Tag Archives: obama

This 11-Year-Old Was Locked Up Trying to Cross the Border. Read the Heartfelt Letter She Sent Obama.

by KennyPyzndltjzo Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, the nation’s top immigration court allowed a Guatemalan woman who fled her abusive husband to petition for asylum in the United States. It’s a landmark ruling that immigrant rights advocates hope will protect women who have escaped horrific marital violence in countries besides Guatemala.

One of those women is a Honduran named Rosemary. In June, she entered the US with Daniela, her 11-year-old daughter, and both were detained near the border. Rosemary and Daniela are currently detained in a makeshift facility in Artesia, New Mexico, set up by the Department of Homeland Security. They are seeking asylum after fleeing Daniela’s father, who allegedly beat and choked Rosemary for three years before the two escaped. (Rosemary asked me to withhold their last name.)

And Tuesday’s ruling could be good news for the two of them—if they ever get out of detention. “It is very difficult to prepare a meaningful asylum case within a detention center,” their lawyer, Allegra Love, wrote to me in an email. “There is limited legal counsel and communication is nearly impossible.”

In less than two weeks, Rosemary and Daniela have a bond hearing. If the judge grants a low bond, the family will pay it and live with friends in Houston. But if it’s too high—or the judge denies them bail—then Rosemary has considered voluntarily going back to Honduras, where she claims her life is in danger.

Why would Rosemary risk heading back to one of the world’s most violent countries? According to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other immigrant rights groups, conditions in Artesia are terrible: The facility is overcrowded, privacy is nonexistent, and phone calls to family and attorneys are limited to two or three minutes. Daniela says she has lost 15 pounds in two months. “Her mother is not sure she wants to risk her child starving to death in New Mexico,” Love says.

So Love encouraged Daniela to write a letter to President Obama. Daniela did, and Love translated and shared with Mother Jones. Here’s an excerpt:

I don’t like being here because we don’t eat well, and I can’t do what I did in Honduras so I need to go back or get in school. I am a very intelligent girl. I can speak English and I am learning French, and I believe that all the kids who are here in this center should leave. No one wants to be here. We are getting sick mentally. The jail is affecting us. Some officials are very rude. President Obama, I am asking you to please help us leave here and stay in this country. While I have been here I’ve been sick two times. I ask you from my heart for your help.

Here’s a copy of Daniela’s letter and Love’s handwritten translation:

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Daniela’s Letter to Obama (PDF)

Daniela’s Letter to Obama (Text)

A copy of Rosemary’s affidavit to the court, which Love shared with Mother Jones, corroborates the basic details of her daughter’s letter.

In one sense, Rosemary and Daniela are lucky: Artesia is notorious for deporting migrants so swiftly that people with legitimate asylum claims never have a chance to file an application. The fact that the mother and daughter are in touch with a lawyer—they met Love through her pro bono work for the American Immigration Lawyers Association—sets them apart from thousands of other women who stream through Artesia every month. (The Department of Homeland Security did not reply to requests for comment.)

Their story also flies in the face of conservative claims that, following Tuesday’s decision, domestic violence victims can earn “instant US citizenship.” Their claim to asylum might have improved in the abstract—but there are still plenty of hurdles between Rosemary and Daniela and their first asylum hearing.

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This 11-Year-Old Was Locked Up Trying to Cross the Border. Read the Heartfelt Letter She Sent Obama.

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Quote of the Day: "We Don’t Have a Strategy Yet."

by KatiaSimas Posted on August 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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From President Obama, asked if he needs congressional approval to go into Syria:

I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.

That’s not going to go over well, is it? Three years after the Syrian civil war started and (at least) half a year after ISIS became a serious threat in Iraq, you’d think the president might be willing to essay a few broad thoughts about how we should respond.

