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That Time When Donald Trump Said Jeb Bush Would Make a Great President

by MarylouXAC Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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In recent days, it seems nothing makes Donald Trump happier than assailing Jeb Bush. The current GOP front-runner gleefully slams the former front-runner almost any chance he gets, and in the past week, with Bush finally trying to attack Trump with some verve, Trump has had plenty of opportunities to one-up Bush with counterattacks. On Saturday, Bush said, “I gotta get this off my chest: Donald Trump is a jerk.” Naturally, Trump fired back the next day on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd:

Jeb is a weak and ineffective person. He’s also a low-energy person, which I’ve said before. But he’s a weak and ineffective person. Jeb, if he were president, it would just be more of the same, it would be just—he’s got money from all of the lobbyists and all of the special interests that run him like a puppet. He’s got 2 percent in the polls; I have 41 percent in the latest poll. He has 2 percent. He’s going to be off the stage soon. He’s an embarrassment to the Bush family and, in fact, he doesn’t even want to use the Bush name, which is interesting. Jeb is an embarrassment to himself and to his family and the Republican Party—they’re not even listening to Jeb. Jeb is saying that—by the way, Chuck, Jeb is only saying that to try and get a little mojo going, but in the meantime, I went up 11 points in the new Fox poll. I went up 11 points after the debate, and he went down 2.

This was just more of Trump’s dismissive and taunting schoolyard bully approach to dealing with Bush. Two days earlier, Trump tweeted out this assessment of Bush: “The last thing our country needs is another BUSH! Dumb as a rock!”

But there once was a time when Trump held Jeb Bush in high regard, hailed him as a leader the country needed, and declared he would make a great president.

In 2000, Trump was pondering a possible presidential run as the Reform Party nominee. (The Reform Party was the remnants of Ross Perot’s independent presidential bid of 1992.) And he wrote a book, The America We Deserve, in which he pontificated on a host of political and policy matters. (He now claims that in this book he predicted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack, but that’s not true.) Toward the end of the book, Trump shared his thoughts about prominent politicians. Trump noted that, should he decide to run for president, he would, of course, offer the best approach “available in the presidential marketplace,” and that he could bring to the presidency “a new spirit, a great spirit that we haven’t had in this country for a long time.” Still, Trump did point out that there were a few politicians of whom he thought highly. And at the top of this list was Bush.

Trump wrote:

Florida Governor Jeb Bush is a good man. I’ve held fundraisers for him. He’s exactly the kind of political leader this country needs now and will very much need in the future. He, too, knows how to hang in there. His first shot at Florida’s governorship didn’t work out, but he didn’t give up. He was campaigning the day after his loss. He won the next race in a landslide. He’s bright, tough, and principled. I like the Bush family very much. I believe we could get another president from the Bushes. He may be the one.

Of the pols Trump cited in the book, Jeb Bush was the only one who Trump pronounced presidential material. High praise, indeed, given that Trump was eyeing the White House himself at the time.

Other prominent Americans Trump fancied included Oprah Winfrey (“enormously successful in an incredibly competitive field”) and then-Sen. Bob Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat (“a first-rate public figure”). Torricelli, though, pulled out of his reelection campaign in 2002 after media reports revealed he had accepted illegal campaign contributions from a businessman linked to North Korea. In the book, Trump—who now wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States—proclaimed his admiration for Muhammad Ali (“on the spiritual level, I believe, he still floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee”). He praised then-Gov. George Pataki, a New York Republican, as the “most underrated guy in American politics.” Trump said he was looking for Pataki to end up on the Republican national ticket in 2000 or 2004. He cited Al Gore for being a man of “formidable intellect” and also “vastly underrated.” (Yet in a 2010 speech, Trump said the Nobel Prize committee should take back the prize it awarded Gore in 2007 for raising awareness of human-induced climate change, claiming that “China, Japan and India are laughing at America’s stupidity.”)

And Trump had positive things to say about the Clintons. He called Hillary “definitely smart and resilient.” He added, “She was very nice to my sons, Donny and Eric, when she visited New York.” As for Bill, he noted that he “could have gone down as a very good president. Instead he goes down as a guy they tried to impeach.” Trump continued:

Now he can’t even get into a golf club in Westchester. But he can join my golf club—I’d be proud to have him. I’m developing a spectacular new country club five minutes from his new home.

