Tag Archives: obama

Here’s How Obama Wants to Spend $3.7 Billion on the Child Migrant Crisis

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, President Obama asked Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency supplemental appropriations to address the rapidly growing number of unaccompanied Central American children attempting to enter the United States. The Border Patrol apprehended 38,833 unaccompanied kids in fiscal year 2013, and it already has caught more than 52,000 in fiscal 2014.

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


4 Reasons Why Border Agents Shouldn’t Get to Decide Whether Child Migrants Can Stay in the US

The requested appropriations include:

$1.8 billion to the HHS’s Administration for Children and Families: to provide more stable, cost-effective arrangements and medical care for unaccompanied children.
$1.1 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): for the detention, prosecution, and removal of undocumented families, as well as transportation costs for unaccompanied children.
$432 million to Customs and Border Protection: for operational costs, an expanded Border Enforcement Security Task Force, and increased air surveillance in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
$295 million to the State Department’s (and other international programs’) Economic Support Fund: for the repatriation and reintegration of deported migrants, and to address the root causes of migration in Central America.
$62 million to the Department of Justice: for additional immigration judges and legal representation for the children.

Notably, Obama’s letter to House Speaker John Boehner did not include a request to alter the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2008. That law requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to turn over unaccompanied children from countries other than Canada and Mexico to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which temporarily houses them in shelters while it locates US-based family members or sponsors. (The kids are in removal proceedings throughout.)

Here’s the full letter:

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Emergency Supplemental Request to Congress (PDF)

Emergency Supplemental Request to Congress (Text)

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Here’s How Obama Wants to Spend $3.7 Billion on the Child Migrant Crisis

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Finally, Someone With the Guts to Call for Obama’s Impeachment

Mother Jones

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I see that Sarah Palin is apparently starved for attention again. Here’s her latest:

President Obama’s rewarding of lawlessness, including his own, is the foundational problem here. It’s not going to get better, and in fact irreparable harm can be done in this lame-duck term as he continues to make up his own laws as he goes along, and, mark my words, will next meddle in the U.S. Court System with appointments that will forever change the basic interpretation of our Constitution’s role in protecting our rights.

It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.

The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.

Quite right. Minors are swarming our borders because American exceptionalism is at risk thanks to Obama’s failure to help the Ukrainians which means our enemies no longer fear us and the dollar is being debased. Or was it because he failed to arm the Syrian rebels? I forget. Something to do with Putin, though. And the Fed. Plus, um, recess appointments and one-year extensions to TyrannyCare mandates. And Benghazi.

Whatever. Impeach Obama! I sure hope every Republican in the country is asked to weigh in on this.

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Finally, Someone With the Guts to Call for Obama’s Impeachment

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Joe Biden’s World Cup Gift to Brazil: A Chilling Torture Memo

Mother Jones

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When Vice President Joe Biden visited Brazil for the start of the World Cup soccer tournament last month, he brought along something of an odd gift for President Dilma Rousseff: a collection of State Department cables and reports that included a chilling account of state-sponsored torture. The documents were from 1967 to 1977 and covered assorted human rights abuses conducted by the military dictatorship then ruling Brazil—a government that was supported by the Nixon administration and its foreign policy poobah Henry Kissinger.

Brazil has been examining its dark past through the work of the Brazilian National Truth Commission, and the 43 documents turned over by Biden are meant to help the commission uncover the dirty deeds of the recent past. As the National Security Archive notes, these records report on “secret torture detention centers in Sao Paulo, the military’s counter-subversion operations, and Brazil’s hostile reaction in 1977 to the first State Department human rights report on abuses.”

And one document stands out: a 1973 cable from the US embassy in Brazil to State Department headquarters titled, “Widespread Arrests and Psychophysical Interrogation of Suspected Subversives.” The report noted that arrests by military forces of regime critics—mostly university students—had recently increased, and that “the detainees are being subjected to an intensive psychophysical system of duress designed to extract information without doing visible, lasting harm to the body.” The cable reported that Brazilians suspected of being “hardened terrorists…are still being submitted to the older methods of physical violence”—such as the use of electrical shock devices and being tied to and hung from a suspended bar—”which sometimes cause death.” But the main point of the cable was that the Brazilian military had developed “a newer, more sophisticated and elaborate psychophysical duress system…to intimidate and terrify the suspect.”

The cable then detailed, in a rather clinical fashion, this process:

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State Department Report on Brazilian Interrogation Abuses (PDF)

State Department Report on Brazilian Interrogation Abuses (Text)

The cable noted that detainees with “good connections” inside and outside the government were usually spared this torture.

This document is a rare step-by-step description of government-backed torture. Yet it contained no criticism of the regime or the practice. It reported that public reaction to a recent wave of arrests “has been mild thus far and is likely to continue to be subdued.”