Don’t get me wrong. I think I understand what Obama is doing here. He’s basically trying to avoid saying that we do have a strategy, and the strategy is to do the absolute minimum possible in service of a few very limited objectives. And generally speaking, I happen to agree that this is probably the least worst option available to us. Still, there’s no question that it’s not very inspiring. You’d think the brain trust in the White House would have given a little more thought to how this could be presented in a tolerably coherent and decisive way.

In the meantime, “We don’t have a strategy yet” is about to become the latest 24/7 cable news loop. Sigh.

Oh, and the tan suit too. It’s quite the topic of conversation in the Twittersphere.

Source – 

Quote of the Day: "We Don’t Have a Strategy Yet."

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Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Get to Decide if Republicans Will Threaten Another Government Shutdown

by Everett95Y Posted on August 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Are congressional Republicans threatening once again to shut down the government this year unless they get their way on a bunch of pet demands? Over at TNR, Danny Vinik doesn’t think so: “There is no excuse for the news media to inflate the quotes of Republican politicians to make it seem that they are threatening to shut down the government again,” he says. But Brian Beutler thinks Vinik is being too literal. It’s true that no one is explicitly using the word shutdown, but no one ever does. Still, he says, “the threat is clear.”

I’m with Beutler, but not because of any particular parsing of recent Republican threats. It’s because of this:

The truth is practically irrelevant to the question of whether recent saber rattling presages a government shutdown fight. Just as it doesn’t really matter whether Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell actually has a government shutdown in mind when he promises to strong-arm Obama next year, or whether he intends to cave.

In either case he’s threatening to use the appropriations process as leverage to extract concessions. That’s a government shutdown fight. And no matter how he plays it, he will unleash forces he and other GOP leaders have proven incapable of restraining. They can’t control the plot.

Yep. It’s just not clear that McConnell has any real leverage over Ted Cruz or that John Boehner has any leverage over Michele Bachmann. Once they implicitly endorse the rider game, they cede control to the wingnuts. And the wingnuts want to shut down the government. Fasten your seatbelts.

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Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Get to Decide if Republicans Will Threaten Another Government Shutdown

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Here’s the Latest Right-Wing IRS Fantasy

by HelenaHastings Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a great example of the conservative media bubble at work. I was browsing The Corner a few minutes ago and came across a post telling me that the government has, rather astonishingly, acknowledged that it has another backup of Lois Lerner’s missing emails. Judicial Watch, which has been trying to get hold of these emails, sent out a press release trumpeting its discovery:

Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe….This is a jaw-dropping revelation. The Obama administration had been lying to the American people about Lois Lerner’s missing emails….The Obama administration has known all along where the email records could be — but dishonestly withheld this information.

Well. That’s fascinating. But I wondered what was really up. I went to Google News but all I found were links to conservative news sites. The Judicial Watch story was plastered over all of them: Forbes, The Blaze, NRO, Breitbart, Fox, Townhall, the Washington Examiner, the Free Beacon, and the New York Observer. But none of the usual mainstream news sources seemed to have anything about this.

Except for The Hill. Hooray! So I clicked:

An administration official said Justice Department lawyers had dropped no bombshells last week, and that Judicial Watch was mischaracterizing what the government had said.

The official said that Justice lawyers were only referring to tapes backing up IRS emails that were routinely recycled twice a year before 2013, when the investigation into the Tea Party controversy began….The administration official said that the inspector general is examining whether any data can be recovered from the previously recycled back-up tapes and suggested that could be the cause of the confusion between the government and Judicial Watch.

Roger that. What he’s saying is that backup tapes are routinely recycled and written over, but it’s possible that some of the tapes weren’t entirely written over. There’s a chance that old emails might still be at the tail end of some of the tapes and could be recovered. And who knows: maybe some of them were Lerner’s. This is, as you can imagine, (a) the longest of long shots, and (b) a pretty difficult forensic recovery job even if some parts of the backup tapes contain old messages. It’s certainly not a jaw-dropping revelation.

But in right-wing fantasyland, it’s no doubt already become conventional wisdom that the feds have some kind of massive government-wide backup system that contains every email ever written by any federal employee. The Obama administration has just been hiding it.