And speaking of his new home, in all candor, he really overpaid. He really got ripped off on the house. If I had represented him in buying the house, I could have saved them about $600,000.

Nowadays, it’s not likely that he wants to help the Clintons.

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That Time When Donald Trump Said Jeb Bush Would Make a Great President

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Why Were Last Night’s Debaters Cut Off When They Actually Started to Debate?

by ErnestiZff Posted on December 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rebecca Traister, along with practically everyone on the left, is dumbfounded that the Democratic National Committee has gone out of its way to reduce viewership for its debates. The first two were both held on Saturdays, and yesterday’s debate was on the Saturday before Christmas. Do they really want to lower the profile of the party that badly? It’s a wonder anyone tuned in at all. But there’s more:

The DNC’s poor choices pale in comparison to the choices of Saturday night’s ABC News moderators, the usually terrific Raddatz and her colleague, World News anchor Muir. They did fine for the first hour, but as the candidates began to actually debate each other in compelling and important ways, Muir especially began to talk over them in an effort to cut them off and adhere to the rules. That precision reffing may be necessary when it comes to shutting down an offensive monologue from Donald Trump, or halting a candidate’s whine about not getting enough time. But when, as on Saturday, the top contenders for the nomination are engaging each other seriously about tax policy, drowning them out and preventing the audience from hearing what they have to say doesn’t do anyone any favors.

For what it’s worth, Twitter opinion on Martha Raddatz shifted so fast it almost gave me a neck sprain last night. At first everyone thought she was great. By the second hour, she was the worst moderator ever. Mostly, I think, this was because she spent too much time interrupting the candidates when she didn’t happen to like their answers. This was especially annoying since, for the most part, they didn’t really dodge or tap dance very much. They mostly provided substantive answers.

As for the “precision reffing” that cut off a potentially interesting argument, I suspect that Martin O’Malley is the person to blame here. O’Malley may be a vanity candidate at this point, but he’s still a candidate, and that means he’s supposed to get equal time in the debates. If the moderators allow Sanders and Clinton to get into long arguments, it takes away from O’Malley’s time and there’s really no way to entirely make that up. So the moderators apply the rules strictly and demand that Sanders and Clinton shut up and allow them to ask O’Malley a question.

This is one among many reasons that O’Malley needs to grow up and get out of the race. He’s polling at 3 percent in a 3-person race, and he’s doing himself no favors by stubbornly staying in. It makes him look like a sore loser, not a serious politician.

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Why Were Last Night’s Debaters Cut Off When They Actually Started to Debate?

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Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan Will…Um…Oh, Who Cares, Really?

by LawrencP32 Posted on December 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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In 2012 the Tax Policy Center scored most of the Republican tax plans, but this year they’ve sat on the sidelines. I suppose this is partly because the plans generally don’t have enough detail to be seriously evaluated, and partly because they got tired of wasting time on tax plans that are meant more as affinity statements than as actual financial documents. I mean, what’s the point of a bunch of guys with PhDs playing the role of pro wrestling referee in a tired game of “can you top this?”

For some reason, though, they’ve gone ahead and evaluated Jeb Bush’s tax plan. Their results are the usual ones from the party of fiscal prudence: Bush’s plan would increase the national debt from 78 percent of GDP to 106 percent within ten years; it would increase the federal deficit by about a trillion dollars; and it would benefit the rich far more than the poor. In other words, it’s the same as every other Republican tax plan. A few of the details change a bit from candidate to candidate, as do the specific numbers, but that’s about all

So does this matter? I go back and forth on this. Dylan Matthews says it does because the other campaigns haven’t provided enough detail for TPC to complete an analysis of their plans:

In the worst case, in which TPC never gets the details it needs for Rubio and Trump’s plans (or Ted Cruz’s very different plan), the Bush analysis becomes hugely valuable. It gives us a glimpse of what Rubio and Trump’s TPC scores would look like. It indicates that the plans are likely to be very, very expensive, with benefits concentrated at the top.