The cable was in sync with the Nixon/Kissinger policy of not getting worked up about torture conducted by military regimes Washington favored. (See Kissinger and Argentina.) And a cable sent to Foggy Bottom a year earlier by William Rountree, then the US ambassador to Brazil, noted that though the US embassy in Brazil had “on appropriate occasion and in appropriate manner” informed the Brazilians that the US government did not condone “excesses in the form practiced in Brazil,” Rountree believed the United States had to make this case without “unduly jeopardizing our relations with this country or causing a counter-productive reaction on the part of the” government of Brazil. In this cable, Rountree said that he strongly supported the State Department’s opposition to legislation then under consideration in Congress that would cut off US funding to Brazil as long as the government engaged in torture.

Rountree explained, “Given Brazilian pride and sensitivity about sovereignty, efforts by any branch of US government or by US political figures to bring pressure on Brazil would not only damage our general relations but, by equating reduction in anti-terror measures with weakness under pressure, could produce opposite of intended result.” In other words, the United States shouldn’t lean too heavily on the torturers of Brazil.

The Brazilian Truth Commission, which has posted the documents Biden handed over, has been at work for two years, and Biden, when he was in Brazil, promised that the Obama administration would mount a broader review of top-secret CIA and Defense Department documents that might be useful to the commission. So the World Cup has given Brazil more than just a soccer tournament; it has highlighted the nation’s effort to come to terms with its recent past of government abuse and violence—and Washington’s own effort to acknowledge its support of that regime.

Original article: 

Joe Biden’s World Cup Gift to Brazil: A Chilling Torture Memo

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New Conservative Meme: Migrant Children Aren’t Children

Mother Jones

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Conservatives have found a new line of attack on the ongoing refugee crisis along the southern border: The children who are migrating en masse from Central America and crowding into detention centers are not children.

“I realize that in Barack Obama’s America we now classify anyone under the age of 26 as a child eligible for their parent’s healthcare insurance,” writes Red State‘s Erick Erickson. “But I’m pretty sure a normal person would not classify these men as children.” He links to this tweet:

Erickson’s analysis is correct—the people in this photo are not children. The way immigration detention works is that children are separated from adults and then sorted by age and gender. This is noted in nearly every single story on the subject. Just because more than 48,000 minors have been detained crossing the border in 2014 doesn’t mean adults have simply stopped coming over.

Lest you think that the administration is inventing this influx of young migrants, here is a photo of migrant children crowded into a single room. I found it on Breitbart:

Big Government

You could also read my colleague Ian Gordon’s wrenching story for the magazine on 17-year-old Adrián’s flight from Guatemala City to the United States.

Link:

New Conservative Meme: Migrant Children Aren’t Children

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Obama Calls for a New Crackdown on Wall Street

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday evening, President Barack Obama called for a new Wall Street crackdown, noting that more than five years after the financial crisis, banks still focus too much on gaining profits through often risky trading, instead of investing in Main Street America.

“More and more of the revenue generated on Wall Street is based on…trading bets, as opposed to investing in companies that actually make something and hire people,” the president said in an interview with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal. He called for “additional steps” to rein in the industry.

Obama’s comments Wednesday represent one of the most pointed critiques he has made of the banking industry since he took office at the height of the financial crisis, and suggest that he may use his final two years in office to pursue further Wall Street reforms.

The president singled out big bonuses as a central problem plaguing the financial system. Banks can still “generate a huge amount of bonuses by making some big trading bets,” he said. “If you make a really bad bet, a lot of times you’ve already banked all your bonuses. You might end up leaving the shop, but in the meantime everybody else is left holding the bag.”

He did not offer specific policy cures, instead alluding to the need to “restructure” how banks work “internally.”

The massive Dodd-Frank financial reform law that Congress passed in 2010 was supposed to keep banks from taking excess risks and prevent another economic collapse. Obama pointed out that much of that law has already gone into effect. Banks now have to keep more funds on hand to guard against an economic downturn or a bad trading bet, he said. The law created a new agency designed to prevent consumers from being duped by mortgage lenders, credit card companies, and student lenders. Last year, Wall Street regulators implemented a much-touted Dodd-Frank measure aimed at limiting the high-risk trading by commercial banks that helped lead to the 2008 economic crash.

But much is left to be done. Wall Street regulators have completed only about half of the banking rules mandated by Dodd-Frank. Scores of these regulations have been watered down by financial industry lobbyists. Congress has made many legislative attempts to weaken Dodd-Frank. Despite efforts to ensure that banks are no longer too-big-to-fail—or so large that their collapse would endanger the entire economic system—the largest banks are bigger than they were during the financial crisis.

