty-one of the people charged were doctors.

Will a Secretary Price continue to pursue this kind of aggressive enforcement? Dr. Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute and a former member of the government’s Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, is skeptical. “He clearly thinks doctors should be left alone,” Berenson says. “Billing fraud is the kind of thing that happens when they are left alone.”

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A Company Closely Linked to Tom Price’s Medical Practice Paid a Big Medicare Fraud Settlement

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Chart of the Day: Obama Era Ends With 152 Million People at Work, an Increase of 9.9 Million

by MelinaBivins35 Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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The American economy added 227,000 new jobs last month. Unemployment ticked up slightly from 4.72 percent to 4.78 percent, so the headline rate increased from 4.7 percent to 4.8 percent. The whole jobs report was a little strange, though, due to a whopping revision in BLS’s estimate of the total population of the country. Without the controls, 413,000 people re-entered the labor force and the total number of people employed rose by 457,000. Those are both excellent numbers, even if they did cause the official unemployment rate to rise slightly. The labor participation rate rose from 62.7 percent to 62.9 percent regardless of the population revision.

Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees went up at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. By coincidence, that’s also the average annual increase for the entire Obama presidency. In an era of low inflation, that’s OK but not great. Altogether, this is the last jobs report of the Obama era and the starting point for judging the economic policies of the Trump era:

Headline unemployment rate: 4.8 percent
U6 unemployment rate: 9.4 percent
Labor participation rate: 62.9 percent
Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees: $21.84

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Chart of the Day: Obama Era Ends With 152 Million People at Work, an Increase of 9.9 Million

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James Baldwin Was Never Your Negro

by HongWhiteside Posted on February 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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In the eyes of filmmaker Raoul Peck, the voice of author James Baldwin has been largely forgotten in the 30 years since his death. Yet Baldwin’s words remain uniquely relevant today.

I Am Not Your Negro, Peck’s Oscar-nominated documentary, which hits selected theaters this week, recounts Baldwin’s incisive examination of the systemic racism that underpins the black American experience. The film—based on letters, published work, and notes from Remember This House, Baldwin’s unpublished manuscript about his contemporaries Medger Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.—also serves as a critique on how Hollywood has clouded the bitter reality that African Americans faced in their struggle for civil rights.

Peck, a Haitian-born director whose previous work includes Lumumba (a biopic of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba) and Fatal Assistance (a film about Haiti’s efforts to rebuild after its devastating 2010 earthquake), spent a decade working on I Am Not Your Negro. He wrote Baldwin’s estate asking for permission to the intellectual’s archives. One day, during the course of his team’s research, Baldwin’s sister Gloria Karefa-Smart handed him pages of notes from Remember This House. “For a filmmaker, it was like almost a mystery book. I knew I could build on that,” Peck told me.

What unfolds in the film, over the course of 90 minutes, is a revival of Baldwin’s decades-old meditation on race in America, whose fraught history—given the rise of white nationalism in parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement—is no less poignant today. I caught up with Peck to discuss Baldwin’s legacy, the absurdity of Twitter, and how Hollywood has twisted our view of race.

Mother Jones: What drew you to this project?

Raoul Peck: I decided to go back to Baldwin because of the role he played in my whole life and because we have forgotten about him. I felt that the world, and in particular this country, were going in circles. What had happened 40 or 50 years ago was happening again, but even in a worse form—that we were sinking into a lot of ignorance and a lot of superficial change.

It was really always about bringing back Baldwin’s words in all their rawness, in all their impact—in the way he analyzes not only this country but also the history of this country, the images that this country is fabricating through Hollywood, and what consequence that has in our imagination.

MJ: How did Baldwin influence your life?

RP: Don’t forget: In the ’70s, when I was a young man, there were not many authors as a black young man where you felt at home, where you felt he’s really speaking about my life and my story. Baldwin was a revelation for me, the kind of revelation that follows you all your life because you can go back to it. It’s not just about stories. It’s about philosophy. It’s about criticizing the world. It’s about deconstructing the world around you. Baldwin explained that you have your own history, and that you cannot be responsible, for example, for slavery. You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.

You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this. It’s not because of you—it’s because of them. This is a powerful thing for a young mind. Which brings us to today. Can you imagine in 2016 there is a discussion about #OscarsSoWhite? Is it a novelty we’ve just discovered that the whole production machine is dominated by only one type of human being, excluding women, excluding gays, excluding minorities? This is not new. So why would anything change that has not been changed since the existence of cinema? Baldwin somehow wakes you up to reality. It takes you out of the dream—or out of the nightmare.

MJ: What influence would you say Hollywood has had in shaping how we think about race?