I don’t buy this. Everyone who’s not a paid shill for the Republican Party already knows it. The only difference is that reporters now have a well-respected analysis they can use to badger the Bush campaign, but they don’t have one for the others. So Bush will get more heat and the others will benefit from being smart enough not to cooperate with TPC.

Beyond that, does anyone care about these plans anymore? They’ve gotten so ridiculous that it’s hard to believe that even the candidates still take them seriously, let alone anyone else. They’re basically just a highly ritualized way of indicating that candidates subscribe to the approved catechism. The message is “I hate taxes, especially on the wealthy,” and the details are unimportant. As long as your tax cut is sufficiently large, you’re in.

TPC says they’d like to evaluate other tax plans, but I’d suggest they not bother. It’s a kabuki show long past its prime, and they must have better things to spend their time on.

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Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan Will…Um…Oh, Who Cares, Really?

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The Craziest Thing About This Supreme Court Case Isn’t That One Plaintiff Believes Unicorns Are Real

by SharronMacartney Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will examine the bedrock principle of “one person, one vote” in a major case that could yield the Republican Party a critical advantage in future elections. In Evenwel v. Abbott, the court is being asked to change how states draw legislative districts in a way that would boost the electoral power of white, rural voters, who lean Republican, at the expense of Latinos and African Americans, who tend to vote Democratic. The plaintiffs behind this high-stakes legal challenge are an unusual pair. One is a Texas tea party activist who has promoted a conspiratorial film suggesting President Barack Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a supposed propagandist for the Communist Party. The other is a security guard and religious fundamentalist who believes the Earth doesn’t revolve around the sun and that unicorns were real.

Texas residents Sue Evenwel and Ed Pfenninger want the court to create a uniform national standard for drawing legislative districts based on the total number of eligible voters in them, as opposed to the total number of people, which is the standard that Texas and many other states use now. Such a change would effectively diminish the political clout of urban areas, which have large populations of people who can’t vote, such as felons, children and noncitizens.

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The Craziest Thing About This Supreme Court Case Isn’t That One Plaintiff Believes Unicorns Are Real

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Donald Trump’s Destruction Test of the Republican Party Continues Apace

by MelisaBlaubaum Posted on December 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago, like an evil mastermind on 24, Donald Trump declared that if we wanted to fight terrorists we needed to target their families for death. Today he gave a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition and told the crowd, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.” Ha ha. Stupid money-grubbing Jews. As Judd Legum pointed out, this means that Trump has now insulted blacks, refugees, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, and Jews.

I’m now going to double down on my belief that Trump is running the world’s greatest reality show here. I think he got bored one day and came up with an idea that tickled him: “I wonder just how deranged you can get and still retain the support of the tea party wingnuts?” So he made a $1 bet with some of his Democratic friends and performed a test run in 2012 with his maniacal birther stuff. But all that did was show the depth of his challenge. He’d have to do a lot more than that in 2016. He started off slow with wild claims about immigrant Mexican rapists, knowing it would draw in the rubes. Then he laughably claimed that he’d get Mexico to pay for a border wall. Nothing happened. He insulted John McCain for being a POW. Nothing happened. He started telling obvious lies. Nothing. He lied on national TV and was called on it a few minutes later. Nothing. He all but admitted that he knows diddly about the Bible. Nothing. He called evangelical darling Ben Carson a nutcase liar. Nothing. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in Jersey City celebrated 9/11. Nothing. He mocked a disabled reporter in front of the cameras. Nothing. He suggested taking out terrorist families. Nothing. He appeared on the radio show of a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Nothing. Now he’s insulted an audience of conservative Jews.

Trump is probably frustrated. He’s basically dialed it up to 11 already, and the crowds are still swooning. What does he have to do? Tell a story about how he was abducted by aliens back in the 90s? Promise to nuke Tehran if he’s elected president? Suggest the world would be a better place if we’d never invented any HIV treatments?

Even Trump must be scratching his head wondering what to do next. There’s gotta be something that finally goes too far. Right?