Progressives fault the president for part of the lax response to the financial crisis. Under Obama’s Justice Department, for example, no high-level bankers went to jail or faced criminal charges for actions that led to the financial crisis. And liberal critics slam Obama’s economic team for focusing too heavily on bailing out banks after the crisis, and allowing the foreclosure crisis to fester.

It is unclear how Obama will push through additional Wall Street reforms. He has limited oversight of rule-making, and banking legislation is not likely to get through the current sharply divided Congress.

Continued:  

Obama Calls for a New Crackdown on Wall Street

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

Mother Jones

Noam Scheiber has a piece in the current issue of the New Republic about Hillary Clinton’s imminent takeover of the Democratic Party, and today Ezra Klein interviewed him about it. Klein was especially interested in the argument that Obama’s 2008 supporters were so disillusioned by Obama’s failure to change Washington that they’re now eager to support an old-school politico like Hillary. Here’s Scheiber:

Back in 2008, Hillary Clinton made this kind of snide, but in retrospect apt, critique of Obama where she said that Obama thinks he’ll get to Washington and the heavens will part and the Republicans will cooperate, but that just won’t happen. So I asked some of these Obama supporters if she was right. And a lot of these people remembered those comments and being annoyed by them. But they all said she was actually a bit right. We were a bit naive then, they said. People used the word naive a lot in these conversations.

I’m not sure I’ve ever fully fessed up to this, so this is as good a time as any. For years, I really didn’t believe the conservative snark about how Obama supporters all thought he would descend on Washington like a god-king and miraculously turn us into a post-racial, post-partisan, post-political country. Kumbaya! The reason I didn’t believe it was that it never struck me as even remotely plausible. Did Obama give soaring speeches? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to change the way Washington works? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to pass historic legislation in dozens of different areas? Sure, he’s a politician.

It just never occurred to me that anyone took this stuff seriously. It’s a presidential campaign! Of course he’s promising a chicken in every pot. That’s what presidential candidates do. I believed then, and still believe now, that Obama is basically a mainstream Democrat who’s cautious, pragmatic, technocratic, and incremental. In fact, that seemed so obvious to me that I never really credited the idea that anyone could seriously see him any differently.

Well, I guess that was naive on my part. By now, the evidence is clear that millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric. Naturally, then, they’re bitterly disappointed at the real-world Obama. Well, I’m disappointed in some ways too—mostly in the areas of foreign policy and national security—but I continue to think he’s a pretty good president because my expectations were tempered to begin with.

Nor do I think Hillary would have done any better. Probably worse, I’d say. After all, once he was in office, it’s not as if Obama acted like he believed his campaign-trail rhetoric. He hired a bunch of pretty ordinary staffers and got to work passing pretty ordinary legislation. Is the theory here that Hillary would have figured out some magical points of leverage that Obama didn’t? That she would have done better because Republicans like her more than Obama? Please.

I have pretty mixed feelings about a Hillary Clinton candidacy. On the one hand, I’ve long admired her obviously sincere dedication to public service in the face of abuse that would destroy a weaker person. On the other hand, another Clinton? This is no fault of hers, but I’m not sure I’m any more excited about that than I am about the prospect of another Bush. Maybe it’s time to move on.

Either way, though, I sure hope all those folks who are disappointed by Obama don’t think that Hillary is some sort of silver bullet either. If she runs and wins, she’ll be dealing with exactly the same kind of Republican obstructionism as Obama—and she’ll have just as much trouble getting anything done.

If disappointed Dems really want to change things, they have only one option: figure out a way to take back Congress in 2016. That’s it. Until and unless that happens, George Washington himself wouldn’t be any more effective than Obama has been.

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

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Want More Oversight? Hire More Spox.

Mother Jones

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Via Paul Waldman, USA Today has a quickie analysis of the evolution of committee staff in the House:

Since Republicans took control of the U.S. House in January 2011, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has led a cost-cutting effort that has trimmed staff for House committees by nearly 20%, saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. But the number of committee staff responsible for press and communications work has increased by nearly 15% over the same period, according to House spending records.

….Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said the numbers are “completely unsurprising. We promised responsible oversight of the Obama administration, and effective oversight requires communicating with the American people.

I love that response from Steel. If you had asked me to defend the indefensible here, I would have spent a few minutes starting at the ceiling and drooling before quietly slinking away in shame. But not Steel! He’s a pro. He instantly comes up with something, and apparently manages to say it with a straight face. It’s completely ridiculous, but that doesn’t matter. It kinda sorta makes sense if you don’t actually think about it, and that’s good enough.

Anyway, there you have it. Effective oversight requires sending ever more outraged email bombs to your tea party base about Benghazi/IRS/Solyndra/Fast & Furious/Bergdahl/Syria/etc. That’s oversight, baby. Jeebus.

This article – 

Want More Oversight? Hire More Spox.