RP: Baldwin basically shows you how! From a young age, he’s watching all those different films. He’s watching John Wayne killing off the Indians. He came to the point that the Indians were him. You had to educate yourself because the movies were not educating you. The movies were giving you a reflection of you that was not the truth. That’s the trick. The movie was also giving a reflection of what the country is. Basically, a country that wanted itself to be innocent. That’s the ambivalence of Hollywood. It thinks of itself of selling one thing but it doesn’t see that, by doing that, it is also selling something else.

Your job as a critic is to question that. Otherwise, you’re just part of the machine. Baldwin looks you in the eyes and says, “You are part of the problem. What do you choose to do?”

We are in it together whether you like it or not. It’s the same history. You can choose to not see the whole of it, or to see one particular aspect of it, but it’s your own delusion. You can’t erase the reality of this country.

MJ: What was Baldwin’s role during the civil rights movement?

RP: Baldwin was a celebrity. A TV show like Kenneth Clark could put him aside of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. He was, at least, one of the three most important spokesmen of the movement and of the black community. He was one of greatest intellectuals of his time. He was an important voice, period, not an important black voice. Over the years, he disappeared—like a lot of our leaders disappear. He was not assassinated, but somehow he went through those assassinations as if it was himself. I think that broke him as well. You could see that in the way he carried himself in the film. He doesn’t take anything lightly.

Today, I don’t even think that people like him are possible. He would not have that much room. The system gives you two minutes to phrase a whole history. Take the example of the current president. He tells you something in two or three sentences. Then you have maybe 30 seconds to respond. You already lost because every single word of what he said is either false or not correctly accurate. You would spend the next hour to deconstruct what he just said before you can even start telling your own opinion on that. It’s the rhetorical battle that you can not win.

Baldwin would have been extremely complicated today because he would not have 40 minutes like he had at the Dick Cavett Show. It says something about our current situation where we are so bombarded with items, with data, with pseudo-information that you don’t even have the time to seek through it to see what is important, what is not, what is fake, what is real. You need to react. That’s the absurdity of Twitter. You can react without thinking now. Your tweet is as important as if you would have written a Ph.D. dissertation on the subject.

MJ: What do you see as Baldwin’s significance as we transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump?

RP: It means almost nothing. Baldwin said the real question is not when there will be the first Negro president in this country. The important question is what country he’s going to be the president of. This is his response. We just experienced that it is true. It’s not having elected Obama. It’s about what country he was the president of. We just got the response.

It’s never about one individual capable of changing everything. It’s about us, every one of us—whether white or black or Latino or women or men. It’s about how you get together and have a sufficiently wide spectrum of citizens who are ready, who have the same diagnostic, or at least who agree on the minimum of the diagnostic and decide to change it.

We have to change it on the basis of reality, not on the basis of what you think is reality—which is based on your ignorance. It’s incredible because we actually have a president who is denying the existence of science, who relies on hearsay. Anybody who has zero credibility and tells him something that he feels could be true through his own prejudice, he just decides that it’s the truth. It doesn’t count that you’ve worked 40 years of your life on the very subject, that you have measured that problem, you have statistics about that problem, you have numbers and facts. All this doesn’t mean anything. That’s the bottom of ignorance right there. That’s the world we are in. Baldwin is needed even more today because he helps you focus to the essential, to what is important.

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James Baldwin Was Never Your Negro

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Could This Anti-Immigrant Hardliner Grab a Top Border Patrol Spot?

by AdriannHaggard Posted on February 2, 2017

Mother Jones

As the Trump administration rolled out its “Muslim ban,” detaining hundreds of travelers and sparking protests at airports across the country, the agency in charge of implementing the order was operating without a chief of staff. Who might get the No. 3 spot at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) remains a mystery despite reports that it will be an anti-immigration hardliner.

Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that President Donald Trump had named Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), as CBP’s new chief of staff. That report was based on a tweet by an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, as well as a Politico story that reported that Kirchner was serving “a temporary political appointment” at CBP.

However, CBP has not officially named Kirchner or anyone else as its new chief of staff. After issuing several cagey responses to questions about the alleged appointment, the agency’s press office confirmed that Kirchner is working as “an advisor to the commissioner’s office” and “her status hasn’t changed.” Attempts to reach Kirchner for comment were unsuccessful. Trump named his new chief of Border Patrol, Ronald Vitiello,* on Tuesday.

If Kirchner is indeed Trump’s pick, it would be another sign that he’s doubling down on his promises to crack down on immigrants. Like Trump, Kirchner has characterized immigrants and refugees as dangerous and costly. Last September, Breitbart published parts of a statement written by Kirchner, who was then working as an adviser to the Trump campaign. “Before President Obama’s failed presidency comes to an end, he is trying to force Americans to accept 30 percent more refugees—providing ISIS a path for their terrorists to enter the country,” she claimed. “In recent years, hundreds of foreign born terrorists have been apprehended in the United States alone.” She also wrote that “instead of providing free healthcare to millions of refugees, we must focus on rebuilding our inner cities and bringing jobs back to America.”