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Donald Trump’s Destruction Test of the Republican Party Continues Apace

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Why Did Democrats Lose the White South?

by EmilioBrodzky Posted on November 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Modern conservatives are oddly fond of pointing out that it was Democrats who were the party of racism and racists until half a century ago. There’s always an implied “Aha!” whenever a conservative mentions this, as though they think it’s some little-known quirk of history that Democrats try to keep hidden because it’s so embarrassing.

It’s not, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and Republicans were the face of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Because of this, the South became solidly Democratic and stayed that way until World War II. But in the 1940s, southerners gradually began defecting to the Republican Party, and then began defecting en masse during the fight over the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But wait: the 1940s? If Southern whites began defecting to the GOP that early, racism couldn’t have been their motivation. Aha!

But it was. The Civil Rights movement didn’t spring out of nothing in 1964, after all. Eleanor Roosevelt was a tireless champion of civil rights, and famously resigned from the DAR when they refused to allow singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall in 1939. FDR was far more constrained by his need for Southern votes in Congress—and it showed in most New Deal programs—but the WPA gave blacks a fair shake and Harold Ickes poured a lot of money into black schools and hospitals in the South. In 1941 FDR signed a nondiscrimination order for the national defense industry—the first of its kind—and he generally provided African-Americans with more visibility in his administration than they had ever enjoyed before. After decades of getting little back from Republicans despite their loyal support, this was enough to make blacks a key part of the New Deal Coalition and turn them into an increasingly solid voting bloc for the Democratic Party.

From a Southern white perspective, this made the Democratic Party a less welcoming home, and it continued to get less welcoming in the two decades that followed. Harry Truman integrated the military in 1948, and Hubert Humphrey famously delivered a stemwinding civil rights speech at the Democratic convention that year. LBJ was instrumental in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, while Republican Dwight Eisenhower was widely viewed—rightly or wrongly—as unsympathetic to civil rights during the 1950s.

In other words, Southern whites who wanted to keep Jim Crow intact had plenty of reasons to steadily desert the Democratic Party and join the GOP starting around World War II. By the early 60s they were primed and ready to begin a massive exodus from the increasingly black-friendly Democratic Party, and exit they did. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, refused to support the Civil Rights Act that year, and influential conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley were decidedly unfriendly toward black equality. This made the Republican Party more and more appealing to Southern white racists, and by 1968 Richard Nixon decided to explicitly reach out to them with a campaign based on states’ rights and “law and order.” Over the next two decades, the Democratic Party became ever less tolerant of racist sentiment and the exodus continued. By 1994, when Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich won a landslide victory in the midterm elections, the transition of the white South from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican was basically complete.

This history is what makes the conservative habit of pointing out that Democrats were the original racists so peculiar. It’s true, but it makes the transformation of the party even more admirable. Losing the South was a huge electoral risk, but Democrats took that risk anyway. That made it far more meaningful and courageous than if there had been no price to pay.

Despite all this, conservatives still like to argue that the surge in Southern white support for the Republican Party was driven not by racism, but by other factors: economic growth; migration from other regions; and by the evolution of Democratic views on redistribution, free speech, abortion, and other issues. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find quantitative data that can settle this dispute.

But a couple of researchers recently found some: Gallup poll data starting in the late 50s that asks if you’d be willing to vote for a qualified presidential candidate who happened to be black. Respondents who answered no were coded (quite reasonably) as racially conservative. They then looked at differences between the Democratic Party ID of Southern whites who were and weren’t racially conservative. Here’s their conclusion:

We find that except for issues involving racial integration and discrimination, whites in the South and elsewhere have indistinguishable preferences on both domestic and foreign policy in the 1950s….We find no evidence that white Southerners who have negative views of women, Catholics or Jews differentially leave the Democratic party in 1963; the exodus is specific to those who are racially conservative. Finally, we find no role for Southern economic development in explaining dealignment.

The charts on the right show one specific data point: JFK’s televised civil rights speech of June 11, 1963. Among Southern whites, approval of JFK plummets right at that moment (top chart). And in the Gallup polls, racially conservative Southern whites leave the party in droves (bottom chart). This is not a steady decline. It’s a sharp, sudden exodus at a specific moment in time.