Which is exactly what you’d expect from them, isn’t it?

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Here’s the Latest Right-Wing IRS Fantasy

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Yes, Republicans Really Are Unprecedented in Their Obstructionism

by HyeNelmsamd Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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When we talk about Republican obstruction of judicial nominees in the Senate, the usual way is to look at filibusters and cloture votes. But that can sometimes be misleading, since cloture votes can happen for a variety of reasons. Or we can look at the raw number of seats filled. But that can be misleading too, since this can depend on how aggressive the president is about nominating new judges in the first place. A better way may be to simply look at how long nominees are delayed. That’s easier to measure, and long delays mostly happen for only one reason: because the minority party is blocking floor votes.

Via Jonathan Bernstein, the chart on the right comes from @Mansfield2016. It shows pretty clearly what’s happened to judicial nominees over the past couple of decades. Under George HW Bush, nominees that made it to the Senate floor were voted on almost immediately. The majority Democrats waited only a few days to schedule a vote.

That jumped suddenly when Bill Clinton became president and Republicans started delaying his nominees. Things settled down and delays plateaued during George W Bush’s administration.

And then came Barack Obama. Once more delays spiked. Even after the rules were changed, delays have stayed high, averaging about 80 days. This is far higher than it was under Bush or Clinton. Bernstein comments:

I believe that Senate rules requiring super-majority cloture for judicial nominations are an excellent idea, provided the minority observes the Senate norm of using filibusters rarely. Unfortunately, Republicans simply haven’t abided by longstanding Senate norms. After Obama’s election, they suddenly insisted that every nomination required 60 votes — an unprecedented hurdle. They blockaded multiple nominations to the DC Circuit Court. They have, before and after filibuster reform, used Senate rules to delay even nominations that they have intended ultimately to support. Since reform, they have imposed the maximum delay on every single judicial nominee.

Ideally, I’d like to see a compromise that restores the minority’s ability to block selected judicial nominees. But right now, the more pressing concern is that if Republicans win a Senate majority in November, they may simply shut down all nominations for two full years. That would be absolutely outrageous. Yet it seems entirely plausible.

That final comment is what makes these numbers even more outrageous. It’s fairly normal for a minority party to start delaying nominees in the final year or two of an administration. Obviously they’re hoping to win the presidency soon and they want to leave as many seats open as possible for their guy to fill. This tends to inflate the average numbers for an administration.

But that hasn’t happened yet for Obama. His numbers for his first five years are far, far higher than Bush’s even though Bush’s are inflated by delays during his final year in office. It’s just another example of the fact that, no, both parties aren’t equally at fault for the current level of government dysfunction. Republicans greeted Obama’s inauguration with an active plan of maximal obstruction of everything he did, regardless of what it was or how necessary it might be in the face of an epic economic collapse. No other party in recent history has done that. It’s a new thing under the sun.

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Yes, Republicans Really Are Unprecedented in Their Obstructionism

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Our Letter to President Obama

by Posted on August 22, 2014

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Our Letter to President Obama

Posted 22 August 2014 in

National

The Fuels America coalition is taking its case directly to President Obama today in a full page advertisement in the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, a weekly newspaper broadly distributed across the island. In this open letter to the President, America’s leading biofuel producers are alerting the President how a proposal by his administration — if it is not fixed — will inadvertently cause investment in advanced biofuels like cellulosic ethanol to shift to China and Brazil, undermining his effort to tackle climate change.

As you enjoy some rest this week, we wanted to share some important news about advanced biofuels.

First, the good news: in no small part due to your efforts to transition America to a clean energy future, we are launching four large, commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants. Using groundbreaking technology developed by America’s most innovative companies, these four facilities will convert agricultural residue into the lowest-carbon motor fuel in the world.

Now, the bad news: the companies and investors looking to deploy the next wave of cellulosic ethanol facilities have put U.S. investment on hold because the EPA is proposing to dramatically change how the Renewable Fuel Standard works.