Kirchner joined FAIR in 2005 as its director of government relations. In 2007, she became the organization’s executive director. During her tenure, FAIR launched an initiative to end the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision, which grants citizenship to all children born on American soil, regardless of whether their parents are legal residents. In 2010, FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, had a hand in crafting Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which required police to detain individuals suspected of being illegal immigrants and made it a misdemeanor for immigrants not to carry their immigration papers. (The Supreme Court subsequently found most of SB 1070’s provisions unconstitutional.)

FAIR describes itself as a nonpartisan organization focused on limiting all immigration. The Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized it as a “hate group” with nativist ties. In return, FAIR has called SPLC a “basket of partisan propaganda artists masquerading as public policy advocates” and has filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that the group is engaged in illegal political activity.

FAIR and its representatives have a history of taking extreme stands and making racially charged statements. In a 1997 Wall Street Journal article, Tucker Carlson quoted FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein, as saying, “Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not those with high ones?” One of FAIR’s field representatives wrote in 2005 that Mexicans were at risk of turning California into a “third world cesspool.” FAIR’s founder and former director John Tanton has warned of the “Latin onslaught” and has said the United States should remain a majority-white country, writing, “One of my prime concerns is about the decline of folks who look like you and me.” After a 2011 New York Times article exposed Tanton’s racist statements and ties to Holocaust deniers, eugenicists, and racists, he quietly dialed back his role in the organization. He remains on its advisory board.

Trump’s ties to FAIR also extend through Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, who conducted polling and research for the group beginning in the mid-1990s. Last December, Stein, FAIR’s president, said Conway’s work for FAIR had a visible impact on Trump’s immigration policies: “We saw that influence helping to shape Donald Trump’s positions and statements once she came on board.”

In August 2015, Kirchner left FAIR to join Trump’s campaign as an immigration adviser. During her time with the campaign, Trump made his promises to build a massive border wall and implement a ban on “Muslim immigration.” Last August, Trump visited Arizona to deliver an inflammatory speech on immigration. “We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate,” he said. “It is our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here.” Trump emphasized immigrants’ ties to violent crime and claimed that illegal immigration costs the United States $113 billion annually—a figure taken from a debunked study published by FAIR under Kirchner’s watch.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Ronald Vitiello.

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Could This Anti-Immigrant Hardliner Grab a Top Border Patrol Spot?

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Who’s to Blame For the Disaster in Yemen?

by FaustoHaines Posted on February 2, 2017

Mother Jones

The raid in Yemen that went pear shaped on Saturday was originally planned under the Obama administration. However, they were unable to complete their detailed assessment before Obama left office. Then Trump and his team took over and—apparently—decided to speed things up:

Mr. Trump’s new national security team, led by Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a retired general with experience in counterterrorism raids, has said that it wants to speed the decision-making when it comes to such strikes, delegating more power to lower-level officials so that the military may respond more quickly. Indeed, the Pentagon is drafting such plans to accelerate activities against the Qaeda branch in Yemen.

That’s the New York Times. Here’s the Washington Post on the same subject:

“We expect an easier approval cycle for operations under this administration,” another defense official said…“We really struggled with getting the Obama White House comfortable with getting boots on the ground in Yemen,” the former official said. “Since the new administration has come in, the approvals at the Pentagon appear to have gone up.”

And here is Reuters:

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations. As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

Reading between the lines, Trump figured that Obama was a wuss and spent too much time over-litigating this stuff. He wanted action, so he approved the mission. It went badly, and now military officials are blaming Trump, telling reporters that he went ahead “without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.”

Is that really what happened? Or is the Pentagon throwing Trump under the bus for a failure that’s their fault? I suppose we might find out if Congress decided to investigate, but that would be out of character for them. After all, Congress rarely spends its time holding contentious hearings about missions in dangerous parts of the world that go south and get people killed. I can’t think of one recently, anyway.

From – 

Who’s to Blame For the Disaster in Yemen?

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So About That Deal to Accept Some Refugees From Australia…

by ShanonOCKB Posted on February 2, 2017

Mother Jones

Here’s the latest on President Trump’s unhappiness upon learning that the Obama administration had previously agreed to accept 1,250 Muslim asylum seekers from Australia. Note the timestamps. The statement from the US Embassy in Canberra comes at 6:15 pm (Pacific Time):

President Trump’s tweet about the deal comes an hour later:

First the US will honor the deal. Then the US president tweets that he’s going to study it.

Aside from the sheer ineptitude on public display here, this shows that, once again, Trump refuses to be briefed before calls with foreign leaders. Even a cursory memo from an area expert in the State Department would have mentioned that the refugee deal was likely to come up in his call with Prime Minister Turnbull on Saturday. But Trump was taken completely by surprise. He had no idea.

Source: 

So About That Deal to Accept Some Refugees From Australia…

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