So: why did Democrats lose the white South? For the reason common sense and all the evidence suggests: because the party became too liberal on civil rights, and racist white Southerners didn’t like it. Southern white flight from the party began in the 1940s, took a sharp dive in the early 60s, and continued to decline for several decades after as Democrats became ever more committed to black equality. This might not be the only reason for Southern realignment, but it’s surely the most important by a long stretch.

For more on both this study and the Southern Strategy of the Nixon era, Wonkblog’s Max Ehrenfreund has you covered.

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Why Did Democrats Lose the White South?

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Jeb Bush Has Missed a Chance to Revitalize His Campaign

by MichealGill Posted on November 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m just noodling around here, but I wonder if Jeb Bush has blown a chance over the past few days. See, I figure his only hope of winning is to let everyone else fight it out for a share of tea party vote while he gets the lion’s share of the other half of the Republican Party. If he’s the one guy who appeals to moderate Republicans, he can win.

Now, generally speaking, Jeb has been more moderate than the rest of the field in response to the Paris attacks. But should he have gone further? It wouldn’t have been hard. Make a real case for taking in refugees. Propose a serious, conservative plan for dealing with ISIS instead of resorting to jingoism and shibboleths. Criticize the other candidates for fearmongering. Maybe even say that he agrees with President Obama that it’s long past time for Congress to act on an authorization for military force against ISIS.

A serious, measured approach like this from a Republican candidate would have been so different, so unexpected, that it could have gotten him some real attention. The press would have swooned. Moderate conservatives would have noticed. Bush would have stood out from the field for the first time. And it would have played to his strengths instead of forcing him into a Trumpesque mold that he’s obviously uncomfortable with.

And as an added bonus, it would have been the right thing to do. What’s not to like?

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Jeb Bush Has Missed a Chance to Revitalize His Campaign

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Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Call Burma a Democracy Just Yet

by hongNgocBaoTram Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama and other world leaders are sending their congratulations to Burma, whose biggest pro-democracy party, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory in a historic general election—the first time in nearly half a century that citizens had a hand in picking their rulers. Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, clinched enough seats in the national parliament to form the next government and choose the next president. It’s a moment for celebration, but the fight for democracy isn’t over yet. Here are three challenges Suu Kyi’s party now faces:

Forming a government: In 1990, the last time Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a general election, the results were annulled by the then-ruling military dictatorship, which subsequently threw many of the party’s candidates in prison. Fortunately, the dictatorship ended four years ago, and leaders in Burma’s current government—dominated by former military generals—have congratulated Suu Kyi on her win this week and pledged to respect the results of the vote.

But the new parliament will not sit until early next year, and the new president likely won’t be inaugurated until March. That’s a lot of time for something to go wrong. “Nowhere else in the world is there such a gap between the end of the election and the forming of the new administration, and certainly it’s something about which we should all be concerned,” Suu Kyi told reporters last week at her lakeside residence in Rangoon.

Picking a president: Suu Kyi is Burma’s most popular politician, but she can’t become president. Before the dictatorship ended, the country’s military leaders wrote a constitution with a clause that makes Suu Kyi ineligible for the job because her late husband was British and her two sons hold foreign citizenship. Suu Kyi has vowed to get around this constitutional ban. Last week, she told reporters that she would lead the government in a position “above the president.” This week, she elaborated in an interview that the NLD would pick a president with “no authority” who would “act in accordance with the positions of the party.”

Dealing with the military: The NLD won a majority of contested parliamentary seats, but not all parliamentary seats were up for grabs. In fact, thanks to the constitution, 25 percent of seats are reserved for unelected military representatives who hold veto power over constitutional amendments and have no interest in allowing Suu Kyi to become president. Asked about the military bloc in parliament during a press conference last week, Suu Kyi replied, “I don’t believe in unbreakable blocks, especially human ones.”

The constitution also gives the military control over the defense, border affairs, and home affairs ministries. And in a state of emergency, it allows a special military-led body to assume sweeping state powers. What’s more, the military continues to wage civil wars against ethnic minority groups in the countryside, and Suu Kyi will likely have little control to end these conflicts. “Burma will get democracy,” Aung Thein, a member of the NLD’s campaign committee, told me. “But we will have to work for many years.”