EPA’s proposal doesn’t just cut the amount of renewable fuel in the gasoline supply. It fundamentally changes how the annual targets are calculated. Instead of basing the targets on our industry’s ability to produce and deliver fuel, the proposal would allow the targets to be reduced if the oil industry refuses to make renewable fuels available to the consumer. Oil companies largely control retail fueling infrastructure through a complex maze of contracts with distributors that often restrict the sale of alternatives.

As designed, the Renewable Fuel Standard attracted U.S. investment because it changed this dynamic. If the program moving forward reflects rather than mitigates the oil industry’s unwillingness to market renewable fuel, the policy will cease to be effective and drive our industry overseas.

That’s why just increasing the biofuels volumes this year or next will not solve the problem. The solution must preserve the original structure of the program, incentivizing oil companies to provide fuel choice to the American consumer and support the retail infrastructure to sell more renewable fuel.

You have always been a strong champion of advanced biofuels and we know it is not your intent to undercut investment. It’s not too late to get the final rule right, so together we can make the United States the leader in producing the cleanest fuels in the world.

Fuels America News & Stories

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Our Letter to President Obama

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Ruling on Nuclear Waste Storage Could Create a "Catastrophic Risk"

by JaninaBeauchamp Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Strict safety controls sought by environmental groups for the storage of radioactive waste at dozens of nuclear power plants may fall to the wayside under a rule that’s expected be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next week. According to a congressional source who does not wish to be identified, the NRC is rushing to vote on the rule before the September retirement of Commissioner William Magwood, an ally of the nuclear power industry.

The rule would establish that the environmental risks of storing spent fuel in pools of water at reactor sites for extended periods are negligible and for the most part don’t need to be studied as part of the licensing requirements for nuclear power plants. But critics of the rule say that the NRC is blatantly ignoring its own research, which shows that the practice could lead to serious disasters: “You will have all the waste sitting, basically, in a giant swimming pool,” the source says, “and the potential of the swimming pool draining or being breached by an accident or an attack or a power loss that causes the water to boil off—all of those things would have impacts that the NRC’s own analysis says would equal that of a meltdown of the reactor core.”

Existing nuclear plants are designed to store spent fuel for no more than a few years but have accumulated large stockpiles of it due to repeated delays in plans to build a permanent repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. In 2010, the Obama administration canceled the $15 billion Yucca project, raising the distinct possibility that a single geologic waste storage site may never be built. In 2012, the National Resources Defense Council successfully sued to force the NRC to stop licensing nuclear reactors until the commission conducted an environmental impact study on the long-term risks posed by on-site waste—including the possibility that those temporary storage sites will become permanent. The completed study, along with the new rule, is expected to be approved by the NRC on Tuesday, over the strong objections of environmental groups.

The NRC rule would pave the way for nuclear waste to be stored in open cooling pools at reactor sites for up to 120 years—and up to 60 years after a reactor is decommissioned. Environmental groups say that’s way too long. “The pools are a catastrophic risk,” says Kevin Kamps, the radioactive-waste watchdog for a group called Beyond Nuclear. Many pools, designed to store the highly radioactive rods for no more than five years, are holding up to four times as many as intended. Packing so many rods into the pools dramatically increases the risk of a fire should a leak cause the cooling water to drain. A 2003 NRC study found that a pool fire could contaminate 9,400 acres and displace 4 million Americans from their homes for years.

The NRC’s assumption that operators will guard and maintain their waste for decades after their plants are decommissioned is laughable to many enviros. In comments submitted to the NRC last December, the NRDC pointed to “the sad history” of managing hazardous waste in America, which often involves commercial operations going bankrupt and saddling taxpayers with the cleanup.