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Why the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby Decision Is the New Bush v. Gore

Mother Jones

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On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its decision on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby’s owners had objected to a provision in Obamacare that forced the the craft supply store chain to provide its employees with health insurance that covers birth control or pay a fine. In a 5-4 ruling, the conservative justices on the court said that the government can’t force Hobby Lobby—or any closely held corporation—to pay for birth control and emergency contraception if doing so would offend the religious beliefs of the company’s owners.

Justice Samuel Alito, the George W. Bush appointee who penned the majority opinion, went to great lengths to write a limited decision, stressing that the ruling should only apply to Obamacare’s contraception regulations, and that other employers shouldn’t cite Hobby Lobby to justify opposing other laws. “This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate,” Alito wrote, “and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs. Nor does it provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice.”

As Alito no doubt knows, that’s not how Supreme Court jurisprudence works. The justices often try to limit their decisions to a narrow set of facts. But they’re still setting legal precedent, and their logic is certain to be used in future cases in lower courts—often in unintended ways. There are no take-backsies for Supreme Court decisions.

Continue Reading »

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Why the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby Decision Is the New Bush v. Gore

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Now Wall Street Is Calling for Climate Sanity. Don’t Expect the Right to Listen.

Mother Jones

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Knowing that conservatives will never listen to liberals—or to President Obama—on climate change, many well meaning, science-minded people have sought to identify other messengers who might possibly sway the right.

Accordingly, they’ve tried tapping evangelical Christians, former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents, and celebrity politicians like the moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s an astute, psychologically sound theory (“trusted messengers” and all that) and yet, it never seems to work. Why does it never work?

We’ll get to that, but first, witness the latest attempt, which is aimed at swaying the business community. This weekend on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, two former treasury secretaries, Henry Paulson (a Republican) and Robert Rubin (a Democrat) went on the air to discuss climate change and, in particular, the new “Risky Business” report with which they’re closely affiliated. The report, emerging from a partnership that also includes Michael Bloomberg and the environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, makes the case that climate change will have dire economic costs. On the air, Paulson said point blank that climate inaction entails “radical risk taking.” Rubin added that the risk is “catastrophic.” Watch:

All of this is true and eminently sane. It is also striking to find Paulson, a man who observed economic collapse up close, drawing analogies between how economies go belly up, and how civilizations do. And we should certainly commend CNN’s Zakaria for convening this discussion.

But here’s the problem: Is Paulson, a Wall Street Republican who says he wants a carbon tax, a “trusted messenger” on the right? The truth is that today’s conservatives aren’t the same pro-big business boosters that they used to be. Commenting on the latest industry oriented climate push, American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein remarked that among tea party conservatives these days, “big business is seen as a part of the problem more than it is a part of the solution. Companies just don’t have the clout that they used to have.”

Remember, Wall Street has never been in favor of another key tea party maneuver: Debt ceiling brinksmanship, which seasoned economic stewards of yesteryear tend to abhor. So why would the tea party listen to to big business on climate?

Which brings us back to the why “it never works” question. Why do trusted messengers never seem to reach the right on climate change? The answer is that the right is not its old self, and once trusted messengers aren’t trusted any longer.

If this was the United States of 30 years ago, we’d already have a bipartisan consensus on climate change.

Read this article:

Now Wall Street Is Calling for Climate Sanity. Don’t Expect the Right to Listen.

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Seriously, What Accounts for the Right-Wing Obsession With Military Tribunals?

Mother Jones

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From the Guardian today:

Mike Rogers, the chair of the House of Representatives intelligence committee, told CNN Khattala had been “compliant but not cooperative” through 10 days of interrogation on a navy ship before being transferred to Washington for a civilian trial. Rogers said Khattala should be classified as an enemy combatant and held at Guantánamo Bay.

….“We have a military tribunal process and I do believe in it. We’ve used it in the past, in World War II and subsequent to that. We have a process where they get a trial and their guilt or innocence is established.

This has become such a knee-jerk reaction from right-wing politicos that I almost don’t even notice it anymore. But seriously, what is it that accounts for the conservative obsession with military tribunals? Abu Khattala would get a taxpayer-paid defense attorney either way. He’ll be held securely either way. He’s got about the same chance of being convicted either way. And if he is convicted, he’ll be shipped off to an appropriately grim prison cell either way.

So what’s the deal? Is this really just code for we should ship him to Gitmo and interrogate him in, um, an enhanced way? Is it code for Obama is doing this so we’re against it? Or is there something more to it? There’s a mountain of evidence suggesting that civilian courts are more effective at prosecuting terrorism than military tribunals, so that’s not it. Unless torture and abusive treatment are their goals, it’s a mystery why folks like Rogers keep banging away endlessly on their infatuation with military tribunals.

Excerpt from: 

Seriously, What Accounts for the Right-Wing Obsession With Military Tribunals?

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