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Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Call Burma a Democracy Just Yet

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The World Will Be Watching Burma’s Election This Weekend. Here’s What You Should Know.

by AshleyWem Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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The people of Burma will head to the polls on Sunday in the Southeast Asian country’s first general election since a brutal military dictatorship stepped down from power four years ago. Here’s what you should know about Burma’s political situation and why the world is tuning in this weekend to see what happens:

Where is Burma? Burma—or Myanmar, as it’s also known—is a Buddhist-majority country almost the size of Texas, nestled between China and India. The country of 51 million people was once seen as the rice bowl of Southeast Asia, but during nearly half a century of dictatorship it became the region’s poorest country. Successive military regimes waged more than a dozen bloody wars against ethnic minorities—including the Karen people along the border with Thailand, as reported by Mother Jones‘ Mac McClelland—in addition to locking up thousands of journalists and political activists, and closing off the country from the international community. After a violent crackdown on activists in 1988, Burma made global headlines, and one of its main pro-democracy activists, Aung San Suu Kyi, shot to international acclaim, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

Why is this election such a big deal? On Sunday, Burmese citizens will vote for lawmakers who will select Burma’s next president in 2016. It is expected to be the most credible general election the country has seen since before dictator General Ne Win seized power in 1962. (The last general election, in 2010, was rigged in favor of the military-backed party; the one before that, in 1990, was fair and led to a landslide victory for Suu Kyi’s opposition party, but the results were annulled by the junta and many pro-democracy politicians were imprisoned.)

In 2011, Senior General Than Shwe, who became the dictator in 1992, allowed a quasi-civilian government to take control. The new government, led by President Thein Sein, a prime minister under Than Shwe, embarked on a platform of reforms: It released hundreds of political prisoners, abolished prepublication censorship, and allowed Suu Kyi to run for parliament. The US government and other Western countries applauded the reforms by easing economic sanctions and re-engaging diplomatically with Burma. Companies like Coca-Cola and Gap Inc. rushed in to take advantage of the last untapped market in the region.

Governments (and corporations) around the world will be watching this election closely because they see it as a litmus test for Burma’s overall transition from dictatorship to a more democratic system, and an indicator of how stable the political and business landscape will be in coming years.

How “free and fair” will the vote likely be? The country’s army chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has publicly vowed to respect the results, and international observers have come from Europe and the United States to monitor the election. But the run-up to the vote has not been without problems. The country’s election commission is chaired by a former military leader. Suu Kyi, whose party is expected to see major gains in parliament, has said the voter lists contain “many, many errors” that will prevent her party’s supporters from casting their ballots. (Many eligible voters were not included on lists, while others who should be ineligible—because they’re dead—were.) As of Wednesday, the election commission was still struggling to finalize voter lists.

An estimated 4 million people—or more than 10 percent of the eligible voting population—will not be able to vote, whether because they lacked information to register or because they live in areas where it wasn’t possible for them to do so. In western Burma, a stateless group of persecuted people known as the Rohingya have been officially disenfranchised. In other conflict zones, ethnic minorities will not be allowed to participate in the election either, due to safety concerns and a failure to cooperate with armed rebel groups. And analysts say residents in rural areas who have registered to vote are likely to follow the orders of pro-military village chiefs when it comes time to choose their candidates.

Nationally, a lack of voter education is also a concern. A study last year found that 44 percent of Burmese respondents incorrectly believed the president would be chosen directly by the people, rather than by lawmakers, while 36 percent said they did not know how the president would be chosen. “Access to information in many parts of the country is poor, while bans placed on campaigning are stifling the people’s ability to make informed decisions and exercise their voting rights,” Bo Kyi, a former Burmese political prisoner who leads an advocacy group in Thailand, tells Mother Jones. “For a free and fair election to occur, there has to be freedom of expression, adequate access to information, and freedom from fear.”

How democratic is the country today? Unlike changes in governments in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, Burma’s political transition has been top-down. Starting as early as the 1990s, Than Shwe and his regime began making plans to eventually allow a quasi-civilian government to take over. Now, though he’s no longer in the limelight, Than Shwe (and other military heavyweights) want to control how far the transition goes (and they say they’re aiming for a “disciplined democracy.”) Last week, President Thein Sein said the country had seen enough political change. “We have changed from a military regime to a democratic government elected by the people,” he told supporters. “What more change do you want? If you want more, go for communism. Nobody wants communism, do they?”