Even at operable nuclear plants, about a dozen waste storage pools are known to be leaking, including one at New York’s Indian Point reactor, which is discharging radioactive water into the Hudson River. To minimize the risk of disaster, environmental groups want the industry to move its waste into thick concrete-and-steel dry casks at a cost of roughly $7 billion. But in a 4-1 vote earlier this year, the NRC ruled that this wouldn’t be cost-effective.

NRC spokesman David McIntyre denied that the commission is rushing to vote on the waste rule before the retirement of Commissioner Magwood, who joined the commission in 2010. Earlier this year, Magwood said he would accept a job as director general of the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency, an association of governments that sponsor, and in some cases own, American companies licensed to operate nuclear power plants. In a letter to the White House last month, the Project on Government Oversight complained that Magwood’s failure to step down from the NRC after accepting the NEA job represented a “glaring conflict of interest.”

In a response circulated by the NRC, Magwood claims that the NEA “is primarily a research and policy agency” and that his future job doesn’t affect his impartiality.

Yesterday, 34 environmental groups called on the NRC to delay its vote until Magwood steps down. His retirement comes amid a broader shakeup of the NRC panel: Commissioner George Apostolakis’ term ended last month and was not renewed by the White House. The two vacancies on the five-member commission will be filled by Jeffrey Baran, an aide to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and former NRC general counsel Stephen Burns.

Environmental groups hope the new commission will break with its industry-friendly past. “The industry crawls all over that place in terms of lobbying,” Kamps told me. “They own that place.”

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Ruling on Nuclear Waste Storage Could Create a "Catastrophic Risk"

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Barack Obama Loathes Congress as Much as You Do

by YTVBrianna Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ezra Klein responds to a New York Times article about President Obama’s chilly relationship with his fellow Democrats:

Obama does see socializing with Hill Democrats as a chore. But there’s a lot that Obama sees as a chore and commits to anyway. The presidency, for all its power, is full of drudgery; there are ambassadors to swear in and fundraisers to attend and endless briefings on issues that the briefers don’t even really care about. The reason Obama doesn’t put more effort into stroking congressional Democrats is he sees it as a useless chore.

The Times article…never names a bill that didn’t pass or a nominee who wasn’t confirmed because Obama’s doesn’t spend more time on the golf course with members of Congress. The closest it comes is…not very close. “In interviews, nearly two dozen Democratic lawmakers and senior congressional aides suggested that Mr. Obama’s approach has left him with few loyalists to effectively manage the issues erupting abroad and at home and could imperil his efforts to leave a legacy in his final stretch in office.”

This is ridiculous. There are no issues erupting at home or abroad where the problem is that House or Senate Democrats won’t vote with the president. There’s no legislation of importance to President Obama’s legacy that would pass if only House Democrats had spent more time at the White House. I’ve listened to a lot of Democratic members of Congress complain about Obama’s poor relationships on the Hill. Each time, my follow-up question is the same: “what would have passed if Obama had better relationships on the Hill?” Each time, the answer is the same: a shake of the head, and then, “nothing.”

I’d probably give a little more credit to schmoozing than this. But only a very little. At the margins, there are probably times when having a good relationship with a committee chair will speed up action or provide a valuable extra vote or two on a bill or a nominee. And Obama has the perfect vehicle for doing this regularly since he loves to play golf. But for the most part Klein is right. There’s very little evidence that congressional schmoozing has more than a tiny effect on things. Members of Congress vote the way they want or need to vote, and if they respond to anyone, it’s to party leaders, interest groups, and fellow ideologues. In days gone by, presidents could coerce votes by working to withhold money from a district, or by agreeing to name a crony as the local postmaster, but those days are long gone. There’s really very little leverage that presidents have over members of Congress these days, regardless of party.

Obama is an odd duck. It’s not just that he doesn’t schmooze. As near as I can tell, he has a barely concealed contempt for Congress. He doesn’t really enjoy playing the political game, and not just because it’s gotten so rancid in recent years. Even if Republicans were acting like a normal political party these days, I still don’t think he’d enjoy it much. And yet, he spent years campaigning for the top political job in the United States. It’s a little bit of a mystery, frankly.