The current government is dominated by former generals, and so is the parliament. In fact, 25 percent of seats in the legislature are reserved for unelected military representatives. That’s a big problem for reformers, because more than 75 percent of lawmakers are needed to approve any amendment to the military-drafted constitution, which gives the military special privileges in politics.

The constitution also makes Suu Kyi, the country’s most popular politician, ineligible for the presidency because her late husband was British and so are her two sons. Suu Kyi says she plans to lead the government if her party comes to power in the election, despite the constitutional ban. “Should you have to be president to lead a country?” she asked. “I will be above the president,” she told reporters in Rangoon this week, without offering concrete details. The election results aren’t expected until about two weeks after the vote, and parliament won’t decide on a president until next year, so until then, we’ll have to wait and see whether her plan plays out.

Why does the United States care about Burma’s election? To encourage reforms after the dictatorship stepped down, the United States eased economic sanctions that it had imposed on Burma in the 1990s. The Obama administration also installed a US ambassador in Burma and handed over hundreds of millions of dollars in development assistance. According to Ben Rhodes, a US deputy national security adviser and a confidante of Obama, the election this weekend will be an important factor in America’s decision about whether to fully normalize relations with Burma, including by lifting remaining sanctions.

In the United States, the Democratic Party also has something at stake in the election: In 2012, Obama became the first sitting US president to ever visit Burma, and he returned again in November last year. Hillary Clinton also visited twice during her tenure as secretary of state, and she’s touted US policy there as an example of her successful leadership. Burma’s election—and the extent to which it’s free and fair—will reflect in some ways on her foreign policy chops as she makes her bid for the White House. (For more on this, read my recent story about Clinton’s legacy in Burma.) The vote could have broader ramifications for American policy in the region, too. Given its strategic geographical position between China and India, Burma has been crucial in the US pivot to Asia. As Clinton explained in her 2014 memoir, “a meaningful reform process could become a milestone in our pivot strategy, give a boost to democracy and human rights activists across Asia and beyond, and provide a rebuke to authoritarian government.”

How can I find out about the results of this election and what they mean? Check out the English-language websites of Burmese news organizations like the Irrawaddy magazine (where I worked before joining Mother Jones), the Democratic Voice of Burma, or Myanmar Now, supported by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Look for reports by Reuters and the Associated Press, which have consistently broken investigative stories about Burma’s political transition since 2011. On Twitter, watch for updates from journalists like Timothy McLaughlin and Andrew R.C. Marshall from Reuters, Thomas Fuller from the New York Times, Jonah Fisher from the BBC, Thin Lei Win from Myanmar Now, Poppy McPherson from Coconuts Yangon, or Burma-based freelancers Simon Lewis, Kayleigh Long, and Hanna Hindstrom. Also look for tweets by Burmese historian Thant Myint-U.

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The World Will Be Watching Burma’s Election This Weekend. Here’s What You Should Know.

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Republicans Very Upset At How Bad They Looked on Wednesday

by JungDellinger Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess this was inevitable:

The Republican National Committee has pulled out of a planned Feb. 26 debate with NBC News after widespread criticism of this week’s CNBC debate from both the party and campaigns. “CNBC network is one of your media properties, and its handling of the debate was conducted in bad faith,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus wrote in a letter to NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack.

CNBC did screw up, but mostly by failing to keep the toddlers on stage under control and being poorly prepared to deal with brazen lies delivered with a straight face. For what it’s worth, I’d also agree that a few of the questions they asked were stupid and/or churlish. Not much more than any other debate, though.

But conservative grievance culture is once again demanding someone’s head on a platter. After all, if conservatives look bad on television it’s gotta be someone else’s fault, right? So it’s off with NBC’s head.

Jeebus. And these guys claim that they’re the steely-eyed folks who can take down Putin and the ayatollah? What a bunch of crybabies.

Taken from: 

Republicans Very Upset At How Bad They Looked on Wednesday

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