Source – 

Barack Obama Loathes Congress as Much as You Do

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Senator Jim Jeffords Died Today. Watch the Moving Speech He Gave Defecting From the GOP.

by LillianCoppin Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Former Senator James Jeffords, who represented Vermont in Washington for 32 years, died Monday at the age of 80. He made history when, five months after George W. Bush was inaugurated with a deadlocked Senate in 2001, he left the GOP to become an independent and caucus with the Democrats, thereby handing Dems control of the upper chamber. He did it because “more and more” he found he could not “support the president’s agenda.” The GOP was no longer the party he grew up in. “Given the changing nature of the national party, it has become a struggle for our leaders to deal with me and for me to deal with them.”

This was before the tea party, before Guantanamo, before Abu Ghraib, before so much of what we now think of when we think of Republican extremism.

Here is the speech he gave announcing his defection, on May 24, 2001. It’s a reminder that the GOP didn’t just up and start losing its marbles after Obama’s election. It had been dropping them one by one for years.

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Senator Jim Jeffords Died Today. Watch the Moving Speech He Gave Defecting From the GOP.

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Watch President Obama Deliver Remarks About the Violence In Ferguson, Missouri

by GeorgiannaChewi Posted on August 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Obama just delivered remarks on the deteriorating situation in Ferguson, Missouri, where Wednesday night St. Louis law enforcement officials fired tear gas on peaceful demonstrators protesting the killing of Michael Brown.

Here are his remarks, transcript courtesy of the Washington Post:

I want to address something that’s been in the news over the last couple of days, and that’s the last situation in Ferguson, Missouri. I know that many Americans have been deeply disturbed by the images we’ve seen in the heartland of our country as police have clashed with people protesting, today I’d like us all to take a step back and think about how we’re going to be moving forward.

This morning, I received a thorough update on the situation from Attorney General Eric Holder, who’s been following and been in communication with his team. I’ve already tasked the Department of Justice and the FBI to independently investigate the death of Michael Brown, along with local officials on the ground. The Department of Justice is also consulting with local authorities about ways that they can maintain public safety without restricting the right of peaceful protest and while avoiding unnecessary escalation. I made clear to the attorney general that we should do what is necessary to help determine exactly what happened and to see that justice is done.

I also just spoke with Governor Jay Nixon of Missouri. I expressed my concern over the violent turn that events have taken on the ground, and underscored that now’s the time for all of us to reflect on what’s happened and to find a way to come together going forward. He is going to be traveling to Ferguson. He is a good man and a fine governor, and I’m confident that working together, he’s going to be able to communicate his desire to make sure that justice is done and his desire to make sure that public safety is maintained in an appropriate way.

Of course, it’s important to remember how this started. We lost a young man, Michael Brown, in heartbreaking and tragic circumstances. He was 18 years old, and his family will never hold Michael in their arms again. And when something like this happens, the local authorities, including the police, have a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities. There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting. There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.

Put simply, we all need to hold ourselves to a high standard, particularly those of us in positions of authority. I know that emotions are raw right now in Ferguson and there are certainly passionate differences about what has happened. There are going to be different accounts of how this tragedy occurred. There are going to be differences in terms of what needs to happen going forward. That’s part of our democracy. But let’s remember that we’re all part of one American family. We are united in common values, and that includes belief in equality under the law, basic respect for public order and the right to peaceful public protest, a reverence for the dignity of every single man, woman and child among us, and the need for accountability when it comes to our government.

So now is the time for healing. Now is the time for peace and calm on the streets of Ferguson. Now is the time for an open and transparent process to see that justice is done. And I’ve asked that the attorney general and the U.S. attorney on the scene continue to work with local officials to move that process forward. They will be reporting to me in the coming days about what’s being done to make sure that happens.

From:  

Watch President Obama Deliver Remarks About the Violence In Ferguson, Missouri

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